text:
How much do Springer-Verlag authors make per book sold?
How much do Springer-Verlag authors make per book sold?

My first book with Springer was on the basis of of royalties with no advance fee. I am about to be offered a second contract but they are offering an up front fee with no royalties. I am slightly anxious about this and would welcome any advice.

There are other benefits to publishing a scientific book than money. E.g., getting a review of the material, professional copy-editing and printing can be itself worth a while over having unpublished lecture notes.

@YetAnotherGeek Yes, of course. My question and the answers here do lend support to the whole open-access model.

Don't expect much money from academic publishing. After a couple of years it is likely close to zero. If you want to make a lot of money writing, do mystery or romance novels and get famous. A few academics buck this trend if their Calc 1 or Econ 1 book is adopted very widely and becomes a standard. They then become slaves to the process of updating it every year or two. But these are very rare cases. I think I've only known one such person in nearly 50 years. Most of the market is too small and the costs too high for authors to earn much.

The big problem with self publishing and open-access is getting adequate reviews of a work as well as expert copy-editing. You'd be surprised how many mistakes you'll make without outside help. This is the value that publishers add (for taking too large a part of the pie).

@Buffy Yes, reviewers are harder to find with OA.

Here's what Springer says:

§ 6 Royalty
For each sold and paid copy of the Work or part thereof, print or
  electronic, sold as an individual book or individual part thereof,
  Springer shall pay to Author a royalty of 6% based on the net income
  received by Springer (list-price minus discount and VAT, withholding
  tax and any other applicable taxes). For the avoidance of doubt, this
  includes (but is not limited to) such individual sales to digital and
  non-digital libraries.
If there is a legal requirement for Springer to withhold any taxes on
  a royalty payment, the taxes will be deducted from the royalty payment
  to Author.  If the Work is sold electronically as part of a Springer
  e-book package, Author will receive an equitable share of royalties
  from the income generated by Springer from the e-book package. The
  share formula for each individual title within the e-book package will
  be determined by Springer no later than April for the preceding
  calendar year.  This amount will be paid in addition to the royalty
  described above and shown separately on the annual royalty statement.
In the case of Bulk Sales, Author's exclusive royalty for the
  respective Bulk Sale will be 0 % of the related Net Proceeds, with
  “Bulk Sale” being defined as the production and/or distribution of a
  special number of copies of the Work or parts thereof at a special
  price regardless of whether it be performed by Springer or by third
  parties, regardless of whether in print or electronic format and
  further regardless of whether in a layout identical to the normal normal edition or not. For the purpose of this Clause 6 Royalty, the term "Net Proceeds" shall be defined as the net amount Springer actually receives after deduction of all discounts, minus production costs incurred by Sprnger or any Springer Group Company and minus VAT, withholding tax and any other applicable taxes.
If Springer grants licenses to use the Work or derivative works
  thereof or parts of either in non-Springer products and the related
  use is not covered by the above subsections of this clause 6 “Royalty”
  (e.g., a license to translate the work and to distribute the
  translation, or a license to distribute parts of the Work in a third
  party book), Author’s exclusive royalty for the respective license and
  any related use will be a share of the Springer’s Net Proceeds
  according to industry standards (currently 50%).
The aforesaid royalties shall be the sole compensation to be paid to
  Author with respect to the Work and the rights granted. In case the
  Work contains or links (e.g. through frames or in-line links) to
  media, social or functional enhancements, the royalties, complimentary
  copies and/or access rights granted under this contract, are deemed to
  be adequate consideration. For the avoidance of doubt, the aforesaid
  royalties will be paid as a total to the joint group of authors if
  “Author” comprises several individual authors. Each co-author will
  receive an equal share of any payment.
Accounts will be settled annually in April for the preceding calendar
  year, with payment to follow soon thereafter.
Authors are responsible for the taxation of their royalties. Springer
  is entitled to report related information (including personal and
  financial data) to the respective authorities.
Free copies which are provided by Springer for the purposes of review,
  promotion, sample or otherwise free of charge are not subject to
  royalty payments. Likewise, copies that are damaged and cannot be sold
  are not subject to royalty payments.
Any publisher's proceeds from rights managed by national copyright
  organizations (collecting societies including but not limited to
  societies such as Copyright Clearance Center) are the sole property of
  Springer. Any such author’s proceeds are the sole property of Author,
  and if applicable, registration and taxation of such proceeds is the
  Author’s sole responsibility. This subsection shall have precedence
  over any other subsection of this Clause 6 Royalty.

This varies substantially, depending on the sort of book, how well the author negotiated (each book involves an individually negotiated contract), the price of the book, etc.  Based on one Springer contract I'm familiar with, here's a first approximation.  I can't say for sure how representative it is, but it's at least one data point, and I'd guess it's typical for Springer and competing publishers.
For regular sales, the author may get 9-12% of "net cash receipts", defined as what the publisher made on the sale (excluding taxes), with the percentage depending on things like how well the book has sold.  Note that "regular sales" excludes some special cases, for which there may be lower royalty rates.
Then the question is how much Springer charged the bookseller for the book.  You can download a 6 megabyte zip file of Springer wholesale prices.  I glanced at a few math books, and the prices look like they are about 60% of what bookstores are charging.  That's certainly the right ballpark, but I haven't computed any real statistics.
So a first approximation is that the author's royalty is probably 5-7% of the price you pay in a bookstore.  Considering that academic books are expensive, that's not bad, but nobody's going to grow rich off it.  For advanced books, selling 1000 copies in total is very good and selling 10,000 is amazing.

I would be interested in the hourly pay for writing such a book :) I guess it would be rather sobering.

Also, http://realtime.springer.com/ shows download statistics for e-books. Do authors get royalties for e-books, too?

@Geremia in a word, yes. Individual eBook sales count a normal sales from the royalty point of view. Bulk access from bundles works differently but the author still gets something.

Based on my 1 contract with Springer, I would like to add that the way to get rich (presumably) is translations. The author royalty on those is 50%. Other than that there is a 33% discount on Springer titles, though I haven't used it. Oh and you get a few free copies of your book, in my case I got 5. I haven't seen a cent other than that

@IvarPersson: It's 50% of Springer's net proceeds if they license the translation rights to another publisher, right?  (At least that's what I've seen.)  Basically, Springer collects royalties from licensed translations and then splits them 50-50 with the original author, but this isn't as lucrative as it sounds since these royalties are only a modest fraction of the price of the translated book (most goes to the translation's publisher and the bookseller).  Also, net proceeds are after production costs, so any expenses on Springer's part are deducted before the 50-50 split.

Net proceeds? Uh oh, don't count on getting rich off any deal based on net - as Bugs Bunny wisely advised us so many years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

@IvarPersson: the discount on Springer titles is available for all authors with Springer publications including journal papers, not only for book authors. (Source: I'm co-author of some papers in Springer journals, but neither of a book nor a book chapter, but get the author discount)

Thanks @AnonymousMathematician that clarifies a lot of things. I must say, in the few years since I posted, I've made almost 600€ in royalties, all of it entirely unexpected. The eBook sales form a surprisingly substantial source of revenue.

My answer is close to $0.00.  I published a book with Springer in 2007, and it is a standard work found in most university libraries.  I have never received a royalty cheque, as there was a threhshold number for sales.  However, now sales are close to zero, as the book is available electronically via SpringerLink and other platforms, and Springer essentially does not pay royalties on downloads via SpringerLink, as they have no way of calculating the proportion owing - so they avoid the issue, and authors are totally shafted.

Was that threshold negotiable?

It probably was, but it was only 200 copies. I did not worry about it then.  Most interestingly, eBooks then took over the market, notably via Soringer's eBook Packages.  Book sales declined to near zero.  Springer pays a royalty on Ebook Package revenue, but it is calculated as % of book sales.  With higher  Ebook Package sales, book sales become effectively nil, and thus total royalties are nil.  Patrons at eBook subscribing libraries can also get a copy of the book (MyBook) from Springer for $25, and obviously no royalties are paid, and sales are lost.

It may interest people that Springer revenue from eBook Packages is now in the hundreds of millions of euros, but authors see a tiny, tiny fraction of this.  Springer refuses to release data about eBook Package sales, despite contracts stipulating a fair and equitable return from Ebook Package revenue.  Authors have no way of knowing if royalties paid, if any, are fair.  My eBook Package royalties to date will not buy a cup of coffee.  Springer does say that they will royalties on MyBook sales, but that would like be less than $1.per copy

On my Springer books, the statement I get shows sales both of physical copies and electronic copies (either the entire book, or individual chapters).  Yes, I have received some money for electronic sales.

Beware of publishing with Apress (Springer-Nature) on two issues:

Payments for SpringerLink downloads are not issued
Data for sales is not shared

I published 5 books through Apress. These books were earlier published on Amazon's KDP program a year before (2016 to 2017) they were republished by Apress (December 2017 onwards).
At Amazon's KDP program they were provided in self-published mode. There I use to get 70% for e-book and 50% for physical book. I could set my own price for different regions. Sales data is shown live too. I was making decent sales of ~10-50 USD per day.
Then Apress approached me to publish the books again (they used the term "adopting") and paid me 3000 USD for all 5 of them (1000 USD for book on Julia programming and 500 USD each for other four). This amount was suggested to be "bonus for signing in" and was in addition to 10% of sales as royalty payments for first 4000 copies, 12.5% for next 4000 copies, 15% for next 4000 copies and 20% henceforth.
But there was a catch. Within the contract, the bonus payments (3000USD) were added for Subscription services like SpringerLink too. Being first-time author dealing with publishers, I was too naive to understand the consequences.
The payments are made on quarterly basis. Payments of one quarter are made at the end of next quarter. My books got published in December 2017. For fourth quarter of 2017, I got payments of ~180 USD which was decent sale of books considering just a month worth of sales. But second payment of Quarter-1 of 2018 which was released in July 2018 was just ~250 USD. This was surprising since the books were decently ranked in Amazon sales data all through the time and Julia book was quite popular. When I asked for sales data based on which royalty statements were issues, the e-mails are simply not relied to. Also at this point of time I realised the issued with subscription based downloads at SpringerLInk where the books got downloaded well over 25000 times within those 3 months of 2018, but I wasn't paid a single dime.
Hence my advice to new authors:

Of course you should not be naive as myself while reading the contract. Even better if you ask a legal expert to do the same.
Ask for payments for subscription based services too. The downloads run in thousands there whereas sales might be less than hundred (if you believe royalty statements!)
To avoid the hassles, go for one-time payments either for life or 5 year basis (royalty paid every 5 years). A decent book priced 20 USD should easily fetch yourself at-least 20,000 USD by the time its obsolete. Of course the estimates varies on type of books and subjects.

I've editted to remove your appeal for help. Whilst it would be great if you could get that help (and given how old this answer is, I hope you got it), this isn't the place for it. If you're still looking for it, I'd ask over on Law.SE.

I am a Springer author of a book in the Boston Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science series, and I made 6% off the gross sales.

If you live in Germany, don't forget to register with VG Wort when your book is published. They only pay out once a year, as does Springer. But I got more money from VG Wort than I did from Springer for my book published in 2014. As an answer above noted: you aren't going to get rich.
Also, do read the proofs very carefully. They seem to employ people who don't understand the manuscripts to do what little editing they do.

Your answer would be more complete, and understandable to everybody, if you could give a short description of what VG Wort is.

Their home page is https://www.vgwort.de/startseite.html (in German). In Germany one cent from every photocopy made and a certain amount for every storage medium is given to the VG Wort to be distributed amongst all of the authors who registered new works for the past year. They pay once a year. They also have an extremely complicated method for registering online articles. Once the articles have be read often enough (the amount changes every year) one can get a few euros for them.

When you publish a book you sign a contract. do you say that you can VG Wort will also publish your book. Could you please tell me what do you do and what do they do? My best guess is that you give your books soft copy to them and they make use of it somehow and pay you 1 cent per usage. Is it compatiable with the contract that you make with Springer? Because you are not allowed to give your book to third parties.

VG Wort does not publish anything. They collect the "Copy cents" (Kopierpfennige) that one pays for every photocopy taken and the yearly fees paid by institutions and distribute that money among the registered authors.

The UK equivalent is ALCS.  They're more focused on humanities than STEM, I think, and on journalism rather than academia, but you should get a small cut from ‘photocopied’ or otherwise downloaded articles.  It emphatically won't pay the mortgage, but it's good for a mildly warm glow every six months.

How much do Springer-Verlag authors make per book sold?

I am getting roughly EUR 2 to 4 for each copy of my Springer book - eBook, softcover, and hardcover, respectively. That's 10% of net sales, and then 25% of that, since my co-author wrote 75% of the book. The annual royalty statements from Springer have been a nice surprise since they also include royalties for eBook packages that universities and other institutions purchase. Plus the book added almost EUR 500 to my VG Wort payout; too bad that's only in the year of publication! So, I am pretty happy with Springer, with the premise that I did not expect (and need) to make any money from this project - indeed the hourly pay is probably something like EUR 2. What may also be of interest to some is that the book is being cited at a rate of 25 to 50 times a year, which is significantly higher than any of my articles. It's a research monograph in a technical field.

Royalties amount to a couple of candybars a year.
It is hilarious to see the looks on students' faces when you recommend your own book for the course. "Cor Blimey, he's getting rich off our backs."
No sunshine, I recommend it because this is the course I intend to teach and you can always download a PDF from the previous years archive, since obviously my book started its life as a set of lecture notes.

With Springer, the royalties accounting report does consider only book sales for individuals while excluding institutional and group sales which constitute the majority of revenues.  For highly specialized expensive books whose price exceeds the capability of individuals, sales are considerably low while institutional and group sales are high.
Even when the detailed chapter by chapter downloads for books on Springer site are high, they are excluded from the royalties accounting report. The authorship rights are thus subdivided into full rights against the minority of individual readers, and zero rights against the majority of institutional and group readers.  Highly unfair to totally exclude the author from institutional and group online downloads and hardcopies.
Totally upsetting and frustrating experience for the authors, specially when emails are not answered!!

I published a book with Springer in 2018. The first years I received less than 100 Euro per year - after that I received less than 10 Euros per year.
If you are based in the German-speaking countries, I urge you to have a look at VG Wort. It will dramatically increase your income once a "Wahrnehmungsvertrag" is signed.

Why the downvote?


text:
What do AHRS, EHRS, QHRS mean on a transcript?
What do the abbreviations AHRS, EHRS, and QHRS mean on a transcript?
My guess would be:

AHRS = "all hours"
EHRS = "earned hours"
QHRS = "quality(?) hours"

What are the differences between these things?

Attempted Hours
Earned Hours
Quality Hours

Source

In the US federal financial aid system there are requirements that students "earn" a certain number of credit hours within a certain amount of time and that attempted (sum of unearned (basically failed) hours and earned hours) cannot exceed certain limits.  Quality hours have earned hours multiplied by GPA points (4 for an A, 3 for a B, etc.)

@BrianBorchers: So, when an employer asks, for example, how many graduate hours I have, what do I give them: the attempted, earned, or quality hours?

@Geremia Earned, typically.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
Interdisciplinary PhDs?
Is there such a thing as an interdisciplinary PhD, where the student chooses the fields, courses, etc.? If so, which U.S. universities offer such a thing?

Almost every PhD program allows students to choose their own electives, and if you Google "interdisciplinary PhD" you will get many results, since this word became very fashionable a few decades ago.

For a while I was a graduate student in the math department of Portland State University. At Portland State, the Ph.D. program in math requires students to have an "allied area" (field of study other than mathematics). The student's thesis must be related to this allied area, the student must take about 25% percent of their courses in the allied area, and the student must pass a qualifying exam in the allied area. Thus the whole program is designed to be interdisciplinary from the get-go.
(Side note: The actual name of degree is "Ph.D. in Mathematical Sciences", and it definitely differs from the traditional math Ph.D.)

In general, every Ph.D. is officially within some formal department, or other program, and a Ph.D. student will need to do at least whatever courses that program requires.  Some such programs, however, are extremely interdisciplinary by their nature: some nice examples are MIT's Engineering Systems Division and Media Lab, where participants have the opportunity to take a wide variety of different courses connected to different disciplines.  Every program has some (often relatively loose) expectations about what a student will do, however, so you're unlikely to find anything where you just get to pick whatever you feel like.
Beyond a certain point, however, a Ph.D. is not about coursework.  Once you start to focus on your research, then you can do anything that you and your advisor agree is appropriate...

authors: Антон Малахов

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text:
Are Honorary Degrees Awarded to Those Lacking PhDs?
Have honorary degrees ever been conferred on someone lacking a PhD?

all the time. Honorary degrees have been awarded to popstars, athletes, etc.
See for example wikipedia

does anyone know of a longer/more complete list of recipients than those mentioned on wikipedia?


text:
Publishing PhD thesis at another university due to not being able to afford high publishing costs?
Would it ever occur, historically, that a PhD student could not obtain his degree from a university due to the high costs of publishing his thesis, such that he would have to publish it at another university and get his degree there instead?

Do any universities charge for the publication of the PhD thesis?

@Tobias at many US universities at least, as far as I know, the costs associated with printing the thesis are borne by the student, and there may also be a fee of some kind required by the university to accept the thesis as fulfillment of graduation requirements. I'm not sure if you'd count it as a publication cost exactly, but this can add up to a few hundred dollars of thesis-related expenses.

@DavidZ So PhD students do not print for free? That certainly sounds atypical to me (though the only US university I have been at is UGA).

@TobiasKildetoft: In some countries, the tradition is that you have several hundred copies of your thesis professionally printed and bound.  (I think there have been some past questions on this.)  That has a significant cost, which the university may or may not help defray.

@NateEldredge But is that a requirement anywhere? I mean, what possible need could there be for that many copies? (I was just happy I didn't have to submit any physical copies at all).

@TobiasKildetoft: Believe it or not, yes.  See this answer.  (Several of the commenters shared your incredulity.)  I have experienced this indirectly; a Swedish friend gave me one of his hundreds of copies.  I probably still have it here somewhere.

@NateEldredge Hmm, very interesting, though from what I can tell it is not actually country dependent, but rather field dependent (as according to the comment by Peter Jansson this should be common in Denmark, where I recently submitted, and where all I needed was a .pdf version).

@Tobias in my experience, no, US universities do not offer free printing of manuscripts for students. (Of course one can always print things from a computer, but I'm not talking about that.) Then again my experience does not extend to cases where any more than about 4 printed copies of a thesis are expected.

@DavidZ That was the kind of printing I meant (as I had not heard about people needing more than a few copies of the thesis before now).

But would a university ever go so far as to make a student who couldn't afford printing his thesis go to another university to publish it and get a degree there instead?

at many US universities at least, as far as I know, the costs associated with printing the thesis are borne by the student — What is this "printing" of which you speak, earthling?

Emphatically, I don't see how this could happen in any subject in the U.S., nor, to my knowledge, in Europe, though I understand that there, in some cases, the actual work can be viewed as somewhat disconnected from a university.
But the point is that, in most subjects in the U.S., for example, one is not required to "publish" one's thesis in any fashion that would incur great expense. A handful of required copies, often printed nearly-for-free, and everything else is optional. Not "page costs" to journals, for example.
Further, in the U.S., it would be essentially impossible to "change universities" for any reason whatsoever, without re-doing many required activities, time-in-residency, and such. So whatever other advantages, there'd be something like a two-year delay, tuition, other things.
I really think that the question's hypotheses are iffy, possibly due to a misunderstanding of how things work. Certainly in the U.S., most likely in Europe, and I'd be surprised to hear that the questions implicit assumptions made sense anywhere in the world (though I'd certainly be interested to hear about such a thing).

When my parents were students in Germany (1930's and 40's) and probably for a long time before that, doctoral theses had to be published, either privately at the student's expense or in a journal.  Because of the cost of private publication, students had a strong incentive to write a thesis good enough to be accepted by a journal. (And there were far fewer journals in those days.)
That information came from my parents. I don't think they mentioned how many copies would be required in the case of private publication, but I'd expect it would be enough copies for quite a few libraries.  Journal publication was not associated with a university, so there was nothing  to be gained by changing universities.

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text:
PhD (Dr.) student willing to finish thesis after several years of inactivity
A few days ago one of my former PhD students (in fact Dr. since I'm in Germany) contaced me and asked me, if there is any chance to finish their PhD thesis. The work was done at a different institution where I was active years ago and I was one of the two advisors.
A rough outline of the facts:

At the time the work was done, it was quite innovative. The work was done in an interdisciplinary field and the person had to dig deep into "the other field" and did a good job. There was a tangible result and an evalutation was performed based on a small group of participants.
The tanglible result was novel at that time, the evaluation of the new system was in line with current findings at that time and confirmed the usefulness and practicability.
The work was not submitted since it was not completed when the contract of that person ended, and after working in the new job, it took a while (~1-2 years) to bring everything to paper.
When this was done (about 3 years ago), the person was in doubt whether "the results are enough" and "whether the validation was proper enough". My feeling was it was enough to at least obtain the grade, even though one could critisize a few things (e.g. size and quality of the study participants), but it was in line with many other theses in this field. The person told me that my remarks would be considered and that I would be contacted if any decision was made.
Now (about 8-9 years after the work was done) the person contacted me and asked, if I would see any chance to "bring this work to an end" - either with the "Dr." title (no matter which grade) or to finally dump it. The person is willing to add some extra work (e.g. doing another evaluation study), but the system developed is outdated from todays point of view and I would see little benefit in an additional study.
The "Dr." title is quite helpful in the field the person is working in.
The technical system itself is still quite unique in the field.

I don't want to bias your answers so I would prefer not to tell at the moment how I responded, but I would appreciate thoughts and experience based on the following questions:

Did you ever experience a PhD handing in the thesis many (>5) years after completition? If yes, was it accepted?
If it was accepted, has it been evaluated based on the state of the art when the thesis work was done, or based on the current state of the art?

Bonus question (but opinion based, therefore just as a bonus ;-) ): How would you proceed? (Keep in mind that the was not done in a structured PhD program but as an employee in a research project for a limited time. And we are in Germany.)

My university had time constraints and you have 7 years after the start of a PhD to complete it. It would be impossible to just "finish" after such a large gap.

@Zenon I double checked the "Promotionsordnung" - there are no time constraints.

The logical answer is that the work needs to be held up to the same standard of a PhD thesis being submitted for evaluation at your university today. When he did it ought to be irrelevant. If it’s at the level of a PhD when measured by the current standards and state of scientific knowledge, give him a PhD. If not, don’t - same as for any other student. (Posting as a comment since it doesn’t answer the main part of the question.)

Related - I don't think it answers your questions directly, but the answers might have some value in giving perspective.

@DanRomik: Maybe the criterium for the awarding of a PhD is the same as 10 years ago: You have to be able to produce innovative research, which the candidate showed already. That it is not innovative today, does not invalidate the fact that it once was.

@user6522399 the candidate did not show it. You show it by writing a thesis, handing it in and have experts evaluate the work you did.

Unpopular opinion: it has been NINE years since they abandoned their PhD for no good reason -- it's totally fair to tell them to pound sand. I think the real question is whether you like and trust the person and the research enough to spend more resources on them.

@cag51 Even though there were no external reasons, the behaviour of the person was comprehensible. But I agree, it's mainly the last part of your comment which counts!

Was there any publication demonstrating the priority/originality of the work? I am surprised I haven't seen this question anywhere in the thread (perhaps I overlooked it?), because I think this is critical in the whole business. If there is no official time limit, then original research is the key in a PhD, and a publication would demonstrate that this has been achieved. Even if by now the research were stale, the achievement stands.

@CaptainEmacs yes, there were publications, but just conference proceedings etc. But the originality has been shown in those publications.

@OBu Well, then you at least have documentation that the work at the time was novel. Now it is the case of the panels to decide whether this is appropriate to accept post-hoc or not. Since the technical system is still unique, you may decide that this additional aspect is sufficiently timely for the work to be accepted as a whole.

Did you ever experience a PhD handing in the thesis many (>5) years
  after completition? If yes, was it accepted?

Our department actually just went through this. Our process involved a justification of why the gap occurred, a defense of the student's standing both at the time the gap occurred and now, and a defense of the scientific merits of the research (and how it wasn't completely stale).

If it was accepted, has it been evaluated based on the state of the
  art when the thesis work was done, or based on the current state of
  the art?

Current.

Unfortunately much of the answer to your question has been given in comments. Let me summarize and then give a personal view as you request.
Yes, many places have a time limit. This is to encourage the student to maintain progress and to limit resources spent on the student's behalf. Your case doesn't really involve either of these and you say there are no limits in any case.
Yes, a degree given today should, in theory, meet today's standards as user Dan Romik has stated.
Yes, it is Germany, where, if I understand it correctly, the rules can be quite formal and, perhaps strictly applied.
An anecdote. I once had a colleague who did world shaking research with some of the top people in CS at the time, but never "earned" his doctorate as he was too busy doing the good work that others are known for. Not that the others don't deserve their acclaim, but my friend just didn't ever put the finishing touches on his work. I once suggested (as he was about to retire) that the university award him an honorary doctorate or lobby another "friendly" university to do so, based on his past work. That this didn't happen always made me sad, as he was, likely, the deepest thinker on our faculty.
My inclination would be to do "whatever it takes" to work with the student to achieve the goal, even if some rules need to be bent a bit. In particular, I would lobby the faculty as a whole to reach a point of awarding a degree by acclamation, or some such thing. I might fail, of course, but I would try.
The reasoning is that the student isn't "shirking" and being given a gift but it is simply a recognition of small, perhaps inconsequential, effects that caused the situation to occur. Letting it go on, or requiring extensive work, seems to me to be letting an injustice fester.
Unfortunately another answer here was very rude and was deleted, but I think that it gave good bottom-line advice. Make it so.

Can you expand on the "degree by acclamation" part? The student did not fulfill the PhD requirements 8 years ago, what has changed? Also, what's the "injustice" you're referring to? It seems like the student dropped their studies on their own accord.

@NuclearWang, I read it as a bit less "voluntary" as the contract ended. My view of the university is that it is the faculty and the faculty should control the rules by which it operates. A bit naive, of course, but I always fought for that view. If the faculty controls the rules it can also make exceptions in appropriate cases. So "acclamation" means, roughly, by "demand of the faculty".

Another anecdote. When former US president Eisenhower was made president of (I think) Rockefeller University he gave a speech in which is listed all of the wonderful things that "the university" would do for "the faculty". After he finished, one of the foremost faculty members stood and said, approximately, "Mr President, the faculty is the university".

@Buffy That was clearly before all the auxiliaries took over: hospitals and medical systems, sports, campus dining, housing/student life, parking, extension programs, professional certificates, foreign campuses, professional school adjunct instructors, overhead departments like IT...

"Yes, it is Germany, where, if I understand it correctly, the rules can be quite formal and, perhaps strictly applied." - but with respect to a possible time limit, this works both ways: On the one hand, if the time's up according to the rules, there may be no leeway for an extension. On the other hand, depending on the university's rules, merely having agreed with the supervisor on a topic, having spent years doing research on said topic and having been employed in the supervisor's lab may not mean anything, as it's well possible the clock for the time limit, according to the rules, only ...

... starts ticking once the PhD candidate has completed some unrelated formal step (e.g. registering their thesis with the exam office), which at some universities is typically done as late as when the thesis is almost ready for printing.

I am not clear that after completion has much meaning outside getting awarded a degree or outward facing milestones, at least not to the outside world. But, with that caveat, there is precedent here:

Other than rules internally imposed by universities there is no agreement that there is "you only get so long" to do it clause in the academia. There are "it might be exploitative to keep a PhD strung along as cheap labour" general agreement, but it's clear that's not what's going on here.
A PhD's merit is measured by contribution to the field. When the work was done should not have any bearing. If work was published during this time, that's a different matter and could well be reasonably judged relative to the state of the art at the time it was published. I don't know if this would be assured though.

Bonus round:
Ask someone with authority if you think it has a decent chance. Ultimately this will boil down to if a university is willing to take on the case (and if an external examiner could be found to support it, but this is rarely an insurmountable issue). I would say there is at least merit to push this further (if you want to, but I would see it as the right thing).

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Applying to History & Philosophy of Science (HPS) PhD programs?
History & Philosophy of Science (HPS) is a relatively small field with a handful of PhD programs in the U.S.
Are their any resources on applying to HPS PhD programs and pursing a career in HPS?


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Master of Research (MRes) schools in the U.S.?
Are there brick-and-mortar or online schools that confer Master of Research (MRes)-type degrees in the U.S.?

Which aspects of the degree do you care about?  There are certainly master's programs in the U.S. in which one carries out research and writes a master's thesis, but I haven't heard of them getting a special designation like MRes.  Would any research-based master's program satisfy you, or are you looking for something beyond that?

I've never seen the term "Master of Research" used in the US.  Many master's degree programs in the US do include a significant research component (either a thesis or project) while other master's degree programs consist entirely of coursework.  In either case, the degree can be called an MS (Master of Science) or MA (Master of Arts) degree.
In programs that do include a thesis, the thesis might be 6 out of 30 credit hours in the degree program.  This is nominally 20% of the program but in practice students often spend much more than 20% of their time on the thesis.  In my experience in mathematics, 3 semesters of course work plus two semesters of work on the thesis is more typical.

My understanding of MRes degrees in the U.K. is that they consist 100% of research and no coursework. Is that true?

From what I understand, MRes degrees are not 100% research degrees but simply master's degrees with a large research component and less course work than a conventional program.  However, I don't work in the British system, so I can't provide an authoritative answer.

Research Master's degrees programmes courses in the UK must guarantee that at least 70% of the content is project based as it is "geared to those wishing to pursue a research career afterwards." http://www.prospects.ac.uk/postgraduate_qualifications_masters.htm


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What is the purpose of the centralized CollegeBoard instead of individual universities giving their own entrance exams?
Why does CollegeBoard (the organization that does the SAT, GRE, etc.) exist? Why don't universities just give their own entrance exams? It seems such centralization of power in CollegeBoard would be a bad thing for diversity in the universities.

Are you familiar with how individual university entrance exams work elsewhere?  The system in Japan for instance is very different from the US one and creates an huge burden on universities, professors and students.

@Kimball What sort of burden?

For one, to ensure fairness, everyone has to take the entrance exam for a given university at the same time and in person (so in practice, you can basically only apply to 2 schools in a given year), and each exam should have completely new questions.  Making these exams every year and then grading them requires a lot of faculty time (note: in Japan, they are not simple multiple-choice exams, so grading is very time consuming).

It's not obvious to me why you think every university administering its own entrance exam would affect diversity (what kind of diversity? Why would it be different?) Perhaps you can [edit] to clarify.

I would expect such a system to increase diversity, since it allows people to easily apply for universities outside their local area, and enables those of lesser means the same chances to meet acceptance criteria. Since CollegeBoard would likely lose custom over an inadequate examination or moderation, it has incentive to make the test as accurate and as widely applicable as possible.

@ff524 and others, there are already concerns in the US, at least, about standardized tests lowering diversity for unplanned socio-economic reasons. Propagating that up a level is likely to make things worse.

One thing I know for certain, if individual universities have their own exams, the travel industry will benefit quite a lot in the spring season every year. An applicant living in Kansas will have to fly to Boston to take the exam by MIT on March 2, then fly to West coast to take exam by Stanford or Caltech on March 4. Worse yet, if both MIT and Caltech have the exam on March 2, which one should I take?

@Kimball: "Each exam should have completely new questions." Why?  The SAT reuses questions.

@NateEldredge I was just describing the system in Japan, and not suggesting entrance exams in the US would work the same way.  (Though replacing the SAT with SAT-like entrance exams seems pointless.)  For instance the math exam for science/engineering students might be a 2h30min exam with 5-6 hard questions and very few students can do all (maybe not even half?) of the problems.  So it's closer to the Putnam than the SAT, but not quite as hard.  If some people have seen some questions before (note exam questions are publicly released) those questions lose their discriminating power.

Applicants to a particular school may be widely dispersed geographically, which makes it infeasible for all of them to be at the university in-person to take the exam (appearing in person may be particularly problematic for foreign applicants), and at the same time infeasible to find space and proctors to give exams in every combination of (student location, university).  Besides, trusting a local party to administer it would eliminate most of the control you propose to give a university over their own exam.  As well, different degree programs at the university would probably want different exams.
Besides that, there's the cost of so much redundant exam creation.  Do you think individual universities would have the resources to normalize year-over-year difficulty of an entire suite of exams?

There are too many exams to efficiently administer and take if there is one for every university. Combining them into a service makes it easier for everyone involved. If a US student wants to apply to Harvard, MIT, and CalTech, do they have to take one or three exams? What if they apply to ten schools rather than three?

I don't think the concern is for the student's time, after all, each university does require filling out its own application, answering its particular essay questions, etc.

@BenVoigt, as a former applicant, I can tell you that there might have been places I wouldn't have applied if I'd needed to take a different 4 hr. exam for each place. Universities care that applicants care because they're competing for the best students. Under this model, they'd be competing in a new way for the best students and have a new reason to lower their entrance requirements (e.g. a sort of race to the bottom to then race to the top). Also, applications are typically shorter than an exam, and not much of anyone will notice if you self-plagiarize your own application letter.

The other answers make good points, but I think they miss some of the most important.

Having such an exam would not help with any of the status games that US schools like to play.  It would discourage applicants, and thus actually be counterproductive in such games (since accepting a low percentage of your applicants is easier if you have more applicants).
Actually, a big reason that universities pay attention to SAT score is that having an entering class with high SAT scores is one of the status games universities play.
Effectively, no one at any university has the least interest in creating and grading such an exam.  Certainly the faculty would hate it.
It would require a lot of money (or to use university parlance: "resources") to run such an exam, whereas the SAT is paid for by the students.  As discussed above, it would lower a university's status and expend faculty goodwill and time (which is effectively money as well).  So, it's a lose/lose/lose.

There's enough correlation between scores on different exams related to the same topic, that I'm sure a school would have an entering class with very high SAT scores even if the decision was based only on performance on say, CLEP and AP exams.  But you're right that a school that chose to give its own entrance exam would still probably demand that students also submit the standard exam scores, just for the bragging rights.


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A private, third party wants to fully fund one's PhD studies. How would one mention this in an admissions essay?
If a private, third party wants to fully fund one's PhD studies, how would one mention this in an admissions essay?

Typically you will be asked about your funding sources at some point during the application process. That would be the right time to click on the box saying scholarship/sponsorship/private funding/whatever. This is true if the application to the university program is separated from that of scholarships/funding opportunities. On the other hand some institutions don't allow their students to pursue a (graduate) degree without having secured a scholarship. Therefore in that case you'd be applying to the program and to the scholarship at the same time and with the same dossier.
Having said this it definitely will not hurt to mention your funding sources in your personal statement if you think that this would add value to your application. If the third party is a well known charity or foundation whose scholarships are indeed prestigious awards then you should probably mention them. This however wouldn't hold if your sponsor is, say, your grandfather.

You would say, at most, that you are not requesting financial support because you have an independent source of funding.

Where exactly does an applicant say this? In the personal statement?

Perhaps at the very end, unless it made more sense in connection with other parts of the statement (e.g. if it was a scholarship from Goggle to pursue cutting-edge search engine technology, and you're applying to a CS department).


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Will Esperanto replace English as the new academic language?
There are already works in several academic fields written in Esperanto. Is it destined to become the new academic language, replacing English?
Esperanto is a constructed language that is easier to learn than English.

What do you mean by easier to 'learn'? English is a very relaxed language, making it easy to put your point across but hard to understand what someone else says.

There are already works in several academic fields written in German. Is it destined to become the new academic language, replacing English? German is a natural language that is easier to learn than English.

There are already works in several academic fields written about Toki pona. Is it destined to become the new academic language, replacing English?
Toki pona is a constructed language that is easier to learn than Esperanto.

Linguist here. Esperanto is more regular than English, but it is a native language for almost no one, and the number of speakers is limited. And whether it is easy to learn depends, to some extent, on the learner's native language(s). No particular reason at the moment to expect it to catch on, particularly in academia (which tends to be fond of tradition). Nonetheless, Esperanto is a fascinating case-study and I will very happily refer any interested reader to Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages (2009) if they want to learn more about it and other constructed languages.

A couple of data points: In mathematics, there is, as far as I know, just one journal with a title in Esperanto, namely "Funkcialaj Ekvacioj." I just visited its web site and, on a quick look, found nothing in Esperanto beyond the title.  I am also aware of one article written in French but with an abstract in Esperanto.  The author, Bruno Poizat, is known for (among other things) his strong disapproval of English hegemony in academia.

I did take a look at the Wiki page provided below and some other references. I can tell this: For me, a native Chinese speaker, Esperanto is much much much much harder to learn than English. This is one data point.

@trikeprof Would you teach me something here? From linguist's point of view, is Lojban easier to learn (by Latin/Roman language speaker) than Esperanto? Just for my curiosity. If it's a hard question, please forget I asked.

@scaaahu No problem whatsoever! If you're starting from Latin or a Romance language, then Esperanto is going to look familiar because a lot of the vocabulary/grammar is very Romance-y. You can probably look at the name of the language and work out that it has something to do with 'hope', for instance. Lojban is probably going to be less immediately intuitive. I know less about Lojban than about Esperanto, though, so it's possible I'm off-target here.

It would have a shot... if we didn't already speak English so widely. It's not the first time our "Lingua Franca" has changed but I wouldn't count on it happening any time soon.

It is far easier and intuitive than english. It would have a chance when schools start teaching it. You can't count on adults learning it in their spare time.

According to Wikipedia, Esperanto is spoken by:

Native: Around 1,000 families involving around 2,000 children (2004)[1]
  L2 users: estimates range from 100,000 total (1999)[2][not in citation given] to 10 million total (1996)[3]

At best, those seem to be some generous numbers.
Given the language has been around since the late 1800s, unless there is some dramatic shift in rate in which people acquire proficiency in the language, the simple answer is "no."


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How was funding handled in the medieval university?
How was funding of research done in the medieval universities?

Scholars were those with money to pursue their own research interests. I think even until recently (~17/1800s?) it would have been a faux pas to ask for money to conduct research

@Luigi I thought they were very poor. hmm

http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for-scientific-research/ The intro talks about personal or acquaintance funding. May not be directly relevant to your question but the article is interesting and may include more relevant information

@Luigi: I don't see anything on the medieval university in that article. The earliest universities were founded by the Catholic Church, and I believe that the Church (typically the diocese) also financially supported them - for instance, Peter Abaelard was a canon. In addition, scholars supported themselves by charging students fees.

You may get better answers at History.SE. If nothing is forthcoming here, consider flagging your question and requesting migration.

The one who could pull the sword from the stone, got the grant.

I don't think the notion of "research" existed or made sense pre-1300 in Europe, at least, and the notion of "funding" could not have had the same sense. The function of the universities was very different, also, due to the socio-economic structure: the three "estates", of "nobles", "church-people", and farm-workers. Not counting slaves. Students at universities were mostly sons of wealthy aristocrats, possibly also entering the church if they'd not be in line to inherit property, etc. And so on...

Duhhh the gladiators.

@StephanKolassa Another (better?) choice might be the History of Science and Mathematics SE.

Plus, of course, monastic orders would send their members to universities to teach (while continuing to feed them), and some of those teachers did take up research. For instance, Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican. The Dominicans were rather conspicuous among scholastic thinkers, teachers and researchers.

A lot of the answers are fairly eurocentric.

@YetAnotherGeek Indeed, since the question is specifically about medieval universities, which are a European feature (although the points about the patronage system would also apply to Islamic science). But if you have complementary answer about a non-European point of view, that would be more than welcome!

@ChristianClason Thanks for clarification. I misread this as research during the Middle Ages, which had also been done many other places. I unfortunately am not experienced enough in the subject, but was interested in how it worked other places too.

Your question is based on a wrong premise: There was no funding specifically for research, because there was no research at medieval universities. Initially, they were created as "self-help" groups of students wishing to learn, first and foremost, the practice of law that was becoming more and more important to urban life. For this purpose, they banded together to pay teachers. (You can find detailed accounts of this in the Wikipedia page or the answers to this question on History.SE). This quickly included also canon law, which brought increasingly many theologians to teach at universities (who, as Stephan Kolassa points out in his comment, did make many significant contributions to the knowledge of the time).
As Darrin Thomas points out, the first research in the modern sense (that cannot be described as doing philosophy) was carried out in the Renaissance by individuals not affiliated with any institution of learning, who were funded either through private means (inheritances, church postings that left them ample free time) or patronage -- in particular, by dedicating self-published monographs to various members of nobility. These later organized themselves outside of the universities in learned societies such as the Royal Society (founded in 1660, but the first seems to be the Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana, founded in 1488 in Cracow). These initially received no funding (apart from the wealth of their members; for example, Robert Hooke, who built many of the experiments for the Society, became very rich by his involvement in the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire), but later received (modest) grants from the government (hence the name, Royal Society). The role of the universities (as opposed to individual researchers, which might or might not hold posts at one) was seen as that of disseminating the new knowledge.
The idea of universities as a place where research should be done (i.e., professors being hired and paid specifically for their research in addition to teaching, rather than research just being what a good teacher did on their own) is a modern one, arising in the beginning of the 19th century with the foundation of the German universities based on Alexander von Humboldt's ideal (which also strongly influenced the new American universities). To quote:

Just as primary instruction makes the teacher possible, so he renders
  himself dispensable through schooling at the secondary level. The
  university teacher is thus no longer a teacher and the student is no
  longer a pupil. Instead the student conducts research on his own
  behalf and the professor supervises his research and supports him in
  it.

Much like modern universities, they were funded by the state: A portion of the tax money was distributed among the universities, which distributed their portion among the departments, which distributed their portion among the professors to pay for their salary and any staff or resources they might require for their research. (Needless to say, there was heavy fighting at all levels about how the money was distributed.)
Funding of specific research via grants is an introduction of the 20th century, when technical and scientific innovation increasingly required expensive equipment. Initially, this was done by corporations and private industrialists, but World War II lead to increasing government support of science and technology. This lead to the creation of national funding agencies after the war. (For example, the NSF was founded in 1950, although the German DFG, founded in 1949, actually has their root in the "Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft" founded in 1920.)

I don't fully agree with your claim that there was no research at medieval universities. Yes, the great scholastic thinkers organized their publications often as commentaries or summaries (e.g., Thomas Aquinas' Summae), ostensibly for the instruction of students, but they did add to existing knowledge and advanced the state of the art. Mostly in theology and philosophy, not the sciences in the modern sense, true, but I'd say this was recognizably research. I recommend Hannam's God's Philosophers, although this aspect is not the central theme of that book.

Yes, that was formulated too strongly; I should have written something like "the purpose of the medieval universities was not research". I also might have a narrower definition of research than you do (no doubt a bias from my own field, mathematics), although I never meant to imply that research (as I meant it) is the only way to contribute to existing knowledge. Anyway, I'll leave my answer as it stands in order not to invalidate your comment.

Thanks. (Incidentally, I'm also a mathematician and take this to mean that mathematics are compatible with a wide range of biases ;-)

Indeed; we're a diverse bunch :)

Agree with Stephan's recommendation for Hannam

A lot of research during the Middle Ages was funded through the patronage system. Scientist and other scholars would receive financial support from aristocratic families, royalty, and even from clergy. For example, Galileo, out of appreciation of the support of the Medici family, named the moons of Jupiter after several members of the Medici family. Unfortunately, these names did not stick. This is act is similar to a stadium taking the name of a sponsoring business.
Another method of research funding was self-funding. Entrepreneurial scientist would find personal sources of income. Kepler supposedly published horoscopes while Galileo built scientific instruments for income. Scientist who were rich either by birth or through savvy business practice were called "Gentlemen Scientist." Among such gentlemen scientist includes Robert Boyle and Stephen Wolfram

It should be noted that none of these was affiliated with any university. Indeed, the notion that research is done at universities is a fairly modern one; historically, universities were purely places to learn the canon in law, philosophy, theology and medicine. (In fact, universities even predate the notion of research as we understand it today.)

This answers the question for the Renaissance period, not the Middle Ages.

As Cape Code says, none of your examples is from the medieval period. Also, none of them would have been called a "gentleman scientist" at the time, although we might now apply the term retrospectively: the word "scientist" was not coined until the 19th century.

The beginning and ending of historical periods is not agreed upon. There is a 100-200 year overlap between Medieval period amd the renassiance.

There's some interesting information about how Kepler was funded here.

@DarrinThomas Certainly the end of the medieval period isn't strictly defined, but I have never seen it put later than mid-16th century. Galileo named Jupiter's moons and Kepler formulated his planetary laws in the early 17th century -- I think it would be a big stretch to claim these years as "medieval". As for Boyle, he wasn't even born until 1627.

I'm not a History scholar but I think there are two questions since a lot of what we would call research nowadays was conducted, and thus funded, outside of the few universities (like Bologna and Oxford) that existed in the Middle Ages and that were mainly teaching institutions in the fields of law and theology.
Major contributors to "research" funding were:

The Catholic Church, even indirectly as many scientific discoveries were made by members of the clergy during the long idle hours their occupation offered them.
Monarchs of various kinds funded work that was likely to put them at advantage in military power, especially in what we would today call engineering, chemistry and ballistics, as well as trade and in particular, navigation that was a lead motivation to study astronomy, mathematical modeling, geometry, as well as agriculture (precursor to today's botany) and other forms of natural resources extraction such as mining. The list wouldn't be complete without arts and architecture that preoccupied reigning powers pretty much everywhere on Earth and that triggered discoveries in geometry, engineering, "classical" physics (that wasn't quite classical yet).

There were also privately or self-funded scholars who investigated occult subjects, such as alchemy and astrology. Astrology in particular was a profitable activity if you counted rich individuals in your "portfolio". These disciplines that seem frivolous to us actually drew a lot of attention and triggered developments that we would today recognizes as scientific discoveries, for example in chemical methods and mathematics.


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How did medieval universities discipline?
How did medieval universities discipline their students? What classroom management techniques did they use?

I think this would be more appropriate on History.SE

The university of Tubingen had a student jail

See Rait's Life in the Medieval University chapters

College Discipline
University Discipline

In the US, you can get Rait's Life in the medieval university from Amazon for free.
There were a number of different punishments for various infractions, which also took the age of the student (children vs. adults) into account. They ranged from a beating over fines to expulsion.

The answers and comments have mentioned Rait's Life in the Medieval University. To give a self-contained answer for this site, this book claims that punishments could be:

financial. This seems to be the most common: fines, loss of "commons" or "burse" (scholarships pro-rated over the period of the punishment), or "sconcing," which seems to be a fine to be paid (or consumed) in wine rather than money.
whipping and other corporal punishments. These were introduced in the 1500s; prior to this, such punishments were for boys rather than adult men. One stricter college would put students in the stocks for fighting.
loss of food. In some places, misbehaving students might get only bread and water, or may have to eat by themselves.
suspension or expulsion. These were reserved for more serious crimes, as now.

In some cases, students (and faculty) were outside the jurisdiction of the lay civil and criminal courts, so actual crimes up to and including murder were dealt with by the internal disciplinary processes of the university. Punishments could include incarceration. One on occasion, the city arrested a student for attempted murder, and the university had to choose the punishment among: cutting off the hand, burning the stigma onto the hand + banishment, or whipping + banishment (at length, option 2 was chosen).
It's worth noting too that the (non-criminal) "crimes" that could lead to such punishments are considerably different than what we have now. Since exams were oral, cheating and such was not really an issue; rather, most of the rules concerned personal conduct. For example, conversation was often required to be held in Latin; this had the explicit goal of reducing conversation altogether. Singing, games with dice, unusual clothing, skipping chapel, sitting down at meals in the wrong order, or missing curfew were often punishable offenses.

Fascinating if true -- if you can provide sources, I'd be happy to add to the answer.

Thanks, found it and added it.

I’m in favour of reintroducing sconcing!

@MassimoOrtolano Those of us who lived in colleges where some vestiges of sconcing still existed were glad to see it abolished/abandoned. It had become a mere drinking game.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sconcing).

@erstwhileeditor Ha! From this answer I had interpreted sconcing the other way round, that is, that the offender would bring wine (possibly good) to the professor. If instead it's like in the Wikipedia's article, then, no.


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Is it bad style to use time-related adverbs (like "recently") in academic writing?
I was going through my supervisors corrections and comments on a particular section of my thesis and I realised that he consistently removed words like "recently" when referring to literature, i.e.

"In a recently published study, monkeys were taught discrete algebra when listening to Beethoven through one ear, and Beyonce through the other"

I haven't had the opportunity to talk to him about it, so I figured I might get a reason as to why words/phrases like that are not desired in literature. Besides it might be helpful for others as well.
Question(s): Is there something wrong with using phrases like "recent study"? If so, is it specific to a field (biomedical science in my case) or to a particular type of publication (thesis vs a regular article, for example)?

At least in my field, it's more standard to omit the word "study" entirely and rephrase as suggested by https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/51866/8966. It's also better writing anyway, as the result is less verbose.

I find that there are some places where temporal context (e.g., "recently") is appropriate in discussing the literature, and others where it is not:

When I'm justifying the "Why now?  Why is this interesting?" nature of the work, typically in the introduction, timeliness is often important, and I'll use words like "recently."  This helps show that researchers are currently interested in the work in the paper, and can help motivate the work by showing how it's filling in a newly recognized gap.
When I'm surveying a landscape of work, on the other hand, it doesn't matter when work was done, just how it relates.  Then I would not note the time of publication.

Your colleague might have been over-zealous (some people have notions or phrases that they just hate), or you might have been giving information that wasn't actually useful in context, and thus should be deleted as distracting.  It's impossible to know without looking at the context in detail, but hopefully these principles can help guide how you think about it.

I'm not sure there is anything particularly wrong, but rather that it would become outdated. If someone reads your thesis 5 years from now, is what you called "recent", still "recent"? On the other hand, if you say:

These other authors (year) taught monkeys discrete algebra ...

Simply providing the year allows the reader to know how recent the other paper is, no matter when someone reads it. I don't know if there are any field-specific conventions, I would assume that it's a personal style.

sure, i get that what's recent now won't be recent in 5 years. On the other hand, the publication date of the thesis won't change, so the results being referred to will always stay "recent" with respect to the thesis.

That's a good point. Though it's still moving towards providing an interpretation for the reader regarding the time of publication, instead of allowing the reader to do so for him/herself. As a reader, I'd like to decide that for myself.


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Strategies, approaches, methods for motivating innovation adoption in academia
I'm curious about what strategies, approaches and/or methods people (successfully) use in academia for motivating colleagues to adopt innovative research collaboration mechanisms, workflows and/or tools. Please share your experience or point to proven range of approaches.
The following is in lieu of background information. Currently I'm leading a university project for developing a software platform for scientific research and e-collaboration in a particular scientific domain. Earlier I have installed, configured and publicized another software platform with a goal of increasing research productivity and make scientific collaboration and reproducibility easier within our group and beyond. Unfortunately, after initial decent interest of some people, most of them (and the rest) went back to "doing business as usual". I understand that researchers are busy and are under a lot of pressure to meet/exceed expectations and due to career advancement demands. I don't want to shove innovation down people's throats, but, at the same time, I'm quite frustrated that people do not see (or don't want to see, or don't care) significant potential benefits of some new ways in doing research and/or scientific software development in academia.
Considering the high visibility of my current project, I started thinking about / trying to come up with novel strategies and approaches to motivating colleagues in academia toward adopting innovative methods/tools (i.e., Agile) through emphasizing their potential benefits and/or lost opportunity in research productivity and other aspects, when such innovative methods/tools are not used.

Why do you believe that "another software platform" improves productivity? And why your "new ways in doing research" are better than any other method that other people use? I do not doubt neither your motivation, skills or your good will, but why do you believe that you know better than your colleagues?

@Alexandros: I'll start with your 2nd question and then will return to the 1st one. I think that "new ways in doing research" are better than some (I haven't said "any") other methods that other people use, because IMHO they potentially improve productivity, along with offering other benefits (i.e., reproducibility). They potentially improve productivity etc., based on logic and my prior experience, It's not that I understand better, it's just 1) I have research background as well, plus 2) I have significant (relative to other people in my group) software development and process exposure.

@Alexandros: (cont'd) That (my last sentence) is not to say that other people in my group don't have software development and process exposure (some of them might very well be better developers than I'm), but they significantly more focus on research per se in their subject domain. In other words, I tend to see the bigger picture (have a wider focus) - again, it's all relative and I'm not trying to generalize anything.

You have to be very very very careful. Statements like "I tend to see the bigger picture" and "I'm quite frustrated that people do not see (or don't want to see, or don't care) significant potential benefits" are guaranteed to backfire.

If you haven't already heard of it, you may be interested in a topic called Change Management.   When you get down to it, you are trying to practice psychological persuasion - and academics are rather well known for being...resistant to being told what to do, generally. These topics have spawned entire fields of research, and dozens of job titles, and I feel that ultimately this is simply too broad to be answerable in the Stack Exchange Q&A format.

Learning new tools takes a lot of time and effort that could also be used for research. This can be a bad trade-off, especially for junior academics. The promised future benefits may simply fail to materialize, if they're unable to secure a permanent position due to reduced research productivity meanwhile.

I think you've made it too much about the process.  Try making it about the people.  Seek out the like-minded instead of expecting them to flock to you.  Students included.

I appreciate everyone's excellent and direct feedback, even the some that makes wrong assumptions about me or what I'm trying to do. Below I will comment individually.

@MaartenBuis: Thank you for the warning. I have considered the backfiring aspect before posting those statements and made a conscious decision to prefer an open/honest and direct tone to fuzzy statements. My hope is that people will understand that I'm trying to present myself in any way superior to my colleagues, but what I'm thinking and saying might be true simply because of the following: 1) my potentially more diverse IT experience (again, no offense or generalizations are implied); (to be continued)

@MaartenBuis: (cont'd) 2) most of my respected colleagues are much more (and more deeply) involved in specific research areas of one or more scientific domains, so they (or most of them) simply don't have time (and, for some, desire) to see their research through a larger variety of perspectives, including the "big picture" 30,000 feet view. I'm not saying that I always see the bigger picture, but I think that often I do. Plus, my statements do not imply the context of subject domain knowledge, but rather the one of research workflows and collaboration strategies, methods and tools.

@BrianDHall: Thank you for your valuable comment. I certainly was aware of change management (CM) field, but haven't had major practical experience, spearheading and implementing significant changes, especially in academia environment. I will definitely consider refreshing my knowledge on CM as well as using relevant strategies and approaches in my attempts in helping my colleagues (and my university) to use innovation in research workflows and collaboration in order to be more productive and, thus, more competitive.

@JouniSirén: Thank you. I agree - your point aligns with my current sentiment in regard to being one of the major reasons for weak adoption of new methodologies and/or tools in academia. I guess, one of the approaches in fighting this problem is to create a circle of early adopters, who not only will enjoy the promised benefits (willing to take some risks first), but also will become change ambassadors in a particular environment. In order to help those early adopters to minimize said risks, I think it makes sense to use an adaptation of Agile methodology (short and small change iterations).

@DaveKaye: Thank you for the comment. I'm always trying to use my people and communication skills to (genuinely) establish rapport and build collaboration on this, as a foundation, rather than on the process. However, any work (even creative, such as art or science) implies a process (with different entropy levels), so when people are nice, but don't want to change their research routines, you can't expect any significant improvements in their productivity, research reproducibility and/or other benefits. Finding like-minded people is one of approaches I'm using, but it might not be enough.

Could we see some screenshots of the software?  I'd bet $20 the main reason people do not want to use it is that the UI is bad.  Good UI is much more important (and much, much more difficult) than most developers realize.

@BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft: No, you cannot, as the software (as planned) doesn't exist yet (so, you just saved $20 :-). It's a good point, though, and I'm certainly paying attention to the UX/UI aspect. However, it seems that you (and some other people) have missed my main point: my concerns and efforts in regard to future adoption are due to my desire to plan and embed relevant strategies and approaches into ongoing development process

@BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft I'd bet $50 that, in fact, the main reason people don't want to use it is that they don't feel that it solves any actual problem that they have.

@DavidRicherby: How do you know that people "don't want" to use some tools or approaches? Have you considered that some people are too busy to change their research routine that is comfortable to them (but not necessarily optimal in terms of productivity and other aspects)? Have you considered that some other people are not ready to perform a mental shift toward different approaches? Having said that, you, as many others, also missed the focus of my question: it's not about that adoption of a "small" tool in the past, but rather about potential adoption of the "big" tool in the future.

To those, who have placed my question on hold. Existing answers, while not perfect, are quite good in partial answering of my question and I'm satisfied with them (plus, there might be others coming). This is just another confirmation that this question is totally answerable with regard to both scope and size. Therefore, I am hoping that your decision will be reconsidered, so that other people will have a chance to provide their answers in academia's spirit of open discussion and encouraging different perspectives.

@AleksandrBlekh "How do you know that people 'don't want' to use some tools or approaches?" You said as much yourself! People start to use it but then stop.

@DavidRicherby: The emphasis of my previous comment is on want versus other potential reasons (being too busy, effort for a mental shift, distractions, etc.). I didn't say they stopped, because the didn't want to use.

@AleksandrBlekh I'm sorry but you're kidding yourself. If these people wanted to use your stuff, they'd continue to use it. The fact that they used it for a while and then stopped using it says very strongly that it had no significant net advantage (i.e., no significant advantage, period, or disadvantages that outweighed any significant advantage). Or do you really believe that these people have so little control over their lives and their research methodologies that they can't do things they want to do, even when those things are beneficial to their careers? That just doesn't add up.

@DavidRicherby: I respectfully disagree. And can clarify why (I haven't included these details initially to make my question compact). When I said that my colleagues used the first (infrastructural) system, I didn't specify for how long. In reality what happened is that some people from my group "used" the system just to extent of registering in it. So, effectively, nobody, but me, really used the system. So, your argument is invalid, because it is based on the wrong assumption / interpretation. (to be continued)

@DavidRicherby: (cont'd) Moreover, as I mentioned, the system is infrastructural and, thus, is not a core element of people's research. Thus, even if it would be used for a while and then abandoned, it would be understandable due to being non-essential for the research. So, I used that example just to provide some context. The other, large system (under development) is a different story. It is essential to research (though the option of doing "business as usual" still remains). (to be continued)

@DavidRicherby: (cont'd) That is why I am seeking various solutions in order to plan accordingly, embed those solutions into the overall strategy and, thus, maximize chances for the system's adoption and success.

@AleksandrBlekh " I said that my colleagues used the first (infrastructural) system [...] [but] effectively, nobody, but me, really used the system." Well, no wonder my arguments are invalid. They're based on the assumption that, when you say something, that thing isn't a total misrepresentation of reality. Like I said, you're deluding yourself.

@DavidRicherby: Well, I had no intention of misrepresenting reality. I'm sorry, if you and some other people feel that way. Perhaps, mentioning the 1st (infrastructural) system was not the best idea - I just wanted to set the context. However, the core of my question is about the future system and I think I made that clear enough. I'm not sure why people focused on something that is not the core of the question...

@DavidRicherby: One more point. I just re-read my question and I don't see words that suggest specific interpretation of people's time length of use of the 1st system. My phrase "after initial decent interest of some people" does not imply significant time frame, quite the opposite: "initial" implies a short period of time. Having said that, I could have done a better job in making sure the question is clear to degree that doesn't allow for invalid assumptions.

OK. In that case, it sounds like this whole comment thread is the result of people getting confused. Apologies for my share of the mess.

@DavidRicherby: Thank you. No problem at all - we all have introduced our respective shares of confusion. But it was me who has started it all :-).

Please [edit] your question to clarify, so that others who share the misunderstanding don't have to read through an extended comment thread. Then you can delete and flag comments that have been made obsolete as a result. (Editing the question will also push it into the review queue for potential reopening.)

@ff524: Thank you for the suggestion. Will do that as soon as I can.

@AleksandrBlekh there has been quite a lot written on what you're trying to do as regards the field broadly known as "Knowledge Management."  A significant chunk of the research in to the field has been based on simply getting others to buy in to KM as an idea in the first place.  Try there?  For instance: http://www.tlainc.com/articl174.htm

@DaveKaye: I'm familiar with KM theory and (some) practice. However, standard approaches to implementing KM are too "heavy", as they focused on large organizations, non-academic environments and longer time frames. Since I'm trying to implement KM in academia, within smaller scope and shorter time frames, I'm considering applying some Agile approaches, so it can be referred to as "Agile Academic KM" (C). So, I think it's more about motivation and larger field / perspective of change management, as BrianDHall has mentioned. Nevertheless, I appreciate your comment and reference.

@AleksandrBlekh I think you get this but I'm not suggesting you try KM, but rather that you look in to the countless examples KM literature has about trying to create buy-in for KM.  Just to clear that up.  ;-)

@DaveKaye: Oh, I see. Now it's much clearer to me what you've meant :-). Will certainly follow your advice. Thank you, again.

I'm quite frustrated that people do not see (or don't want to see, or don't care) significant potential benefits of some new ways in doing research and/or scientific software development in academia.

Have you considered that those benefits may simply not be there, at least not to the extent that you hoped for them? One PhD student building a scientific prototype for a conference is not the same as building a product, and many ideas, concepts, and processes that are great for building a collaborative product on Facebook scale may simply be dead weight or even counter-productive for a PhD student in his daily development work. Frankly speaking, if people actually tried your new way of doing things but then went back to "the old way", this is at least some serious indication that there may actually be merit  to the old way beyond pure inertia. People typically don't revert to an inferior way of working on purpose after trying something new and better. Have you actually talked to people why they went back?
Anyway, if you wanted to sell your agile ideas to me, the core question to answer would be:
What are concrete, plausible scenarios how your ideas would help me personally?
Stay away from lofty but abstract concepts such as code quality, reproducibility, code reuse, etc. Explain how each researcher individually can profit. What sort of embarrassing bugs and mistakes can be prevented? In what sense can each researcher individually save time? What new papers can be written that we could not easily write the old way?
This requires you to understand extremely well how your colleagues are currently working and what their current pain points are. If whatever way they currently build software is efficient and reasonably bug-free for them, I highly question you will be able to convince them to do e.g., TDD "because that's what industry does". If they are usually able to reproduce their experiments well enough, you won't be able to convince them to set up Docker containers for everything in the future, just because Docker is the current hot shit.
If you actually have access to them, explain cases of "lost opportunity in research productivity and other aspects, when such innovative methods/tools are not used". The important part here is that those cases are (a) real, or at least plausible based on the experience of your colleagues, and (b) damaging to me personally. For instance, it will be hard to convince PhD students to invest time setting up a code based / infrastructure purely for the sake o the next generation of students.
(and, of course, stay far away from ever implying that my scepticism for your ideas is because you see the bigger picture and I don't)

Excellent answer (+1). Thank you for your advice - you mention important points, most of which I'm aware of, though, and already trying to implement. Most people didn't quite get my question's emphasis on distinction between the not very good adoption for the smaller (infrastructural) project and my efforts to learn lessons from that and embed them into my plans (strategy, approaches) for the much larger (and much more scientific) ongoing development project. I have no intention to ever imply that someone cannot see the bigger picture - my point is that many people are just too busy to do so.

The best way to illustrate the value of new tools is to effectively use them yourself. If you are an active researcher and you are twice as efficient as your peers, then your peers might ask you how you manage such a torrid pace.
It sounds like you are not an actual user of your own tools. Moreover, it sounds like researchers demonstrated a willingness to try your tools and were not impressed. I would advise concentrating your energies on figuring out why these researchers chose to go back to "business as usual". You are most likely to succeed if you start from the premise that they know how to do their jobs effectively.

Very good point (+1). Unfortunately, you've got the wrong impression, as using approaches and tools I'm advocating for, is exactly what I have been doing, am doing and plan on continuing to do so (to a certain degree). However, I'm seeking supplemental strategies, approaches, methods and tools to help me with my efforts. "... and were not impressed" - no, they were and are too busy (plus other reasons) to change their research routines to adopt new approaches and tools. Plus, some tools are not ready yet - they are in development, so I can't blame people for not using what's not available yet.

I'm a former consultant, and having people like what you provide is key to a consultant's life (doesn't mean I'm right, and it's quite a long while ago for me). It sounds as if you're looking at the wrong end of the chain of steps of how a new product is ideally rolled out - reception, and feedback by users of the finished product. On top of what other answers have stated, you appear to have skipped the 0th stage.
When you are tasked to implement a new tool, you are likely given broad ideas of what the tool is to achieve. But you'll always run up against people being used to old tools, and both liking them and loathing them for some of their aspects. To ensure buy-in, or at least make it more likely, you should push for an interview stage before you start with any work on the tool. Get a solid understanding of the current situation by spending time with the old tool, then prepare a questionnaire for (some of) its users. Tell them that you have been tasked to create a new tool, and strive to make it as useful for them as possible. For this, ask, among others, about

What is essential to you in any such tool?
What would you like to see again which you currently have, with as little change as possible?
Which aspects of the current tool do you loath?
Which additional features would you welcome?
(assuming you are already considering options, solicit feedback on them)
Is there any cross-integration with other tools this tool should have?

There are obviously many more question to ask, but a lot depend on the project at hand.
I would then also ask for one of the later users as a during-project contact with who you share progress to get some in-development feedback. And after roll-out, a training session, and going from desk to desk to help people get set up, will help.
While you can never guarantee that a tool will be willingly adopted, adoption will be much less likely if its users do not feel that they have been involved in its development.

Excellent answer and good points (+1). I'm already interviewing people (as part of requirements elicitation process), so, at least that, I hope I'm doing right :-). My concerns and efforts in regard to future adoption are due to my desire to plan and embed relevant strategies and approaches into ongoing development process (and interviews are part of it). Interestingly, a set of my interview questions includes most of those you've mentioned. However, I hope to be able to improve it, though.


text:
What qualifies a paper/dissertation to received the status 'published'
This is for a master's level, if a department decides to publish students' dissertations, does that qualify to be named as a published paper? or does it have to be a journal with certain impact factor?
Edit: if online publications are considered ok, can they be added to a resume in 'publication' sections?

I think the difference lies in the peer-review process. Just because something is made available (or "published") doesn't give it any academic weight.

@Landric So unless it gets peer reviewed, it would not qualify for that status?

I wouldn't like to say with certainty (which is why I haven't made this an answer); however, certain types of publications (such as Tech Reports) are more often published by an academic institution rather than a journal. It also depends what you want to use it for; you might not be able to use it as a citation, but I think it would be fair to include it on your resume.

@Landric great, I'll leave the question up in hope of getting more comments on this.

A MSc thesis residing on an university's repository is not a peer-reviewed publication. Period.

...but it is a publication.  Period.

Interesting debate between JeffE and Alexandros

There really is no debate. @JeffE is right because a MSc thesis is a publication and thus can be cited. On the other hand, so does a blog or an manual for a vehicle or the website of an online tool. I am also right because a MSc thesis is not a peer-review publication as a paper accepted in a journal or a conference.

I was just interested in the academic sense, I know many things would qualify to be considered publications.

The exact meaning of the word "publication" is dependent on context.  In some contexts, it might be understood to include only articles accepted in peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings.  (Impact factor is not usually a consideration here.)  In other contexts, it might also include books, dissertations, lecture notes, arXiv preprints, and other documents that have been made publicly available.
So whether a dissertation should be "named as a published paper" depends on your audience.
For academic CVs, people often create two sections: one that lists peer-reviewed publications, and another that lists non-peer-reviewed writings.  This removes any ambiguity.  A master's dissertation would go in the non-peer-reviewed section.
If you are writing a resume for the business world, standards might be different.  http://workplace.stackexchange.com might be a better place to ask about that situation.

Indeed I am targeting academia. Thanks for the concise answer.

It is published according to the usual, dictionary definition of "publish", but that is the wrong question. A better question, is "Does this publication count towards my list of requirements for X?" where X might be:

tenure
promotion
hiring for research-only positions

In the academic tenure context, there will be a list of publication types that count towards your tenure case. These often include peer-reviewed journal articles, peer-reviewed conference papers, and books. The requirements might be more strict like first-author papers in one of a small list of conferences.
A master's thesis usually wouldn't count for much in this context. It might have been helpful to your hiring case as a tenure-track professor, but even that is unlikely. It is certainly an interesting piece of a PhD admissions package for someone who decided to get a master's and PhD at different institutions.


text:
Can an author decline to be on a biorxiv paper?
Asking for a friend.
If an author is added to a biorxiv paper, but does not want to be part of it, is there any recourse for him/her?

I suggest contacting bioRxiv directly. The answer depends specifically on their policies.

In common with other publishing platforms, bioRxiv requires the submitting author to confirm that all authors have agreed.

An article may be deposited in bioRxiv in draft or final form, provided that it concerns a relevant scientific field, the content is unpublished at the time of submission, and all its authors have consented to its deposition.

Your friend should contact bioRxiv to explain the situation. The contact email listed on the FAQ page is:

biorxiv.feedback [at] cshl.edu

Submitting a manuscript for publication without the consent of all of its authors is serious misconduct. Depending on the specifics of the situation, your friend should complain about this to administration at the relevant institutions.