When a researcher produces an output and moves between HEIs, portability determines which institution can submit the output for assessment and receive the resulting long-term quality-related funding.
However, a joint letter by the English Association, the Institute of English Studies, and University English, and subsequent interventions from other subject associations, demonstrate that unaddressed concerns over the portability of research outputs are coming to a head.
In REF 2014, if a researcher moved HEI prior to a census date, then only the destination HEI submitted the output. In 2021, to mitigate the potential perceived inflationary transfer market of researchers, the rules were changed so that if researchers transferred, both the original and destination HEIs could return the output. This rightfully recognised the role of both HEIs, having supported the underpinning research and investing in the research of the future respectively.
REF 2029
The initial decisions published in 2023 had research outputs decoupled from the authors with outputs needing to have a “substantive connection” to the submitting institution. Two years on we still don’t know the impact of this decision on portability. One of the unintended consequences of decoupling the outputs from the researchers who authored them and removing the notion of a staff list, is that only the address line of the author affiliation remains. This decoupling means that any notion of portability of outputs with a specific researcher is problematic.
The portability of research outputs is a crucial element of the assessment process. It supports key values such as career security and development, equality, diversity, and inclusion, as well as the financial sustainability of HEIs. More importantly, linking outputs to individual researchers rather than institutions is necessary, particularly in the current Higher Education landscape, to ensure the integrity of both research and the assessment exercise itself. This approach ensures that researchers receive due credit for their work, prevents institutions from unfairly benefiting from outputs produced elsewhere or from structural changes such as departmental closures, and upholds a fairer, more transparent system that reflects actual research contributions.
The sector is in a different place than it was even a few years ago. Many HEIs are financially challenged, with wide-spread redundancies an ongoing reality. Careers are now precarious at every career stage. Making new, or even maintaining, academic appointments is subject to strict financial scrutiny. Across all facets of research – from the medical and engineering sciences to the arts and humanities – the income derived from the REF is essential to the agility of the research landscape.
Whether we like it or not, the decision to hire someone is in part financial. That an early career researcher could be recruited to improve a unit’s (subject) REF submission and hence income is a reality of a financially pressured system. At a different career stage, many distinguished researchers are facing financially imposed redundancy. The agility of the sector to respond is aided by the portability of the researcher’s outputs to allow them to continue their career and their contributions to the sector at a new HEI. The REF derived income is an important aspect of this agility.
Setting aside financial considerations, separating research outputs from the researchers who created them sends a damaging message. It downplays the fundamental role of individuals in driving research and undermines the sense of agency that is crucial to its integrity and rigor.
Auditing the future
As researchers, we recognise the privilege of being supported in pursuing what is often both a passion and a vocation. Decoupling outputs from their creators disregards the individual researcher, their collaborations, and their stakeholders. It also oversimplifies the complex research ecosystem, where researchers work in partnership with their employing institutions, sector bodies, archives, charities, funders, and other key stakeholders.
REF-derived income should not be seen just as a retrospective reward for an HEI’s past support of research, but rather as the nation’s forward-looking investment in the discoveries of tomorrow. To treat it merely as an audit is to overlook its transformative potential. Hence the outputs on which the assessment is based should be both the researchers who contributed to the unit while employed by the university and the researchers who are currently in the unit to contribute to the research that is ongoing, indelibly linking and interweaving past, present and future research.
In addition to concerns over portability, decoupling outputs from the researchers that authored them risks undermining a central premise of the assessment that many of us working to improve our research culture want to see. Decoupling means there is no auditable limit to the number of outputs written by any one individual that can be submitted for assessment. Within the REF, we wish to see outputs authored by a diversity of staff within the unit, staff at different career stages and staff working in different sub areas. By decoupling the author from outputs, a future REF risks undermining the very fairness that the rule change was introduced to ensure.
Not fair not right
Sometimes the unintended consequences of an idea outweigh the benefits it was hoping to achieve. The decoupling of outputs from the researchers that made them possible and the knock-on consequences through restrictions to portability and reduced diversity is one of these occasions.
There has never been a more critical time to uphold fairness in research policy.
If the four funding bodies are to remain agile they must recognise that decoupling research outputs from the individuals who created them is not only harming those facing redundancy but also undermining HEIs’ ability to support the next generation of researchers upon whom our future depends. By the same count, ensuring the portability of outputs is essential for maintaining integrity, protecting careers, and sustaining a dynamic and equitable research environment. The need for change is both urgent and imperative.
REF is about evaluating institutions not individuals. Research England design it for this purpose. The benefits of portability for individuals can be delivered by institutions outside the REF process. It is institutions that use REF to evaluate individuals rather than Research England often with adverse consequences.
It is an interesting reframing of the history of REF to claim that for REF2021 “to mitigate the potential perceived inflationary transfer market of researchers, the rules were changed so that if researchers transferred, both the original and destination HEIs could return the output. This rightfully recognised the role of both HEIs …”. In fact, this was a compromise. Stern’s 2016 review of REF (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a803df4e5274a2e8ab4f03d/ind-16-9-ref-stern-review.pdf) recommended that outputs be non-portable (and for reasons which the present authors use to argue for portability), but in translating that into practice the wise heads then at Research England felt it was too significant a change to implement in the closing stages of the REF2021 assessment period.
There are a whole lot of issues being created in the design for REF2029 which do affect fairness – not least, without the clarity of a group of individuals forming the unit of assessment being assessed, how do we assess whether the outputs submitted for that unit are genuinely representative of that unit? As the authors correctly argue, encouraging diversity in research is a key aim of the design for REF2029. But achieving that does not require portability.
This is an important debate but all too often no attention is paid to the unfairness of sustaining REF as a currency for individual researchers. This is not a level playing field and only advantages certain people (and arguably certain types of research). Redundancies and job cuts exacerbate this, with staff at all career stages competing for fewer positions. If REF drives who gets jobs, what does that actually look like? Will it really benefit early career researchers (ECRs) and if so, what will be the consequences for mid- or late-career researchers? I’m just looking for a more nuanced argument here.
Research missions and strategies should drive recruitment and research activity within HEIs not REF (and what is considered ‘REFable’ regardless of the guidance and criteria). I think we need to be realistic about the behaviours that financial and reputational benefits of REF drive and shape the exercise accordingly. For example, using individual staff data to ensure a diversity of researcher characteristics is likely to have unintended consequences due to the pressure to submit as much 3* and 4* research as possible. Another point not addressed here is the fact that many research-enabling staff are being made redundant at the moment and no one seems concerned that they don’t have some form of REF currency to draw on to protect their careers.
REF 2029 is trying to balance all this and more, seeking to drive good practice while mitigating the unintended consequences of the exercise (and undo the negative consequences of past exercises). Not an easy task, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture and long-term aims. Short-term fixes, such as reining back on non-portability (again) – won’t necessarily get us where we want to be in the future.
It’s also important to remember the other changes to the framework for REF 2029, which accompany the decoupling of staff and outputs and the introduction of the concept of substantive link between outputs and the submitting institution. Output assessment is due to make up only 45% of the final quality profile, with impact case studies 20% and narrative submissions (including People, Culture and Environment) 35%. There is work still to do in developing People, Culture and Environment assessment, but this element, with its ongoing criteria of vitality and sustainability of the research effort in a subject area, should be used to incentivise recruitment and retention of staff. It is attributing outputs to staff, and the fact that all submitted staff had to have one output, that drove the need for portability in REF 2021 – without it newly appointed staff at the end of the period would not have their output(s) to be submitted with. This attribution approach had its problems, including requiring a burdensome individual staff circumstances process.
A fundamental issue is that the Contribution to Knowledge and Understanding policy will be set mid-way through the REF 2029 cycle. This timing doesn’t allow for robust interrogation or analysis by the sector of the impact of such significant changes. A sensible way forward would be to continue developing this new policy with a view to implementation at the start of the next REF cycle, similar to the once proposed changes to REF 2029 Open Access for longform publications.
Underlying this is a very fundamental issue, who do the intellectual outputs of an academic belong to: the academic or the university? Traditionally the answer is that they belong to the academic, REF2029 amounts to the answer that they belong to the university in “the address line of the author affiliation” as the article puts it.
This principle has much broader implications. Applying the same principle to commercialization of the research of an academic would imply that all rights belong to the university, not the academic. Applying the same principle to teaching materials (including recordings of lectures) would imply that they belong to the university, not the academic: the university could show recordings of lectures featuring an academic whom they’ve long since fired.
This becomes particularly egregious if you notice that the university is just a middleman: the teaching and research of academics is paid for by students, the government, charities, companies, … but somehow the middleman (not the funder or the worker) would have ownership..
Someone explain to me why my University should get all of my output when my postdoc is largely funded through an external grant? Especially as the University has no intention of keeping me on afterwards.
Completely agree with this point. It’s all very well others saying that past REF’s ended up privileging publications as currency for individual researchers, but this overlooks that this is one of the few cards that precariously-employed researchers have in their armoury in the job market. Having portability for some high-quality publications, such as in my discipline, books that were literally the product of years worth of work, was something valuable for me and others in my position. As with a lot of things in the coming REF (e.g. original policy on long-form outputs), it doesn’t seem to have been thought out very well.
One of the few cards that SOME precariously-employed researchers have. Less so if you’ve had maternity leave, you’re a carer, you work for a non-Russell Group institution (with it’s own impacts for different groups. What about if moved from business? What are we really engraining with the status quo?
What we are engraining with the status quo is that the intellectual output of an academic belongs to that academic.