Academic Review Board
Tell us where we are wrong
We have translated the Pali commentaries into English for the first time as a complete body, and we are giving the result away. Before any volume is fixed we want scholars who read the language to go through it and mark what is mistaken, doubtful, or merely clumsy.
What you would be joining
- Paragraphs awaiting review
- 118,640
- Reviewed so far
- 0
- Approvals needed each
- 2
The finished reference will be free to read, search and cite, for anyone, with no paywall and no login. You would be improving something that is being given to the world, not to us.
What we are asking
Not a report. Not a verdict on the project. We are asking you to read paragraphs in your own area and leave a note wherever a rendering does not hold — a wrong sense of a term, a compound resolved the wrong way, a missed reference, a sentence that no longer says what the Pali says.
The Pali sits beside every paragraph with the printed page references, so nothing has to be looked up elsewhere. You may review one page or one volume. There is no quota and no deadline — a single well-aimed correction is worth having.
Your name stays on your work
Every comment is published under the name and affiliation of the scholar who wrote it, and every revision we make in response is dated and kept alongside it. Where a reviewer's reading is adopted, the note records it. Nothing is absorbed silently into the text.
Who can join
The Academic Review Board is limited to scholars holding a current teaching or research post at a university or college, who can read Pali commentarial prose in the original.
Every member is verified before admission — by a document naming the post, and by a record we can check independently.
A publication record is not required. Many fine readers of Pali teach without publishing, and we are asking you to read, not to cite.
An institutional email address is not required either. See below.
Review by the paragraph, not by the volume
A journal gives one article to two referees. Nobody can do that with a hundred and eighteen thousand paragraphs, so we have moved the unit of review down instead of watering it down.
Each paragraph needs two approvals from Board members at two different institutions before it counts as reviewed. Each objection needs two endorsements before it obliges us to act. Each proposed footnote needs two confirmations before it may be printed.
Approval is recorded against the exact revision of the text you read. The moment that text is amended, the approvals lapse and the paragraph goes back into review. Nothing stays approved by inertia.
The practical consequence for you is that twenty minutes is a useful contribution. You are not being asked to take on a volume.
What we will print
“A paragraph is marked reviewed when two members of the Academic Review Board, at different institutions, have each recorded their approval of that exact revision of the text. Approval lapses whenever the text is amended.”
When every paragraph in a volume is approved, the Board is notified and the volume stands open to objection for thirty days before it closes. Every volume also states how many paragraphs never reached two approvals — we publish the shortfall as readily as the achievement.
How it works
- ApplySix fields and one document proving your post.
- We verify your postAn institutional email address confirms itself. Otherwise we check your document against a public record of your institution, or write to it. Usually within a week, sometimes two.
- You are admitted to the BoardWe email you a link to set your own password. Your institutional address is your username. Your name goes on the published Board list, and you can add a photograph to your profile.
- Read where you chooseNothing is assigned. You see the shelf — every volume by its cover — and open whichever you want.
- Comment on the paragraphMark what is wrong and say why. A proposed alternative helps but is not required.
- We answer in the openEvery comment gets a reply: adopted, partly adopted, or contested with reasons. The exchange stays visible.
What you get for it
Your name appears in every volume of the finished set, digital and printed alike, as a member of the Academic Review Board of this project — whether you reviewed one paragraph or one thousand. One list, the same in every volume. The work is one work.
Which Board member approved which paragraph is recorded permanently and published online, so the claim behind any single sentence can always be traced. That record belongs in the archive, not in the front matter of a printed book.
Names are given with institution and country as they stood at the time of review. Front matter says so plainly, so a later move never makes an earlier volume wrong.
How a name will appear
Academic Review Board
Prof. A B, University of Hamburg (Germany)
Prof. C D, University of Peradeniya (Sri Lanka)
Prof. E F, Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya (Thailand)
Printed identically in every volume of the set.
Affiliations are recorded as at the date of review.
Apply to the Board
Six fields. We ask only what is needed to verify that you hold the post, and nothing else. Your photograph, your ORCID if you have one, and which volumes you want to read are all settled later, from inside.
If your email is not institutional
Apply anyway. Emeritus scholars, monastic teachers, museum and library researchers, and academics at institutions that issue no email at all are all admitted on the same terms as everyone else.
What we require is a current post and evidence we can check, not a particular domain name. Judging a scholar by their email provider would exclude, first of all, the monastic teachers of South and Southeast Asia — who are among the best readers of this literature alive.
These applications take a little longer, and go through the same standard.
What happens to your document
It is read by one person to confirm your post, then deleted. It is never published, never shown to other reviewers, and never used for anything else. Only your name, institution and country are made public.
Questions first?
Write to research@dhammacakka.in and ask anything before you commit to a thing.