Automating Award Applications for Academics

At the Early Career Academic Retreat I am taking part in is the topic of applying for awards. It occurred to me that a web search system could be sued to find suitable awards, then match people to awards and pre-fill the application form.

Finding Research Funded by the ARC

At the Early Career Academic Retreat I am taking part in is the topic of government support for research. Perhaps one problem is that the public is not told what their investment in research produces. As an example the Australian Research Council has a website which details how to apply for a research grant, but does not detail what past research has produced. A member of the public (or a journalist or politician) would therefore conclude the ARC spends money public but does not produce anything. A good start might be for the ARC to provide a list of research publications from ARC funded project (this could be produced automatically with a web search), with a link from their hone page.

ARC Rejects Open Access Policy

The Australian Research Council's new "ARC Open Access Policy" requires that "... any publications arising from an ARC supported research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a twelve (12) month period from the date of publication.". Unfortunately the policy still allows researchers to publish in closed journals which never allow public access. The researcher just has to make public where their results can be purchased, they do not have to provide the actual research results for free. The ARC policy is not an open access one and misleading for the ARC to name it as one. The ARC seems to wish to continue the system where the Australian public pays for research and then has to pay again to read the results of the research. In contrast the US NIH Public Access Policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to a public archive  upon acceptance for publication, with these papers accessible to the public no later than 12 months after publication.

Dr David Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe criticized the ARC for its lack of an open access policy in a talk at National Library of Australia in Canberra, 14 August 2009.