On Tuesday evening I was asked by Research Professional News for my views on a new report from think tank UKDayOne, which is calling for the abolition of the Research Excellence Framework, unlovingly known as the REF.
The report is provocative and interesting. It has won loud support from one Dominic Cummings. It’s standfirst promises that a lighter-touch alternative will have multiple benefits for the universities and the UK:
“The Research Excellence Framework is too bureaucratic and unaffordable. An alternative system would lead to similar funding allocations whilst supporting university finances and promoting technological diffusion, driving regional productivity growth.”
The entire report isn’t very long so I would encourage fellow academics and policy wonks to read the whole thing. There is bound to be a range of reactions.
Research Professional News’s Fiona McIntyre pulled a few lines from my remarks for her piece (£), but in the interests of stimulating further discussion, here below is the full comment that I sent her. It doesn’t capture everything that needs to be said – there are some complicated issues to unpack here – but I don’t have time right now to dig deeper:
“The REF is an easy target because few would mourn its passing, but I found this provocative report thin and disappointing. Two stars. It cherry-picks from the evidence base and provides relatively little meat on the bones of its main recommendations. It elides research quality with citation performance, a problematically narrow perspective which contrasts with the REF’s much richer view of the outputs, environment and impact of UK research. It claims that Australia and New Zealand have abandoned similar exercises, whereas both countries are currently figuring out how to replace them. The report omits to mention the announcement of a new Canadian Research Excellence Framework.
There are some superficially appealing recommendations for reducing bureaucracy, but these don’t seem to have been thought through properly and leave many questions hanging. The authors propose that QR funding should be allocated in proportion of external research income from private, public and philanthropic sectors and argue this would stimulate collaboration with local industry. Universities already leverage funds from these sectors, but there is no discussion of how much extra stimulus would be provided by this change. Nor is there any attention paid to how this would play out within different STEM disciplines or how to manage the enormous (over 10-fold according to their data) shifts in QR funding that some institutions would experience.
The authors argue that longer term funding for “people, not projects”, targeted at “the most promising individual researchers and research groups” would stimulate blue-skies research, reduce precarity and support equality, diversity and inclusion. But how would this work? How would those researchers not funded this way survive in institutions that need them to teach undergraduates? How does this solve precarity for them? How exactly does it improve EDI? On these questions the report is silent. This rather naive approach to policy formulation is underscored by the quaint notion that grass-roots movements like the UK Reproducibility Network can, on their own, drive much needed culture change. UKRN does important work but in my experience drivers of culture change need incentives that bite.
All of which is not to say that we should not be taking aim at the high cost and bureaucratic burden of the REF. This report should certainly stimulate some fresh thinking but that thinking needs to go much deeper than the arguments presented by the authors.”
