Mashhuda Glencross

3-10 years when you add in rejection and resubmission cycles.

‘Complete joke’: Efforts to reduce funding wait times ends with longer blowout A long campaign to improve Australia’s sclerotic research bureaucracy has culminated in an extraordinary blowout to grant approval times, leaving scientists despondent.

“A complete joke”

After the starting gun fires, Australian researchers have to wait 2–3 years before even starting the race.

Really clear article explaining the impossibly long new time-frames for Australian Research Council grants.

By @liammannix.bsky.social

As a matter of public record, @samsungmobileus.bsky.social, you CAN tell me I must agree to your terms to continue to use the phone that holds essential data and apps, but you're making me 'sign' under duress. If a dispute does arise, expect me to cite the fact that I lacked meaningful free choice.

YouTube video by FatherPhi ChatGPT pen test yields unexpected results in 2026 #chatgpt #ai

I totally want this level of intelligence being used to write code, run companies, direct military strategy, and make medical care decisions.

“ChatGPT how many hands to hold a pen??”

Via @FatherPhi on TT, YT, etc.

12. Honestly a lottery would be more effective at distributing research money. Think of the lost productivity and financial costs of the entire process vs - lottery. Right now it feels like a lottery but with a huge amount of wasted effort.

11. People in the college of experts also have grants under consideration from the same a small pot of money… COIs anybody?

10. The timeline for funding is not conducive to work in fast moving subjects.

9. Overwhelmingly though the funding does go largely to professors that have previously had ARC funding, granted there are exceptions but these are few.

8. After all the work we put in, we get a meaningless graphic charts and scores pre and post normalised. These give no insight to how you could ever improve a proposal and increase the chance of funding. This may be deliberate. Our work deserves more respect.

7. There isn’t sufficient expertise across the college of experts that covers every field of research code so funding is skewed in favour of the expertise of the college of experts.

6. The review process isn’t objective because it’s not a blind review process.

5. Then all these EOIs go to an assessment process with thousands of hours of wasted time scoring EOI proposals (though I have heard some people say that lazy reviews are done based on h-index) only for the scores to then be normalised and even overruled because the ARC carriage didn’t like it.

4. University research offices spend hundreds of hours compliance checking for the rules that ARC impose at every Australian University.

3. Academics at universities spend hundreds of hours preparing proposals, getting and responding to grantsmanship feedback from research offices where people spend hundreds of hours reviewing at every Australian university. This feedback improves quality. But good proposal != successful proposals.

2. For each round millions of dollars of staff time, effort and energy is wasted preparing proposals that have no future because there is a scant amount of money to distribute.

1. The Australian Research Funding system is badly broken.

So, having not just one but two Australian Research Council DP EOIs rejected (one of which was led by a brilliant colleague of mine from UTS in Sydney), these are my thoughts.

Yep. Had this happen to me too.

The money wasted with so much time, and effort spent on proposals with such a low success rate which does feel random could be better spent.

Australian Research Council DP EOI triggered depression day. Not fit for purpose research funding scheme…

It just makes success random. Or at least heavily biased in favour of people with prior success.

I understand, but it doesn’t really help people to understand how to improve their EOIs and chances of success.

So that’s even weirder as I have scores and I have normalised scores so some college members gave my EOI better scores then the scores got normalised down… weird.

DP depression is a real thing.

Yes, I know this is normal but it also doesn’t help. Ultimately every score gets normalised down so what’s the point?

I.e. assessors ratings are higher, college downgraded. It’s impossible to get anywhere with the ridiculously long timeframes, lack of useful feedback and terrible quality of reviewing.

Yeah and they have as always been changed down. Honestly someone in the ARC college must really detest me or my research area.

No joy for me and the feedback graphic tells me nothing.

Why are we being subjected to Tony Abbott on #abc730? Don’t you have anyone credible to interview #auspol

Two-thirds of researchers globally say there is now more emphasis on producing research aligned with government priorities compared with a few years ago, a major survey has found
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/scholars-worldwide-pushed-towards-mission-orientated-research