This is a response to the HEFCE "invitation to contribute"
recommendations for restructuring the RAE:
I have written two papers on how the RAE might be greatly improved in
its assessment accuracy and at the same time made far less effortful
and costly -- while (mirabile dictu) doing a great indirect service
to research and researchers, both in the UK and in the rest of the
scholarly/scientific world as well:
Harnad, S. (2001) "Research access, impact and assessment." Times Higher
Education Supplement 1487: p. 16.
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/83/index.html
Harnad, S. (2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative. Nature 410: 1024-1025
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html
If you wish to see what the RAE would look like if UK research output
were continually accessible online, and hence continuously assessable, see:
http://citebase.eprints.org/
To see how the RAE could help hasten this outcome (which is in any case
optimal and inevitable), see:
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#research-funders-do
We at Southampton are currently harvesting the RAE submissions data
and putting them in an Eprint Archive to provide a "demo" of the sorts of
possibilities an online, open-access research corpus opens up for
research visibility, accessibility, uptake, usage, citation, impact and
assessability.
Best wishes,
Stevan Harnad
