Why I think research access, impact and assessment are linked

Abstract

The RAE can help hasten the freeing of access to this literature by mandating that all UK universities self-archive all their annual refereed research in their own eprint archives. The harvesters (e.g., http://citebase.eprints.org ) will provide newer and richer measures of "impact" with the help of citation-linking services for open archives (http://opcit.eprints.org is an international collaboration between Southampton, Cornell and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, jointly supported by the NSF in the US and JISC in the UK). Not only the citation impact but the "hit" impact, for both the papers and the authors at UK universities and abroad, will be not only accessible but assessable continuously online by anyone who is interested, any time, instead of just in a quadrennial RAE exercise.