News & Views item - November 2010

 

 

 ARC CEO, Margaret Sheil, Defends Excellence in Research for Australia. (November 3, 2010)

The Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Research Council, Professor Margaret Sheil, in an interview with The Australian's Jill  Rowbotham made the following statements in defence of the government's continuing expenditure of public funds and human resources in proceeding with its assessment mechanism for block university funding, Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA):

 

We will not change the framework.

 

We codified a behaviour [of targeting top-rated publications] that was there anyway. Our rankings made it easier for senior people to say to researchers: 'You are not publishing in good enough journals.'

 

Universities are using it in ways that are more rigid than I would. If I was back in a university, I would not be trying to use it for purposes other than what was intended. Young people are getting the wrong message from senior people, that they should not publish unless it's in a A-starred journal. You should get work published where you can and then aspire to better things.

 

[Analogous to our athletes] The athletes are still going to compete at the Commonwealth Games but must also aim higher [e.g. the Olympics]. For the first time people are being called to account for where they publish, not just how much they publish. We wanted to do that, we want to raise the quality of Australian research and its international competitiveness. I do not resile from the push to get people to do higher quality work and put it in better places.

 

[The reason journal rankings are a big issue is they] were the first thing we put out there. So they became the public face of ERA and people thought that was what it was about.

 

Professor Sheil, in concordance with all who have been defending the use of the ERA, RQF, or Britain's RAEs, has failed to present data that demonstrate that such efforts can or have caused any improvement to national research quality. Are we really suppose to believe that the RAEs would have been correlated with the improvement of research quality were it not that they had been accompanied with markedly increased resources for the research sector? Would the improvement have been any less had the RAE not been instituted and peer review of grant applications be relied on?

 

Wouldn't Professor Sheil be far more effective were she to 1) significantly improve ARC's peer review mechanism, and 2) significantly improve the overall funding of successful applications?

 

But are we really witnessing the effect of the obsession of the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, to put into practice his answer to the Howard government's RQF which he first expounded while still in opposition in 2006 -- that the metrics of hindsight would be the answer.

 

The fixation to introduce the ERA is not evidence based and to date there has been no attempt by Senator Carr or anyone else to alter that fact.