Consultation questions The ARC undertook initial consultation on the proposed future direction for research evaluation in Australia, the development of a Research Insights Capability. The consultation commenced in July 2025 and concluded in November 2025. During this time the ARC held more than 50 consultation sessions and received over 30 written submissions. What is the value of research evaluation to you? What are the questions about the research sector would you like a Research Insights Capability to answer? Do you see value in the outputs of the proposed Research Insights Capability? Do you have data that could be shared with the ARC, or are you aware of a data asset, which could be useful to the ARC? Value of research evaluation A key deliverable of the consultations was to understand the value of research evaluation to the sector. Responses to this question fell into a number of broad themes: National research evaluation plays a crucial role in enhancing the understanding and effectiveness of research capabilities within institutions and across the sector. Evaluation processes offer insights to institutions that help identify strengths, gaps, and trends, which support internal improvements and inform strategic planning. Research evaluation should focus on joint societal challenges over cross-institutional competition, emphasise environment, equity, and collaboration metrics alongside performance, and increase the visibility of research activity across institutions, disciplines and diverse research practices. National evaluation should demonstrate return on government investment in research activities. Key themes from the consultation Avoiding rankings was supported as evaluation should focuses ‘on joint efforts to address shared societal challenges’ over competition. Incorporation of, and adherence to, responsible research assessment principles was encouraged, particularly the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Hong Kong Principles. Broad support for promoting persistent identifiers (PIDs), FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data practices, and open access publishing. Support for facilitating benchmarking and highlighting sector strengths and weaknesses. Support for reducing sector burden, and continued collaboration and consultation with the sector. Concern about evaluating the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) without peer review, with strong opposition to purely quantitative evaluation for HASS disciplines. The use of data and artificial intelligence (AI) comes with considerable ethical and practical considerations and robust principles and protocols for data use must be developed to safeguard against misuse. Impact was considered a key challenge with respondents noting there is no way to fully capture impact in a low burden, purely data driven way. While there is support for the Research Insights Capability using open data sources, some respondents were concerned that OpenAlex data has attribution errors and may include outputs from predatory journals. Inconsistent repository practices across institutions are a potential drawback to using data from repositories and there is some concern about administrative burden and resource requirements for implementation. The Research Insights Capability must include diverse output types such as creative works, research reports, and books if it is to capture the breath of Australian research activity. However, this data is difficult to capture. The ARC should engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers, and Indigenous data sovereignty experts, to ensure the Research Insights Capability is fit for purpose for Indigenous researchers and research.