British academics' favourite blood sport, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is due for its last outing in 2008 but the arguments about how to replace it are already prompting online fisticuffs.
Today's warning from Universities UK that bibliometrics - counting researchers' citations, number of papers etc - carry a danger of distortion has drawn scornful comments from Southampton University's Steve Harnad, the high priest of open access publishing.
The report for UUK compiled by Evidence warns that "The metrics system will assaulted from the day it is promulgated by 50,000 intelligent and motivated individuals deeply suspicious of its outcomes. There will be consequences."
But Harnad argues on the American Scientist Open Access Forum
that abuses like "salami-slicing" or self-citation can be detected - provided papers are openly accessible online.
"Yes, any system (including democracy, health care, welfare, taxation,
market economics, justice, education and the Internet) can be abused. But abuses can be detected, exposed and punished, and this is especially true in the case of scholarly/scientific research, where "peer review" does not stop with publication, but continues for as long as research
findings are read and used. And it's truer still if it is all online and openly accessible.
"The important thing is to get all these publications as well as their metrics out in the open for scrutiny by making them Open Access. Then peer and public scrutiny -- plus the analytic power of the algorithms and the Internet -- can collaborate to keep them honest."
Opinion is already divided between those like Eric Thomas, Bristol's combative VC, who say that metrics are the only sensible solution and those like Geoffrey Alderman - a new recruit to Buckingham University which does not take part in the RAE - that the whole process has served its purpose and should be buried.
