The Australian Research Council, the national body responsible for administering non-medical research funding, will be reformed in a development welcomed by the research community after grant delays and longstanding accusations of political interference.
The federal education minister, Jason Clare, announced on Tuesday a review of the agency, which administers around $800m in funding each year to Australian researchers.
A Senate committee found in March that the ARC Act “may no longer be fit for purpose” and recommended a review of the agency in light of “broader concerns about the ARC and its governance and research funding processes”.
The Senate inquiry was held after widespread condemnation of a decision last year by the Coalition MP Stuart Robert, then the acting education minister, to veto funding for six ARC research grants in the humanities.
Clare said in a statement on Tuesday that the review would “look at the role and purpose of the ARC within our research system” and would be led by Prof Margaret Sheil, the vice-chancellor of the Queensland University of Technology.
The ARC would also be required to ensure “future grant rounds are delivered on time to a pre-determined timeframe”, Clare said.
News of the review had been generally embraced by the academic community. “I welcome in principle an open look into how the ARC is performing,” said Prof Sven Rogge, the pro-vice-chancellor of research at the University of New South Wales.
In light of the reform, a planned three-yearly assessment of university research performance, known as the Excellence in Research for Australia, would no longer take place in 2023.
Prof Emma Johnston, the deputy vice-chancellor of research at the University of Sydney, who welcomed the “timely review”, described the move in a tweet as “a reprieve from the administrative burden of the ERA assessment”.
However, researchers had concerns about the “national interest test”, which Clare signalled would remain. It was introduced in 2018 by the Coalition, and had been criticised by academics because a “national benefit test” already existed for ARC grant schemes.
“The national interest test should continue but should be clearer, simpler, and easily understood,” Clare said.
“The national interest test is intended to ask the applicant to showcase why their research would benefit the Australian taxpayer, which is absolutely fair enough,” said Rogge, who is also president of the Australian Institute of Physics.
“The issue is that if you interpret benefit to the Australian taxpayer as, for example, creating a translatable commercial outcome within three years, then there will be a very narrow scope that would kill a lot of work that in the long run will lead to translation,” he said, citing GPS and quantum technology as examples of fundamental research with long-term benefits.
The Australian researcher who runs the Twitter account ARC Tracker, who wished to remain anonymous, said they were disappointed the national interest test would remain, but that “things seem to be moving in a more helpful direction”.
“It’s a relic, taking up tonnes of everyone’s time and it will achieve precisely zero improvement in the research or its outcomes,” the account’s administrator said.
Senator Mehreen Faruqi, the Greens education spokesperson, described the national interest test as “completely unnecessary and onerous”.
Faruqi, who had pushed for the Senate inquiry into the ARC earlier this year, said in a statement: “The ministerial veto power and the national interest test have to go. Scrapping the veto power is overwhelmingly backed by universities and researchers.”
“The review should not narrow itself to governance and operations. We need to ask the basic question of why we can apparently only afford to fund as few as one in five projects under many schemes, despite vastly more projects being of high quality.”
The independent review would be conducted in addition to an internal review of ARC processes already under way. The ARC had been asked to prepare a transition plan by the end of 2022, to be implemented in 2024-25 “in addition to any recommendations from the [internal] ARC review”, Clare outlined in a statement of expectations to the ARC.
The ARC’s chief executive, Judi Zielke, who was first appointed to the role in February, said in a statement: “The ARC is undertaking consultations with a range of stakeholders on the current process and how to improve it.”
The agency also released a three-year strategy on Tuesday, which lays out its key priorities.
