ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) grants are aimed at Early Career Researchers; providing partial salary support for three years and up to $50,000 for eligible project costs. Normally up to 200 three-year DECRAs are awarded each year.
To be eligible to apply for a DECRA 2026 applicants require at the closing date to:
A previous recipient of a DECRA is not eligible to apply for another DECRA. An individual can only submit two (2) DECRA applications within the eligibility window.
The Australian Research Council Act 2001 (amended 2024) excludes the use of ARC funding for activities classified as ‘experimental development’. The updated advice clarifies that experimental development research may be included in an application, where these activities are to be funded from non-ARC sources. The application must make clear this differentiation.
The ARC Experimental Development Policy is located on the ARC website. Examples are also provided in Appendix in Instructions to Applicants document.
‘Benchmarking’ in academia involves the evaluation of a researcher’s, or group of researchers’, performance against other researchers to ascertain one’s standing in that field/s of research, whether it is below, in line, or above the respective average.
At ECU, we provide access to the online research performance assessment tool, Scival, to enable our researchers to benchmark their performance and compare against other researchers in the same or similar field/s or years Post PhD, to identify research trends, to plan research strategies, find potential collaboration partners, and more.
Gaining such valuable insight can help the researcher determine if the quality of their publication track record would be considered competitive for research funding grants and fellowship opportunities and/or strengthen their project collaboration strategies, particularly for Australian Research Council (ARC) and/or National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grants. This knowledge may also be helpful for research-based employment opportunities.
The ECU Library Services provides step-by-step guides on using Scival including how to navigate the website, and how to use the benchmarking feature and reporting tools to evaluate performance. Click here to view these guides.
If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact the Library Services team at researchonline@ecu.edu.au
Please note: External review/support will be provided for those EOIs approved to proceed (based on availability).