The academic and administrative activity supporting these ventures is undertaken by our editors and committee, who are full-time university teachers of distinction, for no financial reward and in addition to their own regular teaching and research commitments. As currently conducted the RAE is having a detrimental effect on the publication of scholarship in learned journals and thereby damaging the infrastructure of precisely the manifestations of quality it is supposed to be assessing. Because of the perception that only the four nominated publications of an individual scholar effectively count towards that scholar's rating and that reference to his editorial activity makes no difference, a university institution on whose behalf we publish one of our journals, faced with financial pressures, has decided to withdraw editorial and secretarial support for the publication, thereby placing its future existence in jeopardy. All our journals report that it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit editors of the highest class. The same applies to larger-scale critical bibliographical reports such as those for The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies .
Good bibliography is, however, the foundation of any good piece of research.
We do not claim any inherent merit in editorial and bibliographical work per se, merely that they are a fundamental contribution to research of which the merits can in any instance be assessed as with any other published work. From time to time our own editors have served as RAE assessors and found that the value accorded to editorial and bibliographical work varies depending on the views of the panel chairman for the time being. We find it frankly unacceptable that different criteria should be applied to cognate modern languages where this matter is concerned. Even though the thrust of funding for the humanities now seems to indicate greater support for collaborative research, the competitive nature of the RAE inhibits scholars from working in teams which include colleagues from other universities. For the scholar, those in other institutions who pursue similar research interests are his partners in a high vocation.