Results tagged “Australian Research Council” from Alex Burns

Two separate meetings on career directions: Where do you want to be in 3-to-5 years? What actions can you take to move toward these goals?

Collaborator Ben Eltham has written a piece on how the 2010 final rankings for Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) has affected his academic publishing record: 'When Your Publication Record Disappears'. A title reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails' song 'The Day The Whole World Went Away.'

For the past year I have been dealing, professionally, with issues that Ben raises. Whilst outside academia, journal publications are often viewed as irrelevant, they are crucial to the academic promotions game, and to getting external competitive grants. A personal view:

ERA is the Rudd Government's evaluation framework for research excellence, developed by the Australian Research Council, to include a ranked list of academic journals and discipline-specific conferences. The ARC released the final ranked list in February 2010. It may be revised and updated in the future, but not this year.

The ARC's goal for this ranked list was to ensure it was comprehensive, peer-reviewed, would stand up to international scrutiny, and would provide guidance to administrators, managers and researchers on quality research outputs.

In the near-term ERA's 2010 final rankings will require adjustments to our academic publication records. Some of the journals we have published in such as M/C were revised down or excluded, probably because of perceived issues with their peer review process. More starkly, ERA's guidelines for academic publications filters out most of my writings over the past 15 years: magazines and journals that no longer exist (21C, Artbyte), websites (Disinformation), magazine articles with original research (Desktop, Marketing, Internet.au), unrefereed conference papers, technical reports, and contract research. It also does not usually include textbooks, research monographs, and working papers. The 'disappearance' effect that Ben describes also happens elsewhere: when Disinformation upgraded its site to new servers, we sometimes lost several articles during the transition that writers had no back-ups of.

Others are in a tougher position: mid-career academics who have taught and not published or applied for external competitive grants, or who understandably focussed on quantity of articles for DEST points rather than ERA's focus on quality ranked journals and 'field of research' codes. ERA has caused a dramatic re-evaluation for some mid-career and senior academics of their publication record, impact factors, and other esteem measures.

House cleaning, gardening, and article writing.

Working through the assessment exercises from Timothy Baldwin, William Bommer and Robert Rubin's textbook Developing Management Skills: What Great Managers Know and Do (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), book site here.

Watched Stanford entrepreneurship lecture on Adding Value to Companies.

Martin Van Creveld on a 1998 television interview: soft-spoken, dismisses claims that the 'future of war' will be dominated by 'cyberterrorism' and other Revolution in Military Affairs trends.

A colleague told me this week of how a professor used the Australian Research Council's national competitive grants program as a bootstrap process for promotion to dean. First, they established their expertise, publication track record, and created a cross-institutional and collaborative research team. Second, they split the ARC grant proposal into different components, delegated each to different team members, and then reassembled them into a completed proposal. Third, they ramped up the number of applications to 15-to-20 per year, with a 50% success rate. The grant revenues made a significant contribution to the department funding. The professor was soon promoted to dean.