In a new HEPI Policy Note, REF2028: Outputs Matter, Professor Sir Nigel Thrift, the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick, argues the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is becoming overloaded – thereby diluting its core purpose.
Professor Thrift argues:
- The REF allows research institutions to show government they are doing excellent research that deserves to be rewarded with taxpayers’ money and in return a special pot of strategic institutional funding is allocated on a formula with few strings. This money is called QR (quality-related) funding because it is concerned with assessing the quality of research put forward by each institution.
- But as more things have been loaded on to the REF, its central purpose is being lost. The proposals for the latest version of the REF, due in 2028, argue for a substantial cut in the percentage of the exercise given over to qualitative assessment of research outputs via peer review.
- Research outputs are the lifeblood of university research, prompting leaps forward in science, medicine and engineering and serving as the basis of world-changing innovations. In the humanities and social sciences, new maps of how societies come together and fall apart, and of how new meanings evolve, see the light of day, as well as policies of all kinds. Without full peer-reviewed consideration of what the authors of these outputs consider to be their best work, it is difficult to understand how government can have confidence in the quality of British research.
Academics’ actual contributions to knowledge are being devalued in favour of bureaucratic imperatives that may be important but cannot be allowed to sideline why the REF exists. Moreover, it is not clear how government will in future be able to gain assurance that taxpayer money is being well spent.
