News & Views item - September 2011

 

 

 ERA Developing into the Heath Robinson of Research Funding Devices. (September 14, 2011)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Tower of BabelIt appears that in the attempt to find acceptable applications of Minister for Research, Senator Kim Carr's Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) the matter has begun to degenerate into what appears to be a face saving farce.

 

The Australian's Jill Rowbotham reports in today's HES "Senator Carr's department has outlined options for including ERA in the Sustainable Research Excellence (SRE) funding allocation model", i.e. some $220 million.

 

SRE funding as originally conceived was to alleviate the gap caused by designating inadequate oncosts by the federal granting agencies when awarding research grants.

 

Now you might think that the appropriate remedy would be to increase the funding allocated when awarding the grants. But then you would be one of many that did not come to government with a mission to rebadge a poorly conceived Research Quality Framework (RQF) into a modified but equally silly ERA.

 

According to Ms Rowbotham: "The aim is to replace the element of the existing [funding] formula based on research full-time equivalent staff divided by weighted publications, taken from the department's Higher Education Research Data Collection. The new formula will include a performance measure calculated using data from ERA to identify excellence across the full spectrum of research performance'".

 

None of that nonsense of considering that when the ARC and MHNRC fund only about one in five peer reviewed proposals that they should be fully funded. And just possibly if you thought they weren't doing well enough, you might provide means to help to improve the system at the source not slather an additional costly bureaucratic layer on top.

 

ARC CEO Professor Margaret Sheil, told Ms Rowbotham that there was a range of options for calculating an ERA index. "Once you have ERA ratings, and say, 'Let's turn them into a funding formula,' you need to add a volume measure and you may or may not add some weightings." And "If weightings were applied to the ratings, there would be different levels of reward for different levels of excellence achieved".

 

The discussion paper that has been promulgated calls for appraising four models for indexing excellence (peer review of grant proposals at the time of funding isn't one of them).