At the mention of the RAE, most people look blank. Some might venture the Royal Academy of Engineering. But only academics will give a tired sigh, knowing it as the research assessment exercise and, more often than not, the bane of university life.
The next mammoth exercise to judge the quality of British research - RAE 2008 - takes place next year. The deadline for submissions is November 30, though any university that hasn't sewn up its RAE submission by now is in real trouble.
Around 1,100 academics and specialists will pore over many thousands of research papers and judge their quality as 1*, 2*, 3* or 4*. (Who said gold stars had to end after primary school?) They will also gauge the research "environment" universities provide - how much money and PhDs they have and so on.
The exercise determines the quality of UK research, and also, ultimately, how much money universities will get as a result. But it is set to change.
Fed up with the sheer enormity of the exercise (and moaning academics), the government announced just over a year ago that metrics - or a more number-crunching, less burdensome way of judging research quality that relied less on peer review - would be introduced after RAE 2008.
On EducationGuardian.co.uk today, Eric Thomas, vice-chancellor of Bristol University and proponent of metrics, argues there is "no earthly reason" why they wouldn't work just as well as peer review.
Metrics are a form of timely, real peer review, which change annually to reflect activity, and are far less administratively burdensome or distorting than the RAE, he says.
But according to Jonathan Adams, director of data-analysis company Evidence - which compiled our RAE league table and worked on a Universities UK report on metrics - the data will be skewed. The quantities measured in order to indicate research quality will be changed irrevocably with the move to a metrics system, he says.
Prof Thomas is dismissive. He claims scientists could not write any more grant proposals than they already do and "salami-publishing" - where a research paper is sliced into smaller papers to look like more research is being produced - will not happen.
The sector bottled its chance to do away with the RAE two years ago. After years of carping about how onerous it was, very few were prepared to throw away work already done in the build up to RAE 2008 just like that.
But Prof Thomas would have been happy to do just that. Now he wants the sector to make constructive suggestions about metrics rather than hysterical denouncements. "Having complained bitterly about the RAE for years, we are going to look particularly stupid if we fail to embrace the only real alternative," he says.
What do you think? Should metrics replace peer review? Will the changes to this RAE help? Or is the RAE defunct? Share your thoughts.
