Over the last two to three decades, many universities around the world have seen an increase in both organizational autonomy and performance-based accountability. While these developments have attracted considerable attention, relatively little remains known about how, within this transformed governance context, academics themselves practice their autonomy as researchers. Focusing on the case of one highly research-intensive university situated in Australia, this paper explores how academics from various disciplines understand and experience their practical autonomy in their own research in both its strategic and operational dimensions. Drawing on analyses of semi-structured interviews with 18 experienced academics, we find that academics' practical autonomy is only loosely coupled to the autonomy they formally have. We further find that the practical realization of autonomy is closely associated with having adequate levels of resources such as funding (strategic autonomy) and time (operational autonomy), with the former being more important for scientists, while the latter was more important for those in the humanities and social sciences. Increasing levels of bureaucratization (humanities and social sciences) and the increasingly narrow thematic focus and strategic orientation of the major funding schemes (sciences and social sciences) were perceived as constraining these academics' practical autonomy.