“If you didn’t refer to them, you’d be remiss in writing the best science case you could,” he says.īailes, who has served on ARC assessment panels, says reviewers are capable of judging the relative merits of preprints and papers. Matthew Bailes, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, says the ARC must modernize its process to reflect the urgent nature of topical research shared in preprints. Their use in biomedical sciences has also exploded in the past 18 months, as researchers around the world fight the COVID-19 pandemic.įemale researchers in Australia less likely to win major medical grants than males Preprints are now becoming common in many fields, such as ecology and social sciences. Physicists, astronomers and mathematicians have been sharing papers ahead of peer review on the open-access arXiv preprint server for three decades. It’s a “killer of innovation”, says one physicist who had their application rejected and also spoke to Nature on the condition of anonymity. Some merely cited technical documents that are hosted on preprint servers, but were never intended for peer-reviewed journals, says the researcher, who chose to remain anonymous. ‘Killer of innovation’Īccording to the researcher behind the ARC Tracker account on Twitter, who has been in contact with 23 rejected applicants, at least 14 of them were ruled ineligible because they referenced other authors’ preprints in project descriptions or methodology. ![]() In publicly accessible reports, the ARC says that 52 applications were deemed ineligible across the two funding schemes this year, but does not list the reasons. However, researchers argue that the rule change was not clearly expressed or defined in instructions to applicants. The ARC says this change “was communicated to university research offices through webinars” at the time of the opening of grant rounds. Now, under a rule introduced in September 2020, ahead of this year’s funding round, applicants are instructed not to “include or refer” to preprints in “any part of” applications, even though they must show how their proposal is timely and relevant. Previously, the ARC banned researchers from including preprints in lists of their own publications some researchers contacted by Nature say they understand the rationale for the original rule. Some will never be allowed to apply again and say their careers have effectively been ended, because application attempts are limited to two for Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards and three for Future Fellowships.Īustralia plans ‘national-interest’ test for research grantsĪ preprint, as defined by the ARC, is a manuscript, submitted to a journal or other publication, that has not yet been through peer review. In a tweet posted on Monday, the funder responded to the influx of complaints, saying: “Thank you to everyone who has contacted the ARC to provide your disciplinary perspective about including pre-prints in applications for funding” and “we are looking into the issues raised and will respond as soon as we can”.Īt least 23 researchers - 7 of whom Nature contacted for comment - have been deemed ineligible because they referred to preprints in applications for two prestigious ARC funding schemes, which can make or break careers. ![]() The ARC did not answer specific questions from Nature about its rationale for excluding preprints, or confirm how many applicants had been deemed ineligible as a result, but a spokesperson said that the rule “ensures that all applications are treated the same”, adding that “eligibility issues may arise in a number of ways”. “The leading research-funding body of the country is potentially throwing away valuable research on a ridiculous technicality,” he says. Nick Enfield, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Sydney, who is currently funded by the ARC, argues that the decision is unconscionable and unethical. In the past week, researchers have taken to Twitter in outrage, calling the blanket ruling “short sighted”, “plain ludicrous”, “cruel”, “astonishing”, “outdated” and “gut-wrenching”. How a torrent of COVID science changed research publishing - in seven charts
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