UK academics concerned about the drive to base some of their research funding on the economic and social impact of their work may be slightly mollified to hear today that the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has reduced the weight it will give to impact in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework from 25% to 20%.

The reduction is to take into account the metric’s experimental nature, but HEFCE intends to ratchet up the weighting in subsequent years. Research excellence will still get the highest weighting, 65%, while the “research environment” – which assesses research income, facilities, management plans and the like – will be worth 15%.

Impact assessment was highly unpopular among researchers when it was first included in the plans for the REF in 2009, with some launching a petition on the Number 10 website opposing it. But a pilot exercise that concluded last autumn went some way towards alleviating their concerns (see Nature’s story on the pilot here).

The reduction in weighting was expected, Universities UK president Steve Smith told me last year that universities would “settle for” a 20% weighting, but some are still not happy. Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group of large research-intensive universities said in a press release today that “we still believe 20% is too high a weighting”. Perhaps because Russell Group schools did so poorly in the pilot?