Research funding in Wonderland...

The Research Promotion Foundation (RPF) in Wonderland has been criticised by many regarding its handling and actual promotion of research in Cyprus.  Criticism includes the fairness of using a purely quantitative system in the review process, the absence of calls (one call every couple of years !) and the low acceptance rate (sometimes around 5-10%) due to absence of substantial funding.

Today I will focus on some suggestions regarding one issue.... acceptance rates:

Reviewing articles

Recently I get a lot of requests from journals (some of which i never heard of) to review papers submitted to them.  One then starts to wonder:

a) Why should I review ?  The first answer that comes to mind is that you can later add this "achievement" to your CV and it will count towards your promotion.  Does it really count that much ? Do reviewers of promotion applications pay that much attention to this type of "achievements"?  My view is that they do count but not to the level that it is often assumed.  A reviewer of a promotion application will expect to see some involvement of the candidate in the shaping of the community around the field and as such will expect some involvement in reviewing papers, seating on panels and conference program committees.  But I am not sure a reviewer will count and weight the volume of these contributions.  Hopefully a reviewer of a promotion will pay more attention to other things (e.g. publications).

Welcome

Stories of an academic in wonderland... small, sometimes funny incidents of an academic trying to come to terms with the situation in wonderland. Wonderland can mean many things, it can be a wonderful place where everything happens in "strange" ways, or it can symbolise in a sarcastic way the wonders of a nation in transition attempting to mature and evolve.... the reader is left to judge.

My plan is to update this as regularly as possible, but I won't promise to update it daily or weekly, as such promises for blogs are never kept :-)