Dear All,

Following Beate Müller's circular about ERIH, I was wondering to what 
extent germanists or modern linguists have actually been involved in the 
controversy surrounding the ERIH list of publications. Checking back, I 
see that there was a meeting of subject associations at the AHRC on 27 
February, at which no modern language association appears to have been 
represented. I am not sure, either, whether the list to which Beate 
gives a link is the original list from 2007 or the revised one (which 
was expected to be 'forthcoming' in July). One of the problems is that 
'modern languages' is not identified as a 'subject' by the ESF, but 
split between various 'fields'.

A number of Arts & Humanities subject associations (and, especially, 
journal editors) have been extermely alarmed at the arbitrary nature of 
this list and the potential danger in the uses to which it will 
inevitably be put. Robin Osborne, Professor of Ancient History in 
Cambridge, set up a group earlier this year called AHRRG ('Arts & 
Humanities Rapid Response Group') to coordinate resistance and lean on 
AHRC (although even if resistance is ultimately useless, the worst 
excesses might be alleviated). This has since morphed into A-HUG ('Arts 
& Humanities Users Group') whose views on the exercise are given in the 
draft letter to Prof. Esler at AHRC appended below my signature (the 
mailbase does not permit attachments).

Given this, I wonder whether completing the feedback form might give a 
credibility to the exercise which many colleagues in Arts & Humanities 
subjects would deny it, and that some kind of coordinated response (by 
CUTG?) with colleagues in other subject areas might be a preferable 
alternative.

Best wishes

Martin

-- 
Professor Martin Durrell
German Studies, SLLC
University of Manchester
MANCHESTER, M13 9PL

Draft letter from A-HUG to AHRC:

The Arts and Humanities community is increasingly concerned about the 
European Research Index in the Humanities. At the meeting which you 
kindly set up in February a very wide range of Arts and Humanities 
subject associations and learned societies were able to hear an 
explanation of the purposes which the ERIH is supposed to serve and to 
express their grave disquiet at the incoherent conception and mistaken 
assumptions that lie behind the ERIH and about the way in which the ERIH 
lists had been constructed. It is now six months later, and although 
Rudiger Klein of the ESF promised to take back these concerns to the 
board responsible for the ERIH, we have received no communication from 
him and there has been no public response to our calls for ERIH to be 
withdrawn until such time that it can be provided with a coherent 
rationale and competently executed.
Our concern is both with the failure of the ESF to show any sign of 
taking the criticisms seriously and with the failure of the AHRC to play 
an appropriate role in representing the UK Arts and Humanities Community 
to the ESF. We wish to make three points.

1. Repeatedly denying that the ERIH rankings claim to correspond to 
differences in quality of research does not make that true. You have 
consistently, and most recently in your response to enquiries from the 
British Philosophical Association, repeated the ESF claims that ESF 
rankings are not qualitative. The Arts and Humanities Community have 
repeatedly drawn to your attention that when the ESF describes ‘A-rated’ 
journals as ‘High ranking, international level publication’ and 
‘B-rated’ journals as ‘Standard, international level publication’ no 
ordinary reader can understand the distinction between 'high-ranking' 
and 'standard' as other than qualitative.

2. Journal editors themselves can see only harm to their interests in 
these rankings. There is a wide variation in the impact and quality of 
articles even in the very best journals. A good proportion of work 
rejected by the most highly rated journals and appearing in less highly 
rated ones is as good or better than work published in the most highly 
rated ones. Anything which suggests that the continuum of journal 
publication divides into distinct categories and gives those categories 
labels that can only be interpreted as a hierarchy is bound to coerce 
authors into aiming their submissions more exclusively at the category 
at the top of the hierarchy. But for editors of A-rated journal to be 
inundated with contributions which are an imperfect fit for the journals 
aims makes their task very much more difficult. The more editors are 
overwhelmed with contributions, the more difficult it becomes for them 
to set up appropriate peer review and the more likely it is that the 
quality of publication becomes more uneven. Nor is it in the interests 
of the research community that the desire to have publications in 
A-rated journals should lead to research being directed ever more 
exclusively at the sorts of topics which A-rated journals favour. It has 
been noted that in the social sciences, where some fields have 
themselves encouraged the idea that there is a hierarchy of journals in 
a field, the most influential papers turn out not to be published in the 
journals at the top of that hierarchy.
As you may be aware, the editors of journals in the History of Science 
have grouped together to request that the ESF withdraw their journals 
from the ERIH (we reproduce their joint editorial as Appendix A below). 
The Arts and Humanities community believes that if the ESF will not 
withdraw the ERIH, the only responsible action for the AHRC to take to 
ensure the continuing health of Arts and Humanities journals in the UK 
is to support and encourage such piecemeal withdrawals.

3. The aims of the ERIH, to give the Arts and Humanities an easily 
calculable measure by which it can indicate the impact of its research 
to governments, are very close to the aim of the UK's Research 
Assessment Exercise. The ESF aim is to give an indication of research 
impact at a national level, whereas the RAE aims to give an indication 
of research impact at the level of the individual university, but what 
they are concerned to measure is essentially the same. The discussions 
over successive RAEs and now over the REF have shown that both within 
and beyond the Arts and Humanities the academic community is convinced 
that any such assessment must be based on peer review not of journals in 
the abstract but of particular research outputs. The AHRC's own 
practices endorse this view by their dependence on research outputs. The 
Research Assessment Exercise panels have  shown that it is possible for 
peer review to command the respect and confidence of the subject 
communities. Peer review is what both appointment to academic posts and 
academic promotions, both in this country and in the U.S.A. exclusively 
rely upon. The AHRC has been pioneering the construction of peer review 
networks, and the Arts and Humanities community fully supports the 
principle lying behind this construction.
	
We call upon the AHRC, therefore, to take the following courses of action:
a) to advise all Arts and Humanities subject associations and learned 
societies that, while the ERIH descriptions of journal categories A and 
B continue to indicate that A journals are of a higher standard than B 
journals it cannot support the ERIH and that it is requesting of the ESF 
that no journal edited in the UK be listed in the ERIH rankings;
b) to undertake a campaign within the members of the ESF to demonstrate 
that the aims of the ERIH would be better met by constructing a system 
for robust peer review based on an extension of the peer-review network 
which the AHRC is itself establishing.
We will offer our full support to the AHRC in undertaking both these 
courses of action.