This is crazy. The Copyright Licensing Agency and Publishers Licensing
Society have already issued a (free) licence to HEFCE enabling them to
access, download and use all such articles from the publishers' online
services, for RAE purposes
Presumably someone at HEFCE is unaware of this!
Sally
Sally Morris
Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy)
South House, The Street
Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Tel: +44(0)1903 871286
Fax: +44(0)8701 202806
Email: sally_at_morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 12 July 2007 12:03
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: The RAE and our Parliamentary Briefing Note (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 11:29:53 +0100 (BST)
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad -- ecs.soton.ac.uk>
TO: CPHC list
Subject: Re: The RAE and our Parliamentary Briefing Note
On Tue, 10 Jul 2007, Harold Thimbleby wrote [on CPHC]:
> HEFCE has asked us to provide hardcopies and CDs of RAE outputs.
>
> In the 21st century it is astounding (it astounds me anyway) that, as
> well as being required to provide physical outputs, we have to submit
> CDs (but not CD-rw nor DVD-rw because HEFCE can't cope with them) of
> PDFs.
This anachronistic piece of somnambulism on the part of the
"decision-makers" at HEFCE was drawn to their attention some time ago
(to no detectable avail), and it runs far deeper than demanding CDs
of PDFs:
"Re: Question for publishers - Research Assessment Exercise 2008"
(Feb 2006)
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5121.html
My only glimpse of how things are done at high levels comes from my
preoccupation with the one circumscribed issue (for which I was recently
voted into silence by a vocal handful on CPHC, so I make bold to respond
on this occasion with some trepidation!), OA, but maybe this is just
a random sample of the ubiquitous dyseconomies and dysfunctionalities of
scale that prevail everywhere, if we look closely enough at large-scale
policy...
Stevan Harnad
University of Southampton
On Tue, 10 Jul 2007, Harold Thimbleby wrote:
> [excerpt]
> - A moderately-capable IT undergraduate might have spent six minutes
> to add a field to HEFCE's RAE database to upload PDFs. Let's say this
> could be done at a cost of n pounds. (Note that n would have been
> negligible if HEFCE had anticipated the problem, but never mind.)
>
> - Instead a lawyer (let's suppose) spent a week drawing up
> requirements for CDs. Their fee would be a few thousand pounds. Let's
> say there are about 100,000 CDs required for the operation taken
> across every university in the UK, and it averages 2 person-days per
> CD (it'll take a lot longer for some people to even to learn what a
> PDF is, let alone get one generated...), and if staff costs are at
> the same rate as the student's, which was 10n pounds per hour, it's
> not hard to imagine a hidden cost to the UK economy of at least 3n
> million pounds. Then if *anybody* on the poor RAE panels are going to
> sort out and spend any time looking at these piles of CDs and
> locating the right PDFs to read, we may as well double the
> person-hours estimate.
>
> (And in our despair, people in UoA23 are going to create the CDs
> *and* refer to PDFs on servers. So we'll do both: ironically doing
> more work because we are IT literate!!)
>
> --
> Prof. Harold Thimbleby
> http://www.cs.swansea.ac.uk/~csharold
Received on Thu Jul 12 2007 - 13:55:07 BST