HASS cedes to culture in draft research roadmap

HUMANITIES will lose their brief-lived priority status, but will benefit from a new focus on cultures and communities, under modified plans to guide spending on research capital.

The exposure draft of the ‘2011 strategic roadmap for Australian research infrastructure’ – currently out for consultation – outlines the 18 research “capabilities” where the federal government plans to target large-scale research infrastructure investment, up from 16 in the roadmap’s 2008 version.

But “humanities, arts and social sciences” – which was included in 2008 after being overlooked in the original 2006 roadmap – has been ditched, along with “heavy ion accelerators” and “disaster and hazard test-bed”.

Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences executive director Angela Magarry said the addition of a fifth national research priority – “understanding cultures and communities” – would “definitely” benefit the HASS sector.

Six of the 18 capabilities contribute to the new NRP, including the newly added areas of “cultures and communities” and “digitisation infrastructure”.

But the other four NRPS are far better represented, with the “environmentally sustainable” and “safeguarding Australia” priorities claiming 15 capabilities each. “Health” ticks the boxes of 11 capabilities, and “frontier technologies” claims nine.

The roadmap says the 2011 capabilities contribute to more than one research priority each, thus demonstrating “the benefits of a national, collaborative approach to research infrastructure investment”.

But two of the new capabilities, “cyber security” and “atmospheric observations”, contribute to just one priority each.

Another new capability of “biological collections and biobanking” has been added to the latest roadmap, while eight other capabilities have been refocused.

Ms Magarry commended the draft’s development and welcomed “the intention to examine the currency of mix between capability areas and researchers’ needs, and how that may enable innovation”.

“But there remains a lack of detail about what kind of eResearch facility the government has in mind,” she added.
The paper recognises eResearch as “a pervasive and underpinning requirement needed to support all research and research collaboration”.

“There is now significant acceptance by researchers and others that the opportunities generated by previously unimaginable amounts of data can only be realised through the use of an eResearch infrastructure capability,” it says.

“This requires both a foundational eResearch infrastructure base and eResearch solutions designed for specific domains.”

The paper outlines the eResearch requirements that need attention, including data, digitisation, high performance computing, networks, human capital, software and collaboration resources.

“CHASS urges emphasis on a targeted national investment which allows for the network of interoperable data repositories to be linked,” Ms Magarry said.

Comments on the exposure draft are due this Friday July 22.