ARC appoints chiefs to grade excellence

The Australian Research Council has appointed eight Australian academics to head up the evaluation committees for Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) 2012. The new chairs will lead committees of up to 20 members that will grade research quality in the nation’s 41 universities, which must submit swaths of related documentation to the ARC next year. Submissions to ERA 2012 open on March 5. ARC chief executive Margaret Sheil said preparations were going well. The next step was to finalise selection of the research evaluation committee members. “We were very pleased with the response we had to the call for nominations,” Professor Sheil told Campus Review. “We’ve still got some gaps we may need to come back to people on, because each individual university nominates a group of people and we don’t always get a perfect fit.” She said the committees would decide grades – at, above, or below world standard – by examining each broad unit of evaluation, comprising deeper income, peer review, citation and journal profile information. “Each unit is assessed and then those ratings are compared and tested in the presence of the whole committee,” she said. “There’s lots of evidence and testing – that’s the process. They spend a week in Melbourne locked in rooms testing the assumptions and testing the basis.” The ARC expects the elimination of journal rankings to make the job of the research evaluation committees easier than it was in the inaugural ERA 2010 exercise. “The changes to the journals won’t slow things down, it will actually make things quicker, because what happened in the previous system was that they were presented with an aggregate of journals, and they often went down and looked at individual journal articles to get a sense of where they were,” Sheil said. “It will be easier this way, because they’ll get a cumulative summary, which they can also still interrogate down to individual journals and papers.” Most of the new committee chairs, who are renumerated for their time, worked on ERA 2010 or other ARC initiatives. They are: Professor Robert Vincent (University of Adelaide), chair of the physical, chemical and earth sciences committee; Professor Joy Damousi (University of Melbourne), for humanities and creative arts; Professor Rose Amal (UNSW), engineering and environmental sciences; Professor Mark Western (UQ), education and human society; Professor Kim Langfield-Smith (Monash), economics and commerce; Professor Mary-Anne Williams (UTS), mathematics, information and computing sciences; Professor Jeffrey Schwartz (Griffith), biological and biotechnological sciences; and Professor Hugh Barrett (UWA), medical and health sciences. Universities Australia said it was pleased with the makeup of the new appointments. “There’s a good spread of representation, experience and skills,” a spokesperson said. The biography of each chair is at www.arc.gov.au. The ARC is also calling for ERA peer reviewers. Interested people can nominate through their university.