It was eagerly but nervously awaited, and when Gordon Brown finally announced his planned overhaul to research funding in the UK, initial reaction was energetic and mixed.
Delivering his pre-budget report to the House of Commons last week, Brown put research at the top of his list of priorities for helping the UK to compete with the burgeoning economies of China and India. He announced three key developments.
The chancellor has decided to do away with the age-old, and trusted, system of peer review for assessing the quality of science coming out of the UK's universities - which has been used as the basis for carving up public funding.
From 2010-11, science, engineering, technology and medicine (SET) subjects will instead be assessed using statistical indicators, such as the number of postgraduate students in a department and the amount of money a department brings in through its research. This new system should solve the much-complained-about bureaucracy of the research assessment exercise (RAE). But some, such as the Royal Society, the UK's academy of science, are adamant that sounding the death-knell for peer review in SET subjects is a bad move.
Professor Ole Petersen, chairman of a Royal Society working group on the RAE, said: "It is extremely disappointing that peer review is not identified as being core to evaluating the quality of research in [SET subjects]. There is no substitute for expert judgment in assessing research being undertaken by a university department."
The CMU group of new universities also said it was " deeply disappointed" at the reforms. But Universities UK (UUK), the vice-chancellors' group, is less concerned, saying the new system "should lighten the bureaucratic burden but maintain the focus on quality and the confidence of the sector in the process".
A surprise development was the announcement of a new £60m-a-year fund for applied research. Reaction to this was also mixed. UUK, the CMU and the Royal Academy of Engineering welcomed the fund, but the academy said it would have liked to have seen more radical changes to encourage more risky science. Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat science spokesman, expressed concern that the aim is to take funding from pure science to give it to applied research.
The third key development was to health research, where an independent review recommended the research budgets of the NHS and the Medical Research Council be brought closer together. The idea, which has been broadly but cautiously welcomed, is to ensure more of the basic research discoveries coming out of the MRC are fed into useful applications for the NHS.
Brown has given researchers a lot to chew over. It will be some months before it is all digested. Natasha Gilbert is news editor of Research Fortnight. ng@researchresearch.com