From the Editor: TSWL and the REF

I first became aware of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the British system for assessing research in higher education, in 2015 when Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature began receiving inquiries about our open access policy. Authors based in the United Kingdom needed to know whether essays published in our journal would comply with the REF’s new requirement that articles be made freely available in open access repositories. As an American academic at an American journal, I was not familiar with British assessment policies, but I quickly realized that we were going to have to make a choice: change our journal’s policies so that articles published with us satisfy REF requirements or lose the opportunity to publish excellent work from authors in the United Kingdom. As of this writing, approximately 15 percent of our published articles are by authors based in the United Kingdom, so it would be a major loss to the journal to forfeit our relationship with British scholars. Thus began a period of research and consultation, led ably by our Managing Editor, Karen Dutoi, in which we attempted both to understand the requirements of the REF and to assess the impact of those requirements on our journal.

For readers unfamiliar with British assessment metrics, the REF is a system developed in the late 2000s by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the governing body that distributes public funds to higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. Since 2008, British academics have been required to submit their research to the REF, which rates their work and that of their academic departments for quality and impact. According to HEFCE Chief Executive David Eastwood, two “key aims for the new framework” are “to produce robust UK-wide indicators of research excellence for all disciplines which can be used to benchmark quality against international standards and to drive the Council’s funding for research” and “to provide a basis for distributing funding primarily by reference to research excellence, and to fund excellent research in all its forms wherever it is found.”¹ Individual departments are awarded up to four stars for the quality and impact of their research, and these results are used to determine both the rankings of academic institutions within the country and the distribution of governmental funding—up to £1.6 billion annually—to support research. A poor performance on the REF can result in the closure of a department, meaning that participation in the REF is a high stakes affair, indeed.

This system has attracted a substantial amount of criticism within the United Kingdom. Chris Husbands, Vice Chancellor at Sheffield-Hallam University, points out, “Every institution wants to be able to describe itself as a ‘top ranked research university’ and, if it cannot do that, to have at least some departments which are ‘research leaders.’”² As a result, some institutions have tried to game the system: “there are research centres of genuine excellence and then there are places which present themselves as research centres of excellence, by being very selective about the research and information they enter.”³ Meanwhile, academics in the humanities have felt particularly threatened by the emphasis placed on impact. According to Matthias Uecker, a professor of German at the University of Nottingham, the focus on impact “may have the effect of disincentivising research that does not translate into immediate measurable impact for public policy or industry in the UK.”⁴ Research produced by humanists does not routinely lead to changes in public policy, and therefore, its impact is difficult to measure in tangible terms. As Roger Brown, codirector of Liverpool Hope University’s center for research and development in higher education, wonders, “These are some of the best brains in the country, but how do you measure the impact of a study on the life of Henry VIII?”⁵ Humanists have also questioned the extent to which long-term research will be affected by the demands of the REF, which seemingly privileges immediacy over deliberation. Writing for the Times Higher Education, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of...