Consultation Draft – New Australian Research Council (ARC) Research Insights Capability

The following response is submitted by Associate Professor Julia Prendergast, President/Chair of Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academic body representing the discipline of Creative Writing (Australasia).

The response was prepared by members of the Executive Committee of Management of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) including Julia Prendergast, Rachel Hennessy, Julienne van Loon and Natalie Kon-yu.

There are a number of areas of concern in this proposal of importance to the AAWP Community.

1.

We are concerned that data dashboards utilising smart technologies risk misrepresenting, or not representing at all, Non-traditional Research Outputs (NTROs) including creative works. As we know, Humanities, the Social Sciences and the Creative Arts as a broad field does not rely on statistics in the same manner as STEM disciplines. Citations are not captured in ways that benefit HASS and Creative Arts researchers. Research evaluation is critical in creative arts disciplines because we don’t fit into traditional research measurement schemes. As a discipline, Creative Writing would not welcome a return to metrics, as these have proven incapable of capturing the depth and breadth of our work.

2.

We note that publications in Australian journals – scholarly and NTRO – cannot be competitive with Northern Hemisphere journals. The Northern Hemisphere bias means that creative arts researchers cannot compete in the metrics.

3.

We emphasise that peer review has been enormously beneficial to the Creative Arts. Under ERA, peer reviewers were able to assess and validate creative writing research and NTROs. This made rankings discipline-specific and visible to our institutions. It is unclear how NTROs will be assessed if the changes in the current consultation draft take effect.

Further, the planning and resourcing of impact measurement needs to be implemented from the ground up, so we are not reliant on individual researchers performing that labour.

We are also concerned that ‘Dynamic real-time insights’, a suggested capability of the data dashboard, will not capture all kinds of research.

The proposal also mentions the creation of ‘In-depth and bespoke reports,’ as a further component of the capability, without detailing who will be responsible for creating these reports or providing detail about how they will be generated. This needs to be clarified in order to assess claims that they will be tailored, specialised, attentive to disciplinary nuance etc

4.

Given the discussions that have arisen, raising concerns about copyright and the protection of artists’ work caused by the impact of generative AI technologies, we have deep reservations about any compilation of academics’ creative works using AI models, as there are issues of copyright and intellectual property at stake. We note that this could be a problem for any discipline whose research outputs are being fed into AI Technology.

Given the significant issues of academic integrity at stake if research is fed into AI models we propose that, should the current proposal go ahead, individual disciplines and copyright holders retain the right to opt out.