text:
What should I do if my advisor doesn't know my research field?
I have just started my PhD with the same advisor of my Master Degree. We are working in Cosmology, a new topic for my advisor who has worked for years in QFT. I owe him a lot and I learnt a lot of things from him, but now I am facing a really big problem: he is not an expert in Cosmology. He pushed me to work on ideas which I realized to be meaningless. Furthermore, I feel like we are working to publish, not to learn something. I suggested to work with a Professor of another university, a friend of my supervisor, who is a really famous master of the subject, but he didn't agree.
I don't know what to do. I really feel bad, because I don't want to waste my PhD but I don't want to argue with my advisor. What can I do?

To put it bluntly, your first job is to publish. Learning comes second. That is how the sea flows in the ocean of academia.

It is not possible to publish without learning. It is like a chain, your final goal is to have a PhD, which cannot happen without publishing good papers, which are in return the fruits of your learning.
As you are a PhD candidate, you do not need a supervisor who is an expert in the domain. You can have your own contacts with other researchers, with whom you may publish a joint work without having problems with your supervisor.

You need a different advisor...

An advisor who is an expert on research, but not on cosmology, would not be a problem if the advisor were leaving the OP to make their own collaboration network and decisions about direction. "pushed me to work on ideas..." and not agreeing to working with a subject expert are both bad signs.

To add to paul garrett's comment: I tried to write a thesis with an advisor whose interests and expertise turned out to be different than my interests (Initially neither of us appreciated this, but it slowly became clear). That advisor has been successful with other students, but in my case my interests wandered away from the context in which that advisor could act effectively. The solution then (and I think there was no other) was to change advisors. Fortunately in my case everyone involved worked to help me and handled the situation professionally and no egos were involved.

I would like to thank you for your advice. I will use it to take a decision.


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How much of a share should I have in a startup based on my PhD research?
I am about to conclude my Ph.D. work. The research has led to a possible commercial product which I always pushed. So now, after four years of work, we've filed four patents with three already granted. A year and a half ago, the PI moved to another position, so now I communicate my progess once a month).
I developed the scientific product along with software, electronic hardware, web apps, and so on, not to mention journal papers on the way. The technology is promising and we have businesses interested and willing to invest.
Along the way we got a part-time master's business student, who supports us when we have to write proposals and do interview calls and meeting possible business leads. I always join those meetings and often take decision on what should be the way and what is achievable.
Now we are on the verge of legally founding the company and possibly soon begin sales.
My dilemma is finding out what share of the company is fair for me.
The partners in the business would be me, the business student, and my PI. (I think the PI should get a fair share; after all, it was research done in her lab, however I have seen opinions saying this should be no more than 10 percent.)
Of course, on the way, there were master's student with whom I worked and taught them the lab work and tricks and all that I could to have them their work done in timely manner, also I offered them opportunity to be part of startup but they were not interested.
I don't want it to be a quarrel but also don't want to feel exploited.
If I leave there is no one on the team who understands how the technology works, or how we can produce with alternative methods (I might be overestimating, but this stuff I did for my PhD and mostly it would be another PhD who could do it. It is countless hours of labwork.) I am a co-inventor along with PI on all the patents filed/granted.
Please help me out in figuring what share of the company I should expect.

The advice about see a lawyer or attorney is priceless in this situation - verbal contracts between friends can be fine until it goes wrong...

What is fair is 100% minus whatever you agree in writing with the other parties.  As what they expect is outside of your direct control, that requires negotiation and at least one lawyer to draw up an agreement you all accept.  If there is a dispute the other parties need their own lawyers.  An experienced lawyer is a requirement, not an option.  But what you consider fair does not mean you will get that - don't lock yourself mentally into the mindset that you can decide what is fair and everyone else should be OK with it - that way lies trouble.

Many institutions have an office dedicated to helping members with the legalese of founding a spin-off company. You should check with them. They can also advise on IP issues. Many universities have IP rules to prevent such conflicts.

What location is this? Sweden has a teacher's exemption that says that universities do not own the IPR of the academics they employ, but in many other locales the university will ask for a share (apparently up to 20% or 30%). Note that "the professor" and "the university" are different entities.

Without stating the contributions made by the other student and the PI (not supervision is a contribution), this question is impossible to answer.  Note that it is possible that the university owns the IP from your PhD project.  Who paid the costs of the patent applications?

@DikranMarsupial student took course and i was tutor. we offered him membership and sought help in writing proposal. I did pitch and got state funding, since then its only me working full time, as student is studying and went abroad for 4 months, the businesses who want our product approached and i offered tech solution. now applying again for funding i came to know of his desires, it worries me as i believe giving less than 5 hours a week for last 18 months does not entitle him for equal share as mine when i put 60+ hr/week and developed the technology + pitch and business meetings.

What about your supervisors contribution?

@DikranMarsupial supervisor expects around 10-15% which i am ok with given her input for technology, Its rather more trouble about the business student, He expects that for writing business part of proposals, calling people for possible business  and arranging meetings entitles him for equal share. However i think its not fair. Not just for now but any member who joins later will put this criteria for demanding shares. What would you advice on this situation.

TL,DR: You deserve a large majority.  I consider 90% for you and 10% for your professor fair.
I finished my Ph.D. and co-founded a company based on dissertation work. I continue to work as a funded tech entrepreneur.  I offer the following insights:

From your situation, it sounds like no one else is remotely close to your level of contribution. If you leave, there is no business.
Equity should be determined based on real contribution to the enterprise.  You aren't being cruel or disrespectful by placing a value on what people bring to the table. At this point of the business, value equals cash or know-how. Do not award equity to someone who's really eager and ready to "work like a dog" (chances are they will fade in six months) without tying their effort to a vesting period -- they don't receive their equity until after a period of satisfactory work, quantified and agreed-to in writing.
As co-author of the patents, your professor is entitled to proceeds from the use of the intellectual property, but not equity. In this case, you are choosing to give equity in exchange for permission to use the patent.  Your business operating agreement should state that.
You need to check the university guidelines regarding use of the patent. Most likely, the patent is controlled by the university and you'll have to work out a licensing agreement.

When all is said and done, you need to have enough cushion to absorb dilution (if you bring on investors or high-level staff), yet retain control or a profitable equity position. I think a 90%-10% split between you and your professor is about right at this point. If you bring on the business student (they may be a nice person, but aren't providing a lot of value), I propose a 85%-10%-5% split with a vesting period for the student.  Consider awarding more equity to the student later if they work hard.
Good luck and remember: you have the know-how if people decide to make things difficult.  Walk away if needed.

If the university (co-)owns patents, it is difficult to walk away and start your own business. Also, I think the share depends on how much effort would be needed to replace you. If you spent years setting something up, but that today it would take only a few hours to read, understand and implement your published articles, then maybe you won't be able to defend 90%. Well, anyway I think it is hard to get an exact value without knowing the exact situation. An attorney might be worth consulting, even if it is expensive, given the impact early choices can have later.

That's not realistic in most places. The university will most likely ask for a share in the 20% range, and whether the prof. will be happy with 10% share depends largely on how large their contribution actually was.

The business student who i mentioned, in process of writing a proposal mentioned his and mine share as equal which i felt incorrect. I got a feeling that he has imagined his shares around 40% or so, this i don't believe is correct given i work full time for it, and he works as part of his business course + gets credit for work. As he initiates the business contacts i have feeling he puts his share at high value. The product is still not such that you can read a manual and make it in few hours. Prof is not the problem but instead the business student, what should i do.

@xLeitix Cute. In an institute I used to work at the number was closer to 40%.

@xLeitix Why would the university expect a share in business, instead of patent royalties? I would only consider this if the university offers funding, or an equivalent like rent-free lab/office access.

@DmitryGrigoryev the university takes only patent royalties, and are open to sell the patent to us ( if we secure investor we may buy it). However the problem still lies with giving share to business student. I would like advice on shares division between him and me. If i disagree then we will not submit proposal now and i will most likely look for another business partner this time probably a more stronger who can actually bring full time + fund and can develop business. at the moment i  invest time in these activites + he can not take decisions when technology comes into picture.

@Phillip I agree with Jesuisme on that you should avoid giving any considerable amount of equity to the business student. This will not be a pleasant conversation, especially if the student has expectations, but I don't see how he can force you into it. Rewarding him somehow for the work he has done for you would be nice though.

@DmitryGrigoryev This relieved me a lot, I would like to give fair distribution as much as possible. I wanted to know if i did all what i mentioned and the student did also all i mentioned was i right in assuming that my share and his share can't be same. I would discuss it now with him and let him know my opinion. I hope it goes smoothly.

@anderstood I agree walking away from the patents isn't an easy thing. My point is that Philip isn't automatically stuck licensing the IP from the university. If he's clever enough to figure something out the first time, there may be other ways to do it. He could also pursue IP "around" the patent controlled by the university. But that means extra time to creating a minimum viable product, so the license may ultimately cost less. I also agree that innovation has a shelf life so get moving Phillip! Finally, attorneys are very expensive and aren't needed to determine initial equity splits.

@xLeitix When we negotiated our license, the university wanted payments, not equity.

@Jesuisme Maybe it is not possible to find workaround as we tried to cover all holes and prevented any seeable workarounds. However its not bad thing as in my domain ( biomed ) strong patent is desired. The rule of university is such that as long as inventor is interested to form startup they are obliged to give 5 years of time to inventor to try. so i have automatic priority.
Could you advice on share split between me and business student as in discussion he refuses to take any less share than me! and all he did until now is write proposal with my inputs called potential business partners.

@Phillip Simple - no negotiation. He takes what you give him. He is free to go start his own company without your IP and know-how. First, examine if he's worth the effort. Apply the Shopping Center Test from Guy Kawasaki. If he doesn't pass the test, move on.  If he passes the test, have a meeting and calmly point out his level of contribution and time put in relative to you and your professor. You can hire someone to provide the same effort. Equity is Monopoly money in the beginning but extremely valuable later.

Anything less than giving yourself 100% comes with risks, risks you are probably completely unaware of and with huge complications. What if someone wants to buy the company but only the entire company, but the minority shareholders don't agree to the sale? What if one of the minority shareholders dies, gets divorced, gets sued, etc. and now you have to deal with a shareholder of substantial percentage you may or may not get along with? Are you sure you won't be sued for minority shareholder abuse if you make unpopular decisions?
If you value the success of the endeavor, do not give away shares in it for work that was done for fair wages at the time.
Only give shares out when there is an event that merits another change in ownership such as when someone does offer you funding or at the time of a sale.
Talk to an attorney who is an expert in this specific subject before offering anyone anything.

+1 regarding the risks.  They should be detailed explicitly in the operating agreement and other addenda like a Buy-Sell Agreement.

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Choosing my name for my first publication
I'm publishing my first ever paper in my career. Given my name is Aaron John Sabu, how should it be broken into the first name and last name?
Also, what should I write when asked for the [Initial][Surname] format?

NB: Aaron is my name, Sabu is the name of my father and John his father.
Also, I do not have a proper surname since it is not part of our custom.

Might be relevant to mention here the name by which you are registered at the university, and any other legal name.

Congratulations on your first publication and a successful Stack Exchange post (which some people consider even a bigger accomplishment)! You might want to add your country or region as a tag, if it's available.

I looked at your profile and saw that you're at IIT. Impressive! I added the tag "India", although I realize it's a large country with many different naming conventions.

@EllenSpertus, thanks!!! And, as Basil Bourque mentioned, my official name is Aaron John Sabu

What is on your passport? The MRZ tells you what the government is using as your "surname" and "forename"

Note if you had only one name, it would go in the "surname" field of your passport. Since you have three, it's likely they've been divided between the two fields.

Regarthles of what you do, get an ORC-ID account. That way, you can link it to yourself, regarthless how different publishers may want to use your name

@AnderBiguri yeah that's done :)

Aaron is my name, Sabu is the name of my father and John his father. Also, I do not have a proper surname since it is not part of our custom.

I suggest adopting Sabu as your surname, Aaron as your given name, and John as your middle name, or some variant of that. I  think this is advisable, because you'll regularly be asked for your surname and given name, and sometimes your middle name or it's initial. Such an adoption will simplify administration. That said, I appreciate that you might want to follow your customs, rather than those of others.
In terms of publishing,

Pick a name you'll use forever.

Your name is your brand. It's how you'll be identified.

Pick a name that is unique (or at least rare, especially to Google).

A unique name is easier to find.
You might decide upon Aaron Sabu, Aaron J. Sabu, or Aaron John Sabu, for instance. Google each and see if it is unique or rare.

From comments:

As pointed out...there is no obvious choice that will send the message that you want to be called Aaron and cited as Aaron et al. That choice just doesn't fit well in the conventions of the Western naming culture, unfortunately

I disagree, S. J. Aaron or J. S. Aaron could be used (an initial could also be dropped). Citations will appear as Aaron et al. and there seems only to be an option of calling the OP Aaron.

Another possibility is Aaron John-Sabu, with a hyphen. That would suggest that Aaron is the name and John-Sabu the 'surname'. People will cite you as John-Sabu et al. rather than Sabu et al. with all other options.

(As pointed out in user2173836's comment, there is no obvious choice that will send the message that you want to be called Aaron and cited as Aaron et al.. That choice just doesn't fit well in the conventions of the Western naming culture, unfortunately).

@FedericoPoloni +1 for each comments, with a response to the second above

Good point on J.S. Aaron, that seems a great option.

@FedericoPoloni thanks to your suggestion, I'm thinking of Aaron John-Sabu, which can be abbreviated as J-S., Aaron or Aaron J-S.
Am I in the right direction?

@AaronJohnSabu unfortunately I would expect people to cite that as "A. John-Sabu", unless you've specifically told them otherwise. It's very unlikely anybody (who doesn't know you and isn't familiar with your cultural background) would understand that "Aaron" is the part you wish to have displayed in full, rather than seeing it as a first name and "John-Sabu" as a family name (i.e. the typical format of names in English-speaking countries) - especially as Aaron and John are both common names in English-speaking countries.

(and specifically telling everybody who might cite you is unfortunately not a viable option)

@ChrisH Oh. That's completely fine. My bad. That's apparently what I meant

@AaronJohnSabu ah, ok - in that case, yes: if you're fine being cited that way, then Aaron John-Sabu is certainly a suitable way to write your name.

Taking @ChrisH into account .. I suggest you do similar to Japanese - their convention for surname given-name when introducing themselves and calling each other so you might reverse the names given to you, when you want westerners call you correctly ( Japanese turn their names around when introducing to Gaijin [foreigners] that mostly expect given-name surname convention

@Buffy's and @user2768's answers raise good points to consider when choosing.
I'd like to recommend in addition: Get yourself an ORCID and use it. An ORCID is a unique identifier that you can keep, however you may later on decide to change your name again.
ORCID allows several names, they say the only one really required is the first names (which can also be multiple first names) in order to also work for cultures like yours. So you could leave surname blank and actually keep your name as it is.
You can also specify how you'd like to be cited (I'm not sure how many look this up, though. But literature data bases should hopefully get that right), and you can even give also-known-as names.
As a side note: while it's good to think a bit which name you like to use, it's not that you cannot change it if it turns out not to work as well as you thought. If you use an identifier like ORCID, this won't even lead to confusion whether it is still you.
(And people in western culture do change their surnames as well, e.g. when getting married or divorced.)

It's not that western cultures don't know patronyms (usually with some change, e.g.  prefix or suffix meaning son/daughter, diminutive or genitive). In many western countries they meanwhile became family names but AFAIK in Iceland it is usual (and Denmark  possible) to give children a proper patronymic or matronymic name. They put the patronym/matronym as surname - so if you don't know the name of the parent, you don't notice the difference between a proper patonymic/matronymic or one that meanwhile became family name.

And Wales. The form "Dafydd ap Iolo" ("David, son of Iolo) is the type of full name some people use. There is no family name in such a usage. If Dafydd ap Iolo wrote a paper then he would use that full name, and certainly would not tolerate being indexed as "Iolo, A. D.".

@cbeleitessupportsMonica did that now with pleasure! Thanks!!!

@JeremyC: wouldn't the abbreviation/indexing be "ap Iolo, D."? And AFAIK, that's what Icelandic or Danish people with patronymic/matronymic do: the patronymic is their surname (but not family name). What I don't know is whether this is just because it would be too tedious for Anders Andersen to tell everyone to list them as Anders rather than Andersen because it is the proper patronymic - while Jens Jensen next door is Jensen because its the family name...

@cbeleites In Iceland, patronyms are the default, with a comparatively smaller number of people having family names, and in Icelandic listings, people are listed by their first names; so Þór Birgisson is listed as such. In Denmark, your surname is your surname, regardless of whether it’s a family name or a patronym; so Anders Hansen is listed as “Hansen, Anders”. The main difference is that patronyms have been very rare in Denmark for over a century; family names are ubiquitous. I don’t think I’ve ever met a single Danish person with a patronymic surname.

@JanusBahsJacquet: many thanks

Actually, you have a lot of freedom to do it as best pleases you. You could even create an alter ego (as I have here) under which to publish.
But there are two constraints.
The first is that you probably want to choose a name that you will be happy with over your career, so that people won't get confused by seeing different names from the same author.
The second is that you want people to be able to find and connect with you. Mostly that will be via email, I suspect, but if someone calls up your university and asks for you by your public persona name it should be easy to reach you personally.
If you just use the name you have used here, few people outside your own culture would even notice and just assume that your "family" name is Sabu. Some names in Western European culture arose in just that way. Others arose from peoples occupation (Taylor and Smith, for example). But people might also want to refer to you as Professor Sabu, rather than Professor Aaron, which you might prefer.
But, don't worry that there are conventions that restrict your choices here. Assume that you have control over your own name.

people will also cite the paper as Sabu et al. which might not be what OP wants. However, since Aaron and John are reasonable common first names, i can see how choosing the surname to be Aaron, it will just get miscited as sabu anyway

You may wish to consider which variations are more unique than others.  A. John may be more easily confused with others in your field than A. Sabu...you might want to survey prolific publishers in your field to create a more distinct combination.

Stage name (Wikipedia)

A surname is used to identify family. From your tradition, you get your fathers name and his father's name to identify family - as far as I can understand.
I suggest that you merge your two last names with a hyphen: Aaron John-Sabu. In that way you pay respect to both your father and grandfather, and you will have a unique name. I am sure you can live with this forever. Which, as User2768 pointed out, is a nice perk for a chosen name.

Thanks. That's my final conclusion as suggested by others as well such as @FedericoPoloni

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What is the difference between project and thesis?
How project and thesis differs in terms of creativity ?
which one is original ?  project or thesis ?
any formal definition for project and thesis ?

You have probably two accounts (maybe three?): you can merge them in a single one. See the I accidentally created two accounts; how do I merge them?.

It differs by school. Technically, a thesis is a claim that can be proven or disproven, but, in practice, the term "thesis" is often used for a project (for undergraduate or Master's degrees). On the other hand, a PhD thesis is not just a project; it should advance the state of knowledge in a field in a way that can only be done by someone knowledgeable in the field.
My department is considering renaming our Master's thesis requirement to Master's project, to acknowledge that it need not be a research contribution.
Of course, even a project can entail publishable work or advance the state of the art, but it need not.

thanks, is there any difference in terms of novelty ?
i know that a phd thesis or masters thesis needs to be original
but does the project needs to be original ?

@RashidaHasanRupa Technically, all projects are original, since nobody has solved exactly the same problem.

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Penalties for disclosing student grades without consent
Is it illegal to share students' grades with somebody else (e.g their parents) without their consent in the US? What are the most common penalties for such a violation of privacy? Is jail time possible as a punishment?

This may depend upon what country you are in, and the rules of your academic institution – that's where you should start asking questions.

@DaveClarke: I am talking about the US. For example, what is the policy at your institution?

Can you change your question to reflect that? Can you also put the title question within the body and make the title somewhat shorter, yet covering the contents of the whole question?

It's not clear what you're getting at.  Is this a theoretical question about what could happen (but won't), or a practical question?  For example, in the U.S. it is illegal to share university grades with anyone else (the law is called "FERPA").  I have no idea whether the theoretical penalties could include jail, but it's inconceivable that anyone would actually be jailed for sharing grades with a student's parents.

-1 as this can't be answered with so few information. It should also not make a difference if the 3rd person is a parent, a classmate, or someone in a role somehow differently connected to the inidividual in question.

I've tried to edit this into a more answerable question.

Does this question need to exist in the first place? In the US, it is illegal so why would you feel the need to share grades to non students.

Do note that your (U.S.) institution will have a standard "FERPA waiver form."  If parents want to know about student progress, just tell them that the student must first present you with a signed FERPA waiver.  If the parents don't like it, that's between them and the student, and you are in the clear.

While this is an old post, FERPA was brought up on another post - thought its worth commenting here also. According to https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/parents.html : FERPA also permits a school to disclose personally identifiable information from education records of an "eligible student" (a student age 18 or older or enrolled in a postsecondary institution at any age) to his or her parents if the student is a "dependent student" as that term is defined in Section 152 of the Internal Revenue Code. .../...

.../... Generally, if either parent has claimed the student as a dependent on the parent's most recent income tax statement, the school may non-consensually disclose the student's education records to both parents.

So, contrary to the popular belief held, schools are indeed allowed to disclose information to parents IF the student happens to be the parent's(s') dependent per IRS purposes.

In addition to US laws like FERPA, I think the GDPR would also apply to any university with European students.

In the US the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protects the privacy of students. This "act" is not a law (on further reading it is a law), but rather a stipulation by the Department of Education that universities must obey in order to receive funding. As such, I do not believe that violations are classed as a criminal offense and hence cannot lead to jail time. Universities which violate the FERPA can lose their funding and likely have grounds to dismiss employees who violate the act. The university might even be able to seek damages against those individuals, but again, not jail time.
I would suggest that you not violate FERPA. If you intend to, or have done so (accidentally or otherwise), I suggest that you seek legal advice.

+1 for seek legal advice. In addition to the institution seeking damages, the the student(s) can seek civil damages from the institution and the individual who disclosed the information.

This is not legal advice... If only people giving mathematical or dietary advice without credentials could be sued for failing to make a similar disclaimer! :)
There are two parts to this issue. First, is it ok to tell people students' grades? In the U.S., almost entirely "no", if the student is 18 or older. FERPA. It doesn't matter whether or not the student's parents are paying the tuition, the student's grades are privileged personal information.
It is acceptable use to disclose student grades for (e.g.) intra-math-departmental function, such as advising, admission committee work, and other "privileged" use.
A traditional practice that is no longer ok is posting grades on instructors' doors, for example.
For "old" people, the idea that one is not in fact legally entitled to know the grades of the student whose tuition you're paying will seem strange. Indeed, decades ago, the grades were sent to the parents directly, in paper mail.
But, now, 18-or-over people are essentially legal adults in the U.S., and their school records (and medical records) are not automatically open to their parents.
Thus, despite intuition to the contrary, simply do not give grades to parents, ... without seeking legal advice about extenuating circumstances, such as emergencies.
Edit: but, then, "jail time"? Who knows? But maybe monetary damages if someone sues you for violation of their privacy rights. Apart from the risk of this, if we think it through, maybe kids' grades (if they're "adults") should not be divulged to anyone... So don't do it?

Parents can sign a contract with their children that the children must furnish their grades in exchange for disclosing their grades; but that is between parent and child, the child must provide the grade sheet to the parent themselves and not involve the school. This is also often a condition of many fellowships.

@RoboKaren: Maybe I am trying to evangelize this message: According to https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/parents.html : " FERPA also permits a school to disclose personally identifiable information from education records [...] to his or her parents if the student is a "dependent student" as that term is defined in Section 152 of the Internal Revenue Code. Generally, if either parent has claimed the student as a dependent on the parent's most recent income tax statement, the school may non-consensually disclose the student's education records to both parents."

@Just_to_Answer .. that information is superseded by: " When a student reaches 18 years of age or attends a postsecondary institution, he or she becomes an "eligible student," and all rights under FERPA transfer from the parent to the student. "

@RoboKaren: The full statement of the first part does deal with "eligle student" also. Here it is: [Quote] FERPA also permits a school to disclose personally identifiable information from education records of an "eligible student" (a student age 18 or older or enrolled in a postsecondary institution at any age) to his or her parents if the student is a "dependent student" as that term is defined in Section 152 of the Internal Revenue Code. [end Quote]

A number of people have mentioned FERPA. Looking at the text of FERPA and at this University web page suggests what some others have said: violations of FERPA can result, ultimately, in withholding funding from the university but the law does not list criminal sanctions for either individuals or institutions for violation. That is also my understanding.
That said, there other privacy laws or other kinds of laws that might be violated by disclosure of educational records. There are a variety of other state, local, and federal laws — plus plenty of common law tort law, that could take effect. And besides, people sue for all kinds of things including things that aren't even in violation of a law.
To be clear: I am not a lawyer nor a legal expert and this is not legal advice. But, as a non-lawyer that likes to believe that world has certain common-sense limits, it seems insane to suggest that telling a parent a grade could result in jail time. If you're worried and need a "real" answer, you should find a lawyer and ask.

It also seems even more insane that a university would risk their funding by allowing the faculty to violate FERPA.

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Is it ethical to invite a student to apply for a job through my spouse?
In my field, computer science, employers offer referral bonuses of a few thousand dollars to employees who refer successful job candidates who go on to work at that company. My spouse works at a company that an alumnus would like to apply to. So do several alumnae and a former professor who has taught that student. I used to work there too.
Is it ethical for me to tell the student (truthfully) that, if he applies through my spouse and gets hired, we will donate the bonus to the college? I would also tell him (truthfully) that I would submit an equally enthusiastic recommendation letter and help him prepare for interviews no matter who he chooses to refer him.
My ethical concern is that the student might feel pressured by my implying I would like him to apply through my husband and fear that I would not help him as much if he did not. I could partly alleviate that concern by writing the recommendation letter first and giving it to the former professor at the company to submit after anyone has referred the candidate. Is that enough?
Update
I asked an alumna at the company (rather than my husband) to refer the student and donate any referral bonus. She cheerfully agreed and coached him on interviewing. The candidate had no problem with being referred by an alumna (or by my spouse) and appreciated the coaching, although he ended up working for another company.
I think going through someone other than my spouse reduced the appearance of a conflict of interest all around (including to the company, to which I would have submitted a letter of reference).

(Disclosure: I'm not a professor.)
I don't personally see any ethical concerns SO LONG AS you indicate clearly (as you said you would do) that the recommendation letter will be equally strong regardless of whether or not the student applies through your spouse. Under those circumstances, I'd call this "networking," not "bribery" or "coercion".
The idea you proposed of writing the letter first and then informing the student seems like a nice way of ensuring that the student knows you've written a strong letter. There is the possibility that the student will still feel pressured, of course -- "if I don't say yes, then my professor will send a second contradictory letter" -- but assuming you have a positive relationship with the student, that seems unlikely.

I don’t see any conflict (or need to donate the bonus).  Simply inform the student that as an applicant, that they are more likely to be accepted if they are referred by an existing employee and that at this company employees receive bonuses when they successfully refer a applicant. Ask if they have such a referral, and if not offer to have your spouse submit one on their behalf.
This is a classic win-win situation, where all parties benefit from cooperation.  The only potential conflict is if the student already has such a referral, it might seem that you are pressuring them to use your spouse instead, which is why you ask if they have one before volunteering your spouse.
The only possible conflict is if you embellished the LoR in order to increase the students chance of gaining the job in order get the bonus, which is more than balanced by the resulting damage to you and your spouses reputations.  An appropriately luke-warm recommendation and referral is going to better for both of you in the long run.

I often found jobs for my cs students at the company I consulted with. I arranged to have the referral bonus given directly to my department.
I made sure everyone knew about this arrangement up front.

Your job includes writing letters of recommendation when students have earned them.  Finding students a referral opportunity from a company employee is doing better than what you need to do.
Your spouse's job includes earning referral bonuses.
Both of you are doing your jobs.  There is no conflict.  Your spouse could reasonably keep the bonus.

Don't require the student to use the referral, apply for the job, or accept the job.
Warn students not to apply for companies you know are abusive.
Don't recommend students who will do a bad job.

Disclaimer: this is not legal advice. This is just a personal opinion. I might be somewhat though in comparison with most.
This is a borderline case. In general however I would stay away from this unless you are very sure the alumni would like this job. Although I am utterly convinced of your good intention, even if you say there will be no consequences the alumni might not believe you. That sounds like it is not your problem but you have an authority position and so you don't have a relationship of equals. This means that you must be much more careful. And in this case the doubt might, completely independent of you, be somewhat justified, because you might not intentionally write a worse recommendation letter. But unintentionally you might. At least I could see that as a legitimate worry.
First writing the letter might be a good guarantee like @tonysdg pointed out. However I still think this is not optimal since then you might write an overly positive recommendation letter because you want the student to be hired for your personal gain (reputation within the college can also be gain) or it might at least be perceived that way.
This might be immoral to the company or towards other students (since they get comparatively less positive recommendation letters).
I can see this working in a morally acceptable way but I think there is alot to be carfull about. In general I would be at the very least cautious when having a monetary/reputational (outside your reputation as teacher) incentive in dealing with students outside of the money adn reputation you get from the university.

I disagree with this answer. To the extent that reputational gain is a gain, all professors everywhere writing letters of recommendation for their students stand to gain from their students' success and are therefore in a conflict of interest similar to OP's. To infer that writing an LOR due to such a conflict is "borderline" unethical is therefore pretty ridiculous IMO, since the same logic would imply that all LOR-writing situations are also borderline. In short, I think your standards are way too exacting. Does OP need to be careful? Sure, she does and is clearly being careful already. ...

... But is there anything remotely unethical about OP's plan? Not at all. Moreover, note that ethics questions are often about trade-offs. What of the benefit that would come to OP's college from a donation of several thousand dollars? Indeed, one could argue quite reasonably that foregoing the opportunity to bring this money to her college because of some hypothetical concern that bears almost no relation to how people actually behave in real life is the unethical choice. So again, I think the level of self-doubt you are advocating here is pretty unreasonable.

Deleted a previous comment of my own for a being worded too strong
@DanRomik On most of this I agree with you which is why included sentences like "I might be somewhat though in comparison with most." and that I think it is possible to do this within ethical borders. However I would not equate all LOR situations to this one. How often does your household get a monetary reward where a LOR is involved ? Yes OP says she will be donating it to the college, but OP's household still gets it personally, I might be somewhat naive, but I do think get this is quite an extraordinary situation


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How much money do government agencies spend yearly on diamond open access?
I read on blog.orvium.io:

Diamond Open Access is an open-access publishing model where scholarly articles are made freely available to readers without cost or barrier. In the Diamond Open Access model, the entire publishing process, from peer review to publication, is funded by non-profit organizations, research institutions, or government agencies rather than by charging fees to authors or readers.

This made me wonder: how much money do government agencies spend yearly on diamond open access? If too broad, I'm mostly interested in the USA.

It is difficult to quantify. It is not yet a structured thing. Maybe you can look after McGill Uni (Canada) budget, since they are very open to host the infrastructure to have diamond open access journals (see press-release https://reporter.mcgill.ca/tectonic-shifts-in-academic-publishing/ )

I don't have a satisfying number answer. I think you would have to search for an compile this info yourself. You might consider looking at DOAJ or cOAlition S. There was a report written up on this a while ago but it doesn't include hard funding numbers.
As far as I know there isn't any public, centralized database with funding info (like NIH RePORT) for journals. In any case, many diamond open access journals are not funded by grants in the same way that research might be. Funding comes from all sorts of places and is not uniform from journal to journal. So it would be tough to figure out specifics across the entire country.
The truth is that the cost of starting a journal these days is negligible. A budget conscious group could start a journal for next to nothing. There are free systems, for instance PKP's Open Journal System, that are open source and easy to implement. Web hosting is very inexpensive, Gmail business emails are too, and most journals rely on volunteer work from editors and reviewers.
The low cost (potentially) of running a diamond open access journal, combined with the fact that they are not as prevalent in the United States as elsewhere in the world means that the amount of government money spent directly on diamond open access is probably relatively low.

An example of a low cost open access journal (OA diamond level) with public figures is The Journal of Open Source Software. In US dollars of 2019: Annual Crossref membership: $275, Annual Portico membership: $250, JOSS paper DOIs: $1 / accepted paper and JOSS website hosting (Heroku): $19 / month (source).  By their 2019 blog post, the $4.75 APC/publication (assuming 200 publications/year) only is possible thanks to volunteers.

I found some numbers on https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-11-21/scientists-paid-large-publishers-over-1-billion-in-four-years-to-have-their-studies-published-with-open-access.html. It's not specific to diamond access, but still interesting.

Scientists paid large publishers over $1 billion in four years to have their studies published with open access
[...]
Stefanie Haustein’s team from the University of Ottawa (Canada) has spent “years” collecting data from the period 2015-2018. According to their calculations, Springer Nature took the lion’s share, with $589.7 million, followed by Elsevier ($221.4 million), Wiley ($114.3 million), Taylor & Francis ($76.8 million), and Sage ($31.6 million). The fees required for a study to be made available with open access are officially called “article processing charges,” and on average, authors or their institutions have to pay more than $2,500 per study. French sociologist Pierre Bataille refers to the publishers’ charges as “research vampirization.”

I don't see how this answers the question. The paper referred to in that news article is, as far as I can tell, focused entirely on article processing charges (APCs) paid to the five largest publishers for articles published in gold and hybrid open access (OA) journals. The paper appears to count diamond OA as a subset of gold OA with unknown APCs. Therefore, all you can infer about how much governments spend on diamond OA is that there is a trivial lower bound of zero. In other words, the costs quoted are specific to non-diamond OA.


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Conference rejects submissions with undeclared Conflicts of Interest (COI) automatically found on DBLP instead of using them to choose reviewers. Why?
I read some email about some paper submission:

Here are potential COIs [Conflicts of Interest] found by our automated tool, which uses DBLP to detect recent coauthorships: [Alice, Bob]. Per [conference name] submission guidelines, it is the full responsibility of all authors of a paper to identify and declare all COIs, and we reserve the right to desk-reject submissions with undeclared conflicts or spurious conflicts.

Why would a conference desk-reject submissions with undeclared conflicts based on COIs automatically found on DBLP instead of using these COIs to choose proper reviewers (e.g., as CVPR 2024 does)?
(The dblp.org website is a database of authorship information for computer science publications.)

If the author intentionally fails to disclose the COI (as opposite to a simple oversight), that's because they hope to get that person as a reviewer....Do you think that in this situation it would be a good idea to use those COIs to choose proper reviewers?

Please don't use abbreviations in your question title.

@FranckDernoncourt Your question is still missing a lot of information for someone that doesn't know exactly how this conference is being run. Are Alice and Bob part of some public list of reviewers?

You/They did not follow the rules and got sanctioned for it.

Thanks. Why would a conference desk-reject submissions with undeclared COIs automatically found on DBLP instead of using these COIs to choose proper reviewers?

Failure to disclose a conflict is an ethical matter. A form of malfeasance. Conferences don't have time for multiple review/revision cycles, so you get rejected.

@Buffy why would that cause multiple review/revision cycles?

Journals have multiple cycles. Conferences don't because of time constraints. But the reason is that COI need to be disclosed in the paper and if you don't do it initially, they need to be added, requiring a rewrite and a new review.

@Buffy why not automatically assign reviewers based on the COIs that are found automatically?

@FranckDernoncourt What if there are mistakes in the COIs found automatically? How would you know/validate that they are correct? You are trying to answer a negative when there is no clear advantage of it.

Dr. Snoopy: I am sharing your concern. Automatic person extraction from bibliographic information has its pitfalls. I presume that missing COI are relatively rare and can be handled by the program committee chair.

While the answer by Thomas Schwarz is correct, I guess a deeper question is why the conference would even ask the authors about COIs if it has a way to automatically extract them.
The reason, quite simply, is that not all COIs are visible from DBLP. DBLP does not index all papers, and there are other types of COIs that are not directly observable from co-authored papers. In practice, it's almost impossible to get around authors self-declaring COIs, and it's crucial to get them to do so carefully and truthfully. I suspect the conference's somewhat draconian response is a reaction to that - authors failing to declare obvious COIs is not a light matter, as it calls into question which other COIs they failed to declare (which are not visible from DBLP).

"authors failing to declare obvious COIs is not a light matter, as it calls into question which other COIs they failed to declare" -> I guess you're right. My thought was that in most cases, COIs = coauthorship, so maybe the conference could focus on asking COIs that didn't lead to coauthorship, so that authors don't have to spend hours compiling the list unless they have a script for it.

@FranckDernoncourt I'm interpreting your comment as, "I'm busier than the conference staff so they should do the extra work." Wouldn't you need a list of COIs for grant submissions, coauthors, etc. anyway?

Hmmm. Why shouldn't authors "spend hours" compiling a list? It is part of the job, actually. Don't expect others to do your job.

@mkennedy no, it's more about collectively saving human time.

@Buffy if someone has a convenient to generate a co-author list, why not help others?

@FranckDernoncourt: That sounds like a good suggestion to make to the DBLP website owners -- since they already have the data, they could generate for any author a list of previous coauthors in a format suitable for placement in a potential COI entry (naturally that wouldn't be the entire entry, but as you say it would save a bunch of time).

@FranckDernoncourt I don't know, I am not involved with any conference that does this sort of checking. But if I had to speculate it's because it is clearer and easier to simply ask for COIs than to ask for COIs except the ones of a specific type (co-authorship visible in DBLP). I do agree with you that manually maintaining COI lists is a pain, but I also agree with some of the commenters that it's not really on the conference to automate this.

A conference needs to proceed in a timely manner. The conflict of interest are needed to select reviewers. If a reviewer is asked to review (at a top conference they might have already agreed to review N papers at this time) and finds a conflict of interest, the reviewer will inform the chair of the program committee and the paper needs to be reassigned to another reviewer. What is easy for a small conference with less than one hundred submissions becomes an administrative nightmare with more than a thousand submissions.
Even with a small conference, there is no time to go out and start recruiting reviewers after submissions. That is why there are program committees, which might or not might give discretion to assigned reviewers to assign to sub-reviewers (in their research group) or recruit other sub-reviewers outside. Usually, shortly after the submission deadline, reviewers are invited to bid on papers (in which they declare their confidence in being able to do a good job at reviewing for a particular paper). Papers with a conflict of interest are usually already excluded for a particular reviewer from bidding. During this phase, reviewers can also state conflicts of interest. After the bidding phase (usually a few days), a typically automatic assignment of papers to reviewers is made, giving reviewers a relatively short time window to prepare the reviews. For conferences with a very large number of submissions, this process needs to be modified. Instead of bidding on papers, the conference might choose a different mechanism, such as assigning papers and reviewers to sub-topics.
Not declaring conflicts of interests interferes with this process. It is not the task of the conference organizers to do the conflict of interest declaration. Automatic tools are actually dangerous. People publish under different names, change affiliations, and there are even people with the same or similar names in the same field.  The current process has enough informal safe-guards to deal with difficulties arising from the difficulties of identifying conflicts of interests.
There is also a concern in the community about various forms of manipulations. There have been cases of groups of scientists helping each other to get published by manipulating the peer review process. Openly declaring conflicts of interests is our duty as submitters in a peer-reviewed conference.

Maybe it would be better to edit your (very short) original answer rather than adding a second answer with more detail?

To me, this sounds like the conference doesn't trust their own reviewers to indicate conflicts of interest.
The automated system is going to be terrible at detecting legitimate conflicts of interests because conflicts based on relationships or shared non-publishing interests will not appear. This will be particularly problematic for conflicts based on rivalries or disputes, because professional enemies are unlikely to publish together.
If the field is one in which multi-author papers are common, the authors are also likely to resent the burden placed on them. I feel annoyed enough when I have to put hundreds of co-author names on an NSF conflict on interest forms and would certainly not want to do so for a conference.
The only potentially good thing that I see is that "we reserve the right to reject" is not the same as "we will reject", so it is possible that the conference is using it as a detector for egregious cases rather than an obnoxious demand for perfection.
Bottom line: the conference appears to distrust its reviewers honesty.


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Are Indian research institutions more lenient about research misconduct than in other countries?
I read on theprint.in (mirror):

In any other country plagiarism and getting banned from publishing in an international journal would be treated as a research crime. The scientist would be suspended and an inquiry would be called,” a senior scientist at Presidency University said. “It’s only here that tainted scientists get promotions and rewards.”
[...]
Such allegations are serious, but most of these Indian scientists continue to thrive in their academic careers without facing consequences—a grim reflection of the state of India’s research ecosystem.

Are Indian research institutions more lenient about research misconduct than in other countries? If so, what would be the reason(s)?

The same article mentions:

Many of these scientists run in close quarters with their institutes’ administration, so it becomes convenient to turn a blind eye to such wrongdoings.

But that's true in most, if not all, countries.

Actually, it’s just not true. On Retraction Watch you can find multiple stories per day of this happening, in every country around the world, with no punishment. Everybody thinks their problems are unique.

@knzhou I think you have an answer. Write it up! :)

@knzhou I second Richard's comment, you're very welcome to write an answer.


text:
How can I list the ORCIDs of all my coauthors?
How can I list the ORCIDs of all the co-authors on all the publications I co-authored? Assume that I don't want to do the list myself manually.


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What percentage of links posted in published articles are dead?
Is there any research/study that looked at the impact of the  percentage of links posted in published articles are dead? I am trying to know to what extent dead links are an issue. E.g. on Stack Overflow, it looks like 10% of the links posted here are dead.

(originally posted on http://openscience.stackexchange.com/q/124/3)

(which is a dead link now…)

Reposting my answer from the original thread
There have been multiple studies about this over the years and in different fields, indicating a link rot on the order of a few percent per year. Here are some, in chronological order:

Randy J. Carnevale, Dominik Aronsky, The life and death of URLs in five biomedical informatics journals, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Volume 76, Issue 4, April 2007, Pages 269-273,  doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2005.12.001.
states

Of the 19,108 references extracted from 606 printed and 86 in-press articles, 1112 (5.8%) references contained a URL. Of the 1049 unique URLs, 726 (69.2%) were alive, 230 (21.9%) were dead, and 93 (8.9%) were comatose. URLs from in-press articles included 212 URLs, of which 169 (79.7%) were alive, 21 (9.9%) were dead, and 22 (10.4%) were comatose. The average annual decay, or link rot, rate was 5.4%.

Edmund Russell, Jennifer Kane (2008). The Missing Link: Assessing the Reliability of Internet Citations in History Journals. Technology and Culture, Volume 49, Number 2, pp. 420-429. doi:10.1353/tech.0.0028
states

We examined the reliability of worldwide web citations in two leading history journals (Journal of American History and American Historical Review) over seven years and found that 18 percent of web links cited over that period were inactive. The problem increased over time. In articles published seven years earlier, 38 percent of web citations were dead.

Jason Hennessey and Steven Xijin Ge (2013): A cross disciplinary study of link decay and the effectiveness of mitigation techniques. BMC Bioinformatics 14(Suppl 14):S5. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-14-S14-S5
states

we downloaded 18,231 Web of Science (WOS) abstracts containing "http" in the title or abstract from the years under study (1996-2010), out of which 17,110 URLs (14,489 unique) were extracted and used. We developed Python scripts to access these URLs over a 30-day period. For the period studied, 69% of the published URLs (67% of the unique) were available on the live Internet, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine had archived 62% (59% unique) of the total and WebCite had 21% (16% unique). Overall, 65% of all URLs (62% unique) were available from one of the two surveyed archival engines.

Klein M, Van de Sompel H, Sanderson R, Shankar H, Balakireva L, Zhou K, et al. (2014) Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot. PLoS ONE 9(12): e115253. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0115253.
looked at link rot in article corpora from arXiv, Elsevier, and PMC:

All three corpora show a moderate, yet alarming, link rot ratio for references made in recent articles, published in 2012: 13% for arXiv, 22% for Elsevier, and 14% for PMC. Not surprisingly when considering the dynamic nature of the web, for older articles the link rot ratio increases in all corpora. For publication year 2005, the link rot ratio stands at 18%, 41%, 36% for arXiv, Elsevier, and PMC, respectively. Going back to the earliest publication year in our corpora, 1997, the ratios become 34%, 66%, and 80%, respectively.

Zittrain, J, Albert, K and Lessig, L . (2014). Perma: scoping and addressing the problem of link and reference rot in legal citations.  Harvard Law Review 127: 176–196.
surveyed law journals and court decisions, with the following observations

We documented a serious problem of reference rot: more than 70% of the URLs within the above mentioned journals, and 50% of the URLs within U.S. Supreme Court opinions suffer reference rot — meaning, again, that they do not produce the information originally cited.

I also think I had seen a study somewhere that indicated that even "early online" articles start out at about 5-10% link rot, i.e. they start rotting well before official publication. Could not find that right now, though.

Dellavalle RP, Hester EJ, Heilig LF, Drake AL, Kuntzman JW, Graber M, et al. Information science. Going, going, gone: lost Internet references. Science 2003 Oct 31;302(5646):787-788. DOI:10.1126/science.1088234; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/302/5646/787 ; https://web.archive.org/web/20170813145731/http://science.sciencemag.org/content/302/5646/787

The use of Internet references in academic literature is common, and Internet references are frequently inaccessible. The extent of Internet referencing and Internet reference activity in medical or scientific publications was systematically examined in more than 1000 articles published between 2000 and 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Science. Internet references accounted for 2.6% of all references (672/25548) and in articles 27 months old, 13% of Internet references were inactive. Publishers, librarians, and readers need to reassess policies, archiving systems, and other resources for addressing Internet reference attrition to prevent further information loss.


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How to format for a useful journal club?
I've been attending my lab's journal club for a while, and I'm wondering whether there are better ways out there of conducting a journal club. To make the question more generic, our club seems to have two purposes:

Ensure that the students in the lab are reading papers in the field
Discuss the latest research findings in the field

Regarding goal (1), that's kinda what I'm spending all my time doing; I'm doing research, and much of that involves little more than reading a ridiculous number of papers. Insofar as accomplishing goal (2), I'm not sure we do it the best way possible. The journal club I'm currently attending is run by a professor. In general, one person prepares a presentation, and the professor grills that person on the paper. Other people chime in if they're interested, but more often than not it's an hour of watching the prof duel with the student. If the student is well prepared, I'll learn a lot, but when the kid has clearly not read the paper well, it's just a waste of everyone's time. What successful journal club formats have you encountered?

Your question is confusing: do you want to talk about lab meeting formats, or journal club formats? The two are not identical at all.

Yeah, good point. My lab meeting was run as a journal club most of the time, which was probably part of the problem :)  I'll reformulate the wording to focus on journal clubs, and ask about lab meetings in a separate question.

This is based on my experience being in some highly unsuccessful journals clubs, and some very successful ones - at least in my mind.

You must have faculty involvement. I've seen more than one journal club that either didn't have faculty members, or had a faculty member or two who just kind of sat back and didn't say anything. That's bad. Faculty members who can contribute, answer questions, and generally provide some context for papers are excellent. They're good for pointed questions we might have missed - I've had faculty members ask a question about a figure that got into an interesting discussion of research ethics, one that led insight into some politics ("The reason that commentary appeared in this journal is Y"), etc.
I prefer to have them separate from lab meetings, and drawing from a wider audience than my specific research group. I find the breadth of experience, diversity of papers, and keeping up with things taking place beyond my narrow little laser-like focus to be both refreshing and more useful than going over a paper half of us already read.
Giving the journal club a greater context. Yes, keeping track of the literature is important. But its importance seems to slide if you know your analysis should be done soon, or something needs to come out of the water bath, or midterms need to be graded. One semester we framed ours as qualifying exam preparation, and another as professional development - the people presenting wrote their critiques like responses to requests for peer review.

Overall, I've found journal clubs to be most useful for mid-level graduate students - they need enough experience to have thoughts, insights and feelings about the paper, but if a JC succeeds, eventually they should need it less and less.

I disagree with point #1. The best journal club I've been part of was one in graduate school that was organized by graduate students and postdocs, with the explicit rule that faculty weren't involved. The idea was to have more "free" discussions, and to avoid the scenario sketched by the OP in which the conversation is simply a grilling of a student by a professor, which sounds terrible. Of course, doing this without faculty or a mandatory structure requires a lot of motivation on the part of the students / postdocs. Thankfully, we had this, and it was stellar.

Fomite's answer is great. Along the lines of "greater context" - you could form a journal club around a topic, rather than around your laboratory. When I was in grad school for plant biology, a friend of mine in Ag Chemistry formed a photosynthesis journal club. He was able to get his supervisor (photosynth bacteria) and another PI (plant focused) on board as regular attendees, while the student himself proctored the meetings. I participated not because I was studying photosynthesis myself, but because I wanted to learn more about biophysics.
Attendees (including the professors) took turns selecting papers and leading discussions. It ended up being good study for my qualifying exam - and a good way to get face time with others in the department that I wouldn't normally interact with.
This is one way to get around the "students take turns getting grilled by one professor." Take the initiative or find another student who wants to run a club, and find professors who want to participate but not lead. The environment will be different.


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Who pays travel & per diem costs for invited lecturers?
When an academic is invited to give a talk at another university, are their food and travel expenses usually fully reimbursed by the university that invited the professor?

In my experience (as a visiting guest lecturer while a grad student elsewhere) the travel expense and accommodation were covered not by the university that hosted me, but by grant money from the professor that invited me. That being said, these visits were for a few days and included both the guest lecture, and some research/discussion on ongoing projects.
I did not claim a per diem for food, but I am sure that if I had it would have been covered, too.

The short answer is that it depends (no surprise there).  If it's to give a talk in a department colloquium or seminar, travel cost are usually covered (at least, that's been my experience in mathematics), though that can vary a bit, especially since smaller departments may have very limited budgets for that kind of thing.
Food expenses vary even more wildly, and they depend heavily on the source of funding.  I've been at places that had a standard per diem for visitors, places that did nothing, and places where the faculty would take the speaker to dinner and split the cost among them.

When you are an invited guest of a university department, in most cases you will have your travel costs paid by the department, or in the case of an individual institute or professor extending the invitation, by the specific people involved. In the case of a short visit (less than a day, for instance), when a per diem becomes impractical, the cost of the meal after the conference might be split among the attendees.
However, I have been an invited lecturer at conferences that were organized at various schools. In those cases, the conferences were operating on a very limited budget, and the "compensation" was essentially a free registration to the conference.


text:
Do professors benefit from undergraduate research?
And does it depend on the type of field? Undergrads in biology can do the menial work, but what about undergrads in the computational sciences?
Are they more or less likely to benefit from undergraduate research in schools/fields where the undergrads tend to be especially self-motivated? (I don't know much about the ratio of self-motivated undergrads to non-self-motivated undergrads, but the professors I talked to at Brown and UChicago said that working with the undergrads at those schools was incredibly rewarding since they tended to be very self-motivated).

As you suggest in your question, this likely will vary from both field to field, and from lab to lab. In the two research labs I've worked in, one engineering and one neuroscience, undergraduates did a tremendous amount of useful work. In engineering, they would help with circuit design and fabrication, as well as doing background research and presenting their findings to the group as a whole. In the neuroscience lab, they would do cellular recordings and prepare cell cultures, as well as participate in paper writing.
In both cases, the undergraduates benefitted tremendously from the experience in a number of ways; they experienced the life of a researcher, they got to perform actual research work, they published articles and conference papers, and they received excellent letters of recommendation. The lab also benefitted, in that they had a (most of the time) highly motivated student who was interested in doing work performing research, the grad students/professors had more time either prepare other experiments or write papers, and all the benefits of simply having someone else around to bounce ideas off of. All in all, if the lab is organized enough to handle the logistics of providing the students with regular (non-busywork) tasks to perform, it's a win-win situation for everyone.

One other (minor) benefit that eykanal and EpiGrad didn't mention is internal brownie points.  Faculty in my department are encouraged to collaborate with undergrads, in part because graduate admissions is highly correlated with undergraduate research experience, and in part so that the department can attract a larger pool of potential majors.  Working with undergrads makes my chair/dean happy.
That's not a major reason for me, though.  As your Brown and UC profs suggest, the enthusiasm that motivated undergrads bring to research can be very refreshing.  And (in my experience, in theoretical CS) there's comparatively little pressure for the research to lead to publication, compared to work with graduate students (where unsuccessful research means they don't graduate).

this lack of pressure on undergrads to publish in TCS has surprised me. I am suppose to help supervise an undergrad this summer, and I was talking to the prof about the project. The idea seems to be "give the student something they can make progress on and something that is worth learning about for both us and the student". Instead I would have expected something like "give the student something they can push to a publication or at least ArXiv".

@ArtemKaznatcheev In my experience, the lack of pressure to publish is three-fold: 1. The undergrad doesn't need to publish. If they do, its a bonus. 2. Undergraduate projects have, IME, a much higher rate of failure/stalling. 3. There are often very low-pressure venues for the student to present work that may not even meet the standards of a MPU but still gets them what they need - departmental talks, undergrad research days, etc.

At the beginning, the product of research is not as important as the process.  In particular, it's important for budding researchers to  quickly become comfortable with feeling utterly stupid, and to make that feeling inspire them instead of inhibiting them.  Yes, of course, the ideal goal is a publication, but very few students meet that goal on their first attempt and that's fine.

There are two major benefits I've encountered for professors sponsoring/hosting undergraduate researchers.

Grunt work.Yes it extends outside laboratory sciences - everyone has work that, while it needs to be handled with attention, doesn't necessarily need doctoral-level expertise. Parameter searches. Literature pulling. Programming implementation. All of these are valuable experiences for undergrads, give them exposure not only to the field they're interested in but the "act" of research itself, and save time for grad students, post-docs and faculty who could do these things, but instead are able to focus on the tasks undergraduates can't do.
Recruitment. Promising undergraduate researchers make for decent graduate student recruits. If they're not terribly interested in pursuing graduate education, but have a knack for research tasks and mesh well with a lab, they're also prime material for lab techs, programmers, and other technical support staff.


text:
What should I do if funding announcements aren't made until after the acceptance deadline?
I was admitted to a US PhD Math program but funding letter was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, they send out funding letter separately.
When I inquired about funding they told me that funding offers go out anytime until July, but our class starts in August so I found that a little bit weird.
I get a feeling that they do not fund all PhD students. What should I do? It would be nice to know asap if they are even going to fund me but I don't think they are in a hurry either. This is my preferred college but I don't want to go if they aren't going to fund me.
Edit: Here are many examples of accepted but not funded yet. I just don't know what my outcome will be.

Did they say that no funding offers go out till July?  (BTW I imagine ASU means Arizona State in the US, correct?  There are probably other universities with such abbreviations elsewhere.)

I've adjusted the title and tags of your question because it's not a function of your individual department, but a fairly general question that could in principle apply to any grad school.

@paulgarett still waiting from somewhere else.

@kimball yes ASU = Arizona State University. No they said offers go out until July.

@paulgarrett I am reading the OP's (a bit strange) phrasing as saying ASU may be making financial offers between now and July.  So presumably their top choices get immediate funding offers but other people won't find out till later.  I've heard of some schools doing this, though I agree it is not so typical in math in the US.

It's not unusual at all for programs to send out second and third rounds of offers to fill spots that were unfilled when other students didn't accept the offers.  Because of the April 15 convention, the scheduling of this is typically that the first round of offers goes out a few weeks before April 15 with an April 15 deadline, then the second round of offers go out after April 15 with a deadline in May, ...  It would be interesting to see an exact quote from the letter the OP received.

As a practical matter, foreign students wouldn't have time to get a visa if they only received an offer of financial aid in July.

@brianborchers reading gradcafe it looks like 1st round of offer has already gone out. the "you've been approved letter" from asu does not mention funding...that's just the way they do things. they send out TA offer letter separately.

@paulgarrett Can you please convert your comment into an answer?

For others reading this thread, it can also be the case that any funding will be tied to a specific departmental training grant and the grant cycle ticks after acceptances are sent out. This is how my funding worked — the number of slots available for each year is finalized after admissions due to the grant giving organization’s schedule.

[I did move my two comments to an answer...]

(Converting my comment to an answer, as suggested by @jakebeal.) Making admission offers without funding is a surprising, and not good, practice on their part, if it is as you describe, since people should make decisions based substantially on funding, not just admission.
If you have other plausible choices with funding, I'd take one of them. Don't go to math grad school without funding (and tuition remission).
(Unlike possible funding ambiguities, in mathematics, the funding is generally almost entirely by Teach Assitantships, and it should be possible to make (approximate) decisions about how many to fund well before the April 15 U.S. nation-wide decision date. That is, except for some (hopefully anomalous) budget crises, math depts themselves would not be "waiting" to find out funding for grad students.)
That is, this sort of "admission" is possibly a very low bar. Funding is the serious issue. In particular, don't get your hopes up, I'm afraid.


text:
Who funded research before 1800?
The Von Humboldt model of a university came about in the early 1800's. Von Humboldt's thought that the fundamental purpose of the university was to promote scientific inquiry and to unify teaching and research. This idea implies, of course, that the purpose of a university is to create new knowledge
However, a previous SE question touches upon the idea that the initial goal of a university was not to discover new knowledge (as was Humboldt's view) but to transmit older knowledge.
With these ideas as context, where exactly were scientific advancements pursued prior to the Von Humboldt model?

Strange. I thought the Academia of Plato and (less) the Semicircle or Pythagoras were among the first places to promote scientific teachings and inquiry.

Maybe to be more fair, as you can see other discussing in the previous SE post, its not true that pursuing new knowledge wasn't a part of the function of a university, but it certainly wasn't the central theme.

I quote from wiki: In at least Plato's time, the school did not have any particular doctrine to teach; rather, Plato (and probably other associates of his) posed problems to be studied and solved by the others.

That's fair. So is it your assertion that academia has always be the center for scientific advancement?

I simply provide info that already since 5th century B.C. there were places in Greece where the advancement of scientific knowledge was the main goal. I am not sure that we can say that this was always the case though.

And I used the word strange because I thought that this idea of Humboldt you describe is at least 2500 years old.

The question in the title subtly deviates from the question in the main text. Which one do you want answered?

I'm really in search for context regarding the evolution of scientific research funding, and unpinning of the relationship between industry and academia. My implication is that research funding and scientific advancements are inseparably linked, so I'm unsure of the deviation youre referring to. But, I'd prefer direct context for Humboldts thinking.

The Lucasian Chair of Mathematics was founded in 1663. Even its earliest holders seem to have valued generating new knowledge, not just communicating old knowledge. Consider endowed chairs as a source of research funding.

To me "where" refers to an institution at which one is employed, "who funded" refers to a person or institution that paid for the research. A not uncommon model where the two differed was a man that married a rich women who funded her husbands research.

In general, there was no central source of funding for research until recently.
If you were engaged in scientific research before modern times, you usually fell into one of a few categories:

You had an official position, such as Royal Astronomer in the UK and other countries, that provided you with a salary in exchange for doing research.
You had your own independent source of wealth that allowed you to survive.
You worked another job, and "dabbled" in research in your "spare time."
You were part of the church (e.g., Gregor Mendel) and did your studies and experiments in your free time.

Industry played at most a small role in funding research, directly or indirectly.

When you say, "official position," you mean government funded, or what entity? Did industry have no role in research, or was all research conducted in industry?

Governments did not "fund research": you were appointed by the ruler, and your position was paid for directly by the state. Industry did not pay for research, as there really weren't "industries" back then.

There were royal/government funded think tanks such as the Library of Alexandria and the Baghdad House of Wisdom.

I disagree that industry didn't fund research. Just to put a couple of examples, by 1800 industry had developed the steam engine and the automatic machine loom. Those innovations are due mostly to craftsmen and engineers who researched solutions to the practical problems they faced.

@Pere: While there were isolated developments, industry basically did not do "research." Thomas Savery was a military officer, and James Watt made his living as an instrument maker. The applications were industrial, but they were not "funded by industry."

@aeismail Maybe we don't understand the same by "research" and "industry". It's true that industry found "isolated developments", but the amount of isolated developments before and during the industrial revolution is impressive, and I would qualify it as research. However, if we understand "research" as organised research as we see today in academy, industry and scientifical societies, I must agree that that didn't exist in industry by 1800.


text:
Would I be disadvantaged in PhD admission if I took only few courses each semester during my Bachelors and Master’s?
I recently applied to a PhD program, and right now I am waiting for their decision.
My GPA from my undergrad and my Master’s program were 4.0/4.0, however during my undergrad I only took 3 courses per semester and during my Master’s, I took one or two courses per semester. Would this put me at a disadvantage when compared with other applicants?
Thank you,

That is pretty much impossible to answer in general. It depends on what you studied and on the particular people who evaluate your application. It might be an issue. It might not be an issue. But you have no option to change the past. Your record is what it is.

My field is Statistics, thank you for your comments

Actually, I mean the individual courses, and how they will be seen to support your candidacy.

What were you doing with the rest of your time?

During my undergrad I took 3 courses because: 1. I was working part time 2. My doctor recommended me to take a reduced course load. For my master’s program, I was working full time for my parents’ business. I didn’t mention this in my PhD application, which i think I should have. But it is too late now, the deadline has already passed

During my undergrad I took 3 courses because: 1. I was working part time 2. My doctor recommended me to take a reduced course load. For my master’s program, I was working full time for my parents’ business. I didn’t mention this in my PhD application, which i think I should have. But it is too late now, the deadline has already passed.

Those sound like perfectly good reasons for a reduced study load to me, and yes, you probably should have at least mentioned your concurrent employment.  Since you were working concurrently with your studies, you might also consider adding that as a standard part of your CV (i.e., in the employment section), which would mean you would not need to make special mention of it in future applications.
Admissions for PhD programs are generally made based on assessments of the quality of applications by academics, and they have wide discretion over what they consider to be relevant.  Opinions on the relevance or non-relevance of a reduced study load will differ among different people, but I suspect that most academics will be interested in your mastery of the undergraduate material ---as reflected in your GPA and other relevant outputs--- than in how long it took you to attain this mastery.  There is no definitive answer as to whether this will affect your application, because it will be assessed by people, and people do all sorts of different things.
Achieving a 4.0 GPA while working concurrently in various jobs (and full-time during your Masters) is a crazy-good record, so you should definitely have mentioned your employment.  Even without that your academic record sounds very strong.  Nevertheless, if you are worried that you have an unexplained gap in your application, it might be worth sending an email to the admissions office giving them a short supplementary paragraph explaining that you undertook your studies at a reduced load because you were concurrently working at such-and-such hours.  (I would suggest you not mention your medical issues, since this would raise more questions than it answers, and your full-time work is already an adequate reason for a reduced study load.)  Ask them if they could please pass this supplementary information on the assessors of your application.  Even though the applications deadline has closed, you might find that they are willing to pass on a short supplementary paragraph; but keep it really short.

Thank you for your answer; it turned out that although the application deadline was Jan 15th, I can still update my CV and my personal statement until the Jan 20th. I just have updated my info accordingly :)


text:
I have two PhD offers. Can I accept one while waiting for the grades for my preferred option without the latter finding out?
Basically I was offered a PhD after my bachelor's degree based only on my performance in the BSc but I enrolled on an MSc and kept this offer as backup.  I have been offered another PhD but it is based on the MSc results rather than the BSc results.  The second offer are asking if I could accept the offer sooner rather than later, but obviously I don't want to refuse the first offer just yet as I know that it is guaranteed.  If I email the second offer and say that I want to accept, would the supervisor who made me the first offer somehow know that I had accepted the other offer and withdraw his offer?  I do not want to turn down the first one if I have not received my MSc grades.  I assume that different universities would not correspond over this type of thing, but I don't know for sure, and I did tell the people who gave me the second offer that I had already received an offer elsewhere and which university made that offer: is this all confidential or could they inform the people who made the first offer?
Obviously, if I don't meet the conditions for the second offer, I could then fall back on the first offer whose criteria I have already met.

The answer does depend a lot on the country. Are we talking about the US/UK, or somewhere else?

UK, do you have any experience of this matter for the UK?

I do not personally have experience with the UK process, but there are users here who do, and knowing it's the UK gives us a better sense of what processes and regulations might apply. (For instance, in the US, accepting an offer of financial support at this date would be considered binding. The UK may be different.)

Ok, it's a joke, but .... get 2 PhD's :)

You should contact both programs and openly describe the situation.
Each individual academic field is fairly small, and academics do regularly talk to each other. Reneging on an offer will tarnish your reputation. Even if you successfully pull off this stunt, you will earn some enemies, which can bite you later (e.g. seeking jobs, applying for grants, etc).

You are toying around with the first offer. It is perfectly reasonable to ask them to wait for a response from another offer; but accepting an offer as a Plan B from the outset, since you have the reasonable expectation that someone else will make you a better one and you will dump the original offer is really not a pleasurable position to put them in. Whether they will know is unclear, but you can be assured that sometimes news travels fast and over improbable routes.
What's more, science is a small world, and while not for the PhD, you may reencounter the original people for reference requests, postdoc applications, as journal and proposal reviewers. While in theory the process should not be affected by being dumped by a prospective PhD, it's anyone's guess when you may need, if not their favours, then their goodwill, unless the offers are in significantly different fields - and even then.
That being said, some people don't care and yet succeed. While it's not really ethical, IANAL, but legally, in the UK you probably can do it before you signed anything.


text:
Are US-based research publishers not allowed to publish research papers from some institutions/firms?
Are US-based research publishers not allowed by US law/regulation to publish research papers whose authors are affiliated with some institutions/firms? Assume that no money or other form of financial incentive is being exchanged, and that publications are only made available on the publisher's website.

You mean in case of sanctions? See Elsevier actions following US sanctions on Iran and Are academic associations obliged to comply with the US government?

@Anyon thanks, any kind of law/regulation.


text:
What are the differences, if any, between area chairs and senior area chairs for a conference?
What are the differences, if any, between area chairs and senior area chairs for a conference?
I am mostly interested in the conferences in the field of machine learning and natural language processing.

May well depend on the particular conference. I’m not familiar with the terms in my field.

@JonCuster thank you, I am mostly interested in the conferences in the field of machine learning and natural language processing.

https://qipeng.me/blog/what-does-an-area-chair-do/ Seems to cover it

Perhaps the area chair is the one who will do all the work, and the senior area chair is the one with the big name who will no little or no work (except possibly make more unnecessary work for the area chair).

Most of high ranked conferences that expect to receive a high volume of submission, the job of reviewing and quality assurance is done by employing area chairs (voluntary services) and senior area chairs (senior researchers). As explained in detail here and here, area chairs are lower in tier than their senior counterparts, and the senior ACs could accept or reject the recommendations made by the ACs.


text:
Why do some documents have more than one DOI?
I was looking for the DOI of a paper (namely Evaluation of Antibacterial Activity of Asparagus racemosus Willd. Root) on http://search.crossref.org/, and found two DOIs associated to it:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1099-1573(200003)14:2<118::aid-ptr493>3.3.co;2-g
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1099-1573(200003)14:2<118::aid-ptr493>3.0.co;2-p

Both DOIs point to the same document (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1573(200003)14:2%3C118::AID-PTR493%3E3.0.CO;2-P/abstract).
How comes?

For the specific articles you gave as an example, the first DOI has an error in the article title in its metadata. The second has the correct title.

The DOI 10.1002/(sici)1099-1573(200003)14:2<118::aid-ptr493>3.0.co;2-p was issued first. In the metadata for that DOI, the title is given as Evaluation of antibacterial activity ofAsparagus racemosus Willd. root (missing a space between "of" and "Asparagus").
The DOI 10.1002/(sici)1099-1573(200003)14:2<118::aid-ptr493>3.3.co;2-g was issued a few days later, and in the metadata, the title is corrected to Evaluation of antibacterial activity of Asparagus racemosus Willd. root.

@FranckDernoncourt It should be possible to change metadata, because at the very least publishers are supposed to keep the URL associated with a DOI up to date (that's kind of the point of the system...) But I can imagine it might be enough of a hassle that it would be worthwhile to get a new DOI instead. Or possibly the employee of the publisher who did this just didn't know what to do in that situation.

FYI http://www.crossref.org/02publishers/20pub_fees.html charges a 2 USD fine if 2 DOIs are assigned to the same document (including the case where there is a very minor difference, either in the document or in the metadata). "A conflict exists when two or more DOIs have been assigned to the same logical work as represented by identical metadata or when subtle metadata differences may exist (e.g. a slight variation in the publication title or style differences in the item title)."

That begs the question: how does crossref know 2 DOIs belong to the same object. A human comparing metadata? What if the object has multiple publishers that all want to maintain their own DOI?


text:
How can I stop getting emails about unwanted registrations to some review websites and asking me to review for random journals?
I often get automated emails about unwanted registrations to some review websites and asking me to review for random, typically paywalled journals. Is there any to stop or reduce that kind of spam?
Example of such emails with the paywalled Displays journal published by Elsevier:

I live in the US and I did follow the process to stop receiving the junk mails via ftc.gov.

Is this somewhat related to your work, could you be a reviewer? Most journals I know just contact people they deem suitable or that are suggested by authors, rather than contacting "registered" reviewers.

@Mark typically, such spams are far away from my field. E.g., I work on natural language processing, and this spam is about display technologies: nothing to do with my work.

For example, Gmail allows us to tag certain emails regarding certain expressions and move them to trash.

Displays appears to be a reputable journal run by a reputable publisher. (Elsevier may be problematic in many ways but they still fit that category, in my opinion.)  So I would not call this "spam".  I would assume this is a good-faith review invitation from an editor who is simply mistaken about your suitability as a reviewer.  Perhaps they are confused about your field of study, or have mixed you up with another researcher with a similar name.
I would simply write back and decline the invitation, explaining that it is outside your area of expertise.  You could add that you are not interested in reviewing for this journal in the future.  You could also ask them how they came up with your name as a potential reviewer; maybe there is a source of misinformation somewhere that you could correct.  If you don't find the response acceptable, you can escalate and contact the editor-in-chief or the publisher.
The registration emails are an artifact of many editorial management systems which require a potential reviewer to be registered in the system before they are invited.  I agree they are annoying but I don't think there's much to be done about them.  Just ignore and delete if you are declining the invitation.
You could attempt to filter such emails with general spam filtering tools (which are outside the scope of this site).  It would not be hard to filter future emails from this particular journal.  However, it may be hard to filter review invitations more broadly without also filtering out ones that actually interest you.
The information at the FTC site does not appear to be relevant to journal review invitations.  In fact, the US anti-spam laws apply only to messages whose primary purposes is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service, which in my opinion would not cover a review invitation.  Anyway, in general, reporting spam to government agencies such as the FTC is almost always ineffective, and in this case I think it's actually inappropriate, since the evidence suggests that the email was sent in good faith.  In the (admittedly unlikely) event that the FTC decides to do anything about it, it could cause problems for the journal.

Got it, thanks for the ideas!


text:
Filed for a patent, then wrote a research paper about it: should the paper cite the patent?
I filed for a patent, then wrote a research paper about the same idea. Should the paper cite the patent?

Related question: Why patents are not cited in papers as that of journal papers?


text:
How can one know if a paper award decision was made with the award committee not having access to the author names?
How can one know if a paper award decision was made with the award committee not having access to the author names?
I am mostly interested in machine learning / natural language processing paper awards.

Ask a committee member over a beer?

@JonCuster Thanks, it doesn't seem to scale well (I am interested to know for many different awards, and often I'm not at the conference where awards were given).

That depends on how much you like beer!

This question is only about a single-blinded review, as it's only asking if the reviewers know the submitters. The other blind can be easier to determine - if you know who's on the award committee, it's not double-blinded (but could be single-blinded).

@NuclearWang Thanks, good point, question edited.

At least two of the conferences that I attend decide on the paper awards right before the conference starts, so all the accepted papers (and authors) are known.

@St.Inkbug awards given to scientific papers.

In some cases the award committee or sponsoring organization may describe its procedures on its official website.  Otherwise, you can write to the award committee chair and ask.
I don't think there's any more general way to know.  In particular, I doubt that there is any central place where you can find this information for many different awards.  (It would be a pain for someone to collect it and keep it up to date.)