The Evolution of ARC Centres of Excellence (CoEs)
Prof Lawrence cram | March 2024
These reflections on the evolution of the ARC Centres of Excellence scheme come from Professor Lawrence Cram, based on knowledge from his time as Executive Director at the ARC when the Centres of Excellence scheme was first introduced.
CoEs and ARC growth
Prof Lawrence Cram
Over the years 2001/2-2005/6, the ARC’s annual program budget doubled. If you’d been an applicant for a Discovery (DP) or Linkage Project (LP), your chance of receiving an award was around 25% with a one-line budget around 75% of the amount you requested. The ARC’s growing budget stimulated Australian university research but required close management of both the ramp-up of total annual funds and the raised expectations of stakeholders.
Commencing in 2003, the ARC’s new Centre of Excellence program addressed three expectations of the expanding ARC: (1) ramp up support for some large-scale, relatively expensive research in internationally vibrant fields aligned with national priorities, (2) reduce the application burden on researchers with outstanding track records, and (3) fund more projects by early or interrupted career researchers who found it hard to compete with established ARC grant winners.
CoEs address these expectations through annual budgets with long lifetimes that are around 10-15 times larger than typical awards to individual/small team investigators in DP, LP and Fellowships. At this scale, a CoE budget can support a collaboration of 5 or more serially successful DP/LP/Fellow grant holders (or the equivalent in overseas schemes). The collaboration can undertake a program of research at a scale that has the potential for international impact. The lead investigators don’t need to submit frequent, multiple applications to DP or LP, reducing the incidence of double-dipping and increasing the diversity of DP/LP recipients. A CoE can also, and is expected to, support early and interrupted career researchers.
With around 25 active Centres at any time, the program supports approximately 150-200 outstanding researchers and their teams. CoEs are an efficient and low-risk way for the ARC to fund outstanding researchers’ programs, although it becomes a high-stakes proposition for the applicants. The scale of support provided to a CoE means that the ARC must strive to ensure that CoE Directors have demonstrated that they have the skills required to mobilise and encourage a large and diverse research group, and to effectively deploy the resources entrusted to the CoE.
CoE guidelines and selection criteria
With CoE program architecture shaped by the above policies, the research themes covered by the ARC’s portfolio of CoEs reflects national priorities and societal challenges as well as the knowledge, skills, and interests of the CoE research leaders. There has been a shift over the 2-decade life of the CoE program from an early concentration in basic natural and life sciences to include more CoEs in humanities, social sciences, and trans-disciplinary research.
CoEs are rated competitively by scholarly peers informed by guidelines and supported by tools that assemble scores against weighted selection criteria. The ARC’s CoE program managers have found that peer reviewers’ ratings are well aligned across the broad sweep of “great proposal” to “not ready”. On the other hand, ranking the very best prospective CoEs can be very difficult for peer review panels.
Importance of Value Add
An ARC CoE assembles the efforts of a team of outstanding researchers with ARC track records established over several decades. It is however not enough for the CoE to be a cluster of coordinated individual DP/LP/Fellowship projects. The ARC and its peer reviewers require that a CoE adds value beyond a cluster of projects by outstanding individuals, for example by (a) driving higher use of major equipment investments, (b) providing a cohort environment for the Centre’s HDR program, (c) activating and coordinating complementary research methodologies [theory/experiment, pure/applied, qualitative/quantitative], (d) exploring the societal impact and ethical implications of the program, and (e) establishing an enduring, prominent, and national profile for their work.
A successful CoE proposal convinces peer reviewers that it will build beyond the established track record of focused and scalable research projects led by one or two senior researchers, to become more than the sum of its parts. Bid teams should aim to conceptualise their Centre in terms of both its program of research projects, and its value-add programs. Where a team isn’t successful on their first attempt, the research projects can then be advanced through other funding programs, to continue to build the researcher’s individual and collective track records and to build Australia’s national research strengths.
Prof Lawrence Cram is Emeritus Professor at ANU and a visiting scholar at CDU and Sydney University. He has extensive experience in tertiary education and public sector research, including practice, funding, administration, and leadership. He has engaged with government and business to promote successful research commercialization at CSIRO, the University of Sydney, the Australian National University and Charles Darwin University.
