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News & Views item - August 2007 |
RQF
Described as "A Dinosaur" By ARC Australian Professorial Fellow.
(August 27, 2007)
The
government's Research Quality Framework (RQF), due for implementation as a
basis for funding next year, "distracts from the real business of doing
original science", according to Professor Ross Crozier's whose critical
assessment appears in the September issue of Australasian Science
magazine.
Professor Crozier, ARC Australian Professorial Fellow and Professor of
Evolutionary Genetics at James Cook University in
Townsville, characterises the RQF as "a dinosaur", pointing out that that
it "is a version of the British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).
However, after two decades this has become so cumbersome and costly that
it is being abandoned in favour of a simpler, more metrics-based system,"
and asks, "Could we not learn from their errors rather than repeat
them?... Many of the scheme's features skew the playing field away
from excellence and, to the frustration of researchers, obviously so."
Professor Crozier points out, "[It] adds to the compliance burden on
universities [which has been] recognised ultimately by a government grant
of $87 million for RQF implementation". He suggests that this money "could
otherwise have been allocated to support real research. [Among] other
pervasive and deleterious effects, it will reallocate portions of the
government's block grants to universities, and will move places under the
Research Training Scheme between universities".
Professor Crozier believes: "The RQF is not really focused on research
because it includes a major category of 'Impact', which is intended
to reflect, and therefore reward, short-term pay-offs. Yet, the history of
science shows that major discoveries typically take a quarter of a century
or more to come to commercial fruition. The RQF unrealistically allows
Australian scientists just 12 years."
He damns the exercise: "The RQF is unlikely to last long, either because
we'll follow the UK and abandon it, or if Labor wins power and, as
pledged, abandons the RQF before it starts and consults widely on its
replacement."
Ross Crozier's preference? "For a replacement, it is hard to better Nobel
Laureate Peter Doherty's suggestion that we simply use success
in peer-reviewed grant schemes as an automatic metric."