The REF seems to really sabotage your chances of getting an article published at certain parts of the cycle, as everyone panics about their ratings. Anyone else had a letter saying 'your article is perfectly good, but due to REF we can't publish it'?

I would have thought publication would help an institution's REF ratings rather than harm them?!

Journals may have something of a bottleneck, as large numbers of academics seek to place publications in issues that come out in time for a REF. I've never seen this given as a reason for rejection myself though.

I'd have thought it would make more sense for an editor to simply accept a paper for a future issue?

How far / many issues ahead would they normally accept them for?

I suspect that depends on the journal and the field. In my area (humanities) I'm aware of at least one journal with a fairly long waiting list. I'd imagine science journals need to pay greater attention to the timeliness of the research they publish - particularly for data-centric pieces.

Oh publication vital for the institutions' REF! Hence the bottleneck, which seems to make it much more difficult to publish at certain times. Guess there's no way round it without abolishing the REF (not a bad idea IMO). Don't quite understand this since my submission occurred AFTER the recent REF, but there you go! Lots of people missed the deadline? As you say, they can simply put it in a later issue, so it may simply be a courtesy to avoid a big delay for the authors.