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...

A number of documents have been published on the REF web-site.
Following publication of the results of the 2014 REF in December 2014, the REF team has published a number of reports giving additional information about the REF process and management. More...

The 1,911 submissions made by 154 UK universities to the 2014 REF have been published on the REF website. The submissions included 52,061 academic staff, 191,150 research outputs (such as journal articles, authored books and book chapters); and 6,975 case studies of the impact of research. More...

Par F.L. et S.M. C’est fait. Le campus Paris-Saclay vient de voir le jour. Le décret du 29 décembre 2014 publié au journal officiel du 31 décembre porte création de cette université d’excellence. Cette entité réunira dès la rentrée de septembre deux universités (Orsay et Versailles-Saint-Quentin), sept organismes de recherche (CNRS, CEA, INRA…) et dix établissements d’enseignement supérieur de recherche (APT, Ecole centrale Paris, HEC, Polytechnique, ENS Cachan, Supélec, Institut Mines Télécom…). Voir l'article...

Entitled ‘Funding for excellence’, it is the first in a series of three thematic reports that will outline many of the key findings of the EUA-led DEFINE project* which analyses the impact of funding efficiency measures on universities (the next two reports will focus on mergers/concentration measures and performance-based funding). The new report takes into account excellence schemes that have been introduced in different countries across Europe but looked more closely at 10 schemes. It also includes a series of project recommendations for policy makers and higher education institutions which are based  on data collection, case studies, site visits and focus groups which have been carried out/collected in the framework of the DEFINE project.
The full report can be downloaded here. More...