The UK’s funding councils have stepped back from plans to require universities to submit all academics on research contracts to the next research excellence framework.
A key recommendation of Lord Stern’s review of REF 2014 was that all research-active staff should be submitted and the funding councils proposed in December to implement this by requiring?universities to include all staff on research-only or teaching and research contracts in the 2021 exercise.
It was argued that this would?give a more accurate picture of a university’s research strength than the previous REF, in which institutions were accused of “game-playing” in the selection of staff for submission. There were also claims that non-selection led to academics being “stigmatised”.
A consultation on the proposals is due to close on 17 March but the funding councils have?already conceded that contractual status may not be the best way to identify research-active staff.
The funding councils have acknowledged that?many universities, particularly those in Scotland, are required to use a model contract which includes both teaching and research duties, regardless of the work actually expected of the academic.
Instead, the funding councils are considering drawing up an “evidence-based definition” of what it means to be research active, leaving it to the universities and individual academics to agree upon who falls into which category.
In a , David Sweeney, the 成人VR视频 Funding Council for England's director of research, education and knowledge exchange, writes that this will likely lead to “consistently very high submission rates in the research-intensive universities”, rather than “variations seen by some as game-playing”. In universities that focus on teaching and knowledge exchange, there might be “much lower submission rates reflecting that fewer staff are hired with a primary success criterion being world-leading research outputs”.
Under such a scheme, universities would be required to “develop and publish the process they used to establish agreement with their staff on their ‘research-active’ status”, he writes.
Dr Sweeney told?成人VR视频 that the funding councils still intended that “100 per cent of research-active staff will be submitted”.
“The only question is how you define research-active staff, and we propose doing that from a contractual basis,” Dr Sweeney said. “That has received a good bit of a push-back, which I understand, so now we’re...floating something else,” Dr Sweeney said.
Dr Sweeney added that, if the consultation responses “suggest a better way” of identifying research-active academics, the funding councils were prepared to consider that also.
