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Funding for medical research in Australia has been significantly reshaped by the introduction of the Medical Research Future Fund and the changes to the NHMRC grant schemes. Both these schemes have significant issues that are being openly discussed by researchers.
Firstly, many of the large grants awarded through the MRFF appear to lack transparent process and rather seem to be awarded based on the relevant Minister’s personal decisions rather than a peer review process.
This has led to the scheme being loosely dubbed by researchers as the "Minister's Research Fund for Friends".
On one hand researchers welcome the hundreds of millions of much needed extra funding to medical researchers in Australia. However, the lack of a transparent process has created a situation where funding has occurred based on lobbying rather than merit.
Secondly, the new NHMRC grant schemes have change the proportions of funding from largely favouring teams, to favouring individuals, especially individuals at the highest level of academic hierarchies, many of whom have secure positions and funding from their institutions.
The numbers speak for themselves: the highest level of applicants (Leadership 3) was funded with near 50% success rate, however, mid career researchers were funded at 7 (Leadership 1) and 9% (Emerging Leadership 2) respectively in both 2019 and 2020.
This is a huge problem as the least funded levels are represented by the most innovative up and coming researchers who are vulnerable due to an increased rate of family and outside work responsibilities and the researcher gender split goes from favouring women to men.
All this is widely accepted amongst the research community but because researchers are so dependent on Government funding, there is no will to speak up and rock the boat.
Today I saw that @TheASMR1 intends to petition an audit of MRFF funding. This is a good step. Next we need to completely redesign a broken funding system to enable innovative research. Some eggs will hopefully be broken.
