Anonymous #53

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Anonymous #53

Responses

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.

Non legislative measures:
Ensure that peer review is fit for purpose, of consistent standard and equitable. Available technology such as natural language processing can be used to identify anomalies/outliers in the peer review process such as where the review feedback/comments are not consistent with the scoring of individual reviewers. A process can be established for assessment and adjustment of these. For example, outliers can be flagged for review/assessment by the College of Expert Member (s).

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.

There seems to be a discipline and gender imbalance in the Discovery grant program in some panels. In particular, the Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences Panel. There were 3170 Discovery Grants awarded between 2002 and 2023 from SBE Panel. 30% of grants over this period were awarded in FOR 17/52- Psychology and Cognitive Sciences. In comparison, 10% of grants were awarded in FOR 15/35 Commerce, Management and Tourism. The number of applications by FOR code is not publicly available. However, in Australian Universities, Psychology academics account for approximately less than half the number of Business/Commerce academics yet are awarded double the number of grants.

Approximate number of Business/Commerce academics from G8 websites - 2100, Estimated total for all 40 Universities 3500.
Approximate number of Psychology academics 1500 (based on Craig et al (2021) who use 780 academics across 21 universities)

Further, while the overall panel has 31% of grants with female lead CIs. the gender imbalance is very evident in Business/Commerce (15/35)) FOR codes, with female lead CIs accounting for only 14% of total Discovery grants over the period.

There were no female lead CIs in Business FOR 15/35 in 2015 and 2021.

I urge the ARC to further investigate this issue and consider processes/remedies to ensure better gender equity in the evaluation and award process as has been done in the NHMRC.

Submission received

14 December 2022

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