Discovery Projects 2016

We - myself together with Stephan Bruns and Alessio Moneta - got an ARC Discovery Projects grant. Thanks also to Zsuzsanna Csereklyei who contributed to the development of the proposal and who we may hire as a post-doc using the grant - depending if she wants to come to Australia for the time we will be able to afford to fund with the money we received ($A273k - 65% of what we requested). This is my second ARC grant following the DP12 grant that we got a few years ago. The title of our project is: "Energy Efficiency Innovation, Diffusion and the Rebound Effect". We will be looking at the diffusion of energy efficiency innovations and trying to measure the economy-wide rebound effect empirically. This was our second attempt at applying for a grant on this topic. Last time around we were rated in the top 10% of unfunded proposals and so I thought it was worthwhile revising and resubmitting!

Other good news today is that my colleague, Paul Burke got a DECRA grant. I think this is our fourth DECRA at Crawford. Congratulations to Paul! Also Peter MacDonald and Robert Sparrow got a DP16 grant. Congratulations to Robert and Peter!

Help Fund a Cool Research Project

Pun intended :) A bit off the beaten path for this blog, but I did warn you it would be a random walk. Faruk Kececi is an online friend who unfortunately wasn't in Istanbul the week we visited. You can contribute money on Kickstarter.

ARC Discovery Projects 2015 Funding Rules Released

The ARC released the funding rules for the current grant round. A single document now also includes the rules for the DECRA, Laureate fellowships, and Discovery Indigenous Grants. A separate document reveals the specific changes to the Discovery program in this round compared to previous rounds. The most important changes, I think, are that :

• You can now apply for five years of funding rather than just three.
• There are no DORA fellowships for 2015!
• The limit on publication costs of 2% of non-salary part of the budget (which could be very little in many cases) is abolished and now you need to justify specifically the publication costs on the proposal.
• International Collaboration Awards are no longer awarded on a pro rata basis but up to $20k and up to 12 months.

The ARC has apparently not yet released the instructions for applicants.

Evolution of the UK REF

Interesting article on how the UK's Research Excellence Framework evolved. An interesting comment is: "Per pound distributed, the RAE and REF are vastly cheaper than distributing the same sums via grant applications to the research councils" Very significant funding is tied to the results of the REF. By contrast, the Australian system is primarily driven by winning grants and then getting overheads based on them sent to institutions by the government a couple of years later with a smoothing process over time. PhD completions also feature strongly. So far, the ERA is only linked to a very small allocation of funding.

ARC Releases 2014 Schedule

The ARC has released its schedule of important dates for 2014. In the past, funding rules and application dates have only been released close to the actual dates and so it has been hard to plan grant submissions. This was especially the case in 2011 when they announced that the closing date for Future Fellowship applications would be several months earlier than expected. There were relatively few applications that year as a result. That benefitted applicants as the success rate was higher. But then this round there were far more applicants than usual and the success rate will halve from 30% to 16%. So, this is a good move from the ARC to make the whole grant application process a little saner.

Innovation Precincts vs. Cooperative Research Centres

I was wondering what the difference was between the "Innovation Precincts" recently announced by the Australian government and the existing Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) program was. I even wondered if they were a replacement for the CRCs. Turns out they are intended to be two quite different programs. A very helpful government document explains the differences. Then there are the ARC Linkage grants...

ERA Verifies that Research Funding is Going to High Quality Research Groups

Yesterday I went to a presentation by the head of the Australian Research Council, Aidan Byrne. I asked him to comment on the article in the Australian that reported his thoughts that ERA results shouldn't be tied to larger amounts of funding. He said that ERA has already had significant effects without having money tied to it and the problem is that there aren't necessarily significant differences between being ranked a 3 or 4 or a 4 or 5 as scores are rounded up or down to produce the final outcomes. He said that the most valuable use of ERA is to verify that research funding is going to high quality research groups. There is a dramatic difference between the funding received by disciplines at institutions ranked 1 and 2 and those ranked 3,4, and 5 with a smaller difference between the latter three categories. Clearly the vast majority of funding is going to the groups ranked at world standard or above. It would help get this message across if ARC presented funding numbers per full-time-equivalent faculty member in each quality ranking. But they want to avoid doing productivity measures for some reason. The ARC slides I saw just show total dollars for all 5's, all 4's, and all 3's without adjusting for number of institutions or individual researchers. As there are usually fewer institutions ranked 5 this downplays the relationship between quality and funding. Also, it would make sense to then leave funding out as one of the indicators used to assess quality. And none of this information is in the ERA report. I think that would be valuable.

Australian Research Assessment Not Heading in UK Direction

That's the message I get from this interview with the head of the ARC, Aidan Byrne (formerly a science dean at ANU) in the Australian. The assumption of many in the sector, myself included is that the Australian research assessment exercise, ERA, and the funding attached to it would evolve in a way that generally followed UK practice with something of a time lag. In the UK, much more money is tied to the REF, the funding ratio associated with the three highest rankings of departments is 9:3:1, and case studies are being used very heavily to assess broader impact. Prof. Byrne argues that case studies should be used sparingly if at all to measure impact, not much money should be tied to ERA outcomes, and the funding ratio should be flatter. On Wednesday, I saw a presentation by Tim Cahill of the ARC on the ERA 2012 process and outcomes. One key finding was that for the citation based disciplines (most STEM disciplines (but not math or computer science) and psychology) there is a weak correlation between the ERA ranks assigned to universities and their citation performance relative to the benchmarks. A lot of subjectivity still seems to come into the ranking by the ERA committees. As they only count the number of citations per paper and not where they were cited, I guess that makes sense. So should Australian universities pay as much attention to ERA as they have been doing? For example, ANU has tied indicators in it strategic plan to the number of disciplines that achieve given ERA rankings by 2020. If I was the minister and looking for budget cuts would I want to continue with ERA on this basis?

ANU Gets a 5 in Economics

The ERA 2012 results are out this morning. ANU got a 5 in economics compared to a 4 in ERA 2010. We got a 5 in econometrics and 4 in applied economics and economic theory. The econometrics score is improved on last time too and I predicted that we would get a 5 in econometrics though I didn't see us improving our overall score for economics. However, the ARC evaluate two digit fields like economics (14) separately from 4 digit fields like applied economics (1402). Different outside reviewers receive a different sample of publications to evaluate. The two digit score is not a weighted mean of the four digit scores.

Melbourne got three 5's and a 4 in applied econ (nobody submitted anything in 1499 "other economics" this time). Monash got a 5 for 14 and econometrics (1403) and a 4 for 1402 and didn't submit in economic theory (1401). UTS got three 5's - it also didn't submit in 1401. UQ got  5 in 1401 and 4's otherwise. That's it for the 5's. Full details are in the table below. Click on it to enlarge.

In other major disciplines of interest to the Crawford School we got a 5 in political science, 3 in policy and administration, 5 in environmental science and management, and 5 in anthropology.

MYEFO Update

The Australian federal mid-year mini-budget was released this morning. The ARC pause on funding has been released and the Linkage program opened for applications. However, the SRE component "research quantum" will be cut relative to a projected inscrease as will so called facilitation funds. The research quantum are government funds for research provided to the universities partly based on their research performance that are similar to the overhead component in US grants. When you submit a grant application to the ARC here in Australia you do not include overheads in your proposal. This doesn't mean that the university doesn't earn overhead on successful grants. It's just done indirectly with a time lag. This is somewhat good news as the cuts are smaller than rumored and don't affect individuals applying for grants.

In total these cuts are estimated to cost ANU at least $3.4 million in 2013 and $8.1 million in 2014. 

More from The Australian here.

ARC Funding Freeze

There has been a lot of uncertainty recently about what is happening with research funding in Australia. There have been no announcements on when the next application rounds will open and around now the results of the ARC Discovery grant applications from earlier this year for funding next year should have been announced. The federal government has promised to deliver a budget surplus and was rumoured to be looking at cutting anything they could to achieve the goal. We got some information yesterday at a Senate hearing, where the ARC CEO - former ANU Dean of Science Aiden Byrne - and the minister both were questioned. We were told that there has been a funding freeze in place since August. It looks like that we might have more certainty after MYEFO or "minibudget", which will be released on Monday. But it also looks like that not as much funding will be available in the near future as there has been in the recent past.

ARC Laureate Fellowships Announced

The ARC announced the award of this year's round of Laureate Fellowships. The Laureate Fellowships - previously called 'Federation Fellowships" are the most prestigious grants offered by the ARC they provide a salary top up for the fellow, post-doc positions, and project funds for five years.

ANU won 4 out of the 17 Laureate Fellows announced and the College of Asia and the Pacific got two of these. The other two ANU awards went to my former Fenner School colleague David Lindenmayer and Eelco Rohling who is a climatologist at University of Southampton who will move to the ANU.

Elsewhere, there are several awards for coral reef science and John Quiggin's fellowship was renewed a second time. His proposed research will examine how financial regulation can be improved to reduce the vulnerability of the financial system and the macroeconomy to unforeseen shocks. His previous Federation Fellowship was focused on adaptation to climate change in the Murray Darling Basin.

James Cook university won two fellowships. Apart from that all the awards went to the Go8.

Congratulations to all the recipients!

ARC Future Fellowships Announced

The ARC announced the outcomes of this year's Future Fellowships round today. Unfortunately, Crawford didn't get any - we made two applications - but ANU did very well and the College of Asia and the Pacific had a 54% success rate overall. Nationally, the success rate was 35%. Presumably the success rate was high because the ARC unexpectedly brought forward the application date catching a lot of people unawares.

Interestingly, no fellowships were awarded in economics, which may partially explain our zero success rate.

Follow up on InTech Book

Last year, I blogged about being invited to contribute a chapter to an open access book published by InTech. I declined the invite, not wanting to pay Euro 590 to publish a book chapter with an unknown publisher - book chapters, even in books published by well-known academic presses usually aren't cited much. Furthermore, I have recently concluded that publishing book chapters is detrimental to our university's ranking in the ERA research assessment exercise.* So I don't need any extra book chapters anyway.

The book has now been published and it is interesting to see the finished product. It turns out that the mystery editor was Shariar Khan of Independent University in Dhaka, Bangladesh who is also the author of Chapter 9. The chapters are an odd combination of physical science and social science articles on the theme of fossil fuels and the environment with authors from all around the world.

InTech claim that 2011 was a huge success for the company. They published 60,000 authors in over 1,280 books. The number of downloaded chapters topped 1.7 million in 2011, while the number of unique users exceeded 154,000 each month.

* This is the case in economics at least where book chapters are considered equivalent to C-ranked journal articles on the whole. ERA assesses publications on the basis of both the overall profile of journal publications and a peer review of a 30% sample selected by the submitting university. The 30% covers all journal, book, book chapter etc. items. If you publish a lot of book chapters your 30% sample will have to dig down deeper in your quality profile. So large numbers of publications in low quality outlets hurt more than a few publications in high quality outlets help I think. This is in contrast to the UK REF where each academic only submits their best 4 publications. Total numbers of publications are still useful for funding purposes in Australia. But increasingly the ERA ratings of the university will be used to weight performance on numbers of publications, grants etc...

Australian Universities Ranked by Research Income

The chart shows all sources of direct research grants earned by Australian universities in 2010. This includes government, international, and industry funding. As yesterday's post explained there are also research block grants paid by the government that total about 50% of this direct funding. The graph clearly shows why we talk of the Group of Eight universities, which are the equivalent of the US R1 universities or the UK's Russell Group. ANU, Adelaide, and UWA are a lot smaller than the big 5. So if we adjusted for size, income within this group would probably be more equal.

But there is a steep fall off to University of Newcastle. That Newcastle is the highest ranked outside the Go8 is no surprise.

How Does the Australian Government Use the ERA Results?

Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) is the Australian research assessment exercise that is very similar to the British REF. We are currently working on our submission to the 2012 ERA assessment, which is the second assessment following ERA 2010. There has been a lot of discussion of the assessment methods and results but few people seem to know about how these results are being used.

So far the ERA results will be used as part of the method of allocating money in the SRE scheme. Currently SRE is around $150 million of the $1.6 billion of research block grants paid to Australian universities. This number will rise to more than $300 million over the next year. The program is supposed to provide universities with overhead or indirect costs of funded research. Unlike in the US, the Australian Research Council (ARC) and NHMRC doesn't pay universities any overhead payments on grants. These come later through these block grant schemes.

The government released a consultation paper on the method to be used in 2012. Basically, money would be allocated according to the amount of competitive research grants each university earned weighted by some ERA based indicator. They haven't yet released the exact algorithm that will be used.

So by next year about 20% of research block grants will be weighted by ERA derived measures. I expect though that ERA will be used to allocate more of the money in the future.

ARC Announces DECRAs and Future Fellows

Only two Future Fellowships were awarded in economics. Benno Torgler (QUT) got one for "The role of moral sentiments and emotions in human nature: an interdisciplinary empirical approach". Michael Smith at Uni Melbourne got one for an econometric theory project. Obviously, it wasn't the turn of economics...

John Tang at College of Business and Economics got a DECRA to work on "Understanding industrialisation, entrepreneurship, and technology adoption in emerging economies: new evidence from historical Japanese firms". This is the only economics award ANU got in this round of announcements.

Only 26 DORA's Were Awarded Australiawide

It turns out that the ARC only made 26 Discovery Outstanding Researcher Awards in this funding round. The consultation paper that the ARC put out before the changes to the scheme had proposed awarding up to 70 DORA's per year.

ARC Grant

The Australian Research Council announced Discovery and Linkage grants starting in 2012 today. My team: Astrid Kander, Jack Pezzey, Chunbo Ma, and myself got a grant for our project: Energy transitions: past, present, and future. As is often the case we got much less money than we asked for - about a third. But I had applied for a DORA fellowship which I didn't get so we should be able to do most of what we planned with the money we got with some ingenuity. I'll post some more on our plans when I have more details. Congratulations also to Crawford School colleagues Michael Ward and Quentin Grafton who also got a grant to look at adaptive management of Australia's urban water; to Adrian Kay for: "The making and unmaking of Australian public policy: using Historical Institutionalism theory to understand the path from Medibank to Medicare": and Sango Mahanty for "Project Title: The political ecology of forest carbon: mainland Southeast Asia's new commodity frontier?".

Congratulations also to colleagues at the Research School of Economics John Stachurski and Renée Fry who also got grants. And at the Research School of Social Sciences, Simon Niemeyer. Well there are a lot more ANU people who got grants, these are just a few who I know.

From our Vice-Chancellor:

"ANU scholars won over 10 per cent of all funding.

102 projects from disciplines across the campus won a total of $34 million from a total pool of $310 million.

I particularly note that this year we have built on our traditionally high success rates with a very impressive 37 per cent of ANU applications under the Discovery Projects scheme awarded funding. This will see 90 projects begin in 2012, supported by $31.5 million.

This sets ANU at the top of the national scale for Discovery Project earnings."

Note that ANU is much smaller than most other Go8 universities and that the average success rate of Discovery proposals is just over 20%.

P.S. I've labelled this post with a new category "DP12". All posts about research resulting from this grant will be also labelled DP12.

ARC to Abolish Existing Journal Ranking System

The Australian Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr put out apress release today describing changes to be made in the 2012 ERA research assessment exercise compared to the 2010 ERA. One of the changes is: "The refinement of the journal quality indicator to remove the prescriptive A*, A, B and C ranks". This follows consultation on changes to the ranking scheme. "The Australian Research Council (ARC) will use a refined journal quality indicator for ERA 2012." In other words:

"Evaluation committees will assess the appropriateness of the journals used as publication outlets for research, taking into account any regional or applied focus of the disciplinary unit concerned. For this purpose, evaluation committees will be presented with a profile of the journals (or other relevant publications) used most frequently by the unit under evaluation. The change empowers committee members to use their expert judgement to take account of nuances in publishing behaviour. This approach will allow experts to make judgements about the quality of journals in the context of each discipline.” said ARC CEO, Professor Margaret Sheil.

This is a further step away from quantitative assessment in disciplines such as economics, whereas I think they should move further towards quantitative assessment. On the other hand, this is likely to be a plus for institutions such as the College of Asia and the Pacific at ANU, which have a regional focus.

I think it is to some degree true that:

"There is clear and consistent evidence that the rankings were being deployed inappropriately within some quarters of the sector, in ways that could produce harmful outcomes, and based on a poor understanding of the actual role of the rankings. One common example was the setting of targets for publication in A and A* journals by institutional research managers.

In light of these two factors – that ERA could work perfectly well without the rankings, and that their existence was focussing ill-informed, undesirable behaviour in the management of research – I have made the decision to remove the rankings, based on the ARC’s expert advice."

I don't think that ANU has been overly prescriptive on this, but definitely there has been a feeling that we should try to avoid publishing in journals ranked B or C if possible. I have heard rumors that other universities were telling researchers that it was better not to publish than to publish in a B or C journal. This is diametrically opposed to the previous Australian tendency to publish lots of papers in low ranked journals.