Research Funding Fight Brewing in the UK

January 20th, 2009

Posted by: admin

According to this Times article (H/T Nature News), the pending release of a research evaluation will ruffle plenty of university feathers in the United Kingdom.  I posted about the research evaluation last month, and the release is not yet official.  The main objection appears to come from the top-tier universities, which may lose research funding because universities outside of the top tier have performed well in the evaluation. I don’t think there’s a good analogous situation for the U.S., as the federal government provides research money directly to institutions via individual researchers or earmarks.  The closest I could think of would be a major expansion of the EPSCoR program (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) – which targets research in states that don’t receive much research funding – at the expense of other major research programs.

The Times article does not explain any rationale behind the criticism, outside of a general disbelief on behalf of the top-tier schools that more even funding levels for British universities can be a good thing.  If there are criticisms of the methodology of the evaluation, they aren’t raised in the article.  The evaluation was conducted through peer review, so I’m hard pressed to think of methodological problems with the evaluation.  Regardless of the outcome, I expect the top-tier universities to argue strenuously that the next evaluation – which will use metrics instead of peer review – will include measure that will favor them over the smaller, less reputable institutions.

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