REF director acknowledges risk of universities gaming the system

Rebecca Fairbairn says REF 2029 team is exploring ways to mitigate risk of unfair advantage

The director of the Research Excellence Framework has acknowledged that recent reforms to the exercise could give universities an opportunity to “gameplay” by recruiting “superstar academics”, and that her team is looking at ways to prevent this.

Rebecca Fairbairn (pictured) told a Westminster Higher Education Forum event on the future of the REF that reforms to the exercise proposed last autumn—including the removal of a maximum number of outputs that can be submitted by staff—had caused some concern among researchers.