Research has been so long neglected in Australian public discourse in recent years that it is difficult to cover any more than a few of the many issues that University of Melbourne DVC R Mark Cassidy and his team must be ruminating about, but we attempted to lift the veil on thoughts behind a few of the thornier research issues in the 15 minutes allocated with the research boss.
Q: Social licence isn’t mentioned in the strategy, but has been a significant issue for the sector, why not identify social licence as a goal? How do the areas of research strength align with what community wants?
“Social licence is not something we should be doing on the side, it needs to be core to the whole strategy. Leading with integrity and openness is important. We understand institutions like unis are being seen as elite, research methodologies are being brought into question… we need to explain what we are doing.
“Trust is a really key theme for the strategy, trust for our own people and for community. We stepped back and looked at what is the core purpose of the university; to benefit society through transformative research and education. We will do that to bring communities along with us, so they can see the benefits of research in their lives – but we are doing that with openness and integrity to improve social licence.”
Q: Researchers are going to be equipped with cutting edge technology, according to the strategy. How does that tally with managing access to AI?
“It’s going to be core to the future, technology. One of the first things we did with AI is say to students and to staff that if you are going to use AI you have to reference it.
“We have a firewalled AI for all our students and researchers. We are not saying don’t use it, but use it ethically; part of that (development of a Melbourne AI platform) is to make sure we don’t lose our IP and other people’s IP in this area, (through an open platform).
“It opens wonderful opportunities for research, data and data analytics, We have lots of opportunities across the university, particularly in drug discovery and digitally-based platforms for therapeutics design – but we need to make sure we are using it in an ethical way.”
Q: How do you prevent Melbourne researchers from submitting AI-generated publications?
“In the strategy we emphasise that we are going to lead with integrity and openness. We are going to need to invest more effort into research integrity as it is more complex. AI can be used for these things (fabricating publications) but it can also be used to police these things; increasingly we will need to be policing ourselves in a systematic way.
Q: The strategy mentions impact, will mainstream rankings still be relied on to measure outcomes?
“We were the first university in Australia to sign up to the DORA declaration on responsible use of citations and metrics. We do use metrics for citations as just one measure and they need to be supplemented with other evidence.
Q: The strategy makes much of Melbourne being Australia’s leader, and the Go8 dominates research funding already, what is the place for Australia’s other universities?
“We spend $1.6 billion on research at UoM; that means we can solve big problems at scale with that type of resourcing.
“Being highly ranked opens up opportunities to collaborate with others. You won’t see a statement saying preserving being number one in research rankings is critical for the University of Melbourne. Instead, what is important, is the attributes that come from that, to do really bold and ambitious research, we should be solving really bold big questions.
“Victoria and around Melbourne could be one of our big translational ecosystems for research, we are just one party who can make that happen, but we are a really important party. We want to see that ecosystem develop and we want to see great enterprises come out of the precinct.
“Being number 1 in itself is not important.”
Future Focus on Research
There are so many issues to cover in relation to research, Future Campus will start to address these and other issues in weeks to come including:
- Succession planning
- Workload management tools – how some are robbing researchers of time
- Performance management and promotion systems – whether they are fit for purpose
- Quality control tools
- The future of publications in post-citation, AI-embedded world
- Reimaging the role of senior staff who continue past what used to be retirement age, to maximise productivity and age-friendly workplaces
- Measurement of impact – given the lack of a consistent national system
- The inclusion of media mentions as a reflection of impact – and what that really means
- Plans to rehabilitate the reputation of / respect for research as a critical part of tertiary sector activity
No doubt you have your own questions to add to the list – drop a line to let us know the issues that you would like us to cover at: info@futurecampus.edu.au