ARC Looks to Revising Peer Review. (August 1, 2009)

Although lacking detail, the chief executive of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Margaret Sheil has told The Australian's Bernard Lane, that the council is in the process of reviewing its system of peer review.

What Professor Sheil appears to be indicating is that the opinions of referees with greater expertise in the area of the proposal should be given greater weight than those referees who are considered less competent. She told Mr Lane: "The critical feature in the reform would be to try (to) get as much response as we can at the lower levels [of the screening process] so that people at the highest level have the best information to make the decision."

At a meeting in Canberra last Thursday, Professor Sheil got together with deputy vice-chancellors for research to discuss, at least in outline, the reforms the ARC has in mind.

It is suggested that a discussion paper will be forthcoming before the beginning of October.

In December, 2007 and February and June 2008 TFW reported on the extensive analysis the US National Institutes of Health undertook to redesign its peer-review system. In the December 2007, News and Views item TFW concluded: "It might be of interest and even useful for those in the newly elected Australian government who are charged with relegating its predecessor's Research Quality Framework as well as the administrators of the ARC and NHMRC to see just what those 2600 submissions received by the NIH contain," which brought forth this reply from the CEO of the NHMRC:

[Your readers] might be interested that we too ARE looking at this, have just had Toni Scarpa from NIH here (he runs their external review process) and will have the Director of NIH, Dr Elias Zerhouni, here at  NHMRC in January to help further with this task. Like NIH, I think there are ways we can do this better!

Professor Warwick Anderson
Chief Executive Officer
National Health & Medical Research Council

With the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Carr, still obsessing over an ill-conceived Excellence in Research for Australia, it remains to be seen just what the ARC's efforts will come to in so far as affecting the quality of support for university research.