Government overhauls tertiary institutions' research funding system

Academics are cautiously welcoming an overhaul of the system for sharing $315-million-a-year in research funding among universities and other tertiary institutes.

The government has announced a replacement for the Performance-Based Research Fund which allocates the research component of government funding for enrolments in degrees and higher qualifications.

Tertiary Education Minister Penny Simmonds said it would be replaced in 2028 by the Tertiary Research Excellence Fund, which would significantly reduce compliance costs for tertiary institutions.

The main change would be dumping an expensive quality evaluation that required academics to compile portfolios of their research for grading by expert panels.

The evaluation happened every six years under the PBRF and the results determined the allocation of 55 percent of the fund.

A Cabinet paper said each evaluation cost universities about $40m.

The new TREF system would allocate funding based on five measures for universities: research degree completions (30 percent); external research income (25 percent); citations in research publications (30 percent); commercialised research (7.5 percent); citation of research in government policy papers (5 percent).

Non-universities could opt into the the latter three measures or receive funding based on their investment in research capacity (2.5 percent of the fund).

Tertiary Education Union national president Māori Garrick Cooper said the new system was blunter and cruder than the PBRF with less bureaucracy.

Cooper said the new system might result in some changes to the share of research funding received by each institution but a bigger problem was the overall size of the fund.

He said the research fund had not increased for years and it was effectively losing ground against inflation.

"Over at least the last five years it's been the same amount so in effect it's been sliding backwards if you take into account inflation and so on so there's no new money going into the sector and that's a problem," he said.

The use of a citation measurement to allocate 30 percent of the fund could disadvantage some disciplines that did not have prestigious research journals, Cooper said.

He said examples included Māori and indigenous studies, feminist studies, digital studies and fields that had emerged in the past 20 years.

Association of Scientists co-president Troy Baisden said it broadly supported the direction of the changes but needed to see more detail.

The quality evaluation aspect of the Performance Based Research Fund achieved its goals nearly 10 years ago and needed to be replaced, he said.

The new system needed to provide sensible incentives for academics to do great research, Baisden said.

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