ARC Discovery Project

An ARC Discovery Project is a competitively awarded grant under the Australian Research Council‘s (ARC) Discovery Program — the largest and most general-purpose scheme in the ARC’s National Competitive Grants Program (NCGP). It is the mechanism most people mean when they refer generically to “getting an ARC grant”: an investigator-driven award that funds a defined program of basic, strategic basic, or applied research, rather than a career fellowship or an industry-partnered project.

What the scheme funds

Per the ARC’s published Discovery Program Grant Guidelines, Discovery Projects support excellent research and research training across all disciplines — humanities, social sciences, science, engineering, and technology — with the explicit exclusion of clinical and other medical research, which falls under NHMRC’s remit instead. The scheme’s stated objectives are to support excellent basic, strategic basic, and applied research that addresses a significant problem or gap in knowledge and represents value for money; expand Australia’s research capacity by supporting excellent researchers and teams; foster national and international research collaboration; generate new knowledge with economic, commercial, environmental, social, or cultural benefit; and enhance the scale and focus of research in areas of national priority.

Funding and duration

Discovery Projects are funded at between $30,000 and $500,000 per year, for a project duration of one to five years, set by the applicant at the time of proposal and assessed for appropriateness during peer review. Administration runs through the ARC’s own Research Management System (RMS), separate from the NHMRC’s Sapphire platform used for Australian health and medical research grants. For funding commencing in 2026, the ARC ran Discovery Projects through a two-stage process — a shortlisting Expression of Interest (EOI) followed by a full application from invited applicants — investing more than $370 million in the 2026 round.

Who can hold one — the key distinction from ARC fellowships

The single most useful fact for distinguishing a Discovery Project from other ARC schemes: it carries no career-stage eligibility restriction. A Discovery Project can be led by a sole Chief Investigator or, far more typically, a team spanning early-career to senior researchers, and the grant is awarded to fund a specific research project, not to support a named individual’s salary and career development. This is a genuinely different mechanism from the ARC’s two dedicated fellowship schemes:

• Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) — restricted to researchers within a defined number of years post-PhD; funds the researcher’s salary and a project, explicitly as a career-development instrument.
• ARC Future Fellowship — a mid-career fellowship aimed at retaining and attracting researchers at a more advanced career stage, again funding the person (salary plus research costs) rather than a team-held project grant.

A Discovery Project, by contrast, is the scheme a research office would point to when a multi-investigator team — with no career-stage constraint on any member — wants funding for a bounded, curiosity- or strategy-driven research program. DECRA and Future Fellowship sit within the same Discovery Program alongside Discovery Projects, Discovery Indigenous, and the Australian Laureate Fellowships, but each targets a different applicant profile.

Where Discovery Projects sit in the NCGP

The ARC’s National Competitive Grants Program is delivered through two programs: the Discovery Program (Discovery Projects, DECRA, Discovery Indigenous/DAATSIA, Australian Laureate Fellowships) and the Linkage Program (Linkage Projects, ARC Centres of Excellence, Industrial Transformation Research Program, LIEF, and related industry- and infrastructure-focused schemes). A Discovery Project is the Discovery Program’s flagship, general-eligibility instrument — the closest Australian equivalent, in function, to an NIH R01 or an NSF standard research grant in the US system, or a UKRI standard research grant in the UK: an investigator-initiated project grant open to any qualifying researcher rather than gated by career stage or requiring an industry partner.

Example

A university research office assessing whether a proposed multi-investigator project — say, a team of three chief investigators at early-, mid-, and senior-career stages, with no external industry partner, requesting $150,000/year for four years to pursue a basic-research question — fits Discovery Projects would confirm: no career-stage gating applies to any team member, the discipline is not clinical/medical, and no industry co-funding is required. That combination is the operational signature of a Discovery Project as distinct from DECRA, Future Fellowship, or a Linkage Project.

Counter-example

A single early-career researcher, three years post-PhD, seeking a grant that funds their own salary plus a project specifically because of their early-career status, is describing DECRA eligibility, not Discovery Projects — Discovery Projects has no such person-specific salary/career-stage gate built into the scheme’s core eligibility.