How the REF’s regime of excellence is changing research for the worse

By Nick Butler and Sverre Spoelstra. There can be little doubt that the research environment in universities is changing: it is now less a collegiate community of scholars than a competitive game of winners and losers. This transformation manifests in all sorts of ways, most notably in the rise to prominence of national research audits such as the recent Research Excellence Framework (REF) – the mechanism that provides the backbone for the way UK government spending on science and research in higher education is allocated. More...