Re: Future UK RAEs to be Metrics-Based

From: Zuccala, Alesia <a.zuccala_at_WLV.AC.UK>
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2006 09:38:03 +0100

Hello
 
I recently stumbled across an article online that was published in the
Chronicle of Higher Education - October 14th, 2005 and I think it bears
an interesting relationship to the discussion thread on metric-based
RAEs.  I wonder if some of you had seen this article: 
http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i08/08a01201.htm  and if anyone has any
thoughts about what the Princeton researcher has said:  ""The impact
factor may be a pox upon the land because of the abuse of that number"
.....
 
Open access to research is definitely valuable. I am interested in all of
its developments etc, but I wonder if we should be concerned about how
citation impact factors are going to be used in the future - should we be
wary of potential abuses?   Will it become more important to introduce
complementary qualitative evaluations?
 
Alesia

________________________________________________________________________________
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Thu 3/23/2006 2:47 PM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Future UK RAEs to be Metrics-Based


Don't say we didn't tell you so! The wasteful, time-consuming RAE will
be replaced by metrics, chief among them citation impact, which already
correlated with and predicted the RAE outcome anyway, without being
explicitly counted. Now it can be explicitly counted (along with other
powerful new metrics) and all the rest of the ritualistic time-wasting
can be abandoned, without ceremony. This is a great boost for
institutional self-archiving in OA Institutional Repositories, not only
as the obvious, optimal means of submission, but as the means of
maximising research impact:  http://irra.eprints.org/software/bronze/
(I hope RCUK is listening!):

    "Research exercise to be scrapped"
     Donald MacLeod, Guardian Wednesday March 22, 2006
     http://education.guardian.co.uk/RAE/story/0,,1737082,00.html

Cf: Harnad, S. (2001) Why I think that research access, impact and
assessment
    are linked. Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16.
    http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=74889
    http://cogprints.org/1683/

    Harnad, S. (2003) Why I believe that all UK research output
    should be online.
    Times Higher Education Supplement. Friday, June 6 2003.
    http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=92599
    http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/7728/

    Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated
    online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving
    the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and
    easier. Ariadne.
    http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/
Received on Thu Apr 06 2006 - 13:06:18 BST

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