Recommended Reading: Is Queen Mary University of London trying to commit scientific suicide?

[Martin Fenner]

Dear altmetrics group,

if you haven't seen David Colquhoun's blog post (http://www.dcscience.net/?p=5388), I highly recommend that you read it. He writes about the strategy the Queen Mary University of London is using for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) accessment of their faculty. The post touches on three important aspects:

• the shortcomings of the Journal Impact Factor to access the impact of individual articles
  
• the dangers of relying on automatically generated numbers to make hiring and funding decisions, e.g. http://www.dcscience.net/?p=5388#comment-11362
• the power of the social web: the blog posts has seen 9000 pageviews and numerous tweets, storify is at http://storify.com/david_colquhoun/queen-mary-university-of-london

Best,

Martin

[Ian Mulvany]

It would go a long way to address these kinds of issues if funders, and especially those involved in the REF, were willing to look at broader signals of contribution. That's why things like the recent call for an update on the bio-sketch for the NIH are so important.

Another level is to find ways to get good information into the hands of academics to help them in their arguments with crazy administrators.

- Ian

[Mike Taylor]

I'm glad to see some defence of authoring practices in HEP in the comments thread. I don't know whether I'm more surprised whether DC or Queen Mary's appear to be ignorant of discipline-specific authoring practice. It's a shame someone hasn't commented re. contributorship work. I sometimes feel conspicuously "Elsevier" when I comment on threads

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