Hidden REF 2021 competition

The winners of the 2021 Hidden REF were announced at an online award ceremony on 2nd September 2021. You can watch the ceremony below.

We heard from our incredible winners, listed below, our committee and from some of our panel chairs. It was a fantastic event that showcased the exceptionally hard work of a wide range of people who are vital to research. Congratulations to all our winners, and thank you to our participants and everyone who volunteered their time to run the competition.

Information about how our winners were chosen is provided at the end of this page.If you’d like to more about the competition, you can read about our panel composition, working methods and guidance later on this page. The timeline and the categories for the 2021 competition are still available.

Applications of research panel

  • Winner 1: EThOS, Sara Gould and Heather Rosie, British Library
  • Winner 2: Guide to Pharmacology, Jamie Davies, University of Edinburgh
  • Highly commended: Growing up on the streets, Lorraine van Blerk, University of Dundee

Communicative outputs panel

  • Winner: Extreme Imagination Online Exhibition, Fiona Macpherson, University of Glasgow
  • Highly commended: Parables of care, Ernesto Priego, City, University of London
  • Highly commended: Digital Holocaust Memory, Victoria Walden, University of Sussex

Contexts panel

  • Winner 1: LibCrowds, Mia Ridge, British Library
  • Winner 2: University of Edinburgh Race Equality Network, Emily Sena and David Creighton-Offord, University of Edinburgh
  • Highly commended: Reteaching economics, Jeff Powell, University of Greenwich
  • Special mention: the Research Software Engineering community

Practices panel

  • Winner: AuthorAID, Andy Nobes and the AuthorAID team, INASP
  • Highly commended: The Turing Way, The Turing Way Community, The Alan Turing Institute
  • Highly commended: Archer 2, Juan Herrera, University of Edinburgh
  • Highly commended: Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training, Mahmoud Elsherif and Connor Keating, University of Birmingham

Hidden Role panel

  • Winner: Tayah Hopes, University of Leeds
  • Highly commended: Eighteen street children and youth who contributed to the Growing Up on the Streets Project
  • Highly commended: Kevin Atkins, Marine Biological Association
  • Highly commended: Silvia Giampieri, King’s College London
  • Highly commended: Leila Whitworth, University of Oxford
  • Highly commended: Gregory Strachan, University of Cambridge

More details

Submissions closed on 14th May. Panels were staffed by volunteer experts and formed by grouping together submissions from related categories. Panellists were chosen based on their experience of the submission categories. The same criteria for assessment was applied across all panels with the aim of celebrating and highlighting the diversity of UK research.

Each panel included an even number of panellists to promote agreement by consensus rather than voting. Each panel was be supplied with a panel advisor, drawn from the Hidden REF committee, who provided background information and details on the assessment process.