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A monument in Moscow to peer review.

Students at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow have unveiled what must be the first monument to peer reviewers.

The sculpture takes the form of a die displaying on its five visible sides the possible results of review — ‘Accept’, ‘Minor Changes’, ‘Major Changes’, ‘Revise and Resubmit’ and ‘Reject’.

The main academic sponsor, sociologist Igor Chirikov, spends part of his time at Berkeley.

It’s a better idea than a sculpture.  The block of concrete was just sitting there, and the challenge was to reuse it, which rather limited the artistic options. It’s a pity that the key words are all in English: a realistic reflection of the current state of scientific publication, but Russia has a great scientific tradition that could have been recalled at the same time. Do commenters have better suggestions for honouring the Unknown Peer Reviewer?  Disappointed authors might for instance go for a hangar full of vampire bats.

Author: James Wimberley

James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three. I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia. James Wimberley's occasional publications on the web

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