Universities spent £6,000 for every researcher they submitted to the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), at a cost of about £3 million per institution, a report reveals.

That represents a significant hike in institutional spending compared with REF 2014, when the average cost per researcher was £4,000, and average institutional expenditure was £2 million, explains a study commissioned by Research England to estimate the overall cost of the 2021 exercise, which examined 185,594 outputs from 76,134 university staff.

Based on a survey of all 157 participating institutions and in-depth interviews with a representative sample of 26 universities, the report by policy advisory group Technopolis calculates that universities spent a total of £454 million on REF 2021, of which £141 million went on preparing impact statements and £24 million on panellists’ time.

Campus views: Don’t let the REF tail wag the academic dog

Costed at £284 million, unit of assessment (UoA) level spending was the biggest source of expense by universities related to the REF, explains the report. Most of this related to the time spent by senior academics identifying researchers and outputs for inclusion, or selecting work that could be submitted for impact, says the REF 2021 Cost Evaluation report, published on 13 July.

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REF-related central management costs, excluding money spent on external consultants, amounted to £146 million, or £21 million a year over the seven-year cycle.

The overall estimate of university-level spending had already been disclosed in a Research England report published last month.

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The massive spike in overall costs on 2014 levels – when the REF was estimated to cost institutions £230 million – came despite efforts to reduce bureaucracy in the national audit of UK university research.

However, several policy changes for the 2021 exercise led to additional costs, explains the report. These include the requirement to submit all research-active staff to the REF – which saw an extra 24,000 researchers enter outputs – and new guidance on open access requirements that was viewed by many institutions as a significant new cost burden, says the study.

In the 2021 exercise, institutions also incurred higher costs in an effort to identify “the best combination of outputs, from a much larger pool of candidate outputs” compared with REF 2014, when selection was based largely on finding the “best outputs”, a process that was less cost-intensive, the study adds.

The impact of the pandemic on REF 2021 was minimal, with Covid mitigation statements representing just 1 per cent of the exercise’s overall cost, the study says.

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It also found significant differences in the per-researcher cost to universities based on the size of an institution. For smaller institutions that submitted 150 researchers or fewer, the average cost of each researcher entered into the REF 2021 was £14,000; for larger institutions, which submitted more than 354 researchers, this fell to £4,000 per researcher. Overall, the average cost per output was £2,000, but this rose to £7,000 per output when institutions submitted 435 or fewer.

In terms of minimising the cost and burden of the REF, the study recommends that there be “continuity of rules” from the 2021 audit, as well as more “timely, clearer, consistent and precise guidance” about changes for the 2028 exercise, early details of which were published last month.

Research England says it believes its proposals – including the complete decoupling of outputs from individuals and reducing impact case study requirements – could lead to as much as £100 million in efficiency savings.

Asked about value for money, some 21 per cent of institutions said the REF – which cost funding councils £16 million to run – was “good value for money” in light of the £15 billion in research funding that would flow to the sector between 2021 and 2028, with 58 per cent saying it was “moderate” value for money and 21 per cent saying it was “low value for money”.

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com