Lottery Offers Better Odds For Research Funding

Opportunity Details

​The ARC proposes allocating some research funds by “weighted randomisation” – what the rest of us would call a lottery. It works for the Brits.

The chance to win up to $1.2m over three years will be in the ARC’s new “Explore” scheme, which starts in March. It’s open to chief investigators on former ARC-funded projects, to “trial bold ideas with the potential to be highly transformative.” The Council, as is its new norm, takes a broad view of pure research, announcing the scheme is for “new fundamental knowledge” which has “ potential to be highly transformative (with) economic, social, environmental, cultural or commercial benefits.”

The ARC does not mention amounts, but if any funds are left after allocation to those that win on peer review, remaining competitive applications “may be selected through weighted randomisation.”

There will be an independent probity advisor and “the rigour and integrity of the peer review process is maintained.” But the ARC adds that experience offshore, “has shown that randomisation can result in fairer outcomes by reducing bias.”

The Council might mean the Canadian New Frontiers in Research Fund, which uses randomised selection if the funding cut-off falls in a pool of equally ranked projects. Or it might mean the UK British Academy’s randomised small research grants awards scheme, now in its second three-year trial. On launch, the Academy’s Ken Edmonds justified it as, “a fairer and more transparent way of allocating limited funds to a consistently strong field of applications.”

Adrian Barnett (QUT) advised the Brits on the scheme and has long made the case for lotteries.

“Funding systems are often conservative and award funding to ideas that build incrementally on past work. A lottery would free researchers to pursue ideas with potentially large public benefits and hence may be more effective than current peer review based systems,” he and Philip Clark (Uni Melbourne) advised a House of Reps committee inquiry in 2018.

Plus, they are, “free from pernicious biases such as sexism, racism and cronyism.”

The ARC’s initiative will appeal to medical researchers. The success rate for National Health and Medical Research Council Ideas Grants last year was 8% – and the other 92% had passed the NHMRC required scrutiny by their institution. In 2024, the Council also created structural priority funding for women and non-binary researchers, “to address differences in funded rates compared to men.”

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