Impact broke the academy. Only a culture change can fix it

Impact is not the be all and end all but it is very important. If the society has funded you, it is only pertinent to ask how your work has benefitted the funder. What is find ridiculous is ex-panel members selling their services to institutions to facilitate the most ridiculous shadow REF exercise. Everyone knows what the purpose of that exercise is. I hope the next REF stipulates that ex-panel members are not allowed to offer their services in this manner and not create a market that can have all sorts of unintended consequences. No one is forcing anyone to do impactful work. If you want to do purely academic work, do so. I hope that Environment and Impact have even more weight in the future REFs.

There is the saying: if a measurement becomes the target, it is no longer a good measurement. This applies to the REF, too. Firstly, it is impossible to know what the impact of a given fundamental research is ahead of time. Yet, we have to come up with great amount of bullshit/science-fiction to get funded. If researchers were accountable for the actual impact of their research, most of those who get funding would go to jail for fraud. And then there is unfunded research, that people do at night, weekends, etc, which cannot be funded, because the quality of bullshit was not sufficient to convince peers. These unfunded project then will have their impact. This is how ridiculous the impact of maths is: £588 return for each £1 spent (as per IMA estimation), because a) we do not get funding (lack of perceived impact) b) if we do get funding, it is minimal. In comparison Engineering produces £88 for £1 invested, Physics £31.

Impact should be no more than 10% of the criteria for distributing funds. For example, 54% of Surrey Law School's outputs were rated 4* while only 35% of Oxford Law Faculty's outputs were rated 4*. Surrey also produced more 3* outputs than Oxford, yet because of impact Oxford ranked 14 in overall in Law for REF, while Surrey ranked 43. This means Oxford will get far greater funding for producing lower quality research simply because it has the brand to get the invites to select committees etc to have impact. It is grossly unfair that a institution with a substantially greater proportion of 4* outputs gets less funding simply because it has less social ties to the lawmakers to get that research being considered in lawmaking decisions. Environment is also another unfair criterion, because the big name universities attract tenfold the number of PhDs and postdocs making it for smaller institutions to compete. The real focus needs to be on the ranking for 4* outputs: in that Surrey Law School was 6th, while Oxford Law Faculty was 23rd. Thus, if Oxford's reserach is of a lower quality proportionately, why is it having far greater impact?

In some disciplines the journals are controlled by US schools and unless you are from the US or have US coauthors nearly imlossible to get published in top 5 journals. REF may indeed rate your work as 4* even if it is out of the top 5 but we dont know what the individual scores are from the REF. So what happens on the REF matters for nothing for the individual academic who are still judged by where they publish. Academia should be more just publishing. Agree with the point about impact being long term and the REF does allow for that. Environment is also just as important.