Acclaim and anxiety as Australia streamlines funding bids

An Australian move to foster a culture of quality over quantity, by reducing the workload associated with research grant applications, has drawn mixed responses locally and overseas.

Many academics have hailed a decision by Australia’s health research funder to limit applicants’ “track record” declarations – essentially, the curriculum vitae section of funding submissions – to their 10 most significant publications.

The change is being rolled out across National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funding programmes, starting with its Investigator Grant scheme.

Researchers who have undergone career breaks will be entitled to list publications from their 10 most recent years in the workforce, with others limited to outputs from the past decade – a period the NHMRC considers sufficient to build a picture of past achievement without overburdening assessors.

“This will help to ensure that assessment of publication track record focuses on the quality and contribution of the science rather than the quantity of publications,” the NHMRC said. “Reviewing a list of all publications – in some cases more than 300 for senior researchers – is burdensome for peer reviewers and can lead to a ‘paper counting’ approach.”

It said that the move conformed with international practice, with many funders – including sister agency the Australian Research Council as well as the European Research Council, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the US National Institutes of Health and Australia’s Medical Research Future Fund – imposing quantity or page length limits on applicants’ publication lists.

Canadian commentators said that the approach should be adopted more widely in a sector where reward structures, doctoral scholarships, external credibility and “inner confidence” all hinged on “doing lots of research”.

“We are at a near crisis point in handling the volume of new research being produced each day, with chronic shortages of the manuscript and grant reviewers, editors and mentors able and willing to maintain the very quality on which new and useful knowledge depends,” blogged Alberta academic administrators Alex Clark and Bailey Sousa.

But while some Australian medical researchers welcomed the change, others protested. They warned that a 10-year time limit could exclude the most impactful research, with the translation of discoveries into drugs, devices or diagnostics often taking considerably longer.

It could also disadvantage researchers in fields such as bioinformatics or epidemiology, where important findings could take decades to emerge.

The Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes, which surveyed its members about the change, said that the “consensus view” it usually encountered was absent in this case. “There’s a lot of diverse opinions about this,” said executive director Peter Thomas.

“When [researchers] know how a particular system works, and how to put the best case forward in what is a very competitive process, they understandably get a little nervous when changes are made.”

Dr Thomas said most researchers supported the principle of “high-quality science, not just lots of it”, but worried about unintended consequences. However, he added that the agency deserved credit for discouraging established researchers from resting on their laurels and encouraging newcomers not to be daunted by the lofty publication histories of older competitors.

“What NHMRC are doing here is very much in line with global trends,” he said. “On its own, will it make a difference? I think it might.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com