The Research Excellence Framework is lumbering and expensive. For a fraction of the cost, a digital census of academic research would create unrivalled and genuine information about UK universities’ research performance

Government efforts at assessing university research via the REF involve universities and hundred of senior academics in perpetuating a mythical, bureaucratic form of ‘peer review’. Inherently these exercises only produce ‘evidence’ that has been fatally structured from the outset by bureaucratic rules and university games-playing. Patrick Dunleavy argues that in the digital era, this mountain of special form-filling and bogus ‘reviewing by committee’ has become completely unnecessary.