1. The ERA is beginning, not ending Presentation to Plenary Panel – Evaluating Academic Research: Challenges, Issues and Opportunities in New Research Assessment Frameworks Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) 2011 annual conference, Communication on the Edge: Shifting Boundaries and Identities University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, 6-8 July, 2011. Professor Terry Flew, Media and Communication, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

2. ERA Scepticism “Think of this as a sort of black box where information is dropped in and a number between one and five magically appears at the other end … And then for $35m (plus all sorts of invisible "treat people's time as a free good" costs) we learn the Group of Eight institutions are doing the best research. Mirabiledictu.” James Allan, “Expensive exercise in subjectivity”, The Australian, 3 February, 2011. Accessed 6 July, 2011 at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/expensive-exercise-in-subjectivity/story-e6frg6zo-1225998992045. Mirabiledictu translates from the Latin as “wonderful to relate”, or “amazing to say”.

3. The end of ERA journal rankings?

4. Principles of transparent regualtion/evaluation (From Lawrence Lessig, Code) Openness: the intentions behind the exercise are made clear at the outset; Transparency: information exists about the material that was used to reach conclusions; Accountability: it is clear who made decisions, and on what bases of expertise or specialist knowledge they were made; Avenues for appeal: those who disagree with decisions reached know on what bases they can appeal such decisions, and where to take such appeals.

5. Journalism, communication and modernity “In practice and study, both projects had many attributes that endeared them to the other. Both were born in and of a certain kind of modernity: journalism, richly implicated in the quest for truth, saw rationality, objectivity, impartiality, and reason as the modes of engagement, which its model of professionalism could offer those wanting to know more about the larger world, in much the same way that communication provided a set of reasoned and predictable operations by which the drums of free choice, consent, progress, science, democracy, and individualism could best stifle those of inequality, ignorance, and injustice ... Journalism, like other areas of practice-oriented scholarship ... could thus offer the field of communication a place in the real world, a reminder of why its scholar- ship mattered, with the media in particular seen as a useful vehicle for modernity’s dissemination.” Barbie Zelizer (2011) ‘Journalism in the service of communication’, Journal of Communication, 61(1), pp. 3-4.