Research rules 'will promote bullying'

THE government's new research performance exercise will promote bullying and disputes over authorship as research students become more desperate to get published, the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations has warned.

CAPA president Tammi Jonas said the exclusion of postgraduates from the Excellence in Research for Australia exercise would have unintended consequences. "It creates a powerful incentive for bullying and authorship disputes," she said.

The ERA - the submissions deadline for which is just five weeks off - was to recognise the publications of research students, but this has been dropped as too difficult to verify. The exclusion of PhDs from the ERA would increase pressure on research students to agree to more favourable authorship rights for their research supervisors, Ms Jonas said.

CAPA had backed the ERA's original inclusion of research higher degree publications as a partial remedy for these students' status as the "invisible underclass of the academy", and to ease generational change.

The University of Adelaide's Graeme Hugo estimated that universities were likely to lose one-fifth to one-third of their staff in the next decade, yet just 4500 PhDs emerged from universities in 2008.

CAPA said it was essential that incentives be provided for academics and departments to support postgraduates to sharpen their skills through publication during candidature.

The comments follow the emergence of bullying by some supervisors as a formal issue in two reports in the HES last week.

In one new Australian case, a postgraduate researcher was "so traumatised by her research experience she couldn't bring herself to speak about it and abandoned her studies," a fellow researcher and postgraduate association leader told the HES this week.

"We hear reports of supervisors exerting undue influence when it comes to intellectual property and publication rights," the postgraduate said.

Jonas said research students would have to rely on legal action in the absence of effective internal mechanisms to deal with such disputes.

Science Minister Kim Carr told the HES it was essential that PhD students were treated fairly and not bullied. "That's their [universities and science agencies] obligation both in terms of the Australian research code, but also at law," Senator Carr said.

Australian Research Council chief Margaret Sheil said sole student authorship was becoming less common as students worked on grants won by supervisors who had intellectual input into the PhD. "My experience of authorship disputes at the University of Wollongong was that more often these involved students refusing to acknowledge supervisor input, rather than the other way round," she said.