I'm still confused by the last advice I got from an unisuper advisor. Also since someone I know who used to work as a Prof in accounting told me that I should definitely not follow that advice.

There are no easy answers I feel. But maybe portability could be allowed for ECRs but restricted from a certain level of seniority onwards?

Not sure, we had the opposite concern in Australia when we had ERA. Allowing portability incentivises unis to poach senior and very well established researchers rather than support and retain their early career academics.

I will have to check later properly, but is this about whether the publication record of a researcher moves along with them if they change universities? If so then I think not allowing this is very reasonable actually to recognise who funded these and to reduce incentives to game the system.

Yes, we weren't overly impressed. Some of the book chapters in our reference list had been turned into invented journal articles, that was the main issue we encountered. Plus some changes to book titles. The journal editors were really helpful although this stuff is beyond their control.

It is really frustrating particularly when the original manuscript and the references were in good shape. Based upon my recent experiences, these days, the proofing provided by the big publishers tends to be not so much a 'value-add' but a source of additional work and headache.

It could well have been the publisher's fault, but still. This happened to me not too long ago - when we got the proofs for a journal article back and the references had all sorts of fakes in it since the proofing team had used AI. I'm glad we spotted this in time, but it took ages to fix.

The administrative burden in Australian universities is most keenly felt by teaching and research staff, according to...[the] study from the University of Melbourne’s faculty of education'. 2/2

Link to underpinning research: academic.oup.com/spp/advance-...

We just published the key findings arising from our admin burden survey conducted across Australian universities and committee meetings came out as one the biggest drains on time. Here's the entire paper is you're interested, may give you some additional ideas: academic.oup.com/spp/advance-...

I think one needs to distinguish between limiting the number of publications (which won't work) and moving toward restricting evaluations to a limited number of papers (per annum or in total). The latter strategy has a lot of merit IMO and has already been adopted by many research councils.

3) Due to a lack of local staff support and administrative automation, academics generally feel they are not effectively supported if they are experiencing admin issues or problems. This is a key concern to them and is seen to result in frustration, delays, and additional admin workloads.

2) Academics experience their teaching and research as administratively highly laborious activities (thus adding to their admin workload arising from generic admin responsibilities). Also, university meetings are a killer in terms of the demands they impose on time.

We packed a lot into this article, but there are three core findings that are particularly interesting perhaps:
1) Academics largely associate the digital transformation and automation of uni administration with an increase, not a decrease, in their own administrative workload and burden.

Btw, I really wish we had better data on this in Australia - this is all self-reported (QUILT) data yes? I would be great to have more reliable large-scale studies using taxation data or the like, although there may be privacy issues rending this impossible.,

From what I hear IT may not be too different. I recently talked to a mate working in a senior role in IT and was told they are receiving a few hundred applications for entry level roles atm - and that the job market is very tough for graduates. It would be interesting to see proper data though.