Australia's Proposed RQF Rates a Mention in Science. (April 14, 2006)

    Elizabeth Finkel writing in the April 14 issue of Science contributes the short summary "Australia's Proposed U.K.-Style Merit Ranking Stirs Debate" on the proposed Research Quality Framework (RQF), notable for some of the quotes she has marshalled.

There's no doubt that RQF would have "dramatic effects" on universities, says Bradley Smith, a spokesperson for the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS), which supports the concept of the framework but worries that its methods may be flawed. "It will drive the stronger groups and destroy the weak ones."

 

Judith Whitworth, director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra: "We all agree that scarce resources need to be focused and that quality needs to be measured," but "the devil lies in the detail."

 

There is also concern that the framework plan will impose a corporate, target-oriented culture onto the academic research sector. "We cannot set targets. We cannot say that next year we are going to produce 10 papers, and we are going to get x amount of funding from the outside," says Patricia Vickers-Rich of Monash University's School of Geosciences.

 

Virginia Walsh, executive director of the Group of Eight Universities (Australia's major universities), says, "There's no way we'd do justice to all the disciplines" if the government were to adopt the panel's proposal to have a dozen peer-review committees when the U.K. system used 67.

The difficulties in obtaining a useful consensus on a preferred model for the RQF led Julie Bishop, she replaced Brendan Nelson as Minister for Education, Science and Training in January, to form the 12-member Research Quality Framework Development Advisory Group (RQFDAG), chaired by Australia's Chief Scientist, Jim Peacock to report as early as June on what it considers would be a workable model for the RQF. (but see also $40 Million and Sinking -- the RQF Millstone Around Australia's Research Neck).