When U.K. universities next submit evidence of their performance to national research funders to help determine their share of £2 billion in annual government higher education funding, the rubric will look noticeably different from the past.
When U.K. universities next submit evidence of their performance to national research funders to help determine their share of £2 billion in annual government higher education funding, the rubric will look noticeably different from the past. Research culture will get more weight, with less emphasis on publications.
The proposals are “quietly revolutionary,” says James Wilsdon, a science policy researcher at University College London, who helped advise the panel tasked with overhauling the REF. The shift is in line with global trends that see research assessment as a powerful tool to, rather than just a measure of research prestige and productivity, he adds.
The REF’s narrow definition of “excellence” has also contributed to wider inequalities, Gagnon says. It incentivizes universities to hire staff members likely to boost the institution’s REF score, she says, which can further disadvantage researchers from historically excluded groups. These researchers typically face barriers to producing the high numbers of prestigious papers that universities aim to submit to the REF.
Another major change will be a move away from assessing individual researchers. In previous rounds, universities have had to show the number of “research outputs”—mostly journal papers—produced by individual research staff. This placed a large emphasis on the productivity of individuals, Firth says, which created inequalities and low morale within departments, and incentivized universities to carefully time the end of short-term contracts to keep certain staff out of their REF submissions.
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