Do You Want to Be Counted or Subject to a Light Touch? Research Assessment in the UK and the Social Sciences—Continued

and the social sciencesöcontinued In 2005 the UK government announced that it was concerned about the amount of time and other resources expended on the regular Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs) conducted on the country's universities. It proposed that the system of peer review used for those conducted to date (plus the one due to be completed in 2008) be replaced by a much less intensive procedure based on metrics: indeed, it hoped the then-current exercise could be so replaced (Johnston, 2006a). The latter outcome was never likely to be feasible, but the country's four higher education funding councils were required to produce an alternative system that could be introduced immediately after the present RAE had been completed. The proposal to replace peer review by metricsöparticularly bibliometrics and data on research incomeöreceived considerable opposition, especially from within the humanities and social sciences. This has resulted in proposals from the four university funding councils for a dual system termed a Research Excellence Framework (REF), published in December 2007 (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Pubs/HEFCE/2007/07 34/). This recommends that metrics be deployed as the sole evaluation criteria for disciplines in science, engineering, technology, and medicine (the STEM disciplines), and a quality assessment regime involving a light touch form of peer review informed by quantitative indicators for the remaining disciplines, most of them in the social sciences and humanities but also including mathematics and statistics. The disciplines which provide most of the audience for the Environment and Planning journals are in this second category, although there are suggestions (from outside the REF document) either that some disciplinesöor parts of disciplines, such as physical geographyömight be reallocated to one of the STEM subject groups or that some individuals/groups might be associated with those disciplines by their home institutions (eg entering physical geographers as earth/environmental scientists, psychologists as health scientists, and some architects and planners as engineers). Although the wording of the REF document clearly indicates that the proposed metrics-based system will be introduced for the STEM disciplines (the c̀onsultation' questions posed are both very general and inviting supportöeg `̀ Do you endorse our proposals .? '' and `̀ Do you agree that.? ''), there is much less certainty regarding the non-STEM disciplines. For these, two basic questions are posed (paragraph 53): `̀What are the key issues that we should consider in developing light touch peer review for the non-science based disciplines? '' `̀What are the main options for the form and conduct of this review? '' The answers will feed into a later consultation; whereas the bibliometric exercise for the STEM disciplines is to be launched in early 2009, with the results used later that year to inform a new funding approach to be phased in from 2010, for the non-STEM disciplines consultation on `light touch peer review' will start in late 2009 for a new system to be introduced in 2013. There is thus plenty of time for debate, to which this commentary contributes, with particular reference to the social sciences, which are largely ignored in the REF document and the consultation processes that led to its publication. (1) Commentary Environment and Planning A 2008, volume 40, pages 507 ^ 514