Proposed English University Research Funding Scheme Remains Contentious. (February 28, 2008)

Gordon Brown's Labor government intends to undertake in 2009 a system of "metrics" to replace the English Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) peer-review system.

Dubbed the Research Excellence Framework (REF) it will allocate £1 billion (A$2.1 billion) a year funding to departments mainly on the basis of citations, rather than its RAE grade. It is the attempt by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to make the process fairer and the applications process easier.

Academic groups, however, have pointed out what ought to be obvious, a citation based metric approach may discriminate against researchers who have not yet had time to build up many citations. "Obviously you don't want a system that penalizes people at the start of their careers or people who take career breaks," says Steve Smith, chair of the 1994 Group, an advocacy group that represents a number of high-profile UK universities. "It does worry me."

Nature's Daniel Cressey makes the point that while: "academic groups are not entirely against it, they do have some concerns. Policy experts are uneasy about a wholesale move away from peer review and concerned that the metrics system will not correctly assess the merits of some disciplines, be very costly for institutions initially and may discourage interdisciplinary research."

Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the UK Higher Education Policy Institute says: "The RAE undoubtedly had flaws, and it was revised continually to address them,” says . “But it was probably better than anything that is likely to appear."

And last year, the audit committee of the HEFCE warned: "a number of technical areas require further work if the new system is to have credibility."

Let's hope that those from the minister on down who will be responsible for the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative will heed the complexities that the RAE and now the proposed REF have perpetrated and design an approach that produces the best research and scholarship for the resources made available.