Two of the OECD’s longest-running national research-evaluation exercises are now effectively gone, and neither government has settled on what replaces them. New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) has permanently cancelled the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) Quality Evaluation, while Australia’s Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) — discontinued in 2023 — still has no finalised successor. For institutions that report into either system, or that benchmark against them, both processes are now in a state that makes near-term planning difficult.
New Zealand: PBRF Quality Evaluation is not coming back
The PBRF Quality Evaluation was New Zealand’s periodic, portfolio-based peer review of individual researchers’ outputs, used since 2003 to allocate a significant share of government research funding to universities and other tertiary providers. A Quality Evaluation round had already slipped from its original schedule before the government confirmed, in 2024, that the next round — planned for 2026 — would not go ahead at all, with the TEC instructed to stop all associated work. Coverage at the time, including in Times Higher Education, described the decision as effectively a death blow for the exercise, citing its “back-breaking” multi-year assessment cycle and heavy compliance burden on researchers and research offices.
The cancellation was tied to a wider review: the government established a University Advisory Group (UAG), chaired by Sir Peter Gluckman, to examine the university system as a whole, with the PBRF’s future role as an explicit part of its brief. The UAG reported in early 2025, and government funding decisions since have moved toward replacing PBRF’s competitive, evaluation-driven model with a Tertiary Research Excellence Fund — reported to hold funding at roughly the same overall envelope (around NZ$315 million a year) while removing the six-yearly portfolio assessment exercise, with a phased transition intended to fully replace PBRF later in the decade. Institutions should treat the specific transition timeline and final design of the successor fund as still-developing and confirm current details directly with the TEC before relying on them for planning.
Australia: ERA has had no replacement for three years
Australia’s equivalent exercise, Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) — a discipline-by-discipline, indicator- and peer-review-based assessment run by the Australian Research Council since 2010 — was discontinued by the federal Minister for Education in 2023. Unlike PBRF, ERA’s discontinuation was not paired with an immediate successor. The ARC has since been developing a proposed replacement, most recently referred to as a “Research Insights Capability,” intended to build a picture of research quality and impact without reviving ERA’s compliance-heavy indicator collection. The ARC ran sector consultation on the proposed approach through the second half of 2025, and an update to research offices in 2026 identified several areas the new system still needs to address — including Indigenous research, research repositories, impact measurement, artificial intelligence, indicators and metrics, and research diversity — without committing to a final design or implementation date.
In practical terms, Australian universities have now operated without a national research-quality evaluation framework for the better part of three years, with the sector’s own reporting describing the replacement’s design as still open on multiple fronts. Any specific launch date for a successor to ERA should be treated as unconfirmed until the ARC or the responsible minister formally announces one.
Why this matters beyond New Zealand and Australia
PBRF and ERA were, alongside the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Italy’s VQR, among the small set of national exercises used as reference points when other systems designed their own approaches to research assessment. Two of those four references disappearing in quick succession — one permanently, one in a prolonged design vacuum — removes concrete comparators right as the broader research-assessment reform movement (DORA, CoARA, and related “responsible research assessment” initiatives) is pushing funders and institutions toward less metrics-heavy, more narrative-based evaluation. Both countries’ moves are broadly consistent with that direction, even though neither government has framed the change primarily in those terms; the practical drivers cited publicly have been cost and researcher compliance burden rather than assessment philosophy.
For research offices that used PBRF or ERA benchmarks in institutional reporting, grant applications, or comparative analysis, the near-term implication is the same in both countries: the reference points are gone or in flux, and any comparison drawing on them should be dated and caveated accordingly.
This changes CASRAI’s existing evaluation-framework comparison
CASRAI’s guide, Research Evaluation Framework: What It Is and How the Major Models Compare, surveys REF, VQR, ERA, and PBRF side by side. As of this article, that guide still characterises ERA as “paused” pending a redesign and PBRF as “active, under revision” — both now out of date given the developments above. Readers relying on that guide for a current comparison of national research-evaluation models should treat its ERA and PBRF entries as historical rather than current, pending an update; a review of that guide’s model-by-model table against this article is flagged internally as needed. CASRAI’s broader guide to what “research excellence” means and how institutions and funders define it remains a useful primer on the underlying concepts these evaluation frameworks are trying to measure, independent of which specific national exercise is currently operating.
What to watch
- Whether the TEC or New Zealand government publishes a confirmed design and start date for the Tertiary Research Excellence Fund, and how it allocates the roughly NZ$315 million currently distributed via PBRF.
- Whether the Australian Research Council moves its proposed research-evaluation approach from consultation to a published, funded implementation plan, and under what name.
- Whether other countries running similar periodic exercises — the UK’s REF cycle, Italy’s VQR — cite the New Zealand and Australian experience in their own reform debates, an angle Impact of Social Sciences and other research-policy commentary have already begun raising.
