Sector divided over Cutler’s funding distribution

Distribution of research funds in Australia’s post-Cutler innovation world could be anti-collaborative and anti-innovative, industry figures fear.

Innovation review chair Dr Terry Cutler’s report, ‘Venturous Australia’, emphasises collaboration in its vision of a university research system that is fully funded and places Australia in the front rank of OECD nations.

But some analysts say Cutler’s rationale for distributing research block funds – success in winning competitive grants, and rankings produced by the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative – could discourage collaboration and ignore some of the more innovative forms of research.

Commentators also say the ERA – which under the Cutler recommendations would also drive the funding of postgraduate students – needs to be fully developed and tested before it can be used for these sorts of purposes.

While the Cutler recommendations have attracted general praise from the sector – unsurprising, given the annual $2.2 billion windfall for universities and public research institutes if the recommendations are implemented – views about how the funding should be allocated have fallen either side of the fault line between the elite Group of Eight institutions and the other 30 Australian universities.

While Go8 chair Professor Alan Robson was generous in his praise for the report, he made special mention of the chapter 6 recommendations covering research funding. “We endorse every one of them,” he said.

“Distributing resources for research and research training based on evidence of excellence is the most sensible course for Australia. It is most logical for Australia to concentrate research investment in areas of strength, and invest further in that strength wherever it can be demonstrated.”

But Lenore Cooper, director of the Innovative Research Universities Australia (IRUA) group, asked whether this sort of approach really fostered innovation. “We need to keep renewing our areas of research, because knowledge keeps changing so rapidly,” she said.

“If we just keep building on what’s worked in the past, or the good research that’s been happening in the past, we’re not necessarily going to be innovating as we should. There needs to be some way of supporting institutions to nurture new areas of research – institutions that might not yet have the runs on the board to attract competitive grants or even attract government or industry contracts.”

Cooper said this had been a function of the Institutional Grants Scheme. Formulae for allocating the IGS, she said, are currently based on all four categories of research income – from “other” public sector research such as government contracts, cooperative research centres and industry and other sources, as well as competitive grants. But under the Cutler recommendations, only the competitive grants would be considered.

“One of the key thrusts of the report – and government policy – is to increase the level of collaborative research between universities and industry, business, government and the community. But this proposal means there’s no reward for the universities that are doing a lot of research in those other categories. It works against the government’s policy objectives.”

The executive director of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS), Bradley Smith, stressed that he strongly endorsed a move to full research funding as the report’s central recommendation and the “most important measure forward for university research”. But he said there was a “tension” in the report.

“It keeps banging on about collaboration, but some of the collaborative research that goes on – through CRCs, industry-funded and so forth – is not getting picked up. If you just nail it on competitive grants, that’s going to impact on institutions that focus on industry research. There’s an inconsistency there that needs to be thought through,” Smith said.

Robson said the institutions that did well on competitive grants also tended to do well on industry research funding. “There isn’t a great dichotomy between those institutions that are receiving a lot of national competitive grant funding and those that receive a lot of industry funding. A measure of the value of research is where industry puts its money.”

Robson said the “beauty” of using competitive grants as a basis of allocation was that it was a peer-reviewed process. He also supported ERA as an allocation mechanism because of the robustness of its data. “I fully favour a metrics approach that takes account of data on publications and quality of publications,” he said.

“Citations and bibliometrics – that to me is a quantitative way of looking at research outputs. I certainly don’t want these sorts of impact statements where people write essays about how the work they’ve done has had an impact on the industry.”

But Smith said ERA was untested. “Ultimately it needs to be used for resource allocation, but we’ve got to see how it plays out first. There are lots of problems in ranking of journals. You get some strange outcomes – for example, a Brazilian journal of climate change outranking an Australian one – what’s more important for Australia?

“There’s an assumption that the humanities are going to be where the problems are. But already we’re starting to see some major problems working out how to handle the science side of it. These sorts of things can be resolved – but you’ve got to get ERA sorted out before you can start applying it.”

Smith also said ERA’s five-year measurement cycle presented problems. “It’s quite a static measure in looking at change in excellence, because of the five-year lag,” he said.

Cooper said ERA was too narrow. “It measures quality from a particular angle, which is the academic world. We don’t think that will fully reflect the range of high quality and high impact research undertaken across the sector,” she said.

“Cutting-edge research is increasingly multidisciplinary and undertaken in collaboration with industry, business and the community. The outputs of that research might not always fit those traditional academic ways of capturing them. They might be technical reports, or service delivery in government, or proposals on a new approach to policy.

“One of the report’s emphases is the need for innovation to be around processes as much as products. A lot of the useful research might be more in that sort of line than producing a traditional academic journal article. While ERA will produce some useful information, it might not fully reflect the range of research – in particular, the type of research the government’s telling us it wants universities to do.”

The president of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations, Nigel Palmer, said CAPA supported the ERA as a significant improvement on the Research Quality Framework. “But the real risk is that you’re going to have overspecialisation at the expense of innovation,” he said.

“If you have everything driven by one measure, you’re going to lose some of the benefits of overlapping and complementary policy measures.”

Robson said some of these concerns might be allayed by using quantitative indicators that took account of applied research. And Cooper said some of her concerns could be addressed by the report’s recommendations for extra funds to encourage collaboration between universities and other research institutions.

“These proposals will hopefully stimulate the interest from industry and business to collaborate with universities, and provide the mechanisms that help support that,” she said.

Smith said a significant third stream or knowledge transfer fund would solve the problem. “The block grant is but one of a range of mechanisms to support research. Significant investment in third stream – and in particular, knowledge transfer with end users – that would mean you’d have a stronger pluralist basis to fund research.

“Third-stream funding has been quite successful in the UK for the past ten years, and there’s been a lot of talk in Australia about it over the past four or five years, but there’s no mention of third stream or knowledge transfer funds in this report. You’d expect it would be more likely to be discussed in the Bradley review. If that is done – a fund that is explicitly there to build collaboration between industry or other end users and universities –I think that would balance up our concerns.”

Cutler recommendations at a glance

Funding

• Rapid transition to full funding of university research while maintaining grant success rates

• Increasing the quantum of publicly funded research to match OECD leaders

• Strengthening publicly funded research agencies such as CSIRO, including restoring funding levels

• A successor to NCRIS with ten years’ funding of at least $150 million a year

• APA stipends raised to at least $25,000, indexed and extended to four years

• ERA research rankings publicised and used as a basis for allocating block grants and postgraduate stipends. Block funding allocation also based on success in winning competitive grants

• New schemes including national priority research centres, an early career fellowship scheme, and incentives for universities and research institutes to partner with each other and with international research organisations

• Extra funds for the NHMRC to rationalise and consolidate health and medical research, including potential amalgamation of institutes with universities

• A national research infrastructure committee to advise on strategic directions in funding national research infrastructure

Other recommendations

• Seven recommendations around tax reform, including a major overhaul of R&D concessions

• 10 recommendations around business programs, statistical collection and private investment in innovation

• Four recommendations around government operational reform, including extending a HECS-style scheme to sole trader entrepreneurs and establishing an advocate for government innovation

• 14 recommendations around governance, including a new national innovation council to replace the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council

• Five recommendations around human capital, including more sympathetic immigration policies

• 15 recommendations around legal and regulatory reform, information dissemination, cultural organisations and awards schemes