Future UK RAEs to be Metrics-Based

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

     ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

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/