Regular successful grants are crucial for academic career advancement. Grants fund research, research leads to publications, and publications result in job security and promotion. But the likelihood of success is low, particularly for early-career researchers. Last year, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects, and National Health and Medical Research Council grants had a success rate around 18%, and ARC Linkage Projects around 30%.
A huge amount of effort is being dedicated to writing grants with very little chance of success.
How can we make this system better? My suggestions include prioritising funding for early-career researches, an expression-of-interest system to gauge the success of proposals, transparent and detailed feedback to unsuccessful applicants, and changing the timing of grant season so that is more family-friendly.
Applied ecology and conservation research group 