The Value of Costing
Systems used in Australia to fund research are byzantine
An accurate assessment of research costs is extraordinarily important to research administration. This importance is not owed only to the demands of good governance, but also to simple pragmatics. Our funding landscape requires both, as research funding is notoriously complicated. It’s funded through a blend of federal and state government sources as well as philanthropy and industry partners.
Although manifold efforts to review funding have been made, ranging in recent memory from the 2018 Inquiry into Funding Australia’s Research to the 2024 Australian Universities Accord, competitive grants remain labyrinthine to navigate. Applications to the Australian Research Council have averaged just over 20% across all schemes between 2015 and 2025. More than three quarters of applications are unsuccessful, though well-supported and expensive for universities to create and submit. Furthermore when grants are won, they do not cover the full cost of research, which encompasses not only direct research activities, but also a host of support and enablement services. The Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes reports a “hidden” cost to medical research organisations of 64c for every $1 spent on research.
Judicious allocation of research resources is critical
Despite the relative scarcity of this funding, it can be a big challenge to prevent waste in research budgets.
Good resource management begins with pinpoint-accurate oversight. What is being used, when, by whom? How much does it cost? Importantly: can that use be streamlined for equal impact and lower outlay?
Research sophistication brings higher stakes to uncertain resource management
The evolution of research practices over time have not made this challenge more approachable. As human knowledge expands, research becomes more sophisticated and the demands for more complex and costly resources increases. This is a funding pressure with which research organisations must find some way to contend.
A wide range of more complex tools or high-support facilities require consultation, training and booking to access; this includes everything from animals used in research to mass spectrometers and telescopes. Researchers, particularly early career researchers, receive minimal guidance on how to cost their research projects, often fragmented and ad hoc. The Research Whisperer blog has previously characterised the process of learning about research grants and funding applications as “almost a process of osmosis: we absorb information from others, often piecemeal and erratically.” The systems supporting them to discharge these responsibilities are often equally haphazard.
There is therefore a perfectly explicable tendency to misestimate the time needed with facilities and resources. This is not, necessarily, the fault of “lazy” researchers: in many cases guidance is confusing and poorly optimised, and in others, the duration or specificity of need for particular resources is not well articulated at the outset and thus cannot be appropriately prescribed.
Take the example of travel to archives, a fairly common activity that researchers may need to undertake: a researcher must travel to receive access, and they have no clear idea of how long they need, so they risk either a) running out of time to look at all of the documents they must access, or b) finishing more quickly than expected, even though they have already accrued the expense of travel and accommodation for the longer duration. Researchers know they are caught between the risks of losing knowledge or the risk of spending too much time and money, but lack standardised guidance on how to reduce these risks or systemic rules for costings that can support more judicious assessment. Accordingly, they will nearly always choose to accept a “buffer” of extra time in support of their research.
How can we minimise waste without harming research projects?
There are two things that can be implemented to reduce at least some of this type of friction:
- The first thing is more standardised and systemic instruction in how to cost and price out research projects, especially aimed at early career researchers. Although now there exist plenty of seminars and documentation, the fact remains that a great deal of costing and pricing training is still offered to researchers in ad hoc one-on-one sessions with research administrators, mentors or supervisors, which can promote more individual and nonstandard practices as well as occupy valuable time in these professionals’ calendars which could otherwise be spent more fruitfully. Systemically and broadly delivered process information could reduce administrative labour and standardise understanding.
- The second thing is implementing solutions that can help set and standardise project costing. Despite the inevitable risk of waste in the landscape, anywhere waste can be mitigated, it must be mitigated. Look for solutions that can:
- Encode workflows that help the user determine the full scope of requirements more accurately
- Enforce standard overheads and indirect costs associated with research needs
- Account for invisible costs such as legal or changing personnel entitlements over time
- Maximise accuracy by ensuring compliance with funding rules and salary rates and indexation, as well as ensuring calculations remain consistent and correct
Uncertainty is inevitable, but must be mitigated wherever possible
Some waste in this system cannot be eliminated. It would be unreasonable to expect otherwise, because funding for the creation of new knowledge is predicated upon a paucity of existing knowledge. Totally inflexible plans are by nature inimical to learning brand-new information. So, sometimes we must account for relative uncertainty.
However, the more such uncertainties that can be eliminated, the better the return on investment in research. We can do this with standardised professional coaching and training, strengthened data management and streamlined analysis of costings for projects. In the current era of research funding, every bit counts.
