Posted on behalf of Stephen Pincock
Putting together a successful funding application is hard enough at the best of times, but Australian researchers have really been pulling their hair out over the erratic performance of the National Health and Medical Research Council’s (NHMRC) online system for lodging grant applications.
’’It’s been appalling,‘’ Julie Campbell, president of the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes, told The Sydney Morning Herald. “It’s wasting a lot of people’s time and they’re getting very frustrated.”
Thousands of scientists applying for project grants and fellowships have been struggling to log into the NHMRC’s Research Grants Management System or to complete the online forms, with deadlines fast approaching.
The chief executive of the NHMRC, Warwick Anderson, has been making regular apologies to scientists about the poor performance of the system in recent weeks, even using Twitter (@nhmrc) to keep the research community up to date with the gremlins.
The system’s woes culminated in a shutdown from Thursday afternoon until Saturday last week for repairs to be made. The system re-opened again briefly, but the agency was forced to shut it down again on Monday. At the time of writing, it was still offline while technicians completed tests.
Throughout, NHMRC has reassured users that the data they have entered already was safe. Application deadlines have also been extended.
But this wasn’t the first time the NHMRC system had suffered problems with the system, for which it paid software firm CA $3.3 million in late 2008. Last year, major problems were a headache too, although Anderson told the Sydney Morning Herald that this was a new problem. “We fixed last year’s problem. But a new bug has arisen in the software.”
Jaine Stockler (@researchgrants), manager, research and development at the University of Technology Sydney, has been tweeting regularly about the debacle. Of the repeated problems, she told Nature: “This is internationally embarrassing.”
Anderson was not immediately available for comment.