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."