The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) team will publish the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) results on Dec 18, 2008 on behalf of four UK higher education funding bodies. The Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) has described its pivotal role in helping publishers simplify access to articles submitted for assessment by UK higher education institutions (HEIs). The challenge presented to the PLS during the planning stages of this year's RAE included facilitating the provision of online access to over 150,000 journal articles without authentication barriers or licence conditions.
After discussions with the PLS, the recommended solution to the time-consuming, largely paper-based processes of the last assessment carried out in 2001 was for participating institutions to submit just the Digital Object Identifier (DOIs) of selected journal articles to the RAE team. The RAE team would then create a database of DOIs and, using the CrossRef database, link through to the journal article on the publisher site. A specially created Athens account would take care of authentication and the whole process should save assessors and the RAE team a great deal of time and effort. PLS, which represents publishers' collective licensing interests, was then required to broker a deal to allow fee-waivers and direct access to publisher content, and to co-ordinate the project on behalf of around 2000 publishers.
The Research Assessment Exercise is conducted jointly by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW), and the Department for Employment and Learning, Northern Ireland (DEL). The primary purpose of the RAE 2008 is to produce quality profiles for each submission of research activity made by the institution. The higher education funding bodies intend to use the quality profiles to determine their grant for research to the institution which they fund with effect from 2009-10. More than £1.5 billion per year will be allocated for research using the results of the 2008 RAE. Any higher education institution in the UK that is eligible to receive research funding from one of these bodies is eligible to participate in the exercise.
