Sphinx

My email inbox this morning contained one of the oddest invitations I’ve received in a long time – odd, to the degree that I’ve just spent ten minutes trying to check whether it’s actually an elaborate bit of phishing, or a practical joke on the part of whoever suggested my name. The message offers the opportunity to become a Detailed Assessor for the Australian Research Council – to write extensive peer review reports on, say, 5-20 applications per year, term unspecified. This is of the order of being asked to pay £20 to secure my fabulous First Prize of unscheduled pancreas removal.

Invitations to review stuff – research applications, articles, book proposals, tenure and promotion cases etc. – become ever more common once you reach a certain level of seniority and pompousness. Occasionally (mostly, foreign research councils and publishers) they are remunerated; otherwise, one takes such things on, within the constraints of time and energy, as part of a fuzzy sense of professional obligation and doing one’s share of the general effort to keep the discipline on the road. The obvious point is that all of this is on a one-off basis, not an ongoing commitment. The exceptions are one’s own national or supra-national research bodies – AHRC, ERC (at least for the moment…) – where the professional obligation feels greater, not least because one is likely to benefit from the efforts of other peer reviewers.

Well, I’m not Australian, and the chances of my ever applying for Australian research funds seems vanishingly remote, so what gives? I can see the logic from their side: much easier and cheaper if you can recruit a limited number of people who can be given lots of reviews without further negotiation than if you have to recruit new reviewers for every application. But why would anyone sign up to this, absent a sense of patriotic duty? Why would they even imagine that someone would? Is the lure of ticking the ‘international research recognition’ box on the cv really so great?

If that is indeed the case, I have a much better idea. I am delighted to announce the foundation of the ERP (Eurasian Research Partnership) and PRC (Pacific Research Council) – snazzy websites to follow – and for £20 I will send you something to peer review, rigorously, via a simple online tick-box form. Bingo! Achievement unlocked, cv enhanced! We will also be accepting application – 80% fEC – for those of you whose progression and promotion criteria demand the submission of £Xk-worth of research funding attempts, without needing them actually to be awarded – but on the understanding that the success rate is very, very low, which just goes to show how rigorous the peer review process is…

Update: I am rather disappointed to learn that at least one other colleague has received the same Exclusive One Time Only Offer For You Personally, Distinguished Academic! email. I thought I was special…