The proposals for the new REF published today by HEFCE are an incomparable improvement on their earlier plans and are unrecognisable from the original proposals made by the Government.

The most significant change is that they now propose to retain peer review as the basis for the assessment, with panels able to call for citation and other quantitative information to inform their judgements. This is exactly the process proposed by HEPI in its report "Using metrics to allocate research funds:  initial response to the Government's consultation proposals" Published in June 2006 and is in contrast to the earlier proposal that assessment should be based entirely on quantitative measures like the value of research contracts earned or the number of citations received.

Peer review panels of experts will continue to assess the quality of the research produced and funding will continue to be based on that . In addition - and in response to the request of the previous Secretary of State - these panels will also assess the impact of the research. There is nothing wrong with that in principle, though establishing a rigorous process for this and credible measures of impact will be a challenge. It is therefore unwise at this stage to propose to rely on assessments of outcomes for as much as 25 per cent of total research funding.

Similarly, while the reasons for wishing to reduce the numbers of panels may be understandable, the integrity of the exercise depends on academics being satisfied that they are assessed by peers with competence in their discipline.  So the proposed reduction to 30 or so panels may be unwise.

But these and other issues raised by the proposals are relatively minor details that will no doubt be addresses during the consultation. The essential thing is that HEFCE is to be congratulated on retrieving what was potentially a very damaging policy that would have harmed the UK's research effort.

HEPI's detailed response to the REF proposals will be published at our major conference that takes place at the Royal Society on 14 October.