Flawed preprints ban ‘not grounds for appeal’

Withholding of funds over Australia’s “preprints” grant eligibility rule will not be automatically overturned on appeal, even though the Australian Research Council (ARC) has implicitly acknowledged that the rule should not have existed in the first place.

Asked whether its appeals committee could override decisions to invalidate funding applications for mentioning preprints, the ARC gave no definitive answer. It said the committee’s deliberations would be limited to “administrative process issues…to ensure that the applicant has been treated fairly and consistently in the context of the selection procedures”.

This suggests that appeals against the application of the preprint rule will be unsuccessful, unless the committee finds that the rule was not applied according to guidelines.

Thirty-two applications to the ARC’s Future Fellowships and Discovery Early Career Researcher Award funding streams – all from physicists – were ruled invalid for breaching a little-known new rule stating that “preprint publications should not be included in any part of the application form”.

The rule has now been revoked, but only for funding rounds that are still accepting submissions. This means thousands of applications to the Discovery and Linkage schemes could fall foul of it, even though grants from those streams have not been finalised.

The ARC said it could not retrospectively change eligibility criteria for closed rounds, but researchers whose applications had been quashed could appeal to the committee whose “experienced and respected” members were independent of the council.

“The ARC needs to allow the independent appeals processes to be completed for these cases,” it told Times Higher Education.

Researchers believe there could be grounds for appeal based on semantics. The expression “should not” does not equate to an outright ban, and the ARC definition of preprints has been imprecise and changeable – with a claim that it may be technically impossible for any publication to demonstrably meet the definition.

However, the appeals committee’s decisions are merely recommendations to the ARC chief executive rather than binding determinations. And even if chief executive Sue Thomas accepts recommendations to overturn funding rejections, there is no guarantee that the ARC will honour the grants – whether or not it has enough money left over. “If an appeal is successful, the ARC will consider the most appropriate course of action,” the council said.

Of 64 appeals against competitive grant decisions between mid-2018 and mid-2020, just seven were upheld. The identity of current appeals committee members is not disclosed, and they meet only two or three times a year – although the ARC says appeals involving the preprint rule will be “progressed as a matter of priority”.

Sven Rogge, president of the Australian Institute of Physics, said appeals should be upheld in cases where publications listed in applications had been wrongly tagged as preprints. Some were papers that had been peer reviewed since being uploaded on preprint archives, while others were government reports or technical specifications never intended for peer review.

But Professor Rogge argued that all of the appeals should be upheld, because the fact that only physics applications had been spiked showed that the procedure had been flawed. He said applications in biology would have been “equally invalid” if the criterion had been applied consistently.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com