Universities Accord: Submission in Response to the Interim Report

This submission to the Australian Universities Accord Expert Panel responds to its Interim Report, focusing on research and research training, given that around half of Australian health and medical research is undertaken in universities. Research Australia draws on its May 2020 national survey of health and medical researchers, which found 65.5% of early career researchers on fixed-term contracts and a further 10.5% casual, with 12 months the most common contract length, and a University of Melbourne and Monash survey in which 50.7% had less than 12 months left on their contracts. It maintains that short-term project grants leave no funding or incentive for the career development of early and mid-career researchers (EMCRs). It recommends that the Final Report make EMCR job security, career progression and professional development a shared responsibility of funders, universities, research managers and researchers, modelled on the UK Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, and that programs offering placements beyond universities, such as the National Industry PhD program, be expanded, noting its proposed Clinician Researcher Fellowship. On funding, it proposes that the Commonwealth give highest priority to funding the direct costs and a fair share of indirect costs of research it sponsors, agreed with universities through the Accord, with support for indirect costs of industry and other non-Commonwealth research drawn from a separate pool under its own policy rationale.