ANZSRC Review, or what are our new FOR codes?

The ARC, Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Statistics New Zealand (Stats NZ), and the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) are undertaking a joint review of the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC). What is the ANZSRC I hear you say - well it is the field of research codes, or FOR codes. It is also the socio-economic objectives (SEO) and type of activity (pure research, strategic research applied research etc).

It is a good time to refresh the categorization to bring it into line with current and future research activity. It is particularity pleasing to see the inclusion of a specific question around how Aboriginal research is categorized (currently it is all hidden at the '6-digit' FOR level).

The other interesting question is around interdisciplinary research and how the classification could be set up to support this better. If research is multidisciplinary then it is probably a simple matter of tagging it with more than one FOR code. If it is truly inter- or trans-disciplinary activity and of some scale then perhaps it should just have its own FOR code (maybe under a division of 'Interdisciplinary').

I sometimes think of research disciplines as fruits - a field of research might be like an apple, and another is a pear and another is a banana. When research is multidisciplinary it is like we have chopped up the fruit and tossed it together in a bowl to make a fruit salad - works well together but still separate fruits. Interdisciplinary research might be more like a fruit smoothy - we've taken all of the fruits we need but blended them together and have created something new and different. So, ANSZRC helps us classify the fruits and the fruit salad - but how will it classify the smoothy?

You can have a look at the review document yourself at the ARC website: https://www.arc.gov.au/anzsrc-review

ERA Washup & Lessons Learnt - Your ERA Submission

On Thursday 26 November I headed over to Sydney for the Collaborative Research Administrators Group (CRAG) forum titled ERA Washup & Lessons Learnt. The event was held at the Stamford Plaza Airport Hotel which was a lovely venue and made it easy to get over and back again for the day. While it was interesting to hear the stories about the blood, sweat and tears that went into some of the ERA submissions of the universities involved - for me the most informative session was presented by Dr Alex Cook from the Australian Research Council (ARC). Alex outlined some the changes that will occur between the 2009 ERA trial and the 2010 full ERA submission. Of course, following the presentation the poor fellow was flooded with questions for a good 20-30 minutes before he was allowed to return to his seat - I think he was well prepared though and did a great job responding to peoples questions and suggestions.

While there were a whole number of changes to the ERA process I think for me these are the most significant:

1. There will be a soft submission that can be checked by the ARC for potential errors before the submission is signed off by the Vice Chancellor - this will allow us an opportunity to fix the submission without requiring the VC to certify multiple times.
2. Field of Research (FoR) codes will be apportioned rather than double and triple counted thus removing "ghost" unit of assessments.
3. There will be exemplar Background Statements available.
4. We will be able to see reports similar to the reports supplied to the Research Evaluation Committees (REC) which will give us a much better idea of what our submission looks like in the REC's eyes - this will also help in producing our Background Statements.

The rest of the presentation mainly talked about data quality issues which are always going to be issues that need sorting out. Also research theme codes are going to be added to every output - this seemed to be a big issue for most of the people in the room. I am not sure that this is such a big issue myself.

In all it was a great chance to hear about other research office's experiences with their submissions and a good chance to network.

Details of the forum and copies of the presentations can be found here: http://www.hes.edu.au/page/conferences---events/era-washup-forum/program---era-washup/