Shows
What the REF?!What the REF do HR have to do with the REF?!This week on What the REF?!, Ola and James start to unpack the long-awaited REF announcement from December, sharing first reactions and a palpable sense of relief across the sector. While a full deep dive is parked until the new year, the episode offers an initial digest of what has landed, why certainty matters, and which debates are already bubbling up around outputs, narratives and research culture.The real highlight, though, is a fascinating interview with Sophie Crouchman from Universities Human Resources (UHR), conducted by Simon. Sophie lifts the lid on the often unseen role of...
2025-12-2345 min
What the REF?!Breaking News! The Pause is Over! What the REF is happening now?!Simon and Ola are live at the 2025 Research & Innovation Conference, hearing Professor Dame Jessica Corner outline how REF2029 is moving forward - and we’ve got immediate reactions.Find out more about the HiddenREF campaign at Hidden-REF.org'What the REF' is made possible by the Embedding Trust in Evaluation (E-TIE) research grant from Research England.Want to get in touch? Email: WTreF@hidden-ref.orgWTreF is co-produced by Simon Hettrick, Gemma Derrick, James Baker and Ben Thomas. Video and Sound production by Ben Thomas. Hosted on...
2025-12-1111 min
What the REF?!What the REF do we want for Christmas?!Find out more about the HiddenREF campaign at Hidden-REF.org'What the REF' is made possible by the Embedding Trust in Evaluation (E-TIE) research grant from Research England.Want to get in touch? Email: WTreF@hidden-ref.orgWTreF is co-produced by Simon Hettrick, Gemma Derrick, James Baker and Ben Thomas. Video and Sound production by Ben Thomas. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
2025-12-0834 min
What the REF?!What the REF do people want to know?!In this lively episode of What the Ref, Gemma, James and Simon guide listeners through the endlessly surprising world of the Research Excellence Framework. Proceedings begin with Simon recounting the final NTO workshop of the year, held at the University of Exeter, which has become the national home of hyper-efficient scrutiny. The team is now preparing an expanded workshop programme for next year.From there, the conversation takes a dramatic turn. Mere minutes before recording, news dropped that the REF pause will end on 10 December, accompanied by major presentations from Dame Jessica Corner and the REF...
2025-11-2645 min
What the REF?!A Festival and a White Paper: What the REF happens next?!In this episode of What the REF?!, James, Gemma, and Simon reflect on an extraordinary few days at the Hidden REF Festival and explore what the new Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper could mean for the future of research assessment. The conversation begins with highlights from the Festival, where workshops, think-aloud experiments, and even a debate over Tom Cruise films versus K-pop tracks became creative ways to unpack how we evaluate non-traditionally submitted research outputs. What started as playful exercises quickly revealed deeper insights into the heuristics people use when making judgments, and how those can be made...
2025-10-2934 min
What the REF?!What the REF is Ola up to?!Welcome back to What the REF?!, the only podcast where academics make bureaucracy sound almost fun. Simon, James, and Gemma welcome new team member Dr Ola Thomson, who brings both organisational-behaviour expertise and the calm assurance of someone who’s already read the entire REF guidance.Ola compares the REF to an iceberg: what you see is a harmless evaluation exercise, but beneath lurk strategy, politics, performance management, and possibly a kraken of accountability. The hosts debate why the REF's noble pursuit of excellence ends up raising everyone’s blood pressure.Between discussions of “...
2025-10-0637 min
What the REF?!What the REF is wrong with “culture”?This week on What the Ref, the gang (Gemma, James, and Simon) score a big guest: Lizzie Gadd, one of the UK’s most respected voices in research assessment. If you’ve ever wondered why people keep muttering about “the REF pause” like it’s a cliffhanger in a Netflix series, this episode’s for you.Lizzie dives straight into the thorny issue of research culture—what it is, why it matters, and why simply having shiny labs and big grants doesn’t mean your environment is excellent if the culture is toxic, precarious, or exclusive. She makes the ca...
2025-09-2937 min
What the REF?!What the REF does a pause mean?!This week, James, Gemma, and Simon dive headfirst into the post-summer politics, but start with Simon’s keynote at the Research Software Engineering Conference. Imagine a room full of coders being told that research software deserves a spot in the REF – cue applause, tough questions, and one very good point: are we rewarding novelty over long-term, community-building work?But that’s just the warm-up. The real drama? The infamous “pause to the REF.” Is it a no-cost extension in academic speak, or just three months of potential confusion? Rumors are flying fast: some say REF is being scra...
2025-09-1130 min
What the REF?!What the REF are we doing with NTOs?!In this jam-packed episode of What the Ref?!, we look into the latest updates on the REF, including the portability debate, and the ever-evolving world of not-traditionally submitted outputs—aka NTOs, or as our guest from Liverpool calls them, Dots (Diverse Output Types).We kick off with dramatic outcries, vague role descriptors, and the REF team's valiant attempt to clarify who actually counts in REF submissions (spoiler: more people than you think!). From technicians to research software engineers, the REF's message is clear—contributions come in many formsThen we head to Liverpool, wher...
2025-07-3042 min
What the REF?!What the REF is happening with the CKU?It’s out! The CKU guidance is out! And it’s the focus of this episode.We start with an update on our events, mainly focussing on their popularity. Both the Hidden REF Festival and the not-traditionally submitted output workshops that we ran recently at Kings and Liverpool have proven very popular.We then discuss the guidance for the Contributions to Knowledge and Understanding (CKU) which was released on the 19th June 2025. Once again the REF have made clear their commitment that all outputs are equally important, and that outputs other than journal arti...
2025-07-0224 min
What the REF?!What the REF are our research incentives?In this episode, we kick off with a few updates and then hear about the incredible agenda planned for the Festival of Hidden REF (7-8 October in Birmingham). We are hugely excited to welcome our first guest: Marcus Munafò, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost at the University of Bath and Director of the UK Reproducibility Network. He talks about his experience of the REF and its role in incentivising research behaviour, how we can improve research quality by focussing on the entire research process and not just it's final output, and the changes that will be needed if universities are t...
2025-06-2543 min
What the REF?!What the REF should we call these outputs?In this episode, we focus on the struggle of what to call the outputs that aren't journal or book publications. We update on an article from Dame Jessica Corner on the People, Culture and Environment statement, what's happening with REF panelists and - for possibly the first time in history - use the words "secretariat" and "interesting" in the same sentence.If you want to learn more about how you can engage with the REF, you should sign up for the Festival of Hidden REF on the 7-8 October 2025 at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum. The Festival...
2025-05-2829 min
What the REF?!Welcome to What the REF!Welcome to the first ever episode of What the REF?! Our attempt at demystifying everyone's favourite national research assessment exercise.In this episode, we discuss the REF as an amazing driver of research culture change and our hopes for increasing engagement with the exercise so that we can build a research environment that is more equitable and more effective. We talk about our dream guests for future episodes, the difficulties in running an assessment that gets to the heart of what is important to research, REF myth busting, Gemma tests our knowledge of REF output categories...
2025-05-1221 min
Research Culture Uncovered(Bonus) Celebrating Research Diversity: The Hidden REF's Bid to Recognise Non-traditional OutputsIn our fortnightly Research Culture Uncovered conversations we are asking what is Research Culture and why does it matter? In this bonus episode, Ged Hall, Academic Development Consultant for Research Impact, chats to Dr Gemma Derrick about research evaluation and the Hidden REF. Gemma is an Associate Professor in University of Bristol. Her research interests include researcher behaviour, academic practice, research evaluation, societal impact, the research workforce and its governance (e.g. peer review systems), and the politics and dynamics of knowledge production and translation. She has investigated the effects of national audit frameworks, such as the R...
2023-10-1129 min
Code for Thought[EN] Hidden no more - The HiddenREF Festival Sep '23The HiddenRef https://hidden-ref.org in the UK is an initiative to push for considering a wider range of research outputs than publications, e.g. software and data. The members of the initiative organised an event on 21 September 2023 to bring together academic institutions, funders and publishers. The aim is to increase the amount of non-publication output for the next research assessment in the UK in 2028. https://hidden-ref.org/festival-of-hidden-ref/ The HiddenREF festival pageIn this episode I spoke to a number of participants and presenters. In order of appearance;James Baker, director of digital humanities at S...
2023-10-0334 min