PLS is working in partnership with the UK’s four higher education funding bodies and publishers in order to facilitate secure electronic access to journal articles and other research outputs for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021.
The agreement will reduce the burden for researchers submitting outputs for assessment and provide assurance that outputs are handled in accordance with copyright.
It will also increase efficiency for the REF assessment panels and save public money that would otherwise have been spent on fees.
PLS will facilitate electronic access to up to 200,000 journal articles and other research outputs for assessment by more than 800 panellists across 34 units of assessment in the course of the REF 2021.
The REF, which is managed by Research England on behalf of the UK’s four higher education funding bodies, is the system for assessing the quality of research and is critically important to the higher education sector. The UK funding bodies will use the results of periodic REF exercises to inform allocation of government investment in research worth around £2 billion per year.
PLS will request publishers’ support for the assessment by agreeing to provide electronic access to their publications and to waive fees, enabling the REF team to overcome the logistical and financial challenges of an assessment on this scale. REF 2021 has the support of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and the Publishers Association (PA) and of publishers in the UK and abroad.
In addition, the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) - on behalf of PLS, the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society (ALCS), the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) and the Picture Industry Collecting Society for Effective Licensing (PICSEL) - is providing a royalty-free licence to allow copyright-compliant storage and reuse of the materials for the purpose of the REF 2021 assessment.
This approach will build on the success of this work for REF 2014. PLS were able to obtain the support of over 400 publishers worldwide, representing about 98 percent of all publishers approached, which enabled more than 97 percent of journal articles submitted to be accessed in this way.
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