Hide table of contents

TLDR

The Unjournal is inviting qualified candidates for a paid project, with two opportunities: Contracted Research (CR) and Independent Projects (IP). CR is a unique chance to contribute to the evaluation of key research themes in economics, policy, and social science, with fair compensation for your time. IP, a parallel opportunity, offers mentoring, feedback, and potential rewards for strong work. If you're interested in applying for either CR or IP, or if you have research you'd like us to assess, please fill out our survey form. For more details, check out our GitBook page.
 

Project Summary

The Unjournal seeks qualified candidates for a paid project: "Impactful Research Scoping for Evaluation Management" (see further details in the linked GitBook page). There are two opportunities: “Contracted Research” (CR) and “Independent Projects” (IP).

 

At The Unjournal, we coordinate and finance the public evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically presented research projects. We are working independently of traditional academic journals to build an open platform and a sustainable system for feedback, ratings, and assessment. The Unjournal aims to make rigorous research more impactful, and impactful research more rigorous.
 

Contracted Research (CR)

We are offering an opportunity to contribute to the identification and in-depth evaluation of impactful research themes in economics, policy, and social science. We’re looking for researchers and research-users who can commit a (once-off) 15-20 hours, in exchange for fair compensation for your time, within the next month or so. 
 

The project includes:

  • Characterizing a narrow research area and its relevance to global priorities
  • Identifying and contextualizing high-value research for Unjournal evaluation 
  • Focusing on a small set of papers in this narrow area, providing a detailed review, and identifying potential evaluators and key areas for evaluation 
  • Potentially: corresponding with authors and evaluators


We are likely to follow up on your evaluation suggestions. We also may incorporate your writing into our web page and public posts; you can choose whether you want to be publicly acknowledged or remain anonymous.


We will compensate you for your time at a rate reflecting your experience and skills (likely $25–$65/hour). This work also has the potential to serve as a “work sample” for future roles at The Unjournal, as it is highly representative of what our  “field specialists” and “evaluation managers” are commissioned to do.

 

Independent Projects (IP)

We also invite applications for Independent Projects, a parallel opportunity designed for those eager to engage but not interested in working under a contract, or not quite meeting the criteria for the Contracted Research role. If you are accepted to do an IP, we will offer some mentoring and feedback. We will also offer prize rewards/bounties for particularly strong IP work (we will also consider working with professors and academic supervisors on these IP projects, as part of university assignments and dissertations).

You can apply to the FS and IP positions together (fill out our survey form); we will automatically consider you for each.   

 

Get Involved

Interested? Fill out our survey form to express your interest in either of the above opportunities. We look forward to your contributions to impactful research! 🌍🔬

Comments


No comments on this post yet.
Be the first to respond.
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
[Cross-posted from my Substack here] If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right? The answer is all of them and none of them. This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say: * Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement. * Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick. * Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement. * Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964. * Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly. * And so on… To paint this picture, we can see this in action below: Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things: 1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing 2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
 ·  · 2m read
 · 
I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons. 1. Scalability 2. Capital counterfactuals 3. Standards 4. Learning potential 5. Earning to give potential These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1] Scalability There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations. Capital Counterfactuals I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue. Standards Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want. Learning Potential Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
 ·  · 31m read
 · 
James Özden and Sam Glover at Social Change Lab wrote a literature review on protest outcomes[1] as part of a broader investigation[2] on protest effectiveness. The report covers multiple lines of evidence and addresses many relevant questions, but does not say much about the methodological quality of the research. So that's what I'm going to do today. I reviewed the evidence on protest outcomes, focusing only on the highest-quality research, to answer two questions: 1. Do protests work? 2. Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence? Here's what I found: Do protests work? Highly likely (credence: 90%) in certain contexts, although it's unclear how well the results generalize. [More] Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence? Yes—the report's core claims are well-supported, although it overstates the strength of some of the evidence. [More] Cross-posted from my website. Introduction This article serves two purposes: First, it analyzes the evidence on protest outcomes. Second, it critically reviews the Social Change Lab literature review. Social Change Lab is not the only group that has reviewed protest effectiveness. I was able to find four literature reviews: 1. Animal Charity Evaluators (2018), Protest Intervention Report. 2. Orazani et al. (2021), Social movement strategy (nonviolent vs. violent) and the garnering of third-party support: A meta-analysis. 3. Social Change Lab – Ozden & Glover (2022), Literature Review: Protest Outcomes. 4. Shuman et al. (2024), When Are Social Protests Effective? The Animal Charity Evaluators review did not include many studies, and did not cite any natural experiments (only one had been published as of 2018). Orazani et al. (2021)[3] is a nice meta-analysis—it finds that when you show people news articles about nonviolent protests, they are more likely to express support for the protesters' cause. But what people say in a lab setting mig