New rules on staff submissions for the UK¡¯s research excellence framework could create more work for department leaders than before, despite a drive to reduce complexity, universities have warned.

Reforms for the 2021 exercise state that all staff with ¡°major research responsibility¡± will be required to submit at least one output for assessment, in a bid to give a better picture of institutional performance and to end the ¡°stigma¡± associated with non-submission.

Research England has now outlined how universities will have to identify staff with major responsibility but institutions have warned of challenges in identifying when potential exemptions ¨C based around issues such as part-time contracts, or health and family-related leave ¨C should apply.

Research England will check university submissions against records held by the ÖйúAƬ Statistics Agency and departments face being penalised if they apply the rules incorrectly.

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Simon Kerridge, director of research services at the University of Kent, said that taking care to ensure that all individual staff circumstances are accounted for ¡°will be a huge burden¡± for university departments.

¡°It is hard to argue against the exemptions on equality grounds, but the burden will be at least as high as last time, [if not] more so with more staff,¡± said Professor Kerridge.

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¡°This is a major stress point and a source of anxiety [since] every department will want to get it right and yet there will be no extra pairs of hands to help us.¡±

Liz Bromley, acting chief executive of the University Alliance mission group, said ¡°getting the equality and diversity proposals right¡± would be a ¡°nagging concern¡± for group leaders.

While funding bodies had clearly ¡°listened carefully to the sector¡¯s concerns¡±, she said that ¡°accounting for special staff circumstances, while clearly important, is a tricky business¡±.

¡°The drawbacks of the current proposals are difficult to ignore,¡± Ms Bromley added.

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Martin Eve, professor of literature, technology and publishing at?Birkbeck, University of London, agreed that the biggest ¡°challenge¡± in implementing the rules around submissions ¡°lies in capturing the edge cases¡± ¨C those where it is difficult to determine eligibility ¨C while at the same time ¡°ensuring equality and diversity provision remains strong¡±.

¡°While ¡®research-active¡¯ sounds straightforward, different institutions have a variety of staff in many roles that require special treatment; research assistants, for instance,¡± Professor Eve explained.

Kim Hackett, Research England¡¯s REF director, said that there would be many institutions where all staff would have significant responsibility for research, and in these cases a 100 per cent submission rate was expected.

¡°Responses to our consultation last year made clear that contractual definitions alone will not always accurately identify significant responsibility, and that an alternative approach for determining this would be needed,¡± she said. ¡°For many institutions where this applies, employment expectations are captured in an auditable way ¨C for example, through workload models ¨C that will allow significant responsibility to be identified without much additional burden.

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¡°It should be clear that this will not be about making judgements of expected performance, but about the activity that staff are employed to undertake.¡±

Professor Eve added that, ¡°while the new guidelines are, in some ways, complicated, we shouldn¡¯t lose sight of the fact that for the last REF, institutions also played their own complex games to attempt to rig submission in their favour. A certain degree of complexity seems, to me, to be part of REF and is unavoidable.¡±

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rachael.pells@timeshighereducation.com