The impact of impact - Research Information

"‘Impact’ is a word that is never neutral. Researchers today are required to reach audiences inside their academic discipline and within national boundaries at the same time as reaching beyond the walls of universities and sometimes even across national and linguistic borders. In addition, there are increasing demands for student satisfaction, particularly in an age of higher education commoditisation, while at the same time there is a need for quality of both content and academic and public engagement. All of these demands impact on the time we have to do these tasks and the funds required to do it. All these pressures mean that, although official mandates seem to be to open up and reach out, in very practical terms there can be great difficulty in achieving this idea. The precondition for becoming ‘social machines’ is ‘frictionless sharing’ but what we really have are too many obstacles. Cultural change in scholarly communication is often imposed rather than encouraged and this has led to a series of negative sentiments associated with the word ‘impact’. There is an increasing polarisation, in both discourse and practice, between visions of the future  and the pragmatic limitations still experienced by many. So far the voices of funders have been heard (or mis-heard), as have the voices of some key players of the academic publishing industry. However, not all researchers, and particularly surprisingly to me, not all PhD students and early career researchers, are fully invested in the debates. The old dictum of ‘publish or perish’ has turned academic publishing into an empty signifier, a landmark to reach in order to get a stamp on the passport. You could say that publishing has become the process where content goes to die. Researchers move on after publishing an output as there’s pressure to publish more and more, and many publishers consider the job done once the content (or often rather just the URL, or the abstract) is online ... "