Harnad to weigh Open Access impact against the RAE

A new proposal to use the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to create and validate powerful new Open Access metrics of research impact will be presented this month by Professor Stevan Harnad.

Professor Harnad from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), pioneer of the Open Access movement, will deliver a keynote address at the 11th Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics in Madrid from 25-27 June (alongside a keynote from scientometric pioneer and founder of the Institute of Scientific Information, Dr Eugene Garfield).

In his keynote, 'Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise', Professor Harnad will describe how he and his team at ECS will test old and new metric measures of research impact to validate their joint predictive power against traditional RAE panel rankings in the forthcoming parallel panel-based and metric RAE in 2008.

‘This is a unique opportunity,’ said Professor Harnad. ‘The RAE is unique to the UK and the UK also leads the world in Open Access. We see Open Access Scientometrics as a rich new means of navigating, evaluating, predicting and analysing the growing Open Access research database, as well as providing powerful incentives to make it grow faster.’

Professor Harnad will also report new findings on the causal basis of the positive correlation between Open Access self-archiving and research impact.

Professor Harnad will deliver his keynote address at 9.30am on Monday 25 June.

An abstract of Professor Harnad’s keynote is available; in addition to an abstract of his new findings on Open Access self-archiving and research impact. Read a history of the Open Access movement.