Half-a-dozen British Nobel Prize-winners have added their signatures to a petition protesting a proposal to assess basic science in part by its ‘economic and social impact’.

The Research Excellence Framework, or REF, will be an important cog in the machine that doles out money to universities. The Higher Education Funding Council for England will use it to help determine which campuses receive around £2 billion a year in quality-related research funding from 2013.

Under a proposed set of changes to the REF, the council will begin basing 25% of their assessment on the research’s ‘economic and social impact’.

Those words undoubtedly ring true with the UK’s Treasury, which is seeking some economic payback from its generous investment in research over the past decade. But it has rubbed the Nobelists the wrong way. “The REF proposals are founded on a lack of understanding of how knowledge advances,” says the petition, which is on the University and College Union website.

This year’s Chemistry Nobel prizewinner Venki Ramakrishnan is among the signatories. You hear his view in his own words by watching the Nature Video at the right (comments at 5:15).