Professor Alistair Fitt, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University and research lead for University Alliance has written a letter to Times Higher Education highlight concerns about proposals for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) to assess institutional research performance as a whole, instead of individual units.
Prof Fitt writes:
“Unit-level assessment is important because it generates granular data for the purposes of allocating funding. That in turn ensures that research excellence is identified wherever it exists, even at smaller institutions that have historically received less funding or none…”
“…Allocating research funding on the basis of scale or past funding volume would not improve the overall performance of the research base. It would bring only diminishing returns while undermining the richness and diversity of UK science and research.”
