News Story

REF 2021 recognises 82% of OU research impact as world-leading or internationally excellent

Kiran Parmar, Thursday 12 May 2022

The Research Excellence Framework 2021 results are out! KMi contributed to several units of assessment, the biggest of which was Computer Science and Informatics, which submitted 45 full-time equivalent staff, 44% more than in 2014.

The Open University’s Computing Research is ranked 27 out of 90, for Research Power, which puts us in the top 30% of UK submissions. 73% of our research papers and 100% of our research environment were assessed as world-leading or internationally excellent. A great result!

Computing Research achieved the third-highest result with respect to the Research Power ranking of the 21 subjects submitted by the OU, and the highest Research Power ranking within the OU’s STEM faculty.

The Strategy co-chairs for REF 2021 in Computer Science and Informatics, Prof. Stefan Rueger and Prof. Andrea Zisman, would like to thank all of our researchers, with a special thanks to those who offered and authored impact case studies, to Prof. Janet van der Linden and Prof. Enrico Motta for coordinating impact case studies, to all OU B11 panel members for being a sounding board throughout the submission period and for assessing and selecting our research outputs, and to our dedicated professional support teams.