The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) has reported the results of a study they commissioned by Evidence Ltd that found that the ranking criteria for assessing and rewarding research performance in the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) changed from RAE 2001 to RAE 2008. The result is that citations, which correlated highly with RAE 2001, correlated less highly with RAE 2008, so a number of universities whose citation counts had decreased were rewarded more in 2008, and a number of universities whose citation counts had increased were rewarded less....
(5) The dawning era of Open Access (free web access) to peer-reviewed research is providing a wealth of new metrics to be included, tested and assigned initial weights in the joint battery of metrics. These include download counts, citation and download growth and decay rates, hub and authority scores, interdisciplinarity scores, co-citations, tag counts, comment counts, link counts, data-usage, and many other openly accessible and measurable properties of the growth of knowledge in our evolving "Cognitive Commons."...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/20/2009 02:38:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
