Amanda Harris

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Amanda Harris

Responses

Q1. How could the purpose in the ARC Act be revised to reflect the current and future role of the ARC?

For example, should the ARC Act be amended to specify in legislation:
(a) the scope of research funding supported by the ARC
(b) the balance of Discovery and Linkage research programs
(c) the role of the ARC in actively shaping the research landscape in Australia
(d) any other functions?

If so, what scope, functions and role?

If not, please suggest alternative ways to clarify and define these functions.

a) The ARC no longer funds post-doctoral fellowships as part of team projects. This used to be an explict part of Discovery Projects, prior to DECRA. Research teams allow for mentoring and the building of genuine collaboration - essential for progressing the careers of ECR scholars, whereas DECRA Fellows often report being isolated and lacking clear career pathways after completion of inital fellowships. The scope of ARC funding could be expanded to once again allow for post-docs embedded in team projects.

b) the continued importance of pure/basic research is essential to sustaining and growing the Australian research landscape. Recent moves towards emphasising industry links and commercialising research is worrying, especially when the balance between Discovery and Linkage shifts to favour Linkage projects. Without genuine discovery-oriented research, the research sector will be less and less able to produce innovations that can be applied to industry

c) Expert researchers are best positioned to drive new areas for research enquiry. The ARC should not be overly prescriptive in shaping the research landscape to avoid closing off new research directions.

d) currently the ARC prioritises government defined Science and Research priorities. These generally exclude the humanities and creative arts. Australia could look to EU and UK schemes framed around social challenges, for example, Horizon 2020 [https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/europe-tackle-societys-challenges-biggest-ever-research-programme] or the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund. A shift towards social/global challenges would foster interdisciplinary research in its application to larger social issues and complement the Science and Research priorities' focus on industry and manufacturing

Q2. Do you consider the current ARC governance model is adequate for the ARC to perform its functions?

If not, how could governance of the ARC be improved? For example, should the ARC Act be amended to incorporate a new governance model that establishes a Board on the model outlined in the consultation paper, or another model.

Please expand on your reasoning and/or provide alternative suggestions to enhance the governance, if you consider this to be important.

To enable research experts to be responsive to emerging approaches and current scholarly challenges, the ARC Act should be less interventionary, not more.

It is important that the advisors and board are members or former-members of the research community.

The current ministerial veto power is driven by politics not genuine research. It should be removed so that funding decisions rest with the expert panel members.

Q3. How could the Act be improved to ensure academic and research expertise is obtained and maintained to support the ARC?

How could this be done without the Act becoming overly prescriptive?

Avoid making the Act any more prescriptive - empower the College of Experts to advise on research

Q4. Should the ARC Act be amended to consolidate the pre-eminence or importance of peer review?

Please provide any specific suggestions you may have for amendment of the Act, and/or for non-legislative measures.

The importance of peer-review should be protected. The ARC's assessment system is rigorous and should not be impacted by politically-driven government interventions, or excessive oversight from public servants.

Q5. Please provide suggestions on how the ARC, researchers and universities can better preserve and strengthen the social licence for public funding of research?

The NIT should be integrated with the Benefits section and should be part of the application visible to assessors. Assessments can then be considered to have taken this benefit into account. Without genuine peer assessment, the NIT is an exercise in spin, not genuine communication of research.

Q6. What elements of ARC processes or practices create administrative burdens and/or duplication of effort for researchers, research offices and research partners?

The NIT is administratively burdensome in its current form in which Research Offices often re-write NITs, sometimes without any consultation with applicants (aka the research experts).

Q7. What improvements could be made:

(a) to ARC processes to promote excellence, improve agility, and better facilitate globally collaborative research and partnerships while maintaining rigour, excellence and peer review at an international standard?

(b) to the ARC Act to give effect to these process improvements, or do you suggest other means?

Please include examples of success or best practice from other countries or communities if you have direct experience of these.

- fixed timelines that give realistic expectations about outcome dates
- research priorities that focus on social challenges, not just manufacturing priorities
- allow funding to be allocated to PIs/CIs where a case can be made for this (not just in Fellowships) - the rule against funding CI/PI salary means that key people are sometimes not named as investigators as there is no organisation responsible for their salary in working on the grant.

Q8. With respect to ERA and EI:

(a) Do you believe there is a need for a highly rigorous, retrospective excellence and impact assessment exercise, particularly in the absence of a link to funding?

(b) What other evaluation measures or approaches (e.g. data driven approaches) could be deployed to inform research standards and future academic capability that are relevant to all disciplines, without increasing the administrative burden?

(c) Should the ARC Act be amended to reference a research quality, engagement and impact assessment function, however conducted?

(d) If so, should that reference include the function of developing new methods in research assessment and keeping up with best practice and global insights?

ERA exercises have been extremely administratively burdensome, and their results are often contested by those in the sector. To date, the systems of journal rankings, and ERA rankings have not been widely satisfactory. Data driven approaches would likely only be applicable to citation disciplines - but the technology should now exist (through DOIs and ORCID) to harvest this data without many administrative hours of labour. It is important however, that non-citation disciplines (HCA) are not left out of this exercise however, including Creative Arts disciplines that produce substantial NTRO outputs. More work could be done to define equivalences between traditional and non-traditional outputs (e.g. Book/journal article = Major/Minor NTRO)

Q9. With respect to the ARC’s capability to evaluate research excellence and impact:

(a) How can the ARC best use its expertise and capability in evaluating the outcomes and benefits of research to demonstrate the ongoing value and excellence of Australian research in different disciplines and/or in response to perceived problems?

(b) What elements would be important so that such a capability could inform potential collaborators and end-users, share best practice, and identify national gaps and opportunities?

(c) Would a data-driven methodology assist in fulfilling this purpose?

Data driven methods will not capture all disciplines, areas without citation metrics also need to be included in evaluating research excellence.

Q10. Having regard to the Review’s Terms of Reference, the ARC Act itself, the function, structure and operation of the ARC, and the current and potential role of the ARC in fostering excellent Australian research of global significance, do you have any other comments or suggestions?

The ARC could improve transparency of outcomes by:

- providing breakdown of research areas that received submissions (by FoR codes rather than just by panel) so that outcomes can be evaluated in a clearer and more transparent way
- making scores and rankings transparent to unsuccessful applicants (without need for FOI requests). Current feedback is very limited and open to misinterpretation. Full scores from both detailed and general assessors could be made visible to applicants at time of outcome announcement.

Submission received

14 December 2022

Publishing statement

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