Universities spent £6,000 for every researcher they submitted to the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), at a cost of about £3 million per institution, a report reveals.
That represents a significant hike in institutional spending compared with REF 2014, when the average cost per researcher was £4,000, and average institutional expenditure was £2 million, explains a study commissioned by Research England to estimate the overall cost of the 2021 exercise, which examined 185,594 outputs from 76,134 university staff.
Based on a survey of all 157 participating institutions and in-depth interviews with a representative sample of 26 universities, the report by policy advisory group Technopolis calculates that universities spent a total of £454 million on REF 2021, of which £141 million went on preparing impact statements and £24 million on panellists’ time.
Costed at £284 million, unit of assessment (UoA) level spending was the biggest source of expense by universities related to the REF, explains the report. Most of this related to the time spent by senior academics identifying researchers and outputs for inclusion, or selecting work that could be submitted for impact, says the REF 2021 Cost Evaluation report, published on 13 July.
