Biased grant reviewers ‘should be put on notice’

“Inappropriate and unprofessional” assessors of grant applications should be blacklisted from review panels, with repeat offenders barred from applying for funding themselves, says a pre-budget submission endorsed by hundreds of Australian researchers.

Funding applicants should also be given more time to defend themselves from “manifestly defamatory, discriminatory, biased or conflicted” reviews that “any reasonable researcher” would ignore in assessing research projects’ merits.

The proposals are among six “simple” measures that would “provide much greater certainty” for academics while costing the Australian Research Council (ARC) as little as A$100,000 (£56,000) – a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars it allocates each year in grants.

The document was set to be presented to new federal education minister Alan Tudge and assistant treasurer Michael Sukkar on 29 January, ahead of a deadline for submissions to inform this year’s federal budget.

It has accrued signatures from about 800 academics headed by 15 prominent researchers, including University of Queensland astrophysicist Tamara Davis, University of Sydney learning scientist Peter Goodyear and UNSW Sydney artificial intelligence expert Toby Walsh.

Lead signatory Jodie Bradby, president of the Australian Institute of Physics, said some of the suggestions were “procedural” measures that the ARC could implement without ministerial directive.

They included directly informing people of the outcomes of their grant applications, a practice the document says could be implemented through a “small upgrade” to the ARC’s research management system. Professor Bradby likened the current approach, where the results were published in website updates, to bygone days when students’ marks were “posted in the newspaper”.

“[They] need to be published, but we should still have a personal email that comes out in a timely fashion,” she said.

Measures requiring ministerial consent include setting the dates when researchers will be informed if they have been funded – a “simple, no-cost solution” that would allow the planning of research projects to be fast-tracked, while shielding researchers from wasting weeks applying to subsequent funding rounds or moving overseas because of job insecurity.

“The benefits are wide-ranging and numerous,” says the document, composed by a research transparency activist known as “ARC Tracker”. “It quickly becomes apparent how wasteful and uncertain the current system is, and how easily it can be improved.”

ARC Tracker said the submission had been prepared “to let the incoming minister know that he could make a real, positive difference to researchers’ lives right now, while universities struggle with the impacts of Covid on their research capabilities.

“[While] a huge increase in ARC funding is what’s really needed, the suite of small, zero-cost changes we’ve proposed would help in so many ways. Researchers from the full range of disciplines across Australia have signed [the submission]. This is not coming from a vocal few but a true cross-section of the research community.”

The proposals include giving applicants two weeks to submit “rejoinders” to unfair reviews, up from three days at present. Professor Bradby said it was hard to say whether biased reviews were common because the issue was addressed “behind closed doors”.

But she said that as a mother of young children, she had attracted reviewer comments questioning her capacity to complete proposed research. And anecdotally, some bad reviews were more “malicious”, with assessors rejecting proposals out of spite. “It’s certainly something that happens, and it’s not clear that there’s a process to deal with it.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com