From the Chancellery
A
new Research Quality Framework for Australian universities
On June 2 the Vice Chancellor attended a meeting in Canberra to discuss
the newly proposed Research Quality Framework.
The framework, proposed by the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), is designed to assess the quality and impact of research in Australian universities and publicly funded research agencies.
The development of this framework is a result of increasing concerns about the quality of research supported by government funding and follows moves in other countries, like the United Kingdom and New Zealand, to tie funding more overtly to quality measures.
Current government funding formulas reward universities for the amount of money they win to undertake research, the number of publications their staff produce and the number of research students they have or the number who complete.
Of course, there are measures of quality involved. Research Infrastructure Block Grant for example, provides funding on the basis of success in Australian Competitive Grant Schemes and journal articles and conference papers must be peer reviewed to count towards the Institutional Grants Scheme or the Research Training Scheme.
Both DEST and the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee (AVCC) have established expert working groups around the development of the framework and the DEST Expert Advisory Group recently released an issues paper and invited comment from universities, publicly funded research agencies, and other interested parties.
Key points for debate in the issues paper include the unit of assessment and reporting of research, the make up of the expert panels who will undertake the assessments, and how best to measure the impact our research has on the users in industry and the wider community.
While all universities agree on the basic points such as the research group should be the unit of assessment and the expert panels should contain disciplinary, industry and community experts from Australia and overseas, inevitably, there has been some jockeying between the various blocs within the AVCC.
The Go8, for example, has stressed the importance of impact of research on international peers in the discipline while the ATN has emphasised the role of university research within the national innovation system and the importance of the impact of our research.
Depending on the model which is chosen, the outcome of the Research Quality Framework debate could result in significant changes to the distribution of infrastructure funds between universities.
However, we believe that our strategies of building up internationally recognised centres of excellence, together with our emphasis on collaboration with external partners, provide a platform for us to do well in the new framework.
We await the publication of the proposed model with great interest.