In today’s Higher Education supplement there are two articles, here and here, dealing with the replacement to the now defunct RQF process. The replacement is called Excellence in Research for Australia, and will be jointly crafted by the Australian Research Council and the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.  These also relate to the media release that was put out yesterday.

It is good to see some movement again on this issue and will be interesting to watch the process development. Apparently the first issues paper will be released soon after the first meeting of the ARC advisory council, to be held on March 5.

One interesting omission, at least to me, is that there was no mention of the open access requirements that the RQF had. This provision was most interesting to me, and to many librarians, as it was a way of boosting content in open access repositories. It was also a major headache in that we needed to maintain a so called “dark repository” for those things we couldn’t make publicly available due to copyright concerns.

I would hope that an open access provision was part of the new ERA because making research outputs available to a wider section of the community has to be good for research, and the quality of research overall.

The other major issue is the use of metrics. There are really two main issues with metrics that came up as part of the RQF. The first is what metrics can be used for discipline areas that don’t have metrics already established. The other is the source of the metrics data.

There is  also international debate currently under way about the applicability of citation analysis as a research metric. The letter is available here, with a large amount of information available at the Nautilus website.

Interesting times will be ahead this year for librarians and those, like me, working in the research services area.