Australia’s government is set to introduce a ‘national-interest test’ for research projects seeking grant funding from next year.

The policy will require that researchers outline how their project will advance the country’s interests, the education minister, Dan Tehan, said in a statement released on 31 October. “The value of specific projects may be obvious to the academics who recommend which projects should receive funding, but it is not always obvious to a non-academic,” he said.

The test will apply to future project applications seeking money from the Australian Research Council (ARC), a major funder of science, as well as humanities, research.

Research groups and academic have criticized the decision, saying grant assessments already demand a description of a project’s potential benefits and impact.

“Given the ARC’s expert panels already consider national benefit and impact when making their assessments, how will a new test add value and not just more red tape?” the Australian Academy of the Humanities tweeted.

The new policy comes days after it emerged that the previous education minister, Simon Birmingham, used his powers to reject 11 grant applications that had been recommended for ARC funding by independent peer-review panels in 2017 and 2018. The rejected projects were in the humanities, and included titles such as ‘Price, metals and materials in the global exchange’, ‘Greening media sport’ and ‘Rioting and the literary archive’.

Although the education minister has the power to reject recommended projects, the right is rarely exercised. Birmingham has not provided his reasons for rejecting the projects. On 26 October, he tweeted: “I’m pretty sure most Australian taxpayers preferred their funding to be used for research other than spending $223,000 on projects like “Post-Orientalist arts of the Strait of Gibraltar.”

Little transparency

Academics were also upset that Birmingham’s decisions were not made public at the time.

In today’s announcement, Tehan said he would guarantee greater transparency in the reporting of grant funding decisions. “I have asked the ARC to add an additional category to the grant outcomes so applicants are notified of instances where a project is recommended to but not funded by the minister,” he said.