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Interesting website, Simon. The whole 'academia industry' reminds me of Chapter XIV of the Little Prince, by Antoine de St Exupery. This is the scenario where the Little Prince lands on a planet where the inhabitant has just one job, to light a street lamp at dusk and extinguish it at dawn. Which used to be a great job as he could rest all day and sleep all night. Only now the rotation of his planet has gradually speeded up so a 'day' lasts just one minute. And on our lamplighter goes, obeying the REF, sorry I mean orders, frenetically lighting and extinguishing his lamp once a minute. When I was doing my PhD at Leeds around 2000 there were happy leisurely times when all you had to do was spend time in the back of the library looking up old journal issues, you never knew what interesting stuff you'd stumble across - you could do that then because the Internet was in its infancy and everything was hard copy, the ultimate 'open access'. However the writing was on the wall (OK shelf) even then because for long-running journals there was a clear trend of increasing size year on year. A journal that produced 3 inch-thick issues a year in the 1950s would have 4 by the 1960s, by the 80s you had 4x 1 1/2 inch thick issues, then around the 1990s ther annual size increased exponentially to 9, 10, 12 inches of shelf space. Maybe some link to the first REF, the RAE of 1998 here? Pressure to publish or perish? Planet Academia's rotation was seriously speeding up. Of course that made the whole library space thing unsustainable, so on-line was the only way to go - great for journals that wish to charge, as at the same time university libraries were getting harder to enter without some card, SCONUL or whatever. Information was being produced at a faster rate and simultaneously becoming harder to access for many. The wonderful irony being that to keep up with the accelerating rotation you also had to chase this retreating information ever harder and faster. Now we are used to a REF every 6 years or so, and to the zero-sum game of grant chasing, where one person's success must automatically mean many wasted hours for scores of others, and to TEFs and meetings and numerous other metrics too. Just as well our lamplighter seemed able to cope with 59 second bursts of sleep between lamp lightings and extinguishings. I note that the Little Prince hurriedly left this planet for the next one along.........which happened to be one where a geographer, a (non) explorer lived who did no travelling but 'explored' solely from his desk. I don't think he even left his desk for lunchbreak, and there was no indication that his institution even subscribed to a decent range of online journals. Dr Hillary J. Shaw Director and Senior Research Consultant Shaw Food Solutions Newport Shropshire TF10 8QE www.fooddeserts.org -----Original Message----- From: Simon P J Batterbury <[log in to unmask]> To: CRIT-GEOG-FORUM <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Sat, 5 Mar 2016 11:08 Subject: Re: ACME and Impact Factor Exactly, that is what I said. And see “what to do?” herehttps://simonbatterbury.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/158/ From: Candice Pamela Boyd Sent: Saturday, 5 March 2016 9:44 PM To: Simon P J Batterbury; [log in to unmask] Subject: RE: ACME and Impact Factor The profession doesn't 'get there' without dissent. A drawback position which argues that up-and-coming scholars need to think about their careers only endorses the prevailing system. What we need is senior people like yourself to recognise the inherent value of a person's scholarship, perhaps not through the author's self-aggrandisement but through your own familiarity with the content. Considered judgement is everything.