Brace for impact: making the most of your research

Please explain why you seem to believe that a national protest against the metric of impact will have no effect. If every UK academic would sign a letter saying that this is childish, mendacious, and ludicrous, at least the government would have heard the truth. And the UK's academic collaborators would be exposed.

Impactless. Let us not forget that impact is an effect of collision. In this case, it may be the a collision between the moronic wish to control the progress of human knowledge by deciding who will get funding for experiments and who will be sidelined from the system and the university that supports creativity, academic standards, human curiosity, the study of the past and present and the imagination of the future. At the very least, it diverts the attention of those who are in position to contribute to the sciences and to the arts (the impact game destroys the concentration) from the significant work in their respective areas and scatters it to the behaviours that mostly please the game-players and other bureaucrats. The prostitution of science is now formalised and taught. But if you do not like the term, then I come back to the author's reassurance that he will have cured the common cold in 3 years (my personal experience is that it lasted less! :) - When Queen Mary started destroying those academics who hadn't attracted certain level of public or private investment to their field of enquiry, I tried to explain the problem to the bureaucrat who seemed to think the College was being rational in the same way. Was it obvious why solving gaps in knowledge by command would fail? Society cannot replace the value of nurturing good citizens and academics working for the public good. The UK will pay dearly that it has allowed the Universities to be run by detached managers who slaughter those involved in higher education and scientific research. And we scientists or artists or educators are not there for managers to make profit. Hopefully we will react more rationally and in an organized manner before it is too late.