Senator Kim Carr has released a ministerial statement to the Senate Economics Legislation Committee regarding improvements to Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA).

The senator has approved a set of enhancements recommended by the ARC while maintaining the rigour and comparability of the ERA exercise. These improvements are:

• The refinement of the journal quality indicator to remove the prescriptive A*, A, B and C ranks;
• The introduction of a journal quality profile, showing the most frequently published journals for each unit of evaluation;
• Increased capacity to accommodate multi-disciplinary research to allow articles with significant content from a given discipline to be assigned to that discipline, regardless of where it is published (this method was successfully trialed in ERA 2010 within Mathematical Sciences);
• Alignment across the board of the low volume threshold to 50 outputs (bringing peer-reviewed disciplines in line with citation disciplines, up from 30 outputs);
• The relaxation of rules on the attribution of patents, plant breeders' rights and registered design, to allow those granted to eligible researchers to also be submitted; and
• The modification of fractional staff eligibility requirements to 0.4 FTE (up from 0.1 FTE), while maintaining the right to submit for staff below this threshold where affiliation is shown, through use of a by-line, for instance).

Read the full ministerial statement here.