ARC moves to end grant confusion

Changes to the wording of the Australian Research Council's discovery grant eligibility criteria have left scientists at medical research institutes believing they are no longer eligible to apply for grants from the organisation.

But the ARC, which administers the commonwealth government's non-health and medical research funding, says it has simply re-worded the criteria in an attempt to clarify eligibility, listing eligible higher education institutions as an appendix to the rules for the first time.

Prof Alan Johnson, the ARC's executive director for biological sciences and biotechnology, said institutes were not eligible to be administering organisations for grants that include project costs, but they could be administering organisations for Australian postdoctoral fellowships, QEII fellowships and Federation Fellowships -- so long as the grant was for salary components and not project costs, and only if the institute MRI is funded primarily from state or commonwealth government sources.

Researchers who derive more than 50 per cent of their salary from a medical research institute are eligible to apply to be a chief investigator on a discovery program application that includes project costs -- provided that:

• The institute is not funded primarily from state or commonwealth government sources.
• The researcher is associated with an eligible higher education institution, museum or herbarium, including a researcher with an emeritus or adjunct academic appointment, and the researcher applies with the associated eligible institution as the administering organisation.
• The researcher meets the other, non employment-related, criteria such as residency.

Johnson said researchers at institutes who did not meet those criteria could still be involved in applications as partner investigators.

He said the definitions of eligibility had been widely distributed to researchers since December last year, and further clarification was recently sent to medical research institutes.

But he said that the rules would probably affect relatively few researchers, as less than 1 per cent of the more than 3200 applications for discovery projects funding come from institutes.

In last year's funding round, for example, only five grants were awarded to medical research institutes -- the Victor Chang, St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research, the Bionic Ear Institute and the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. The year before that, nine grants were awarded to institutes including the Victor Chang, the Howard Florey Institute, the Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and QIMR.

Applications for the current round, for funding commencing in 2005, are due this Friday, March 5.