Editorial - 02 August 2013
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Senator Kim Carr

 

Kim Carr - Research Impact - and The ERA?

 

Impact Sceptic

pdf file-available from Australasian Science

 

 

Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research and Minister for Higher Education appears to be adamant as regards the utility of trying to assess the impact of scientific research -- both hard and soft -- as well as research in the humanities.

 

I am open to new developments that can reassure me on questions of rigour and relevance, but I am still to be convinced that what we can learn about the benefits of research, and the confidence we can have in the claims that are made, will justify the considerable effort and expense.

 

 Don't forget, it is the sector itself that has called for less paperwork. The government is taking them at their word on that, which is why we have commissioned professor Kwong Lee Dow to look into university red tape. So it would be a brave government that launched a whole new assessment regime without carefully scrutinising the value of the exercise.

 

To be useful, an impact exercise would need to produce more than the top-line good news stories; it would need to show the effects of research right down the line. It is not clear to me how the case-studies approach would capture all the research that is not taken up. And there are some fundamental challenges to the entire exercise. But as I say, I am prepared to listen to any well-thought out proposals.

 

Whether his intransigence is the result of critical reasoning or the pressure of governmental-politically-motivated budgetary constants is perhaps a moot point, but in any case it's welcome.

 

As for the matter of the minister's pet initiative, the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) and its squandering of millions on retrospective back-patting rather than working toward upgrading the peer review system of the nation's public research expenditure, that may be another matter. At least if it is simply abandoned, there will be some savings of public monies but real improvement of peer review appears to be a bridge too difficult to cross for the government and its instruments for the distribution of public funding for research.


Alex Reisner

Editor, The Funneled Web