Posted on 18 July 2009
Everyone knew this was coming but it was still a shock to see the swingeing recommendations in print. It would be futile to speculate on what the organisational topography of Irish third-level education will look like this time next year but I think it’s safe to assume that streamlining and rationalisation are going to profoundly effect how research is funded by the State. Relying on bibliometric analysis as a primary yardstick of research quality meets with cold dismissal:
‘The largest verifiable output to date appears to be the publication of articles as opposed to more concrete
measures of economic returns.’
I’m not sure what these concrete measures are but the emphasis in the report seems to be toward applied research. This is a dangerous supposition infringing on the concept of academic freedom and dismissing the nursery of real innovation. One big gun is already absorbing the extent of this challenge so I won’t dwell on this here. It does seem safe to assume that the agencies delivering funding to research under The Strategy for
All this flux and fear bookends a fairly successful repository summer. I was glad to have my instincts confirmed by Stuart Shieber that funder policies over institutional mandates can be more effective in leveraging Open Access. Using the stated policies of the agencies described above I was able to convince a number of high profile researchers to avail of the benefits of the repository and allow deposit of their current published research. The Open Access service that will aggregate Irish university research outputs (publications, theses etc) is also under development and looking at an end of year delivery date. This should be a core component of an all-Ireland research support infrastructure. This project is currently funded by the Irish Universities Association and the Strategic Innovation Fund which has established Institutional Repositories in all Irish universities and gone some way to keeping a roof over my head since 2005. The McCarthy Report has recommended that the fund