I am often asked to write letters of recommendation for students and colleagues. I take this responsibility seriously, and I work hard to write clear, careful, and informative letters documenting scholarly achievement and potential. I enjoy this part of the job. Unfortunately, the accelerating digital transformation of more domains of social and institutional life is quickly changing this activity. Nearly every institution is requiring applicants to submit applications through online systems. Each system is unique, given the competitive ecosystem of tech innovators and private consultants promising the latest and greatest interface for its own proprietary "Referee Management System." This creates a perverse dynamic, in which a growing proportion of all human effort devoted to peer review is spent not on the core activity of peer review -- but rather on navigating the learning curve of the RMS. This involves struggles to understand each unique interface; attempts to make sense of each institution's legal context as specified in its lengthy Terms of Use and End-User Licence Agreement (EULA); and realizing that anything you learn about how a system works today will be rendered irrelevant tomorrow when a new consultant is hired to re-write the code of yesterday's bleeding-edge creative-class innovator.
Vancouver, BC, November 2014