Australian universities expect to face their first research quality assessment a year later than federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson had planned - in 2007, rather than 2006 - and leading research universities are still concerned about its purpose and cost.

A forum of all groups involved in planning the research quality framework (RQF) agreed last month that introducing a new scheme to assess research quality and allocate funding would be impossible in the short time frame sought by Dr Nelson.

After the forum, Sir Gareth Roberts, president of Oxford 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ's Wolfson College and chairman of an expert advisory group set up by Dr Nelson last year, said he was delighted with the level of agreement on the rationale for the RQF and its core components.

He told The Times Higher : "Areas of more or less complete agreement were to do with the grading points system and the focus on research quality."

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He said three key issues needed more detailed work over the next three months before trials of a model or models could take place. These were the structure of assessment panels and the approach to cross-disciplinary research; the best way to incorporate research training into the RQF; and how the outcomes could enable useful international comparisons to be made.

In his introductory speech to the forum, Sir Gareth referred to third-stream funding. This was an issue to which Dr Nelson responded when he invited the forum to prepare a case that he could argue with his colleagues for more funding.

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"I am confident we can agree the core principles of the RQF by October and that detailed design work and guidelines can be developed through 2006 for implementation in 2007," he said.

But the leading Group of Eight research-intensive universities said it was concerned about the lack of clarity provided by the Government about the purpose of the RQF and the high costs of its implementation. It said Britain's experiences with the research assessment exercise and New Zealand's with the Performance-Based Research Fund suggested that the model applied must differ substantially depending on whether the purpose was to measure research quality and impact, determine the allocation of research funding, or both.

The group estimated the cash and in-kind cost of implementing the RQF could be as high as A$20 million (?8.4 million) per cycle for the university sector alone. Including the expenses incurred by administering departments, the total cost of each exercise could be as much as A$50 million.

In Britain, the RAE and the competitive grants systems used by its research councils produced essentially the same rankings in terms of universities' research performance. Introducing an RQF was likely to result in similar duplication, the group said.

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It claimed the current assessment and funding processes used in Australia - based on a mix of peer-review, qualitative and quantitative indicators - could be adjusted at minimal cost to provide more detailed comparative information between institutions.

Universities should be free to choose whether they participated in the RQF, the group said. But this would only be on the proviso that those choosing not to take part would not be eligible for any of the cash allocated by the RQF.