UK's HEFCE Squandering Its Credibility and Assets In Research Assessment

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 10:02:21 -0500

      Re:
      Corbyn, Zoë (2009) "Conflict of interest warning over
      Evidence sale" [to Thompson Reuters]. Times Higher
      Education Supplement. 22 January 2009

There is indeed not only a potential but an actual conflict of
interest when the party that is comparing and assessing the different
candidate data and databases that can be used in UK national research
assessment is the commercial producer of one of the candidate
databases. 
HEFCE is sleep-walking in letting this happen, and in several other
decisions it is making without thinking them through properly,
including the failure to test and validate a rich variety of other
potential research-assessment metrics, over and above the few that
either Reuters-Thompson ISI or its (now disadvantaged) rival SCOPUS
can offer, especially the ones provided by the growing worldwide
network of Open Access Repositories. 

HEFCE is well on the way to foolishly locking itself into dependence
on only what is available from a single commercial provider -- under
the guise of an objective assessment by an independent honest broker.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Harnad, S. (2001) Research access, impact and assessment. Times
Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16. 

Brody, T., Kampa, S., Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Hitchcock, S.
(2003) Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments.
In Proceedings of European Conference on Digital Libraries,
Trondheim, Norway. 

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 35.

Harnad, S. (2006) Online, Continuous, Metrics-Based Research
Assessment. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton. 

Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Oppenheim, C., McDonald, J. W., Champion, T.
and Harnad, S. (2006) Extending journal-based research impact
assessment to book-based disciplines.Technical Report, ECS,
University of Southampton. 

Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research
Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the
International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp.
27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds. 

Brody, T., Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Time to Convert
to Metrics.Research Fortnight 17-18. 

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A.
(2007)Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web:
Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch
Quarterly 3(3). 

Harnad, S. (2008) Self-Archiving, Metrics and Mandates. Science
Editor 31(2) 57-59 

Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against
Peer Rankings.Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11)
doi:10.3354/esep00088 (Special issue: The Use And Misuse Of
Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance)

Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Gingras, Y. (2008) Maximizing Research
Progress Through Open Access Mandates and Metrics. Liinc em
Revista 4(2). 
Received on Sun Feb 15 2009 - 15:03:16 GMT