ResearchAssessmentExercise

From UoWiki

The other day I realised that many uoniks have been publishing in academic contexts - for example I see Jo has used the uo as her institutional moniker when publishing papers that get distributed widely in academic and business contexts.

If intellectual property and knowledge generated outside of the institutional context is valorised by institutions in a protective / aquisitive way - as I understand your institution to be doing, robert, could this equasion not be worked in the opposite direction?

For example, if we generate research 'points' - say a 4 point score in the UK research council's Research Assessment Exercise.. would we be able to use that to get money fron the Research Council? Unlikely I'm sure.. you probably have to have some kind of academic regalia to valorise the research directly (a chaplain or something.. I think that's one of the necessities of being a proper academic institution). But how about barter? I know there are several universities and ex-polytechnics with very poor research outputs. They can't afford to employ staff who publish in peer review journals and academic publications so they are constantly on the prowl for people willing to be employed for one day / year through some administrative fiddles that allow them to claim that person's research points.

Could the research generated by uoniks be used to barter with such institutions for resources, money and sexual favours?

It would certainly be an interesting market to open up. I know that the flaxman lodge (http://flaxmanlodge.omweb.org) has had financial worries (see http://flaxmanlodge.omweb.org/modules/wakka/July7thNotes if you're interested) about maintaining their space. This research points barter scheme could work quite well (or quite badly...) for them, or anyone else seeking to generate income from within research bandit collectives. Of course whether their research is then just adjuncted to an existing institution is debatable.

Does anyone know enough about Research Assessment Excercises or how Research Council grants are given out to assess the potential of such a scheme?

mary writes: I work in university admin, and though I don't deal directly with research i can probably find some stuff out about the RAE. But although I understand that up until now the RAEs have been used as a way of deciding how much money an institution gets from the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) the 2008 one will not, and is likely to be the last RAE ever. RAE 2008 will still be a tool used to determine the status of a university, ie effectively a recruitment tool. For example, when my employer got a five-star rating in the last RAE, it precipitated a reverse brain-drain from the USA in which they recruited about 15 new academics.

But RAE 2008 will certainly not be tied to funding levels. This role is to be taken over by FullEconomicCosting (FEC), a bean-counting exercise in spreadsheet vampirism that shows every sign of being the final nail in the coffin of 'pure' research within a publicly-funded institutional context.

Interestingly, my fellow vorticians and I have speculated that this may well drive the number of uoniks up dramatically. Under FEC, academics who might otherwise have remained within their ivory towers won't stand a chance of funding, but that won't stop them thinking and (most likely) won't stop them researching.

My suggestion is that investigation into research assessment exercises needs to work in both directions: establishing barter arrangements with universities, but also as a strategy to facilitate 'brain drain' from traditional academic institutions into self-institutions.

see also Open Colleges Network: http://www.nocn.org.uk/info/ESF/Content.html in London: http://www.locn.org.uk/