Australian Research Council Consultation
Linkage Infrastructure – Equipment and Facilities
Response by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL)
This response was prepared on behalf of CAUL (Council of Australian University Librarians) by
Cathrine Harboe-Ree.
Contact Details:
Cathrine Harboe-Ree,
CAUL President and University Librarian, Monash University
cathrine.harboe-ree@monash.edu
2 April 2012
Note: also submitted online via SurveyMonkey 3 April 2012
Australian Research Council Consultation
Linkage Infrastructure – Equipment and Facilities
Consultation Questionnaire
Purpose
The ARC is currently considering changes to its Linkage Infrastructure – Equipment and Facilities
(LIEF) scheme to:

support a more strategic approach to investment in medium-scale research infrastructure;

provide for better integration of LIEF objectives and funding with other Commonwealth
research infrastructure programs; and

establish a better balance of funding for infrastructure between research disciplines.
Consultation
To assist the ARC to develop its proposed improvements to LIEF, a consultation paper and this
accompanying online questionnaire are being distributed to key stakeholders: higher education and
other institutions that are eligible for funding under the scheme, Directors of ARC-funded research
centres within those institutions, and other recent large infrastructure grant recipients. The ARC
welcomes all comments.
Please complete your questionnaire by Monday, 2 April 2012.
Your responses will be treated in-confidence and are for internal use by the ARC as part of this
consultation only. Should the ARC decide to disseminate or publish information obtained from
responses to the questionnaire, it will only do so in a way that does not allow attribution of responses
to individual respondents.
The ARC will provide feedback to respondents, in summary form, about the outcomes from this
consultation.
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Questionnaire
A more strategic approach to allocating funding
See pages 3-4 in the Consultation Paper
Q1
Would you support a two-stage process (expression of interest and full proposal) for identifying highpriority needs and assessing proposals for relatively large infrastructure to be funded from a portion
of the LIEF budget?

yes
Q2
If a two-stage process were introduced, would you support it being guided closely by an assessment
of strategic priorities for infrastructure at institutional, regional and national levels?

yes
Q3
Please provide any additional comment you may wish to make on the changes under consideration
for a more strategic approach to allocating funding under LIEF.
The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) supports strengthening of several LIEF
objectives, including more funding for the humanities and provision for funding technical experts. It
is likely that both of these objectives would be better realised if a two-stage process were to be
introduced, giving time for research teams to develop details of the research undertaking. CAUL
supports this process for smaller projects as well, noting that many humanities projects will be
smaller.
Larger, multi-year grants
See page 4 of the Consultation Paper
Q4
Would you support a portion of the LIEF budget being used to fund larger grants?

No comment
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Q5
If larger grants were introduced, should there be an upper limit on the amount of funding that could
be allocated to any such grant in any one year?

No comment
4
Q6
If larger grants were introduced, should there be an upper limit on the portion of the LIEF budget
used to fund them? (At present, the LIEF budget is about $30 million per annum.)

Yes, otherwise it is likely that an even greater proportion of funding will go to the sciences.
Q7
If larger grants were introduced, would you support multi-year funding being allocated to them?

All grants – not commercial, not otherwise done. Especially note reference databases
Q8
Please provide any additional comment you may wish to make on the changes under consideration
for larger, multi-year grants.
Many of the humanities projects that have been funded to date require multi-year funding. These
have been important projects but they or may not have qualified as “large” projects. CAUL
recommends that multi-year funding be considered for any project, with each project assessed on
its merits.
A better balance of funding between research disciplines
See page 4 of the Consultation Paper
Q9
Would you support a lowering of the minimum funding threshold for LIEF projects? (At present, the
minimum level of funding provided by the ARC for a project under LIEF is $150,000 per year.)

yes
Q10
If the minimum funding threshold for LIEF projects were to be lowered, at what level should it be set
per project, per year?

no minimum threshold
Q11
Would you support widening the scope of budget items supported under LIEF to include salaries for
technical personnel necessary to develop and build specific items of infrastructure?

yes
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Q12
Please provide any additional comment you may wish to make on the changes under consideration
for a better balance of funding between research disciplines.
Many humanities projects, while important, are quite small and involve less collaboration than is
likely in large-scale science research. Smaller projects should encourage humanities collaboration.
Scheme performance
See page 5 of the Consultation Paper
Q13
Please comment on any aspects of the ARC’s current management and administration of LIEF which
you believe could be changed to improve the scheme’s efficiency and effectiveness.
CAUL has three main areas of interest regarding this review of LIEF grants. These are: the ARC's
stated goal to increase the amount that goes to the humanities; the possibility that funding could be
made available for technical experts; and; the desirability of greater complementarity between
research infrastructure and LIEF grants. Specific comments follow:
1. Funding to the humanities
1.1 Lowering the minimum funding threshold may make a difference, but a bigger problem may be
the requirement that LIEF funding be used for collaborative projects. If there are ways to encourage
and fund smaller collaborative projects that could be beneficial. This might be more likely if the
minimum funding threshold were to be lowered.
1.2 One of the most critical issues for the humanities is the need to digitise research collections and
to manage the digital output of research. This has been raised through reviews of NCRIS but
remains an area largely unfunded in Australia (in comparison with many overseas countries, where
digitisation programs are extensively funded). It would be helpful if the list of budget items
supported specifically included digitisation. CAUL suggests that any digitisation funded through LIEF
would need to be transformational, meaning that the digitisation must be necessary to enable new
research methodologies or to enable research outcomes that it would not be possible to achieve
with non-digitised materials. There should be evidence that the digitised materials would be data
collections of significance, and they should be digitised and made available in ways that support the
use of tools and techniques such as text mining and other kinds of computer-assisted processing,
and integration with other collections and inclusion in virtual research environments.
2. Technical experts
This is critically important and should be
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supported. Generally speaking research teams do not
have the expertise to manage research workflows and research data, and so inclusion of provision
for this would make a huge difference to research projects. CAUL would like to see included in this
area expertise in research data management, information management (such as: rights
management; deployment or development of standards, including digitisation standards; and
curation, including management of retention and disposal regimes). CAUL also recognises the need
for research workflow, user needs analysis, usabilty assessment, computational and software
development expertise.
3. Complementarity between research infrastructure and LIEF grants
CAUL would like to see support for greater linking between various Government funding programs,
so that ARC LIEF grants favoured projects that involved working with NCI, RDSI, NeCTAR or ANDS,
for example. This would help to optimise the investment in infrastructure as well as collaborative
research, and would help ensure that standards and common tools were deployed as widely as
possible.
Respondent details
Please enter your contact details. This information is required for validating responses.
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Name: Cathrine Harboe-Ree
Position: President
Institution: Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL)
City: Melbourne
State: Victoria
Postcode: 3800
Email: cathrine.harboe-ree@monash.edu
Thank you for contributing to the ARC’s consultation on LIEF by responding to this questionnaire.
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