Professor Colquhoun’s Guardian article on our age of “endarkenment” is perhaps a bit exaggerated, but it’s basically right. Educational and research institutions are being turned into corporate bottom-line-feeders and democracy itself is morphing into opinocracy and hypocracy (shaped by hearsay and well-funded media manipulators). Promoting “metrics” in research risks feeding into this, and that is troubling. Metrics are, of course, fallible, misinterpretable, and manipulable. For me, they are not an end in themselves, but a possible means of making research freely accessible to all. Right now the media are dominated by trash and quackery. Injecting all of real research into that open database might — just might — mitigate that a bit. Openness might even help constrain metrics (monitoring, exposing and shaming abuses). I doubt it can make things worse. (Trouble is that although openness may be asymptotically self-corrective in the long run, technology, including the media, are beginning to make it possible to do such monstrous acute mischief in the short run that the long run might come too late. Let’s hope this is merely a hysterical hypothetical…)
Stevan Harnad