There is so much infuriating nonsense in the world of academic admin.

One bit of nonsense is grant admin.

Today, I filled out an online form for a major grant application.

My task: list 6 papers and 2 grants that I’ve been involved in.

It took three days, and involved a long multi-way email thread, screenshots with arrows drawn on them, and utter despair disguised with jokey banter. Everything went wrong when we were all logged in at the same time, and the best solution was for each of us to log in, edit, and log out again as quickly as possible.

This is normal. Every single grant application process is terrible. The rule seems to be that the larger the funder, the more terrible the software. Today we were applying to a national institute with an annual spend of well over £1 billion. An organisation that big must have unimaginably bad software. Those are the rules.

Another kind of admin that makes academics despair is the journal admin…

Whenever a paper is accepted for publication, each author has to do two very important and perfectly reasonable things: describe any potential conflicts of interest they may have; and sign some terms of agreement.

The state-of-the-art way of doing this is by spraying email attachments everywhere, one per author, as a PDF or a Word document.

To take a random example, here’s the blank terms of agreement for a paper I was involved in last year.

Author statement form for Elsevier eClinicalMedicine, showing a lot of blank boxes that need filling out

Imagine being me, having to remember out how to open a PDF in a way that allows me to edit it, and “sign” it. (And come to think of it, what does “sign” even mean? Does it just need a picture of signature? Does it need to be digitally, cryptographically signed? Can I just type my name? Nobody knows.)

Now imagine being Ya-Ting, the lead author, who had to get 14 other authors to “sign” this, by emailing and then chasing every one of them.

Authors have slowly evolved a tacit agreement that no-one is going to bother getting all the authors to sign one document, so now imagine being someone at the journal and receiving 15 copies of this file as an attachment, and doing some other kind of hellish admin with them.

Then there’s disclosures, in the malevolent form of the omnipresent ICMJE form. (I don’t know why I hate it so much, but I really do.) This is a Word document which doesn’t even have the dignity of a box for your “signature”. The process of “signing” it is literally to press the letter X in one place in the Word document. And sending it back as an attachment.

This is a process used by every medical journal in the world (as far as I know). Exactly the same Word document, with a couple of Xs in it (maybe some conflicts of interest, if you’re lucky), repeated once for every author.

None of these attachments ever see the light of day again, as far as I can tell. Maybe there’s a whole department at the publisher allocated to waste some more time by, I don’t know, transcribing it to copperplate and turning it into jigsaw puzzles? (Incidentally, authors are already expected to write conflicts of interest in the actual paper where people can actually read them in any case.)

I feel so sad about all that wasted time for something which could so easily be designed with users in mind. So very sad, I’ve started writing some software in a kind of angry protest. The entire thing is such a harmful, time-wasting charade, it’s driven me to spite-based-programming: I’ve decided to invest an irrational amount of effort into this, as a kind of performance art scream into the void.

With that, I present Fending-off Academic Form Fuss (FAFF): a very rough, first run at automating filling out all these immensely irritating forms with a Python script.

I doubt many other people will actually use it; right now it’s very limited, in any case. But I’ve already used it twice and it has given me a small thrill of righteousness each time. The user experience is simply:

  1. Edit a file that lists your name, conflicts of interest, etc
  2. Run a command

In my dreams, this software will evolve to become a repository of every conflict of interest of every academic. It’ll save everyone’s time, and make for better science, all in one go.

I secretly hope the journals never sort out a better system, so that this dream software can maliciously comply with journal admin by spraying attachments at journals on behalf of a host of joyful academics, finally liberated to spend time on things like writing angry blog posts about journal admin.

In reality, it will probably remain a small, sad collection of scripts I wrote in an angry moment which I never use again, but I don’t really mind.