Let users decide if research is relevant

The traditional reluctance to include end-users in the peer review process does have the potential to make us - the academic research community - appear to the wider community as yet another self-indulgent interest group, but there is a more compelling need to involve end-users in the evaluation process.

Society is increasingly looking to the research community to create economic opportunities or to solve its problems. Solutions to society's problems and ideas that create economic opportunities seldom come packaged in a single discipline, but more frequently have interdisciplinary angles.

Much innovation occurs at the intersection of disciplines, as the context of one discipline provides the right stimulus for the development of another.

Good interdisciplinary research is inherently difficult and can be made even more difficult if suitable incentives are not in place. As researchers, we tend to build our credibility in a single discipline, and our track record ensures that our papers get a fair hearing from our peers. When we venture into interdisciplinary research, we are suddenly being evaluated by reviewers who do not have a pre-existing credibility assigned to us and some of our papers may have a more critical reception.

If at this time our research output - and volume sometimes can easily be confused for quality - is being evaluated, there is always a temptation to claw back to the comfort of our disciplinary burrows.

The peer review process is very effective at evaluating research in disciplinary silos, but less so when it comes to interdisciplinary work. End-users, however, tend to be outcome-focused and are less likely to display the biases of any particular discipline. They tend to be more concerned with and effective in evaluating the relevance, if not the elegance, of interdisciplinary research.

The Research Quality Framework is a necessary step in reinforcing society's support for publicly funded research. It will be successful if it leads to a dynamic, publicly funded research sector where the best institutions have to continue to work hard to maintain their status and where there is also opportunity for aspiring institutions to emerge as leaders if they are willing and able to do so.

The relegation system of sports leagues is often better than an ossified caste system: the latter may be stable and predictable but it seldom leads to global competitiveness.