Anthea Lipsett and Anna Fazackerley, RAE shifts focus from prestige journals, Times Higher Education Supplement, July 22, 2005. (Thanks to Matt Cockerill.) Excerpt:
Senior academics overseeing the 2008 research assessment exercise [RAE] have urged universities to abandon their obsession with big-name journals such as Nature and Science. If successful, the move could signal a major culture shift in universities where academics are pressured to publish "career grade" papers in top-ranking general journals to gain appointments and promotions....Sir John Beringer, chair of Panel D, which covers the biological sciences, said: "The jolt will come for those (academics) who take the mindless approach - 'I have so many publications in journals X and Y, therefore I am excellent'. It is terribly important to break the link that publishing in a journal such as Nature is necessarily a measure of excellence." Rama Thirunamachandran, director of research at the Higher Education Funding Council for England, said: "It is not all about publishing in high-impact journals. It is about ensuring that high-quality research is disseminated by whatever means. In some cases that might be a patent application, in others conference proceedings."
Comment. Although OA journals with impact factors have respectable ones (evidence here, here, and here), most OA journals are too new to have impact factors at all. The new RAE policy will remove disincentives that have kept UK authors from submitting work to OA journals. If carried out properly it could also encourage OA archiving as a sign that researchers are taking steps to make their work, no matter where it was published, as visible and useful as possible.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/26/2005 01:04:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
