Australian Research Council (ARC)

The Australian Research Council (ARC) is the Australian Government’s principal funding and research-assessment agency for research outside clinical medicine and dentistry. It is a non-corporate Commonwealth entity established as an independent statutory authority under the Australian Research Council Act 2001, tracing its institutional lineage back to the Australian Research Grants Committee, first established in 1965. The ARC sits within the Australian Government’s Education portfolio and administers competitive research funding on the order of roughly A$800 million to A$1 billion a year, though the exact figure moves with each federal budget and should be checked against the ARC’s own annual report rather than treated as fixed.

What the ARC funds — and what it doesn’t

The ARC funds research across all fields of research except clinical medicine. Under the ARC’s Medical Research Policy, “medical research” is defined broadly to include laboratory-based, clinical, group- or community-based study of the causes, treatment, and prevention of human disease, and explicitly extends to dental research and to the diagnosis, monitoring, and management of disease. Research meeting that definition is out of scope for the ARC and instead falls to the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), which runs a separate national competitive grants program for health and medical research. Everything else — humanities, social sciences, physical and biological sciences (outside the clinical/medical carve-out), engineering, information technology, and more — is within the ARC’s remit.

The National Competitive Grants Program: Discovery and Linkage

The ARC delivers its funding through the National Competitive Grants Program (NCGP), organised into two complementary programs.

Discovery Program

The Discovery Program funds basic and applied research and research training led by individuals and teams, largely independent of a nominated external partner. Current schemes include:

• Discovery Projects — the ARC’s core investigator-led project-funding scheme, open to researchers across career stages.
• Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) — salary and project support for researchers early in their independent research career.
• Discovery Indigenous — funding for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander researchers, which can be combined with a Discovery Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award (DAATSIA) providing salary support.
• Australian Laureate Fellowships — the ARC’s most senior individual fellowship scheme, for researchers of international standing.

Linkage Program

The Linkage Program funds research undertaken in partnership — typically between a university and an industry, government, or community organisation — and the infrastructure that supports collaborative research. Current schemes include:

• Linkage Projects — collaborative research between researchers and one or more partner organisations, usually with co-contributed cash or in-kind funding.
• ARC Centres of Excellence — large, multi-institution research centres funded over an extended term to build critical mass around a strategic research area.
• Industrial Transformation Research Program — including Industrial Transformation Research Hubs and Industrial Transformation Training Centres, which embed researchers and postgraduate trainees directly alongside industry partners.
• Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) — co-funded major research infrastructure and equipment.
• Industry Fellowships and Industry Laureate Fellowships — early-career, mid-career, and senior fellowships specifically structured around industry placement or partnership.
• Special Research Initiatives and Linkage Learned Academies Special Projects — targeted, time-limited funding instruments for specific national priorities or sector-building activities.

Scheme names and eligibility rules are revised periodically through the ARC’s published Grant Guidelines — always check the current guidelines on arc.gov.au for the funding round you are applying to rather than relying on a scheme list from a prior year.

ARC vs. NHMRC: how the split actually works in practice

Research administrators frequently need to route a proposal to the correct national funder, and the ARC/NHMRC boundary is the first practical test. The two agencies work closely together — including on the administration of competitive granting schemes, on research-integrity governance, and jointly, together with Universities Australia, as co-owners of the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, 2018 (the sector-wide integrity code that adherence to is a precondition of ARC funding) and of the Australian Research Integrity Committee (ARIC), which reviews institutional handling of research-integrity complaints connected to ARC- or NHMRC-funded research. Despite that close collaboration, the funding boundary itself is a hard line, not a matter of degree: a proposal is medical research, and therefore an NHMRC matter, or it isn’t, and therefore an ARC matter — there is no dual-funding pathway for a single project that sits across both remits.

Operationally, the two agencies also run on separate systems: ARC applications and grant management run through the ARC’s own Research Management System (RMS), while NHMRC schemes (including Investigator Grants and Ideas Grants) are administered through NHMRC’s Sapphire platform, which replaced the older RGMS system. A research office that supports both medical and non-medical disciplines is, in effect, supporting two separate national grants ecosystems with separate systems, separate guidelines, and separate funding rules — not one program with two labels.

Research evaluation: from ERA to a new framework

Beyond funding, the ARC has historically also run Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), a periodic, discipline-by-discipline evaluation of the quality of research undertaken at Australian universities. The Australian Government discontinued ERA (along with the related Engagement and Impact assessment) in 2023, and the 2023 ERA round did not proceed. Following the Australian Universities Accord review and a subsequent review of the ARC Act, the ARC has been working on a proposed replacement national research evaluation framework; research administrators should check the ARC’s own evaluating-research pages for the current status rather than assume ERA itself will return in its earlier form.

Where the ARC fits in the international funding landscape

For research offices managing international or comparative funding portfolios, the ARC is one of several national/supranational research funders whose cost models, application systems, and reporting requirements differ meaningfully from one another — alongside the UK’s UK Research and Innovation (UKRI, including its full economic costing and TRAC methodology), the European Commission’s Horizon Europe program, and Canada’s Tri-Agency (CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC). See CASRAI’s grants management pillar for the broader lifecycle context, and the dictionary entries on Grant Agreement (Horizon Europe) and the guide on Innovative Training Networks (ITN) — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions for how a comparable EU collaborative/training scheme is structured relative to the ARC’s own Linkage Program instruments.

References

• Australian Research Council Act 2001 (Federal Register of Legislation)
• ARC Medical Research Policy Frequently Asked Questions, arc.gov.au
• ARC Discovery Program and Linkage Program scheme pages, arc.gov.au
• Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, 2018 — NHMRC, ARC, and Universities Australia
• NHMRC Funding and Investigator/Ideas Grants pages, nhmrc.gov.au
• ARC — Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) evaluating-research pages, arc.gov.au