Making QR count

Pilot study highlights the unseen benefits of QR funding

While much is written (not least in Funding Insight) and discussed about how universities, research offices and researchers can best position themselves in the scramble for competitive grant funding, the other leg of the UK’s ‘dual funding’ system is less examined.

This second leg is delivered as a block grant via the Quality-related Research (QR) mechanism, the value of which to each institution is dependent on its performance in the Research Excellence Framework. There is therefore little to say about how actors in higher education can increase their income from it (do well in the REF!), but there might be more to say about how QR could be most effectively distributed and deployed.