Welcome to the first ever episode of What the REF?! Our attempt at demystifying everyone's favourite national research assessment exercise.In this episode, we discuss the REF as an amazing driver of research culture change and our hopes for increasing engagement with the exercise so that we can build a research environment that is more equitable and more effective. We talk about our dream guests for future episodes, the difficulties in running an assessment that gets to the heart of what is important to research, REF myth busting, Gemma tests our knowledge of REF output categories, and we even look into how long it would take the average person to read through all of the REF guidance (spoiler: it’s about 11 days).If you want to learn more about how you can engage with the REF, you should sign up for the Festival of Hidden REF on the 7-8 October 2025 at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum. The Festival focuses on sharing knowledge about non-traditional outputs and Hidden Roles, collecting new ideas and the latest developments from attendees and, most importantly, celebrating everyone who contributes to research.If you have a question about the REF or an idea for the podcast, let us know at [email protected], BlueSky or Linkedin.Our hosts are James Baker, Gemma Derrick - a self-confessed REF junkie - and Simon Hettrick, and our producer is Ben Thomas.Find out more about the HiddenREF campaign at Hidden-REF.org'What the REF' is made possible by the Embedding Trust in Evaluation (E-TIE) research grant from Research England.Want to get in touch? Email: [email protected] is co-produced by Simon Hettrick, Gemma Derrick, James Baker and Ben Thomas. Video and Sound production by Ben Thomas. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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