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British academics are reacting warily to the prospect of increased paperwork and closer scrutiny of their activities as a result of the first wave of a ‘transparency and accountability review’ of research.

The review is being introduced into eight pilot universities following the government's comprehensive spending review last year. This made more money available to universities on condition that they accept increased public scrutiny of how the money is spent.

The Treasury-driven review requires universities to cost the activities of staff by department, subject and type of research sponsor. The government wants greater transparency of university research, on which it spends £1.7 billion a year.

“Improving transparency is an important step in maintaining the health of university research,” said John Taylor, director general of the research councils, last week. He was commenting on a report outlining how universities could implement a uniform approach to costing research.

Taylor promised that the methodology proposed would not impose “requirements that are unnecessarily burdensome”. But the academic community is concerned it will mean more paperwork and closer scrutiny of spending decisions.

“Of course they are suspicious,” says Robin Jackson, policy adviser for the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals. “This is an additional requirement on an overburdened and under-funded system.” But he points out that it is “not an exercise to determine a shortfall in funding”.

Heather Williams of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, and also a member of the steering group that commissioned the report, says the methodology “is simple to implement and gives reasonably robust, auditable figures without an administrative burden”.

The novellist, Terry Pratchett (centre) has received an honorary degree at the University of Warwick for the science content of his ‘Discworld’ books. Ian Stewart (left) and Jack Cohen (right), his co-authors on The Science of Discworld (Ebury), were made ‘honorary wizards of the Unseen University’. Credit: KIM OLIVER

Some argue that the review cannot determine whether the full costs of research are being met by research funders, as they would like, as it fails to require reporting of the number of hours worked by academics.

“This is where people magic money out of thin air when they say the research base is well funded,” says Peter Cotgreave, director of the lobby group Save British Science. “When the issue of full overhead costs for grants comes up, people say that, because the research is being done, there must be enough [money]. The truth is that people work longer hours to get it done.”

There is concern that the transparency review could work against universities if it is found that teaching grants are being spent on research. But this seems unlikely, given the pressures on teaching resources within higher education. The recent expansion of student numbers has already seen a decline in the resource allocation per student.

There will be a three-stage implementation of the proposals. New costing standards should be reported by January 2001 for eight pilot universities, and by summer 2001 for a further 30 universities.