The UK higher education funding bodies have recently published their initial decisions on REF 2028

Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a national assessment of the quality of UK higher education research in all disciplines. REF’s purpose is to maintain the standard of ‘world-class, dynamic and responsive research… across the full academic spectrum within UK higher education’.

On 15 June, updated rules were proposed for the next round of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the assessment system used to distribute around £2 billion (US$2.5 billion) of annual funding across UK universities. These were unveiled by the United Kingdom’s four higher-education funding agencies.

At first sight, the planned changes seemed to better recognize research outputs that are not just limited to conventional ones such as publications and books.

But a closer reading reveals that it is not quite so attuned to the realities of academic research. As education researchers who, for years, have followed and written about the REF’s shortcomings, we think that policymakers are being naive both to the realities of UK research culture and to the risk of causing more problems than they solve.

The proposed rules for the next REF, set to conclude in 2028, are built on the findings of the Future Research Assessment Programme (FRAP), a programme of research and evaluation from UK funding bodies. FRAP includes a report by a group of international advisers, chaired by New Zealand’s former chief scientific adviser Peter Gluckman.

The advisers’ 13 recommendations still regard the REF as a core way of determining university research funding, but acknowledge that it can warp research culture through perverse incentives such as an over-reliance on publication metrics to assess a researcher’s worth.

Their report proposed an increase in the contribution to the overall REF score of metrics that recognize how well an institution supports research, and a drop in the weighting of conventional research outputs. The recommendations were adopted by the funding bodies on 15 June.

However, we argue that the recommendations and proposed changes repeatedly miss the mark. Far from leading towards a more holistic and equitable system of research assessment, this guidance might result in the further degradation of research culture in UK higher-education institutions.

‘REF-ability’ rules

The proposed rules consider how universities’ attempts to exploit REF rules for their own advantage can be detrimental to the working conditions of individuals, with the advisers calling for “shifting the burden away from a focus on the individual to the institution”.

Such thinking is commendable. In practice, however, it is impossible to avoid an individual’s research contribution during a university’s preparations for the REF. Universities are made up of individuals, and research is mostly individually motivated and assessed.

The guidance also recommends making the REF more inclusive by making contributions from all researchers eligible for assessment. The aim here is to remove the detrimental effects for researchers who are not selected for submission — a major problem of the first REF exercise in 2014. Universal submission was introduced in REF 2021, but in REF 2028 there will be no maximum or minimum number of research outputs attached to any individual researcher, provided an average is met across a subject area.

The problem is that universities will still probably return to being hyper-selective, focusing on members of staff who produce the most ‘REF-able’ research, thereby marginalizing others. Moreover, the shift away from individual researchers could mean that special circumstances — such as parental leave — might not be considered in an assessment. This is unlike previous REFs, in which academics could disclose often complex and distressing life and work experiences, as well as disabilities, to their employers.

Inherently flawed

A bid to break the link between individuals and institutions also wrongly assumes that research culture is limited to single institutions. The international advisers’ emphasis on ‘team science’ as the basis for many of their recommendations is counteracted by the fact that the REF focuses only on UK research.

Many academics will also be concerned by the lower contribution of their research outputs towards an overall REF score, which will drop from 60% in REF 2021 to 50% for the next REF in 2028. This neglects the status of scholarly publications, rightly or wrongly, as the main currency in academia’s prestige economy, and risks the global status and mobility of UK academics if their focus on outputs is disincentivized.

Finally, the advisers’ recommendation that the REF should not be given “excessive emphasis” in evaluating staff or benchmarking performance against other institutions completely ignores the REF’s inevitable use as a management and ranking tool. The UK higher-education sector, much like every other, is in thrall to rankings. The REF indisputably serves such a fixation, certainly at a national level. Any look at UK university websites reveals how integral the REF is in the way in which universities promote the quality of their research. Moreover, the REF-ability of research is deeply ingrained in the psyche of UK academics and how they value their, and others’, work. Input from grass-roots initiatives are needed to break this culture, not just through imposing top-down rules.

Fundamentally, the REF’s rules are made by people who are increasingly distanced from the working conditions experienced by the average researcher. Thus, efforts to limit the harmful effects of the REF on individuals serve only to further their exposure to occupational precarity and the degradation of research culture. Until the voices of the majority of academics are heard and responded to, modernizing the REF will be no more cultural reform than retrogression. Until then, this is not our REF: it is (still) theirs.