Why this exists.

Anyone looking for an academic position in Italy knows the routine well: every day, open the calls portal, the websites of single universities, department pages, mailing lists, group chats with colleagues. Check, filter, note down the deadlines. And hope you did not miss anything.

PostTheDoc exists to take that burden off researchers.

The problem

Calls exist and they are public. But there are many of them, they are scattered and they are short-lived.

• Many: hundreds of institutions (universities, research institutes, fine arts and music academies) publish every week calls for PhDs, research fellowships and contracts, researcher, technologist and professor positions.
• Scattered: each kind of position has its own section, each institution its own website, and there is no simple way to be notified only about what concerns you.
• Short-lived: often only a few weeks pass between publication and deadline. Noticing late means not having time to prepare the application.

So finding the right call too often depends on luck, word of mouth or the network of people around you. Those with an attentive group or a well-informed supervisor start ahead; those moving to a new city, field or country fall behind. It should not work this way.

The idea

Flip it around: instead of you looking for calls every day, the calls come to you.

You say once what you are looking for (position, field, location) and from then on, every morning, PostTheDoc reads the new calls published on bandi.mur.gov.it and writes to you only if there is one for you.

Why email

No app to install, no account to create, no feed to remember to open. Email is the tool that everyone working in academia checks every day anyway. One digest, only when needed: if nothing comes up for you, you get nothing.

Principles

• Free, forever. PostTheDoc is and will stay free for everyone: nobody should have to pay to learn that a public call exists.
• The bare minimum of data. Only your email and your preferences. Only anonymous, cookieless visit statistics (Umami), no profiling. When you unsubscribe, your data is really deleted.
• No password. Every email carries signed links to change your preferences or unsubscribe in one click.
• Open source. The code is public on GitHub: anyone can check what it does, report a problem or improve it.
• Bilingual. Pages and emails in Italian and English, because Italian academia is also made of people coming from abroad.

What it is not

PostTheDoc is not an official service of the Italian Ministry of University and Research and does not replace reading the call. The information comes from the Ministry portal and may be incomplete: some calls do not state a field (by default you get them anyway, so you do not miss them) and some multi-site institutions, such as CNR institutes, are not tied to a region (to get their calls, select them explicitly or do not filter by location). The call published by the institution is always the reference.

Who is behind it

PostTheDoc is an independent, open-source project, born to make looking for a place in academia a little less exhausting. If you find a mistake or a missing call, or have an idea to improve it, open an issue on GitHub.

Keeping it running has some costs: the domain, email delivery and development time. If PostTheDoc has been useful to you and you want to chip in, you can do so on GitHub Sponsors or Buy Me a Coffee: it is entirely optional, and the service stays free for everyone.