Just 25 applicants were awarded a mid-career industry fellowships – at least the others get to find out where they went wrong

The Australian Research  Council uses the announcement to trial providing unsuccessful applicants with details, “to identify areas of improvement for future applications.”

And a full monte of misery is what they will get with, three sets of feedback, including, “detailed assessors’ scores, assessments and ranking.”

The ARC  chose ANZAC day eve to announce 289 of the 314 bids for mid-career industry fellowships failed.

But at least the winners got pretty much what they wanted, receiving a total of $23.8m of the $24.6m they asked for.

Of the 25 winners, Monash U had five, UNSW four and Uni Queensland three. All up the Group of Eight accounted for 20 of the 25 awards.

The programme is intended to support academic researchers establish careers in industry and industry-based researchers to work in universities.

Last year the success rate for Discovery Grants was 19 per cent.