A New ERA for Australian Research Quality Assessment
By Kim Carr
Australian research is something to be proud of. The government is confident of that. It has launched the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative as a measure of the achievements of researchers in our publicly funded higher education institutions.
This will show how Australian university researchers stack up, not just against each other, but against the best in the world.
ERA will help identify not only the strengths in our national research effort, but the gaps, and will help to fill them.
ERA replaces the former government's flawed Research Quality Framework. The RQF failed to win the confidence of the university sector because it lacked transparency and did not reflect world's best practice. It was cumbersome and far too resource-greedy.
The new ERA will be different. Unlike the RQF, it will be a world-class system of research quality assessment. ERA will be streamlined - employing only eight committees instead of the RQF's planned 13.
The clusters comprise: humanities and creative arts; physics, chemistry and geosciences; biological sciences and biotechnology; engineering and environmental sciences; mathematics, information and communication sciences; social, behavioural and economic sciences; health; and medical sciences.
The ARC will be the lead agency for the ERA, and will work in conjunction with the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. Development will be overseen by the ARC Advisory Council with advice from the ARC, the NHMRC and DIISR. Each review will be overseen by a Research Advisory Committee that will include experienced, internationally recognised researchers with expertise in research assessment.
The new ERA model will:
- utilise measures of research quality that can be benchmarked internationally (such as international citation rates per discipline)
- recognise the validity of a suite of indicators appropriate to different disciplines
- utilise experts in each discipline who have the necessary background to ensure that anomalies and discipline-specific issues in compiled data are identified and addressed
- utilise the enormous body of work done to date by institutions and others such as the learned academies.
Metrics will be used as a measure in disciplines where they enjoy established confidence – for example, the physical and biological sciences. At the same time, there will be expert review of the metrics used for all disciplines where they might apply. Elsewhere, consultation with other disciplines and researchers within them will help us establish alternative metrics, or proxies for metrics, that will work effectively and that will have credibility. We have already begun that process. For each discipline, a suite of possible indicators will be examined.
The government will not impose a system that lacks the support of our scholars and researchers, nor of the institutions in which they work.
Peer review as a principle for judging research quality is highly respected by the Rudd Government. ERA will be based soundly on this standard. ERA will deploy leading researchers in each of the ARC discipline clusters to evaluate research performance both by institution and by discipline.
Institutions will be invited to nominate both existing and emerging areas of strength in each cluster. In helping to define areas of excellence, ERA will assist in the development of the government's “hubs and spokes” model for higher education. This model is based on the assumption that all universities - not just an elite few- can have centres of excellence in specified fields. All university academics will have the opportunity to be active researchers in their chosen disciplines.
The government acknowledges the extensive resources already expended in preparing for a new research assessment system. ERA will utilise the vast body of valuable work that has been undertaken in recent years by higher education institutions, the learned academies and others.
The first cluster assessments will commence in early 2009, with data collection and trials late in 2008. Crucially, the evaluation exercise will initially be decoupled from funding arrangements with the aim of ensuring that the system's credibility and standing are assured before ERA is used to drive resource allocation. This way, the government intends to achieve the trust and confidence of university researchers, and to establish a consensus that the system is fair, equitable and transparent.
In shaping the detail of ERA; the ARC will consult broadly with the higher education sector. This will occur in the first half of 2008, with a view to finalising an implementation timetable and plan for 2009. There is a firm commitment to reaching a commonly agreed approach for each discipline cluster - starting with existing and proposed citation metrics and journal rankings, and other measures and proxies as appropriate to each discipline.
The Rudd Government wants to send a clear message to Australian university researchers. They are highly valued, and just as highly respected. ERA will recognise their role, and help to lift it on the national stage. I am confident that the researchers in our universities will play an essential part in the government's agenda for innovation that will revitalise our nation's economy, our social fabric and our cultural life. I look forward to the challenge.
Senator Kim Carr is the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.