Assessing research impact: AOASG submission | Australian Open Access Support Group

Measuring the impact of research has been on and off the government’s agenda for many years now. Originally part of the Research Quality Framework, impact was removed from the Excellence in Research for Australia when that was trialled in 2009 and experienced its first round in 2010. In response to increasing indication impact was becoming relevant again, the Australian Technology Network of universities and the Group of Eight universities conducted a trial into measuring impact through case studies in 2012. The final report from this study: “Excellence in innovation: Research impacting our nation’s future – assessing the benefits” was released in November 2012 ... The Department of Innovation in now planning to design and develop an assessment of impact with the plan to run a pilot exercise in 2014. To that end the Department released a Discussion Paper in July – 'Assessing the wider benefits arising from university-based research'  The paper is 'seeking the views of interested parties regarding a future assessment of the benefits arising from university-based research'.  

Now before research administrators throw their hands up at yet another assessment program, the paper did address concerns about adding to the long list of compliance universities already have to meet ... Given that one of the goals of AOASG is increasing the uptake of open access, we prepared a submission for the discussion paper with the general philosophy that open access should be recognised as a means for increasing impact and therefore some reward should be associated with making work accessible.  All submissions will be made available to the public on the Dept of Innovation website. In anticipation, the AOASG submission is copied below ..."