Research Assessment

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SUMMARY: CrossRef and Publishers Licensing Society have come to a "gentleman's agreement" with RAE/HEFCE to "license" the papers that are submitted to RAE for assessment "free of charge." No such licensing agreement was necessary, however. The RAE's insistence on authors submitting the publisher's version of each paper for assessment, rather than the author's peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints) is arbitrary and serves no useful purpose. Moreover, the RAE needs no special permission for its individual authors to submit their work for assessment: that is merely Fair Use on the authors' part. The RAE restriction to only four submissions per author is likewise needless and counterproductive. Once the unnecessary and wasteful "peer-re-reviewing" by the RAE panels is at last abandoned in favour of metrics, there will be no need for either a 4-item cap or any attempt to get the "originals" to the panel. The authors' self-archived postprints in their own institutional OA IRs will suffice. What will moot all of this is the OA self-archiving mandates by RCUK and the UK universities themselves, which will fill the UK universities' IRs, which will in their turn -- with the help of the IRRA (Institutional Repositories and Research Assessment) -- mediate the submission of both the postprints and the metrics to the RAE.

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CrossRef and Publishers Licensing Society have come to a "gentleman's agreement" with RAE/HEFCE to "license" the papers that are submitted to RAE for assessment "free of charge":

2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)
CrossRef Newsletter (September 2006)

"CrossRef has been working with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) on the 2008 RAE...

"Review panel members increasingly want access to materials - particularly journal articles - in electronic form. They require access to the authoritative final version of an article, and not to a pre-print held for example in an institutional repository. HEFCE, CrossRef, PLS, and EduServ are therefore working together to facilitate access...

"The licensed materials will be accessible only to RAE panel members and to HEFCE staff administering the RAE, the works will be accessible only for the purposes of conducting the RAE, and all text will be deleted from the data collection system at the end of the exercise...

"The licence between HEFCE and PLS as negotiated is free of charge despite the fact that it has value for HEFCE in significantly saving administrative costs. This reflects the fact that photocopied works underpinned previous RAEs at no cost under a 'gentleman's agreement' between HEFCE and publishers, and also the value to the publishing industry in demonstrating that we can work together to provide innovative licensing and access solutions..."

At the heart of this there are not one, not two, not three, but four pieces of patent nonsense so absurd as to take one's breath away. Most of the nonsense is on RAE/HEFCE's end; one cannot blame the publishers for playing along (especially as the gentleman's agreement holds some hope of forestalling OA a bit longer, or at least the role the RAE might have played in hastening OA's arrival):

(1) The first piece of nonsense is the RAE's pedantic and dysfunctional insistence on laying their hands directly on the "originals," the publisher's version of each article per author, rather than sensibly settling for the author's peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints).

(2) The second is the equally foolish notion that the RAE somehow needs special permission to do this, or, worse, might even have needed to pay for the right, but for this "gentleman's agreement"! (Of course the publishers are more than happy to play along with this self-imposed farce on RAE's part; but if no one had ever absurdly suggested in the first place that when an author sends a copy of his own paper to his own funder for evaluation, he needs his publisher's permission, none of this nonsense would ever even have come up!) In reality this is of course Fair Use by inidividual authors, and the nonsense was in misleadingly portraying it instead as a transaction between universities and national origanisations: It is merely individual assessment.

(3) The idea of restricting submissions to only four papers was originally floated by RAE in part out of the hope that this limitation would act as a counterweight against salami-sliced publication. It didn't. And it's time to drop this absurd, arbitrary limit on what work can be submitted.

(4) Of course the other reason the number was kept down to four was the even more dysfunctional feature of the RAE that is only now, at long last, being deservedly jettisoned: the submissions and panel reviews themselves! Yet one hand does not seem to be aware of what the other is doing: For once the unnecessary and time/money-wasting "peer-re-reviewing" that the RAE panels had been trying to do is at last abandoned in favour of metrics, there will be no need for either a 4-item cap or any compulsive attempt to get the "originals" to the panel. The authors' self-archived postprints in their own institutional OA IRs will suffice (and the only thing the RAE panels -- if there still are any RAE panels -- need do, if suspicious about any particular item, is a database search (say, in Web of Knowledge or Scopus or PubMed) to make sure that the item in question did indeed appear in the journal indicated, under the name of the author in question).

What will moot all of this is, of course, the OA self-archiving mandates by RCUK and the UK universities themselves, which will fill the UK universities' IRs, which will in their turn -- with the help of the IRRA I(Institutional Repositories and Research Assessment) -- mediate the submission of both the postprints and the metrics to the RAE. Then this ludicrous side-show about the "licensing" of the all-important "originals" to the RAE, for "peer re-review" via the mediation of CrossRef and the publishers will at last be laid to rest, once and for all.

RAE 2008 will be its last hurrah...

Prior AmSci Threads on this topic:

"Future UK RAEs to be Metrics-Based"
"Question for publishers - Research Assessment Exercise 2008"

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. and Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives. Ariadne 35.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum