A message from Kevin Shakesheff (Project Sponsor for RIS)

I’d like to thank many people across the University for their hard work to get RIS ready for the REF Readiness Review 2018. Within Research and Innovation, Libraries, IS and Faculties there has been intense activity for many months to get live reporting of staff and their outputs into RIS.

We have taken a flexible approach to the implementation of RIS for REF and have been guided, with some limits, by the views of Unit of Assessment Co-ordinators. Over the next three months the use of RIS will ramp up and I’m sure a number of teething problems with the system and data quality will come to light. We will endeavour to sort out these problems and communicate actions as promptly as possible.

One early teething problem has been that some academic staff have received author scoring request from Units of Assessments that they are not part of. I’d like to explain this a little more. For REF 2021 we have to link all authors to all outputs so we can get the best possible return. For interdisciplinary outputs you may be an author on a paper that could be submitted by another unit. For these outputs you might be asked to give an author score. We can’t stop these requests being sent to staff but I can reassure you that scoring is optional if you are not part of that unit. If you give a score then it will be considered along with the scores from within the Unit of Assessment. If you ignore the request then the output will be considered within the Unit of Assessment only.

I’m grateful for the work that staff will be undertaking to build a strong set of data within RIS for REF 2021.