Open Access Archivangelism

Peter Suber: "If the metrics have a stronger OA connection, can you say something short (by email or on the blog) that I could quote for readers who aren't clued in, esp. readers outside the UK?"

(1) In the UK (Research Assessment Exercise, RAE) and Australia (Research Quality Framework, RQF) all researchers and institutions are evaluated for "top-sliced" funding, over and above competitive research proposals.

(2) Everywhere in the world, researchers and research institutions have research performance evaluations, on which careers/salaries, research funding, economic benefits, and institutional/departmental ratings depend.

(3) There is now a natural synergy growing between OA self-archiving, Institutional Repositories (IRs), OA self-archiving mandates, and the online "metrics" toward which both the RAE/RQF and research evaluation in general are moving.

(4) Each institution's IR is the natural place from which to derive and display research performance indicators: publication counts, citation counts, download counts, and many new metrics, rich and diverse ones, that will be mined from the OA corpus, making research evaluation much more open, sensitive to diversity, adapted to each discipline, predictive, and equitable.

(5) OA Self-Archiving not only allows performance indicators (metrics) to be collected and displayed, and new metrics to be developed, but OA also enhances metrics (research impact), both competitively (OA vs. NOA) and absolutely (Quality Advantage: OA benefits the best work the most, and Early Advantage), as well as making possible the data-mining of the OA corpus for research purposes. (Research Evaluation, Research Navigation, and Research Data-Mining are all very closely related.)

(6) This powerful and promising synergy between Open Research and Open Metrics is hence also a strong incentive for institutional and funder OA mandates, which will in turn hasten 100% OA: Their connection needs to be made clear, and the message needs to be spread to researchers, their institutions, and their funders.

(Needless to say, closed, internal, non-displayed metrics are also feasible, where appropriate.)

Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads:

UK "RAE" Evaluations (began Nov 2000)
Big Brother and Digitometrics (May 2001)
Scientometric OAI Search Engines (began Aug 2002)
UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) review (Oct 2002)
Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data (began Dec 2002)
Potential Metric Abuses (and their Potential Metric Antidotes) (began Jan 2003)
Future UK RAEs to be Metrics-Based (began Mar 2006)
Australia stirs on metrics (Jun 2006)
Let 1000 RAE Metric Flowers Bloom: Avoid Matthew Effect as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Jun 2006)
Australia's RQF (Nov 2006)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum