Re: Should Institutional Repositories Allow Opt-Out From (1) Mandates? (2) Metrics?

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 03:30:53 +0000

On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, Christian Zimmermann wrote:

> Stevan,
>
> I wanted to add a comment to your blog (topic "Should Institutional
> Repositories Allow Opt-Out From (1) Mandates? (2) Metrics?"),
  http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/322-guid.html
> but comments are disabled. So here it is by email:
>
> Re: whether download statistics should be put in CVs. I would not
> necessarily
> go that far (I do not put citation counts in my CV either),

Stay tuned. Academics will soon be going that far -- and further too!
And soon it will appear as self-evident as listing one's degrees,
positions, publications, memberships, grants, invited talks and honours.

> but they are certainly a metric for the value of research. At RePEc,
> we count them (http://logec.repec.org/) and use them in rankings of
> authors or institutions (for example,
> http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.all.html).
>
> Re: whether statistics are abused. Of course, some people can start
> playing
> with them. At RePEc we caught a few doing so, as we have all sorts of
> safeguards is place. In addition, we need to take care of all sorts of
> robots, declared or not, and various pattern checks are performed to take
> into account some other possible abuses. See
> http://logec.repec.org/about.htm
> for details, or soon a post on the RePEc blog, http://blog.repec.org/.

The safeguards, detections, and the naming/shaming of cheats, plagiarists,
spammers and scammers will also become standard practise 'ere long,
and far more powerful than the abusers, though always a step or two
behind them every time, so short-term mischief-making will always be
possible. Fortunately, research is a long-term, self-corrective system,
buffered against get-rich-quick schemes.

(The comments on my blog were disabled because of spammers; I didn't
have the time to sort through thousands of spams for the occasional
sapphire. The new generation blog software will be buffered against such
bogus comments and trackbacks.)

Chrs, Stevan

> Christian Zimmermann
> Department of Economics
> University of Connecticut
> 341 Mansfield Road, Unit 1063
> Storrs, CT 06269-1063
> http://ideas.repec.org/zimm/ christian.zimmermann -- uconn.edu
> http://ideas.repec.org/e/pzi1.html
>
Received on Thu Nov 08 2007 - 03:33:41 GMT

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