Page 286 - Becoming Metric Wise

278 Becoming Metric-Wise

publications in the social sciences and humanities to contribute to the sys-
tem of output financing existing in Flanders for further details, see
Debackere & Gla ¨nzel, 2004; Spruyt & Engels, 2013. In this way this
financing scheme increased its value as an incentive for performing and
communicating quality research, including that part that focuses on local
aspects. As such we may say that the introduction of the VABB-SHW
responded—avant la lettre to two points included in the Leiden Manifesto:
(3) Protect excellence in locally relevant research and (6) Account for variation by
field in publication and citation practices. The first version of the VABB-SHW
was officially published on December 22, 2010. Since then it is updated
on a yearly basis.
Next we describe how this database is constructed and which charac-
teristics of the local, Flemish, research in the social sciences and humani-
ties can be derived from it. In accordance with the regulations stipulated
in the decree mentioned above, outputs eligible for inclusion must meet
the following basic criteria:
1. to be publicly accessible, be it not necessarily free of charge.
2. to be unambiguously identifiable by an ISBN or ISSN.
3. to make a contribution to the development of new insights or to
applications resulting from these insights.
4. to have been subjected—prior to publication—to a peer review pro-
cess by independent scholars who are experts in the field to which the
publication belongs. Peer review should be done by an editorial
board, a permanent reading committee, external referees or a combi-
nation of these. Peer review should not be organized by the author.
The last stipulation means that, for instance journal editors may not
organize peer review for their own submissions to the journal. This point
was already mentioned in Subsection 3.1.4 when discussing the deontol-
ogy of editors.
The following five publication types are eligible for inclusion in the
VABB-SHW: journal articles (including reviews), monographs, edited
books, book chapters and proceedings papers. The responsibility of decid-
ing which publication channels meet the criteria mentioned above rests
with an authoritative panel consisting of 18 members from all Flemish
universities, covering all disciplines within the social sciences and humani-
ties. An important task of this panel is to decide which publications and
publication channels were peer-reviewed. As mentioned above, this data-
base is used to decide which publications contribute to the Flemish allo-
cation model. Other research-related parameters in the allocation model