Academic says thanks but no thanks as grant falls short

PERTH academic Rob Donovan has made good his threat to knock back Australian Research Council Discovery projects funding and sent a stinging letter to Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr, claiming underfunded grant offers are an insult.

PERTH academic Rob Donovan has made good his threat to knock back Australian Research Council Discovery projects funding and sent a stinging letter to Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr, claiming underfunded grant offers are an insult.

Curtin University's Professor Donovan foreshadowed in the HES last month that he might decline a grant allocation from the recent round, which at $35,000 was 44 per cent of what he requested to investigate anti-tobacco advertising for young children. His letter also raises doubt over whether he will accept another $270,000 grant, 60 per cent of what he asked for, to mount a longitudinal study of children's attitudes to substance abuse.

"Speaking frankly, I regard these offers as an insult," Professor Donovan wrote in his October 28 letter. In relation to the $35,000 grant, he says: "It is simply not possible to conduct that research to an acceptable scientific standard." The other research was still possible through increasing researchers' workload and reducing the number of young people surveyed.

"Are we able to accept funding if we reduce the sample size?" he asked in the letter. "If so, does the application then have to be re-submitted to the ARC's expert panel for approval?

"The fact that these offers are made in a context apparently oblivious to the realities of actual costs suggests little appreciation of what it takes to develop a competitive research application and even less about how to conduct internationally competitive research."

Senator Carr's office yesterday confirmed he had received the letter and was seeking ARC advice.

Professor Donovan, who works at Curtin's Centre for Behavioural Research for Cancer Control, told the HES this week: "I thought it was time to take a stand. Some people were being offered 25-30 per cent of what they had asked for, others between 50 (and) 80 per cent. It seemed to me that everybody was thinking this was normal and a state of affairs you did not do anything about primarily because you did not want, potentially, to be put on a black list."

Underfunding is a vexed issue in the competitive grants process. ARC chief executive Margaret Sheil told the HES last month that researchers asked for more funding in the expectation it would be cut and that she regarded a grant of 80 per cent of funds requested as fully funded.