The impact of university research can and should be measured, says Australian Technology Network executive director Vicki Thomson, but more work needs to be done before impact can be linked to funding.
The ATN, together with the Group of Eight, is nearing completion of a trial assessing the impact of research undertaken at 12 Australian universities, with a report due at the end of this month.
“We believe it’s demonstrated that impact is assessable,” Ms Thomson said today.
“The Australian Government and taxpayers deserve to know where their money is actually going. At the moment we have a really good system, which measures the quality of research, but we don’t have anything that does that for impact.“
Ms Thomson said while the ATN and Go8 Excellence in Innovation trial would help address how to measure impact, there were still question marks about how to distribute funding on the basis of impact.
“There’s a huge conversation that needs to be had about the merits of measuring impact before we talk about money,” she said.
Ms Thomson’s comments come after Australian Research Council chief Aidan Byrne told The Australian he would be open to including impact measures in any future research funding audits.
“For the ARC to acknowledge that (impact measures) could be part of a modified ERA is something we’d be encouraged by,” Ms Thomson said.
However Andrew Norton, program director of higher education at the Grattan Institute, said academics would always try to do what they were going to do anyway, but shape it within any new incentive structure.
“Most people agree at a high level that you should have broad indicators of impact but it’s finding robust indicators of impact – how do you actually measure impact?” Mr Norton said.
He added that any system could be gamed and that was the major problem facing measures being linked to funding.
“The real risk with all this fiddling is that universities put more and more effort into gaming rather than actually focusing on what they’re good at, or their original mission, which in many cases is to serve local communities and not the global research production machine.”
Group of Eight executive director Michael Gallagher declined to comment, however a backgrounder report released by the group last year argued measuring the impact of research was difficult because not all impacts are direct, some can be negative and the time between the performance of research and when its benefits become apparent can be significant, unpredictable and differ for different kinds of research.
The Coalition has also flagged an increased focus on research impact as part of its education policy platform, with Andrew Robb telling The Australian the government should focus on funding research that produces innovation.
“Linking it to innovation makes sense on the face of it, but you’d have to make sure you had robust measures in place,” Ms Thomson said.
The Coalition is also seeking to make the grants program more efficient to reduce the time researchers spend applying for grants.
Ms Thomson said the ATN would welcome the increase of grant periods from three years to five years to improve researcher productivity.
“The downside is if you are an early career researcher you’d have to wait five years for the next grant round. So you’d have to have some mechanism for early career researchers,” she said.
Dorothy Bishop
logged in via Twitter
A view from the UK. Be warned. Yes, you can devise ways to measure impact, but because it's a multifaceted construct, it is complicated to do so in a way that will be accepted as valid by both the academic community and politicians. It is very important to look at the costs - in both time and money - of implementing any scheme to measure impact. Here in the UK institutions are employing administrators on fat salaries purely to write 'impact statements', while academics sweat over trying to assemble data that will convince others they are having impact. Because the stakes are high - funding allocations will be affected by this in our REF - universities are taking it terribly seriously and there's a danger that evaluating the impact of research is seriously denting people's ability to actually get on and do research. See my blogpost, http://tinyurl.com/6olcfaq and this piece in the Times Higher Education http://tinyurl.com/bnt3mvm
Ian Smith
Hon. Res. Fellow at CSIRO
As I wrote several years ago in a review of a particular field of endeavour:
"There currently exists a view that the quality of science can be judged by the extent to which it can drive policy and affect societal change. In one sense this idea is entirely impractical since the impacts of research can be subtle, any judgements are likely to be subjective and, as history often demonstrates, the value of science is not fully realised until well after the practitioners (and their critics) have departed."
From a science point of view, the value and impact of any research is best measured by the respect of our peers. History tells us that this is a far better guide than anything devised by bureaucrats/administrators.
Gavin Moodie
logged in via LinkedIn
I agree that the measures of the impact of research that are currently available are rudimentary and resource intensive. However, a leading Coalition front bencher Andrew Robb has recently continued conservative politicians' tradition of attacking humanities research, this time attacking a grant to research on the history of emotions in Europe from 1100-1800. There is little one can do directly to avoid such narrow philistinism, but at least trying to provide evidence of impact may stop this sort of criticism widening.
Daryl Adair
Associate Professor of Sport Management at University of Technology, Sydney
Hi Gavin, a very sobering example of Andrew Robb's attitude to historical inquiry. As someone with a PhD in history, but who now works in a Business School, I look with concern at colleagues in the Arts and Humanities who are under renewed pressure to justify the "value" and "impact" of their scholarship. Some areas of applied research are easier to showcase, but the study of the past seems - at least to skeptics - something of an unnecessary indulgence. Or, as John Howard often complained, the study…
Read moreGavin Moodie
logged in via LinkedIn
Yes, one could get very depressed. However, I prefer to see it as another aspect of universities' role in improving the community's understanding.