I had a similar feeling on receipt of a request to comment on a journal from a society I am a member of recently. It is the only journal that focuses on Australian aspects of my field of research. The rating is entirely irrelevant to the quality of the papers. However it now has a great impact on the way research funds are distributed. Makes little sense to me.

I think that this is an important article in that it highlights the silliness of attempting to have a league table of journals. My main worry is that that process is not just futile - that would be just another waste of public monies - but is ultra conservative. By that I mean that papers with views that differ from the current fashion on some issue or another will only get published in journals that are labelled as of lower quality, the implication being that the papers themselves are inferior. The risk is ossification which is unacceptable.
A couple of months ago there was an OLO article which talked of a breakdown in science because of what was seen as a quasi closed shop of the 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours variety' within the peer review system. That article was referring to science specifically whereas this article is over all disciplines. However both have the same implications of the shutting out, or at least devaluing, of divergent, more radical thought. The earlier article sees the problem as being that only an 'in' group can get papers published in the supposedly top class journals in science; this article sees a problem in the ranking of journals by a Top of the Pops vote. Taken together the two articles paint a poor picture for the advancement of knowledge and critical thinking and analysis.
Very worrying indeed.

"Whose perception should count?" you say.

What about the person whose perseption leads to the best outcome?

I think the problem is analogous to inflation.

Universities, institutes ... anyplace involved in basic (as opposed to applied) research, need lots of money do discover something which can never pay for itself. Basic research almost always leads to discovery. One can patent an invention, but not a discovery.

Applied research usually leads to invention. Much of it fails to recover its own costs. Business and industry support it because, on balance. the returns exceed the costs. And because one must stay abreast of competitors, who are also doing applied research.

Until recently, basic research never paid for even a fraction of its own costs. Governments recognised its importance, though, and supported it for both pride and national security reasons. In the 50s, 60s, the results were amazing. Science grew exponentially.
So did the cost of basic research. By the 80s, it was costly enough to bankrupt the Soviet Union. Governments never had the expertise to make informed decisions about how much to spend on what basic research. For that, they used to ask senior University researchers with tenure.

On the evidence, that system worked pretty well, but it didn’t last. I’m not sure how university bureaucracies managed the coup which put them in charge, but it’s fact. Tenure’s practically extinct. Since the 90s, decisions about what basic research should be funded is the province of institutional bureaucrats who, collectively, know absolutely nothing about science. Their preferred proxy for the judgement which tenured professors used to supply is ‘publication count’. I have no idea why.

By and large, governments know enough about economics to understand that, if they print too much money, they’ll be rich in the short term, but inflation will soon enough make it all worthless. University bureaucrats are even dumber than governments; they still think more publications will bring them more grants.

They’re wrong, of course. The value of publication counts is already debased. An ERA is too little, too late. Today, the best thing for your grant application is a tick from the Wilderness Society, or a good word from Tim Flannery. Sad, but that’s it.

DonkeyGod,

I would be happier with a system in which one could only patent an invention, not a discovery. I'm happy to take my chances as I possess the skills to differentiate an item of interest.

As it is, major corporate players whose boards do not possess such analytical skills may patent not only discoveries like a particular gene of interest or the genome of a newly isolated organism, but whole classes of unexamined things like the blanket patent on "junk DNA" the untranslated sequences that molecular biologists long understood to contain regulatory motifs. Robber barons were granted similar rights.

As for the topic:

The scuffling for more "prestigious" journals has burdened many editorial boards with a vast swamp of unsuitable papers. We were once able to submit as we thought fit, but the allocation of "research quanta" over the last twenty years has given consideration to the "journal rating", purely at the behest of university administrators themeselves scrambling to control greater budgets.

Not an improvement, further involutions will make more heat and noise without a doubt.

Rusty

Since science does not supply value judgements, and governmental funding of science requires them, governmental funding of science cannot ever be anything but
a) non-scientific, and
b) an exercise in arbitrary political favouritism.