"Stand up for Research" petition update

Here's an email I received this morning - sign the petition if you have not yet done so! (I posted earlier about this topic here and here; and this page is a collection of links in support of the campaign, in addition to links that make the general case for curiosity-driven research.)

Dear colleague,

I wanted to update you on the progress of the “Stand up for Research” campaign.

More than 12,500 academics have now signed, making this the biggest ever such petition UCU has run. The signatories represent all disciplines, applied as well as pure research and come from every kind of university, defying the way in which the proposals trade research communities off against one another.

You can also read more about the campaign in the forthcoming edition of UC magazine, in which Professor Philip Moriarty from Nottingham University argues that “The imposition of impact criteria in peer review and in the REF is nothing less than an assault on core academic principles and the ethos of university research. It will also, perhaps counter-intuitively, be immensely damaging to the long-term socio-economic impact of academia.”

We now have only THREE WEEKS left to make this statement impossible to ignore.

Please help us do this by forwarding the link to the page to someone you know and asking them to sign it: http://www.ucu.org.uk/standupforresearch

Yours sincerely

Jonathan White