MEASURING EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH AND RESEARCH TRAINING
Canberra, 22 June 2004

Welcome
Dr Jim Peacock

The National Academies Forum is a gathering of the four learned academies in Australia - the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. The National Academies Forum held a small workshop in March of this year to scope this public symposium on the topic of measuring excellence in research and research training. We are delighted that the symposium has attracted some 150 participants including scientists, scholars, administrators, research managers and policy makers from universities, research organisations and government agencies.

A number of countries, as you know, have put various schemes to measure excellence in research in place, and in some of them at least the institutions being measured, as well as collaborating with the measurement process, have also used some strategies to present the best phenotype for the measurement. We don’t particularly want games-playing to affect what happens in Australia; if we have got a good, open, light-touch system it gives us the best opportunity to get things right.

Importantly, today we want to talk about research and research training, and it is also important to think about the recognition of emerging excellence as well as extant excellence. So I think we need to think of ways of looking at the vitality, the flexibility, of institutions and groups in research and research training.

So how do you do this? Do you make an assessment on an institution, like a university, say? Do you assess departments and then have some form of aggregation to give an institutional score? Do you assess disciplinary teams? Or do you use different assessments for multidisciplinary teams? Where does peer assessment feature? I am sure we all want to see that, and peer assessment will be very important. But we don’t have that many peers in Australia, and that presents a problem in itself – or a challenge, anyway.

I think the main thing is that today we, the stakeholders, if you like, in this process, have a chance to discuss these issues together. We are not likely to come up with a single solution today, and there probably shouldn’t be – nor could there be – a single solution. I think, though, we do need to recognise that ultimately the assessment of research training and research in regards to excellence is going to affect investment. So that is something that we need to hold in our minds.

This process will be a continuing process for us. We will have the opportunity, as I have said, either individually or through other arrangements that the National Academies Forum might try and put in place, to have further interactions with the people who are battling to come up with a scheme, so we have a continuing dialogue.

So what do we want out of today? We would like to know your views on what the assessment framework must achieve, for both training and research, and what it must avoid doing. I think we all have some quite strong opinions about both those things, so let’s hope we are going to have a creative day.