UK's HEFCE Squandering Its Credibility and Assets In Assessing Research Assessment

Corbyn, Zoë (2009) "Conflict of interest warning over Evidence sale" [to Thompson Reuters]. Times Higher Education Supplement. 22 January 2009

There is indeed not only a potential but an actual conflict of interest when the party that is comparing and assessing the different candidate data and databases that can be used in UK national research assessment is the commercial producer of one of the candidate databases.

HEFCE is sleep-walking in letting this happen, and in several other decisions it is making without thinking them through properly, including the failure to test and validate a rich variety of other potential research-assessment metrics, over and above the few that either Thompson-Reuters ISI or its (now disadvantaged) rival SCOPUS can offer, especially the ones provided by the growing worldwide network of Open Access Repositories.

HEFCE is well on the way to foolishly locking itself into dependence on only what is available from a single commercial provider -- under the guise of an objective assessment by an independent honest broker.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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