All personal notes made by those conducting a massive assessment of university research in the United Kingdom should be destroyed, the organization in charge of the exercise has recommended.

Last week, the Times Higher Education published extracts from a letter written by Ed Hughes, head of the team managing the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which determines funding allocations for university departments. The letter recommended that members of assessment panels destroy all personal notes relating to their decisions.

However, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which distributes the English portion of RAE-related funds, says that minutes of assessment meetings will still be published so that decisions can be scrutinized. The destruction of personal notes, the council says, is to prevent panel members being over-burdened with requests to publicly release their notes.