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This article assesses the risk of two COVID-19-related changes necessary for the expert review of the REF2021's Impact criterion: the move from face to face (F2F) to virtual deliberation; and the changing research landscape caused by the COVID-19 crisis requiring an extension of deadlines, and accommodation of COVID-19-related mitigation. Peer review in its basic form requires expert debate, where dissenting opinions and non-verbal cues are absorbed into a group deliberative practice and therefore inform outcomes. With a move to deliberations in virtual settings, the most likely current outcome for REF2021 evaluations, the extent that negotiation dynamics necessary in F2F evaluations are diminished and how this limits panellists' ability to sensitively assess COVID-19 mitigation statements is questioned. This article explores the nature of, and associated capabilities to undertake, complex decision-making in virtual settings around the Impact criterion as well the consequences of COVID-19 on normal Impact trajectories. It examines the risks these changes present for evaluation of the Impact criterion and provides recommendations to offset these risks to enhance discussion and safeguard the legitimacy of evaluation outcomes. This article is also relevant for evaluation processes of academic criteria that require both a shift to virtual, and/or guidance of how to sensitively assess the effect of COVID-19 on narratives of individual, group or organizational performance.

Many higher education institutions (HEIs) seek to attract international students through marketing and recruitment activity. At the same time, HEIs are developing strategic plans that suggest internationalisation strategies such as the recruitment of students are an important consideration for their institutions and these strategies and implementation differ by their individual settings and culture. This study uses an international comparison of three universities to explore how HEIs' strategic plans shape or mediate international student recruitment practice within higher education. The activity theory is used to compare institutional strategies as an activity by considering how practitioners in different parts of the world shape the meaning, outcome and tensions of their practice. Using this approach, the study examines international student recruitment at three HEIs in Canada, Hong Kong and the UK and shows how practitioners of international student recruitment are influenced by their institutional strategic plans, and the extent of this influence on practice is mediated by institutional culture and the practitioner's position within the institutional hierarchy. The study results indicate that considering strategy practitioners' perceptions and interpretations of strategic plans provides HEIs with additional resources to improve strategic planning processes by creating and designing plans that address practice implementation within institutions.

This paper examines the consequences of a culture of "personal ethics" when using new methodologies, such as the use of social media (SM) sites as a source of data for research. Using SM research as an example, this paper explores the practices of a number of actors and researchers within the "Ethics Ecosystem" which as a network governs ethically responsible research behaviour. In the case of SM research, the ethical use of this data is currently in dispute, as even though it is seemingly publically available, concerns relating to privacy, vulnerability, potential harm and consent blur the lines of responsible ethical research behaviour. The findings point to the dominance of a personal, bottom-up, researcher-led, 'ethical barometer' for making decisions regarding the permissibility of using SM data. We show that the use of different barometers by different researchers can lead to wide disparities in ethical practice -- disparities which are compounded by the lack of firm guidelines for responsible practice of SM research. This has widespread consequences on the development of shared norms and understandings at all levels, and by all actors within the Ethics Ecosystem, and risks inconsistencies in their approaches to ethical decision-making. This paper argues that this governance of ethical behaviour by individual researchers perpetuates a negative cycle of academic practice that is dependent on subjective judgements by researchers themselves, rather than governed by more formalised academic institutions such as the research ethics committee and funding council guidelines.

Realising the societal gains from publicly funded health and medical research requires a model for a reflexive evaluation precedent for the societal impact of research. This research explores UK Research Excellence Framework evaluators' values and opinions and assessing societal impact, prior to the assessment taking place. Specifically, we discuss the characteristics of two different impact assessment extremes--the "quality-focused" evaluation and "societal impact-focused" evaluation. We show the wide range of evaluator views about impact, and that these views could be conceptually reflected in a range of different positions along a conceptual evaluation scale. We describe the characteristics of these extremes in detail, and discuss the different beliefs evaluators had which could influence where they positioned themselves along the scale. These decisions, we argue, when considered together, form a dominant definition of societal impact that influences the direction of its evaluation by the panel.

This article assesses the risk of two COVID-19-related changes necessary for the expert review of the REF2021's Impact criterion: the move from face to face (F2F) to virtual deliberation; and the changing research landscape caused by the COVID-19 crisis requiring an extension of deadlines, and accommodation of COVID-19-related mitigation. Peer review in its basic form requires expert debate, where dissenting opinions and non-verbal cues are absorbed into a group deliberative practice and therefore inform outcomes. With a move to deliberations in virtual settings, the most likely current outcome for REF2021 evaluations, the extent that negotiation dynamics necessary in F2F evaluations are diminished and how this limits panellists' ability to sensitively assess COVID-19 mitigation statements is questioned. This article explores the nature of, and associated capabilities to undertake, complex decision-making in virtual settings around the Impact criterion as well the consequences of COVID-19 on normal Impact trajectories. It examines the risks these changes present for evaluation of the Impact criterion and provides recommendations to offset these risks to enhance discussion and safeguard the legitimacy of evaluation outcomes. This article is also relevant for evaluation processes of academic criteria that require both a shift to virtual, and/or guidance of how to sensitively assess the effect of COVID-19 on narratives of individual, group or organizational performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of metrics to represent complex information about research in an accessible format has previously been overlooked in preference to debate about their shortcomings as research evaluation tools. Here, we argue that bibliometrics have the potential to widen scientific participation by allowing non-academic stakeholders to access scientific decision making, thereby increasing the democratisation of science. Government policies from 3 countries (UK, Australia and Spain) are reviewed. Each country outlines a commitment to the democratisation of science for one set of policies whilst ignoring this commitment when developing parallel research evaluation policies. We propose a change in dialogue from whether bibliometrics should be used to how they should be used in future evaluations. Future research policies should take advantage of bibliometrics to foster greater democratisation of research to create more socially-reflexive evaluation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]