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We're starting on the final plenary sessions at SPIN [3] now. The first speaker here is Toss Gascoigne from CHASS [4], the Council for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Toss notes the fact that the HASS sector is wildly underrepresented within the government sector - while there are organisations representing the sciences and other areas, and an Australian Chief Scientist, there is no such representation for the HASS field. Toss and his organisation are working on changing this, and some of their work was presented yesterday already (see e Commercialisation in the Humanities [5]). Unfortunately, of course, the HASS sector is also measured in terms of its validity using science-derived rules (publications output etc.), and CHASS has been asked by the federal government to provide alternatives to such measures. Toss also points out the continuing need for organisations in the HASS sector to become members of CHASS and take part in its decision-making and advisory processes.
Toss points out that the project between CHASS and the Australian federal government Department of Education, Science and Training [6] to develop alternative quality and impact assessment systems for publicly funded research in the HASS sector is a once-in-a-decade opportunity. On Tuesday, DEST released its new issues paper "Research Quality Framework: Assessing the Quality and Impact of Research in Australia" [7] which sets the theme for this work. Toss now hands over to Jonathan Powles to describe this project in some more detail. Jon notes that the move here is away from purely quantitative measuring systems (number of papers published, etc.) to more qualitative approaches which evaluate excellence - and so it is important to be clear about terms and definitions in this context. There are three key terms here, with working definitions:
Jon goes on to pose four questions to the audience now: