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Can a public university block me on their official social media account if I am a student and/or employee?
I am a Ph.D. student at a large public university in the US. I am working on completing my defense and trying to graduate before the end of the summer term. I found out recently, rather accidentally, that the university's official account had blocked me on social media. This is presumably because I had posted critical comments on a number of their posts.
Are public universities allowed to do this? I believe this violates some federal precedent based on President Donald Trump, where he was made to unblock politicians he disagreed with on social media. I would like to address this for the sake of future students.
If I pursue this, is this likely to harm my academic career? I am concerned about potentially starting a legal battle with the university since I hope to graduate soon and am currently asking for letters of recommendation. The last thing I would want is for a professor who would disagree with my take on a certain issue in favor of the university's position and have that affect possible letters of recommendation.

This question is probably better suited for Law.SE.

My guess would be that they don't block quite as cavalierly as is implied here, and that "disagreeing respectfully" crossed a line that's not actually respectful. However, probably this comment will not convince you of that.

Obligatory xkcd.

Comments have been moved to chat and a few suggestions have been edited into the post. Please note the post notice above; future answers-in-comments and so forth cannot be retroactively moved to chat and must therefore be deleted without warning. Note, the first question is somewhat borderline for this site; we are not legal experts. The second seems okay to me.

If you want legal advice you should hire a lawyer.  I'm surprised to discover this, but from a cursory reading of Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump and reports on the decision, it sure looks like it would apply to public universities.  If that's the case, then public universities would be quite restricted in the reasons they could use to block accounts.  Of course, we don't know why they blocked you, and it's possible they did so for reasons unrelated to viewpoint.  But I'm not a lawyer, and it's quite possible that there's a key point I'm missing here, and at any rate the issue has not yet been litigated so it's impossible to give a certain answer.
As to whether it's a good idea, cheersmate gets it right on this point: there's no possible good that this can do you, and a lot of potential for harm to you.  This is especially true if your posts in question are insulting or otherwise paint you in an unprofessional light.  If they're genuinely unoffensive content, then probably suing won't harm you much, but it'd still be expensive and time-consuming, and some people might be nervous about interacting with someone who brings lawsuits at the drop of a hat.

The question is whether this university account is a "public forum." If that's not how the university is using it, then Knight doesn't apply. From what the OP said in chat, it also appears that he was not blocked from other university accounts that are used to conduct university business.

Right, they'd have to decide whether that particular account was a public forum (it seems very clear to me from Knight that the main university twitter account is a public forum, but maybe other university accounts are different) and they'd have to decide whether the account was blocked because of viewpoint.  Both of those depend on facts not available to us.

Your university uses its "main" twitter account to engage in debates on controversial campus issues? It seems to me that such accounts don't serve any purpose other than to make dumb PR announcements. It's not like there's nowhere else to make your voice heard.

I agree that that is a difference, but I don't see anything in the text of the decision suggesting that the key point is whether the account engages in debates or makes PR announcements, quite to the contrary, the bottom of page 8 and top of page 9 suggest that the account being used for PR announcements is evidence in favor of it being a public forum.  Nonetheless one would need to litigate to be sure.

Trump was conducting government business on his Twitter account, not just making announcements about someone else's decisions. He was actually hiring and firing people real time on Twitter.

It really looks to me from reading the decision that making PR announcements is precisely conducting government business.  Again see pages 8-9 and page 18.  As I said, I'm not a lawyer, but it would help if you would point to something in the decision or elsewhere in case law that suggests that making PR announcements to the public is not conducting official business.

I was making a distinction between what Trump was doing and what a university PR office does. I'm not a lawyer either, but again, the central issue is whether this particular account is a "public forum." The footnote at the bottom of p.17 cites a case defining a public forums as "places that the government has opened for use by the public as a place for expressive activity.” Trump did this implicitly, top p.23. IMO, a university PR account does not, especially if there are alternative forums. Not every interaction with the public must or should be considered a place of expressive activity.

Incidentally, I think in this situation the viewpoint discrimination angle is a crock. Assuming that the university is just keeping controversial stuff off their PR feed, blocking people looking for a fight has nothing to do with "discrimination against conservatives."

@ElizabethHenning: I assume you're quoting from an earlier version of this question which I didn't see?  At any rate, I certainly agree that there's a very good chance in practice that there wasn't viewpoint discrimination.  In Knight both sides stipulated that the accounts were blocked based on viewpoint, so the decision doesn't address that question at all.  For example, blocking people who are using sockpuppets seems to me like it would be viewpoint neutral.

Can a public university block me on their official social media
account if I am a student and/or employee?

De facto: yes. De jure: we don't know (see Noah Snyder's answer and the comments), but I don't see a compelling reason against it.

I am concerned about potentially starting a legal battle with the
university

Then don't.

But I'm not sure I should even worry about it because of how close I
am to graduating and whether it will affect my job search.

Starting legal battles simply because of political disagreement or because you cannot accept being blocked (after a twitter fight with you using multiple accounts) means there will be a public record of behavior which many people will find unpleasant. Such a reputation can obviously affect future job prospects. To avoid this, don't do anything which earns you a this reputation (i.e., let it go).

At the same time, even if it will have no long-lasting effect on me, I
don't want the problem to go unaddressed for other students.

As you only found out "rather accidentally" about being blocked, there seems to be not that big of a problem. Possibly other students avoid this situation by avoiding posts which get them blocked in the first place.

I suspect your answer to the first part is correct, but would be nice to see a citation. As for the second part, it's perhaps logical to give the university the benefit of the doubt, but theoretically, if a university was posting abhorrent content and blocking students who dissented, I think many reasonable people would think legal action was appropriate.

@cag51 Added a disclaimer. Regarding the theoretical scenario: I think it is extremely unlikely that a (large, public) university posts anything really repulsive. The people maintaining these accounts are usually professionals and avoid anything controversial.

@cheersmate Your answer is good (+1), but regarding your controversial posts comment, I don't think that's true. See here for a representative social media post: https://m.facebook.com/IndianaUniversity/posts/10159180323819595 (and see the comments for the apparent controversy). It wouldn't be surprising at all if this exact topic was what the OP was referring to; most major unis have made similar official statements on the last year, and they've received pushback from conservative politicians, alumni, donors, etc.

So that my meaning is unambiguous: I certainly don't mean to say that the IU Facebook post I linked is "abhorrent," and I don't personally find it to be "controversial." But, per the comments on that same post, others may disagree with me, and that's one of the obviously thorny facets of any of this discussion.


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How to determine which textbook problems are the most useful when studying?
If I have to study for an exam, like organic chemistry, I know that I should be studying my notes and, most importantly, practice problems.
However, when you have to review for final that is cumulative, you have to go through potentially hundreds of problems assigned. I understand the best case scenario is that you budget your time throughout the weeks to do them all, but some problems are just repeats of a very simple concept (sometimes with a nuanced variation).
My question is: how do you determine out of all the problems assigned which ones would be the most effective to study for the final/an exam?

Are you saying that they were assigned and you didn't do them, and now exams are coming up so it is time to actually do them now? Or have you done them all previously in the flow of the course?

@Buffy Could be "recommended practice problems".

Some books list problems that increase in difficulty, so do the first one, the last one and one or two from the middle...

Perhaps the obvious answer, but I would select a random subset, taking about two problems from each section (~20 problems total). In some courses, I would skip the first few chapters (e.g., by the end of a physics course, you probably won't need to review unit conversions or vector addition).
Then I would try to solve this random subset under test conditions. Some of the questions might be too easy or too specific; such questions can be swapped out. But the essential thing is to actually do a few questions from each section end-to-end, don't just think about it, read the answer, and declare victory.
After spending a few hours on the above, you will be in a position to allocate your remaining study hours among the topics.

Ignore the textbook problems and concentrate on the course material. This can be past-year exam papers or simply the homework problems assigned.
Once you're fully familiar with these, you'd have some idea what kind of questions can be expected, and can work through the textbook problems with that knowledge.

That's why there's the second sentence.

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I missed an application deadline, but it wasn't entirely my fault. How can I still be considered?
About a week ago, I went to submit the application for the mathematics PhD program at one of my top choice schools.  The form told me I had missed the deadline, which was December 15th.  I had January 5th written down on my list of application information, but when I looked it was indeed Dec. 15 on the department website.
I distinctly remembered seeing Jan. 5th, however, so I looked it up again and found the website for general graduate admissions where I found the deadline to begin with.  It said/says January 5th, and is even program specific (under the "PhD in Mathematics").  So I emailed my application to the mathematics department graduate admissions email address explaining there was an incorrect deadline on another part of the website, provided a link, and requested that I still be considered.
I should note that this is a big school which will probably get a lot of applications, so hopefully they haven't gotten far through review yet.  Also, everything except my personal statement was on the website before the Dec 15 deadline, but of course the submit button was not hit so I don't know if this helps.
I haven't heard back from them aside from an automated "we'll get to this eventually" email, and it has been about 7 days now.  I think I have a strong application for this school in particular and really don't want to lose my chance to apply.  What do I do?  Should I try to call the math department?  Submit it to a different email?  Or am I just boned?
Update: I called the department's admissions office and was vigorously informed that they refuse to consider my application under any circumstances and that they "didn't care what my excuse was." The prof I was corresponding with talked to somebody and I guess they're going to fix that part of the website. Doesn't do me any good, but it's nice to know. I would up getting into (and completing) a PhD program somewhere else.

I would try and personally contact someone at the school, like @gerrit commented, call them. Try and explain your situation, and say that you hope you will still be considered for the program. Do mention that it was not that you simply forgot the deadline, but that an official document stated the wrong date and include this piece of evidence. Stress that you are very enthusiastic about the program, and that you would be disappointed if this communication error would prevent you from having a chance to enter the program.

Sorry to disappoint you but Dec 15 to Jan 5 is a long time in the graduate admissions process. We (in neuroscience) try to read and short list (hundreds of) applications within a week of the application deadline so that we can send out invitations for 2nd round interviews, which generally take place at the end of January.
It is pretty bad that they had conflicting information on their site. I think the "call them" advice is good. But it would be even better if one of your letter writers knows someone personally at that school and can intervene on your behalf.

OP has already been disappointed in 2013, 10 years later I think he is ok with the outcome ...

I ended up getting into (and completing) a different PhD program. Still think they should have let me apply, but hey, their loss.

You do two rounds of interviews?

@EarlGrey that's hilarious - I didn't notice how old this question was... somehow it popped up as hot network questions.

@AzorAhai-him-Typically most departments in my field select a list of candidates for interviews from the applications, and those candidates are invited for interviews. However, we have been discussing a 2 round interview process, with the first one remote and a smaller pool invited for in person interviews/recruitment.

I probably would have explained this to one of your recommendation letter writers to see if they could write to someone in the department.

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Should I make my research students' pay contingent on completion of tasks (such as reading/summarizing papers)?
I received a fund that I can use explicitly for paying graduate (master's and doctoral) students for research. These students already receive a stipend from the university, but most advisors who can afford it pay them a supplement. My colleagues just pay a fixed amount per month. However, I am inexperienced in advising students, and I fear I might end up wasting the money on students who do not do their job.
So I thought of making the payment contingent on some research-related task. I do not want to make it contingent on actual research results, since the "flow" of results (particularly in my field - theoretical computer science) is not constant, and the students need a reliable source of income. Instead, I thought of paying the students for reading and summarizing papers and books related to their research topic (up to the maximum amount I can pay per month). There are several reasons:

Reading is an important part of research.
Most fresh graduate students do not read enough - they prefer to program. They need an incentive to start reading.
Reading is a relatively "stable" activity: by putting a sufficient amount of effort, the student can guarantee a fixed income for themselves.
Summarizing research papers will help the students once they start writing their own papers.
The summaries can also be useful for me during teaching, as supplementary material for the students.

Is it reasonable to pay research students based on reading & summarizing papers, or for other activities?
Clarifications:

The basic income (before the supplement) may or may not be enough to live on. For students who come straight for undergrad, many are young and still live with their parents. During undergraduate studies they had to pay tuition, so the very fact that they now study for free (even before receiving any money) is a substantial upgrade for them. Other students are older and have children; for them, the basic income paid by the university may be insufficient.

Are there laws that bind you in this? Worth a look.

"I fear I might ending up wasting the money on students who do not do the job". Every manager has the same problem, yet most people in my part of the world receive the same income regurarly. What do they do differently?

If my PI were to pay me with this scheme, IMO tho whole joy of reading literature would pretty quickly die out: think about that "I need to read this article to feed myself". Is this a good or sensible motivation?

This sounds like an X-Y problem to me. Consider making a new question with more details about your concerns about the students, leaving out your idea for a financial-oriented solution.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

Do not do this. At best, you will appear merely stingy; at worst, perhaps financially abusive. (I also suspect your university would not even allow it, but I think that's not as important because it should not be done anyways)
I strongly, strongly advise you to reconsider how you think about students. It seems you are thinking about them like employees you want to squeeze some work out of, with some sort of benefit that you deserve for providing funds. This thinking is wrong, and leads to many of the student horror stories here about abusive advisors.
A student should never be under threat that their financial security is subject to the whims of their supervisor on a regular basis. Any process that leads to a student getting paid less than their full salary* should be a structured process with warning and opportunity for improvement. You write that "students need a reliable source of income" - exactly, so don't make it unreliable.
Students in research are not mere employees, they are future researchers for whom you are taking on a responsibility as an advisor. You pay students so that they can focus on their research and education. You pay students who you think have good potential as researchers that are worthy of your time investment. You are not paying them to do a job, you are paying them to learn.
If you think you need to add incentive for students to focus on things like reading, do that incentivizing outside of the regular compensation structure. One option is to have regular meetings where students present papers or literature reviews of a subset of papers. Students are typically quite motivated in that setting to look good in front of their superiors and peers and they will put in the effort. You could also use a bit of peer pressure to offer some sort of group reward, like buying lunch for the whole group when a student wants to schedule a presentation over lunch to summarize what they have read (harder to do now during pandemic times, but hopefully that won't be permanent).
I'm glad you've asked about this here before implementing it, because I cannot stress enough how bad this would be.
*Exceptions: for someone who is a part-time employee, like an undergraduate student, there is nothing wrong with hourly compensation, but it should not be based on production but rather on time worked. You can decide at the end of a semester if it's worth taking that student for another semester. There could be graduate students in special circumstances that work and study part-time; they should be paid a salary relative to their part-time level of commitment.

Not only are students not employees (which I heartily agree with), but almost no professional employees would be paid in a piece work manner like this in a successful company in the modern world.

@IanSudbery There are a few (which fits in your 'almost no'); writers and freelancing jobs in the arts come to mind, as well as the broader "gig economy". Rarely but occasionally in tech, mostly in the developing world. But I think it's a pretty simple argument to make that in most cases these schemes are exploitative of workers, especially when there is a single source for the income, it just turns into bypassing legal obligations to employees.

I also wouldn't call those people "employees" and if their (not) employers did so, they would be in legal hot water.

@IanSudbery Fair point. Uber would strongly agree with you to not call those people employees.

@BryanKrause Also, for freelancers all (directly) required work is paid for specifically. In the proposed scheme, students would still be required to perform research but only be paid for reading papers, which depending on the laws involved actually could be illegal.

I think you got that wrong, students who get paid to do research certainly are employees, during the e.g. 10 hrs/wk for which they are hired.

@Karl it depends on the country or funding source. E.g. most funded PhD students in the UK are not employees.

Bryan, I would read Erel's edits. It substantially changes the nature of the question (although I do wholeheartedly agree with  your answer to the question as it was when you wrote it).

@AzorAhai--hehim I saw, I think it stands though. He still hasn't answered the very important comment regarding how much of a bump this pay is, but I still think it's a bad idea to peg it to "papers read and summarized".

Regardless of the legal definitions the research students are not employees in the industrial sense -- industrial employees provide financial benefit to their employers, keeping them productive is a matter of bargaining. Financial incentive in OP's case should be aimed towards helping students free more time for research as opposed to spending potential research time working an irrelevant side job to make ends meet. +1 on OP reconsidering how to think about students

Not a good idea, and here's a take from a behavioral point of view, taken from this article

In Haifa, Israel, there were a bunch of day care centers, about a dozen of them, and the kids came in the morning and the parents picked them up in the evening. And as is the case, some parents came late. And they decided that they were going to impose a fine on the parents coming late. Well, happily for economic science, a couple of behavioral economists knew about it, and so they said, now, wait, wait, wait. Let's just do it on half of the day care centers and not do it on the other half so we have a nice experiment. So, sure enough, one day, the parents came, dropped off their kids and there was a notice. It said, starting tomorrow, anyone who's picking up their kid more than 10 minutes late will be fined 10 Israeli shekels. And then they recorded. They had been recording what was happening in the week before, and then they recorded how many people came late in the day care centers which had the fine and those where there was no fine. It was amazing what happened. In the places where there was no fine, nothing happened. It continued. There was actually a small number. In the ones in which the fine was imposed on the parents coming late, the amount of lateness doubled - doubled.
Now what - how can you possibly explain that? The fine was supposed to get them to come on time to pick up their kids. Now, if you think about it, there are lots of possible interpretations of what happened. But what you just said, Shanker, about framing seems to be the most likely explanation, which is the parents framed coming late or coming early to pick up their kids as essentially a moral question. I mean, perhaps not high morals, but you ought to pick up your kid on time because your kid might be anxious, because the teachers maybe want to go home and be with their kids or there's something like that. OK. Sometimes there is extra traffic, and you're late. But it was a moral question. As soon as you put a price on it, then it's just like a commodity. It's a shirt or a beer. Step right up. You want to get some lateness, here's where you can get it. It'll only cost 10 Israeli shekels. So I think they turned this thing from an ethical problem into more or less a self-interest problem. And, apparently, 10 Israeli shekels wasn't a big enough fine to really cause them to do anything differently.

The core idea is that, if something that is supposed to be done because it is the right/good thing to do, is incentivized with money, then it starts to become a commodity, and loses its original purpose. Feeling like you've got enough money this month and don't like to read? Just don't read and don't get paid, nothing wrong.
Motivating students to read should come from the actual value of doing it, like what you have mentioned in your post: that reading papers and summarizing them is useful. So, I believe it's better to have the funding be paid consistently, and not prorated based on the number of tasks they did.

As a counterexample, I'll mention plastic bag "bans" that have been implemented in many places. By charging a nominal fee (typically 5-10 cents) for each plastic bag used, many places have seen a marked decrease in usage. This seems like a successful implementation of commodifying the environmental/moral issue of sustainability, with the exact opposite result as the daycare example. I generally agree with you that the OP's proposed system is a bad idea, but providing monetary reward for moral choices can in fact be effective.

For other readers, 10 shekels is about $3 ... so a very small fine

@NuclearWang: I think the example of plastic bags actually supports this answer.  The 5-10 cent fee for bags is hardly an important budgetary consideration for most customers.  But it reminds them that bags are considered bad, which is far more influential for many customers.  (It also prevents the store from just automatically giving bags to everyone whether they want one or not, which is probably another major reason for the marked decrease in usage, but that aspect of the bag analogy is not relevant to this answer.)

@Matt The bag fee is an external indicator that bags are bad, which was enough to change people's behavior - it's not about the money, it's about doing the right thing. The daycare fee is also an external indicator that lateness is bad, and also is a pittance - it's also not about the money, but it didn't get people to do the right thing. They're opposite outcomes from the same incentive structure, so I don't see how both can be supportive of this answer. We have one scenario where the incentive worked, and another where it didn't, but this answer just suggests they don't work.

Thank you Nuclear Wang for the counter-example! Definitely human behavior is a complex thing. I guess it depends on when the decisions are made. In the plastic bag case, it is quite simple to just bring your own bag before going for groceries. For the parents being late case, surely they were late because they were doing something else. With the incentive, they could think to themselves, "Well, I could still finish this thing a bit more, then later pay a small fee for being late."
So I guess it also depends on how important it is the other thing that prevents the good thing from happening.

@NuclearWang I think the issue with bags is that (at least where I am, in the UK) it didn't go from single-use bags being discouraged, but not charged for, to being discouraged and charged for. They went from practically being encouraged to being discouraged. I suspect the main reason the bag charge was effective was that it forced shops to change their practices in this regard.

Beware of setting targets.  If you set a target, and an incentive for reaching it, then meeting that target becomes the most important thing.
Graduate students should be doing research, writing papers and writing their thesis, in addition to the background reading.
But if you pay them to read papers and write summaries, then that becomes the most important thing.  Other activities can, and will, be left until their target for reading and summaries has been met.

Or in other words, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

In theory it sounds fine, but I think you will encounter a number of practical problems.
By paying for summaries you are incentivizing students to skim the paper and whip up a summary with minimal effort. I'll go ahead and assume your students are not so unethical as to hand you fake summaries, but I think it's evident that you will need to define quality guidelines for the summaries to "count". But if you do so, you will then have to verify the summaries to make sure they are of sufficient quality. It's not impossible and I have successfully done somewhat similar things, but it requires setting up a sophisticated system beyond just paying per summary. All that just to get the student to read... The student came to you because they have confidence in your mentorship. Can't you just talk to them and ask them to please read the damn things by next monday?
Moreover, I am a bit skeptical that money is a strong motivator for your students. If they cared about optimizing income, they would have gotten much higher paying industry jobs (especially in your field). Even if money has significance to them in a career sense, like any young student they are probably focusing on getting their career started so they can do well later rather than chasing pennies now. Often the feedback from advisor and the thought that their future career prospects are improving is a better motivator. Not like those are excluded by you paying them extra for writing papers, but you shouldn't get distracted from a big thing by focusing on a minor thing. Concerns about micromanaging aside, if you believe reading and summarizing papers is important you can simply require students to do it, rather than giving an option to skip it and getting paid slightly less. Maybe you could ask for a 5 or 10 minute presentation of the paper at every meeting? That would also help them practice presentation skills and disseminate the content to other members of your group.
Beyond this, you also risk inviting a disproportionately negative response from both your colleagues and the students. See for example the other answer - people in academia do not like this kind of incentive based scheme, they prefer to be paid anyway and have freedom to do their work as they see fit. Even if you had a system that was somewhat effective, you could have so much resistance that it negates any benefits. On the same note, because in academia you are rarely incentivized in this way (even publish or perish tends to take the form of gating at the application stage or annual quotas, not pay-per-work) so in a sense you are wasting the student's time by teaching them a way of working that is unlikely to translate into their future career.
As a tangent, learning to read and summarize papers quickly is an important skill for researchers. But if you want to teach this the "hard way", it may be more practical to simply limit the time they have to do it ("here's a paper, write me a summary by the end of the day"). Their first few attempts will probably not go well, but once they get a chance to experience and reflect on why they fail to do it quickly, you can start teaching them how to overcome those problems. While it may sound harsh, nothing stops you from being as nice about it as you want, such as asking the student to schedule some time for this in advance ("can you find a day this week where you have 1-2 hours for our paper skimming exercise?"), being encouraging, telling them that it's okay to not be able to finish in time and this is just a learning exercise, etc.

Keeping such a system up is going to cost so much in overhead alone that the feasibility drops the more complete you want to keep it.

To me it does not sound fine in theory.

The other answers cover a lot of different perspectives which are quite important. I am not in academia any more but I have always closely watched the related issues.
Firstly, try to understand, why the funding agency is funding you? What are their vision and specific purpose of this fund? Is it to help you as a new early-career researcher or is it to help you help the students? It seems like it is for the later.
When a fund is being utilized all stakeholders would like to see a tangible result at the end. Students must have learnt something, you must have achieved a research objective and the funding agency must have seen a positive outcome towards realizing their vision.
With this broad guideline, if it suits you, you could try to make decisions. The other answers seem to be from academicians and are at a more micro level.

The goal of the funding agency, as far as I see, is to get the research done. I am trying to think what is the most effective way to attain this goal.

I'll provide a meta-answer for your question. I believe you are facing this dilemma due to a combination of several factors, with the most important being the following:

Your academic institute at Ariel is in a legal twilight zone - the Israel-occupied Palestinian west bank; and is itself not a regular part of the Israeli academic system (e.g. the Israeli Council for Higher Education), so employment conditions overall have some aspect an "anything goes in the wild west". (Even the question of whether it's a college or a university is a subject of political debate.)

Junior researchers are (AFAIK) not unionized at Ariel college/university, nor in Israeli universities proper. The academic staff unions threw them out in the 1970s, and the universities degraded them from full-time academic employees to being only employed in teaching and receiving soft money in all sorts of ways for research. A description of this process at the Technion can be found in my chapter in the book on "Wrongful employment" (העסקה פוגענית); available online ;  see chapter 16. Over The current unionization picture is that junior academics are mostly unionized as teachers, but those unions avert their eyes when it comes to research work.
Had your employees - and they are employees, even if they're also students - been unionized, you would not have had the prerogative of choosing how to employ them: It would have been in basically the same format and under the same conditions as everywhere else.

The Israeli labor courts - who are infamous in their bias in favor of employers - have a checkered and inconsistent history of ruling about employer-employee status of people who perform useful work in relation of, as part of, or during their studies, or as a condition for being recognized with some academic degree. If you try to extract a consistent line of reasoning, all of them should be employees; but the courts often don't rule that way, contradicting earlier precedent. This also means they have never tried to shape a consistent doctrine for the status and rights of "not-quite-employee student-workers" - despite supposedly recognizing the existence of this category. So you are without a legal yardstick even ignoring the question of occupied territories vs Israel per se.

Perhaps this goes without saying, but - lack of oversight w.r.t. employment practices and their ethics, by the funding bodies.

As for what you should do: You should pay junior researchers as you yourself are paid - by hour (or an FTE-fragment) spent doing research-related activity. That includes reading, and summarizing papers (assuming you find that to be a useful part of the research process), and writing, and probably just sitting at the office scratching one's head thinking of abstract problems. Of course, they're not quite like you in that they're not independent researchers and are supposed to be guided by you, including in the allocation of their work time to some extent - but you (ethically) cannot condition their payment on their research achievements. An exception is prize/bonus money, over the basic guaranteed wage - which you yourself may be competing for as a senior academic staff member; although, frankly, I'm not a big fan of that either.

"An exception is prize/bonus money, over the basic guaranteed wage " - actually, this is exactly what I meant to do - the students already get a basic income from the university. The grant money is extra.

"Even the question of whether it's a college or a university is a subject of political debate" - Legally it is a university. The fact that some politicians do not like it, is totally irrelevant from a legal perspective. It is irrelevant just like the fact that some capitalist politicians do not like the laws of worker rights and think that these laws harm the economy.

The political issue you mentioned in 1 is irrelevant, as you note later in 2,3,4. Indeed, students in all universities in Israel are not considered workers - they are considered customers. Formally, they have to pay a tuition for the right to study. The universities usually waive this tuition and pay them a monthly allowance, but I can see why they claim it is not a salary. Students take much more time and effort to guide than usual workers; they leave after two years (masters), go to work in the industry and earn 3 times their professors. Viewing this as "abuse" ignores the bigger picture.

I recall, when I started my M.Sc. studies in the Technion, and was told that I am going to get 5000 ILS per month just for studying (not including a salary for being a teaching assistant), I felt that I am abusing the university - I receive money for studying, while in many other universities in the world, the students must pay to study for an MA degree.

@ErelSegal-Halevi: 1. Well, you didn't receive money for studying. You had a set of obligations which are those of an employee. Students who just study at their leisure don't get paid. You received money for engaging in research - which involves a lot of studying. And the Technion receives a lot of its money, in turn, to conduct that research which relies on M.Sc. and Ph.D. candidates to a great extent. 2. Irrespective of that: Charging students tuition is a cruel, abominable practice which should have been abolished long ago for university-level studies just like it had been for K12 studies.

I'm going to detract from the other walls of text here and suggest that it may be worthwhile to use financial incentives to encourage participation (though by grad school a student should be self-motivated) - provided you establish a minimum baseline and use the incentives as bonus.
Just be careful as this is arguably a power dynamic which may be abused. It depends critically on your good faith.
I wasn't paid during grad school; students aren't entitled to this money, unless things are different where you are, though it may make studying easier for some. If you're having problems with unmotivated students, as you allude, then this may be a viable option, if unorthodox.

OP seems to assume that the students are already properly compensated for their work and life costs, and this extra money is just an additional prize for performance. If so, I don't see anything particularly bad in paying for something like reading and summarising papers, which can be useful and easy to assess. What would be bad is paying for some arbitrary result, like getting something published in a journal: such prizes cause all sorts of issues in China and India. Consider paying to put the summaries in cc-by-sa in some place like Wikipedia or pubpeer where they're useful and reviewed.

I agree that there should be a guaranteed baseline, so that the student does not have to worry about necessities.

Beside the legal and psychological perspectives, this is contrary to how an efficient labor market works. (Although in many circumstances, in reality you do get labor markets which allow for this kind of contract due to the concentration of power) You seem to want freelancers, not employees - or worse, to have somebody enter a contract which combines all the downsides of being an employee with all the downsides of being a freelancer, while you have your cake and eat it too.
In a employer-employee situation, it is the employer who bears the financial risks. The employee gets a lower payment than a freelancer, and has a secure income. They are not involved in the enterprise's losses (or success). They are being paid for turning up and doing work, no matter what the result.
In a freelancer-client situation, the freelancer functions as a one-person enterprise, and thus bears the risks of business. You contract with an enterpreneur not for a volume of their worktime, but for achieving a result, and pay for it. Accordingly, it is up to the enterpreneur to manage all financial and complexity risks connected to the project. In some countries, this is even embedded in the legal system (Arbeitsvertrag vs. Werkvertrag in Germany).
Obviously, nobody wants to bear a risk. Just the possibility of making a win if things turn out easier than expected is not sufficient to weigh up for the potential losses. It is you who wants the result, and it is your risk that somebody sitting with a paper may not produce the results you wanted. If you want somebody else to bear that risk, you have to pay for it - in practice, this functions through freelancer rates being much higher than employees'. (I am handwaving here a bit about real life complexity - in today's regulated labor markets, there are of course other factors behind freelancers' higher rates, such as health insurance rates. But you'll note they also tend to be connected to bearing a risk). So, if you want to not bear the risk of "when my instructions were followed, the result turned out to be not useful for me, or was not ready in the expected time", you have to 1) find the kind of person who is willing to bear that risk (and so appears on the labor market as a freelancer, not as an employee) and 2) pay market rates for it.
There is a second risk you want to guard against - a lazy student. The economic way to state it is that in a situation of incomplete information, Adam Smith's theory of perfectly efficient markets doesn't hold, and you are in a classic principal-agent theory. This is not something solvable by forcing result-only contracts on people who apply as employees, first because it has the side effect of transferring other, very large risks wihtout a payment, and second because of all the non-economic reasons covered in the other answers. The way it works is by trust. You first hire a student whom your instincts qualify as trustworthy, then you wait for the execution of tasks, and if you realize that the student has been taking your money without spending any time working, you fire them. If you want the theoretical perspective, this is also borne out by game theory - it roughly corresponds to the tit-for-tat strategy in multi-round prisoner's dilemma (which is an optimal strategy). Without the theory, this is how millions of employers and employees solve it every day.

"you have to pay market rates for it"..in today's student market, you might find some desperate enough to not have to pay appropriate market rates..

@user111388 yes indeed, I was describing the mechanisms that are prevalent in a market equilibrium - but not every single individuum will want to decide in line with these mechanisms. It is always possible to find single individuals who agree to a contract that is economically detrimental to them, for a variety of reasons, but the side effects of employing them under these conditions can easily outweigh the economic gain. To state it simply, on any market, if you offer below market rate, you get low quality. On the labor market, you also get low loyalty and motivation, which tends to lead...

... to exactly the problems the OP is trying to avoid. Even if you can find, say, smart and desperate students, do you really want a desperate person working on your paper summary, with half a brain reading, and half a brain worrying if they will make rent this month? Or if you find smart and low-self-confidence students who think it's fair to have the risk put on their shoulders without extra payment, you'll have a team of people with impostor syndrome and all other problems correlating to low confidence. Add  the motivation problems from paid-per-piece work, and forget any productivity.

Unfortunately, many (even good!) students are very desperate and do keep up with even abusive advisors just for the vague idea that they could on some day work as a professor.

What risk is there in an assignment of reading and summarizing a paper? It's not that I pay them only if I find the paper interesting / useful. They know in advance exactly what they should do to get paid - there is no uncertainty for them.

Since you seem to be from Germany, have look at the news about Werkverträge in the meat industry, and you'll see that this is exactly how an unregulated labor market works. If people are desperate enough for a job, the employer dictates the working conditions, resulting in Akkordarbeit and pseudo freelance work, in which the employees take a major share of the entrepreneurial risk in exchange for no additional freedom.

@henning--reinstateMonica I'm not saying that it doesn't happen - it does. People/organizations with power can always force their contracting partners to take a loss (that's basically the definition of what power is). And it makes for nicely lowered expenses in the yearly balance sheet. It comes with a ton of negative effects, which are not punished by the stock market (or rather, their connection to the stuff that gets punished on the stock market is not as glaringly obvious as salaries paid) so large companies continue the practice. This doesn't make it a good fit for OP's situation.

@ErelSegal-Halevi Getting into the different sources of risk is too complicated and unnecessary. Let's define it like this: imagine that you have a weekly review meeting with the student. The student is also paid weekly. If 1) the outcome of the review has an influence on how much money the student gets for the past week, and 2) you are the one who defines the outcome of the meeting (accept/reject a task as done), then the student bears a risk the way freelancers do. If the student gets paid the same sum every week no matter the review outcome, there is no financial risk for the student.

@rumtscho well, your phrasing "this is contrary to how the ... labour market works" sounds like you're saying it doesn't happen. I guess what you want to say is that (based on fairness or equitability) it shouldn't happen.

@henning--reinstateMonica Oh! You are right - I guess I was too caught up in microeconomic theory when I wrote that sentence, than forgot about it during the comment thread. Reworded.

@rumtscho In any job that I know of, the employer reviews the work done by the employee, and if the employee does not do the job in a satisfactory manner, the employer stops paying (= fires the employee). It is true that the review is usually not done weekly, but rather monthly or annually, but it is still done. The risk of a freelancer is not that you may fail to do the job - it is that you might not find a job at all. If a freelancer is guaranteed a fixed flow of work with a guaranteed payment for completion, there is no real risk.

@ErelSegal-Halevi that's an unfortumate ambiguity of the word "review". I don't mean an annual performance review of the person, I mean a scrumlike review of looking over the current progress of work. At such a review, the employee might hear that their work was great, or that something is missing, or that they misunderstood the brief completely, whatever. But such a meeting has no effect on the payment for last week - even if you decide to fire the employee (which should actually happen in a different process), that only changes future perspective of payment.


text:
How much time should I allow for math postdoc candidates to accept or decline my offer?
For the first time in my life, I received a research grant that allows me to hire postdocs. The hiring procedure is very flexible, and I have complete control over the process, without any involvement from my university or the grant agency.
My question is - how much time is it customary to give to potential postdocs to decide if they accept my offer?
I am especially interested in feedback from pure mathematics.

If you allow less than a week, you will seem unreasonable.

Supposing this question is not hypothetical, and you are at one of these U.S. departments (assuming you need respect the agreement), you do not have too much choice in the matter. The departments at that page have agreed not to require responses to postdoctoral job offers before Monday, February 3, 2020.
Otherwise you could place it before January 24th (the deadline for decisions on the NSF postdoc), in hopes of snagging someone who might get a more attractive offer later, or afterwards, to avoid having someone else renege on your offer.
This all depends on where you are located, and what the status is of your potential candidates (the agreement above applies only to candidates within two years of their Ph. D.).

Thanks. I am actually located in Europe, so am not bound by any of these. But I am mostly wondering how much time I should give the candidates. Would 10-14 days be a normal range of time to decide?

The decision seems totally up to what your aimed outcomes are. If you are in Europe, you probably have more (stronger?) non-U.S. applicants. At this stage, in some European schools shortlists are beginning to be made, with interviews taking/having already taken place. If you have particular applicants which you are targeting, then you might use whatever information you know about the applicant. The application cycle for postdocs this year may well go into March, so if you cut the deadline early you might pick out reasonably well qualified candidates but miss the others who expect more chances.


text:
Do US universities publish cohort ranking - position in class?
When you take the GRE, you get the percentile score. Do US universities publish such distributional data about how to interpret their grades? Can it be requested specifically?
I ask because if you are charged with evaluating applicants, it would be helpful to know how they performed compared to their peers during their bachelor or master's degree. For example, in the UK first honors is around top 9% of the cohort.

You want to compare percentile scores taken on samples of students from different institutions and disciplines? That's going to be... problematic.

The answer to any question of the form "Do US universities...?" is Some do, some don't. Every university is different.

The US has no organized system of class rank comparisons. Some individual universities (or departments within a university) may track this, but at the university level the educational approaches are so diverse, even for different options within a single department, that direct rank comparison would make little sense in any case. It is for this reason that a number of high ranked universities (MIT being one example) explicitly refuse to create such ranking comparisons.

My university does not publish cohort rankings. It does award some degrees "with distinction" but these like other awards are given by departments on the basis of nomination by faculty, and not by grades.
Remember that you only get grades for coursework, which is a tiny part of your graduate experience.


text:
How do professors advance from 2nd to 1st class in France?
There are three classes of professors in French universities: second, first, and exceptional. I understand that within each class there are several ranks which seem to be based mostly on time since becoming professor.
What I am wondering is what are the conditions for switching to a higher class. Is it necessary to go through all the ranks in each class?
Also, is it possible to become directly professor or should one become first "Maitre des conferences"?

What I am wondering is what are the conditions for switching to a higher class. Is it necessary to go through all the ranks in each class?

There is no hard rule. Unlike maîtres de conférences, who need to reach the 7th rank of the normal class to be eligible to apply for the outstanding class, professors have no specific rank requirements for promotions.
However, there are discipline-specific criteria that are set by the relevant section of the "Conseil National des Universités" (CNU). It's a promotion, and it doesn't come for free. You need to write an "activity report" to support your application, which will then be evaluated and ranked among all the other applications for that year. Common criteria include research output, international standing, doctoral supervision experience, service to the university, etc. A quota is set each year for how many promotions there will be. Half are awarded by the CNU and half by the local universities.
It's competitive.

Also, is it possible to become directly professor or should one become first "Maitre des conferences"?

It's theoretically possible. Since this is largely unrelated to your other question I'll let you ask another one if you want more information.


text:
How to not publish in peer-reviewed journals and still be taken seriously?
If someone has a paper which could be published in a peer-reviewed journal, but they choose to not publish it in a peer-reviewed journal, what can they do to help the research to be taken seriously? By "taken seriously," I mean that this paper would not be significantly disadvantaged; that is, a typical researcher would assume that this paper is roughly comparable to similar papers in a peer-reviewed journal.
Many academics view peer review as currently practiced as indicating credibility of the work. I completed a PhD last year and currently work in a non-research job. I am working on a few papers on the side. I have published peer-reviewed journal articles and reviewed some articles before, but I find the review process to be typically superficial and slow. I barely have the time to do the research in the first place, much less time to format the paper to the journal style, respond to reviewers, etc. I also would like to publish open-access but can not afford the fees. In my case I think publishing in a peer-reviewed journal as they exist today fails a cost-benefit analysis. I'm not interested in debating these points here, so take them as given for the sake of argument.
At present I'm thinking about publishing on preprint websites and leaving it at that. I know from experience that many people won't take me seriously if I do that, so I am curious if anyone has advice for being taken seriously publishing outside of the typical peer-reviewed ecosystem.
Note: Assume that I am not a crank and that the content of the paper is similar to that of any normal preprint which is eventually published in a peer-reviewed journal. There are many webpages that give advice to cranks and those webpages are not helpful to me. The question is about how to make a paper which could be published in a peer-reviewed journal but is not have the credibility to most researchers of being published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Related: How should I interpret a promising preprint that was never published in a peer-reviewed journal?

Comments are not for extended discussion; some info has been edited into the post, and this conversation has been moved to chat. Please see this post before posting another comment.

i have a dumb question: how exactly is this different from asking in general how to be like an independent researcher?

@BCLC An independent researcher could publish in peer-reviewed journals and not have this problem (many do). An independent researcher who doesn't publish in peer-reviewed journals also might not care about being respected.

I think this is a great question, but I think many of the downsides of standard academic peer review can be smaller than what is assumed, depending on the field and conference/journal. Some diamond-open-access conferences/journals will allow you to publish open access without having to pay (and, for conferences, without having to register). Some conferences/journals have pretty loose formatting requirements on submissions. And many conferences will give you an accept/reject verdict without a requirement to implement the reviews (though hopefully you would do it if they contain good feedback).

So, in a sense, some publication venues are a net win in terms of giving credibility to your papers: with essentially no effort on your part and at no cost, you can get some opinions on your papers and possibly a badge of endorsement. If your research community has such conferences, the question is more: "Why wouldn't you use them?" (This being said, such conferences are rare, and presumably they may get fed up eventually if you completely ignore the reviews you get, so this comment is intentionally a bit provocative.)

I’m happy to assume your premise that you are not a crank and the research you generate is comparable in quality to mainstream research that gets published in peer-reviewed journals.
Here’s the problem though: it’s not me you’re trying to impress. The academics who you are hoping will “take your work seriously” are not assuming that premise. And it’s not because they’re mean or snobbish; rather, they cannot afford to assume your premise, because they are living in a world where there are a lot of cranks, and there are a lot of people who may not be outright cranks but are legitimate researchers who nonetheless sometimes generate mediocre or not-very-good research that other researchers don’t want to waste their time reading. So, what the academics you are trying to impress need is a credible signal that will tell them that your work is likely correct, and more worth paying attention to than all the other papers clamoring for their attention. There is simply not enough time to look at all the work being put out there, even legitimate, serious work that does get published in peer reviewed journals.
Now, a mechanism that produces such credible signals (or the best approximation to them that anyone’s been able to come up with) exists. It’s called peer review, and you say you don’t want to use it, and have your reasons which you’re asking me not to question. Well, fine, like I said I won’t question your premises, but the question remains: where are you going to get your credible signal that replaces peer review?
I don’t have an answer to that question, and for that reason I believe what you are hoping to achieve is basically impossible — unless your work is at such an amazing level that it will immediately attract attention and the appropriate level of scrutiny based on its obvious stellar quality and merit. In math, announcements of breakthrough proofs of famous conjectures do get taken seriously when the people making them have a modest amount of credibility and a quick look at the work convinces serious researchers that it’s worth their time to dig deeper. But with “normal”, non-breakthrough research, you’d have a hard time getting anyone to care about what you’re doing without going through the normal process.

"where are you going to get your credible signal that replaces peer review? I don’t have an answer to that question" Really? I can think of one right off of the top of my head.

@nick012000 Want to share? I'm sure if it worked, it would be both relevant to the question at hand, and extremely valuable in general (given how overworked the current peer review process is).

At least, other ways have been tried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill However, I wouldn't suggest this one.

@RichardRast I already did, in my answer to this question.

Also, lets not forget, most likely will the peer reviewer be the only persons in the world going every step of the paper. So at least two people really know your work.

@lalala Perhaps that's how it is in math, but I don't work in math and as I said in the question, my experience is that peer review is typically quite superficial. I doubt many reviews outside of math go over every step of the reviewed paper. It seems to me that the main way to get someone else to check every step is to catch the attention of someone more interested in rigor.

With uncontroversial documents, I've been told, repeatedly, as a referee (for math, in the U.S.), that it is not my job to certify correctness of all details... :)

I used to do research, and hated writing papers and grant proposals. I agree with you completely, which is one reason I left research.

In mathematics, currently, it seems to me that if you have some good, interesting ideas and can present them well, and put documents on arXiv, people will look at them.
I look at arXiv daily (and, also, web pages of people I know) for new things. I rarely look at on-line versions of "peer-reviewed journals", because all that stuff is a year or two out of date (given the glacial slowness of the refereeing process...), and, anyway, would have either been on arXiv a year or two earlier, or someone would have told me about it.
I gather that some parts of physics treat their arXiv more seriously than some mathematicians seem to want to treat our arXiv.
I have no idea about other fields.
Certainly it's best to have already cultivated some sort of reputation/credibility before "rebelling". :)

@MishaLavrov, I myself don't care much whether or not something is arXiv-only, unless it makes unlikely claims that I'd have difficulty verifying for myself. Further, if it contained good ideas, other people might have taken them up themselves, and borne out the promise of those ideas. That's a stronger confirmation than "peer review".

You can't really apply for jobs just having preprints on arXiv though, so not publishing research articles in journals is at least going to make finding a job difficult.

@Tom, oh, indeed, especially people in specialties other than one's own, with their own candidates competing with you, will not want to acknowledge anything on arXiv (in math). But good (uncontroversial) work on arXiv is often recognized by people in one's own field, far in advance of "peer review".

It's also interesting the extent to which articles can be published in good journals and then sort of ''languish'' unknown (especially if the author is not well known),  Compare this to arXiv, where work is very visible and readily available.

This is a tricky one regarding stuff which stays on arXiv for a decade without being published.  Lohkamp's claimed proof of the positive mass theorem in arbitrary dimension has been on arXiv since 2016 and not published as far as I know due to the controversy over the techniques which he employed.

@Tom: OP already has a job, in a non-research environment. That's what led to the question. Given that more people earn a PhD annually then are needed within academia itself, this outflux is entirely natural. Industry doesn't care as much about proper publications in the best journals.

Well, sorry but this is Academia Stack Exchange.  If you are not intending for your articles to be read by academics, then there is not really a question here.

@MishaLavrov Ironically some of the best math papers stay on the arxiv a long time, because the refereeing process takes forever for the top journals. For example this paper was posted on the arXiv on 2009 and published in 2016. Needless to say, it is one of the most important papers of the last decade on the subject.

do you think OP's question is very different for like pure maths or even pure computer science or pure physics as compared to say like law, medicine, finance, economics, psychology, etc?

'Certainly it's best to have already cultivated some sort of reputation/credibility before "rebelling". :)' --> so like nassim nicholas taleb?

Wow, received 2010 and accepted for publication 2015.  That's a long time.

It is possible to do what you want, but, it takes more work than going through the standard process. At one time there was no such system and people got a reputation by sending off their work to other scholars. Many had patrons who helped give them a bit of visibility.
So, in actuality, the journal/publishing system is an attempt at an optimization, by giving a third party an incentive to help you get your work seen. An added feature is that a reader can have some confidence that other experts in the field have "blessed" the validity of the work by reviewing it.
The problem with the old system, is that every reader has to verify every paper independently and so reputation grew only very slowly and not very "far".
But, you can send your work to those you think are interested and carry on conversations about it if they respond. You can publish preprints, but, again, no reader has automatic confidence in your work until you already have an established reputation.
The current system isn't perfect, but we haven't managed to replace it with one with different positive incentives than are present in the journal system (money, primarily). There are other possibilities, and some are being tested, such as open publishing, but it is difficult to cover the long term cost without some incentives.
It isn't essential that people make a profit from publishing, but it is essential that the costs get covered if you want long-term availability.
One way to build a reputation in some fields, however, is to attend lots of conferences, though you won't be a presenter. But most conferences give you an opportunity to meet people between sessions and talk to them about their (and your) ideas. You can, in theory, establish a circle of collaborators this way, but most of them will want to publish (and then present in conferences), so you are more likely to be a 'junior' partner in their work than if you were on the podium also. This was also not a possibility in the far past. But conferences (and the associated travel) are expensive. So, it is more likely to be open to the independently wealthy.
A third method is to somehow get tenure (good luck with that if you don't publish) and then let your students do the publishing of ideas you develop jointly. You will get a reputation through them if you are successful at it, but it still depends on some sort of publishing system, probably with peer review.

Conferences are time-consuming and expensive. Not sure whether this will help OP.

@usr1234567 We aren't here to question why the OP doesn't want to publish.  Conferences are not publishing.

@Yakk, actually, in some fields, conferences are the main publishing venue, via proceedings. CS is like that, for example.

@Buffy My apologies; please add "in a peer-reviewed journal" after my use of the word "publish" and "publishing".

@Yakk, conference papers in CS are actually reviewed. But the process is much faster - one of its benefits.

Unfortunately, "peer review" has been made the core certificate of quality for research. Not that everyone agrees with it, but this is how the community works.
If you do research that can be reproduced from the preprint (mathematics, theoretical physics etc.), you might get the occasional follower of your work, but unless you have a network of people that know what you do and have interest in it, I doubt that you will make much headway in visibility - but that's normal, even for "peer-reviewed" papers, unless it is a top journal.
If you just want the knowledge to be out there, the preprints might be sufficient. If you want visibility, you probably have to drum it up in social media - but you need to be careful not to come across as overly interested in publicity.
In an experimental field where experiments are not easily reproduced, you will likely be entirely out of luck. Nobody will see themselves being able to rely on experimental results of an unvetted paper.
Put this way, for an external reader, "non peer reviewed" means: nobody but the author may have read this paper. It might be full of mistakes, badly or inconsistently written, and possibly a waste of time. Unless it promises a really interesting introduction, model, technique or result, which would attract their attention, it more looks like a waste of time.
Whatever you do, you need to make sure that your work does not come across as a waste of time for the reader, peer-reviewed or not; not being peer-reviewed increases the a priori expectation for that for the uninformed reader.

I disagree that in experimental fields no one takes pre-prints seriously. As a researcher, I work almost entirely from preprints. By the time something comes out in peer-reviewed format, the field has almost certainly moved on. But this only appilies to things in my field - i.e. things I could have been the reviewer for if they were peer reviewed. I teach several topics where this is not the case, and hear I would not teach from preprints.

@IanSudbery Yes, if you are affiliated and possibly and established researcher. Which OP probably isn't going to be, or they wouldn't ask this question.

I'm happy to read any paper I could peer review - I effectively DO peer review the paper. If I'm capable of doing the peer review myself, why would it be any different if the paper was peer reviewed by someone else?

@IanSudbery So do I, but many people don't. Again, I think it depends on field and topic. I do put anything on my reading list if I find it interesting and I have the time.

What is the purpose of all this?
The goal of publishing, ultimately, is to communicate your ideas to other researchers. Peer review is supposed to help with that: to give you few more eyes to look at your work and - supposedly - ask you questions a wider audience would have upon reading your work.
Side note - I must admit there is an argument barely anyone is reading academic work, raising questions about its cost efficiency.
But the bottom line still is - what do you intend to write these papers for and who do you want to reach out to? If it is researchers, publishing in peer-reviewed journals does make sense as it is what they read, a lot. If it is industry, by contrast, they don't read these papers a whole lot but they do attend conferences and exhibitions.
If you want to reach out to just general audience with your cool ideas, you might as well post on social media instead for arguably bigger impact at a less effort.
Sorry, it all boils down to how you define "be taken seriously". If your ultimate goal is for scientists to act upon your work, you either publish in peer-reviewed journals and attract attention that way, or reach out to academics saying you have a project where collaboration would make sense and you'd provide them with some resources from the industry and they would do some more in-depth research in return.
Finally, don't forget that funding in academia is oftentimes tightly coupled to publications. If you want academics to act on your ideas, you either hire them to work on the industry side or seek grant funding which means... publishing this work.

I don't see how the arXix preprint you linked backs up the claim that "barely anyone is readind academic work". The preprint analyzes the decrease of concentration of citations over (a certain period of) time.

@JochenGlueck it doesn't - it provides another perspective on the study it is intended to rebuke (Evans' "Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship"). In the latter, an (indirect) claim that fewer articles get read is made - "If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles". This is directly linked to concentration - in an extreme case, everyone finds just a single article on the topic and goes with it, other papers don't enter the discourse.

This is similar to social media - if there are no reposts, sure thing, some people will read it still, but that number will be on the low side, and notably so. Also, if it is not clear from the previous comment, the claim to be backed up by the link is slightly different from "barely anyone is reading academic work" - rather that "there is an ongoing discussion about whether anyone even reads academic work and whether it is cost-efficient".

@Lodinn, arxiv, researchgate are great sources to connect with worldwide audiences than even journals because arxiv has open access while many journals don't have open access

Ultimately, I think this comes down to where most of the good papers are.  If all the best papers are in the traditional peer-reviewed academic journals, then naturally they are going to maintain credibility and outside sources are going to lack it.  However, if substantial numbers of valuable papers are appearing in alternative fora (e.g., on ArXiv) then it is likely that those alternative fora are going to be "taken seriously".  In any process like this there is a temporal delay between quality and credibility, but they will tend to connect in the end.
I agree with many of the criticisms of traditional academic publishing, and indeed, there are some you do not even mention.  Nevertheless, one advantage these journals do have is that they have a filtering mechanism that is likely to filter out really low-quality contributions.  Non-peer-reviewed repositories have some very good papers in them, but they also have a substantial amount of "chaff".  Peer review provides some kind of quality assurance to the reader (for all its many flaws and limitations) and this is something that is helpful when looking for papers.
My suspicion is that we may eventually end up with some kind of hybrid system, where researchers post pre-prints on a general repository and then put the onus on journals to come and have a look at what is available and make publication offers on papers they like.  Such a system would solve many of the problems relating to difficulties matching papers to journals, long delays in review, and the one-journal-at-a-time inhibitor on the publication process.
To answer your main question, if you publish on a non-peer-reviewed repository, and don't seek to convert these papers into peer-reviewed publications in journals, you are going to be at some disadvantage.  Whether the work is "taken seriously" will ultimately come down to whether it is visible to other researchers, and perceived by them to be of high quality.  All of the normal advice for advertising your work and trying to get it noticed applies here.  Some papers on ArXiv get lots of attention and citations, so it is clearly possible for papers to be taken seriously without peer-reviewed publication in traditional academic journals.  Although you may be at a disadvantage in the short term, if you publish high quality papers in such fora, you are contributing to their credibility in the long term.

You have three problems:

How will people find out that your work exists?
If they see it, why should they trust it enough to bother reading it?
If they read it, why should they trust it enough to rely on it and cite it?

Problems 1 and 2
If you develop a good enough personal reputation, you can just post stuff. Two blogs that come to my mind are Dan Luu[1] and Vitalik Buterin[2]. But this is pretty rare, not reliable. For the rest of us, you want to put your work somewhere your audience already reads, and you want it to go through some filter so your audience believes it's worthwhile.
I have no idea how to solve this, though. When you think about it, peer-reviewed journals are amazing in this way: where else will you get top professionals to thoroughly investigate your idea for free, then publicize it to all the other top professionals? Good luck!
One thing you can do is communicate with some people who already have strong reputations, tell them about your work, and ask them to publicize it e.g. on social media. Another thing you can do is post to arxiv and hope. Some eyes will get on the paper, but...
Problem 3
For someone to rely on your results and build on them takes a lot of trust. Investigating correctness can take a lot of effort -- even more if it's not very well written, which is possible for a solo author with no peer feedback. I don't think this is as big an issue as problems 1 and 2, but it will be a barrier. You might also find that someone replicates your results in a somewhat different way and is able to publish, with a small citation to you, but their paper is the one that ultimately gets most of the credit, because it goes through peer review and people are comfortable relying on it.
[1] https://danluu.com/
[2] https://vitalik.ca/

Ultimately it comes down to getting the people who would be interested in your work to read, review, and cite it.
So whether you submit to a journal or put it on a prepublish website, how about contacting the researchers in your field about your work.  Submitting to a journal will get you some visibility through their readership, but there are probably a lot more out there you could find.

Contacting other researchers might work to get a collaborator who wants to coauthor the article on your groundbreaking research and do most of the boring work of writing, formatting and submitting. However your work needs to be good enough for anybody else wanting to do that work.

@Pere Do they contribute intellectually? Otherwise, they do not deserve co-authorship.

"Deserve" is quite an elastic term. It seems that for the OP the less intellectual part of the job is what is harder. Therefore, he might want to lower the bar of what intellectual contribution a coauthor needs. Furthermore, if the OP doesn't even want to format and submit the article himself, I can't imagine him dealing with reviewers, and that would be a quite intellectual contribution that a coauthor might handle in large part.

Work for a tech giant with deep pockets.
If you want to do innovative work that will still be taken seriously, then you need to be able to demonstrate that your work is serious. One potential way to do that is to work for a massive tech corporation like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, or Google (often collectively referred to as FAANG). They're all massive companies that do innovative research and development work within their areas of business, that can sometimes be more advanced than the state-of-the-art within academia. Similarly, within the financial tech industry, there would be many companies whose financial market prediction tech is more advanced than similar tech within academia.
Of course, all of that work would be company trade secrets, so talking about specifics in public would likely be verboten (though these companies do occasionally publish technical "blue papers" about their research), but academics would respect you and take you seriously. If the guy in charge of Google's quantum computer division starts talking about quantum computers, academics won't dismiss him as a crank.

Thanks, this is exactly the sort of advice I am looking for.

Of course, good luck getting a position as a head of Google's quantum computer research division without a strong academic record (== published, peer reviewed, cited research).

It took my father more than two decades post-PhD to become the chief scientist at the very large corporation he worked for - by then he was in his 50's - and even then the results he was allowed to publish went through both peer review and a corporate legal filter for non-disclosure. As @penelope points out only a minuscule number of people attain such position.  If the goal is to publish results which will be widely accepted faster than you can do through peer review, this isn't a workable solution for most people.

@JEs9X I'm surprise you say that, because this really doesn't seem to answer the question you asked. This isn't an alternative way to get your research recognized by the research community, it's a suggestion to do a completely different type of research in the first place.

@BryanKrause You are correct, this answer addresses a broader question than that I posed. I'm also not taking it at face value (In my area researchers who work at small companies also seem respected), but it's on point. That's what I meant. Often good solutions are not apparent because of how the question was posed.

"Of course, good luck getting a position as a head of Google's quantum computer research division without a strong academic record (== published, peer reviewed, cited research)." Companies generally don't care about peer reviewed research. They care about results and the bottom line - so join at the bottom ranks, and demonstrate your competence as you work your way up the ladder.

@pjs "only a minuscule number of people attain such position." Of course, but the numbers I've heard are that only one in ten PhD graduates manage to get a job in academia, so not many people manage to follow the "traditional" path either.

@nick012000 I don't see how that counters my point. I worked in industry for 6 years before going back to grad school. My experience is that no matter how deep the company's pockets, most employees do assigned tasks. They don't get to tap that money for projects of personal interest. Given this and my earlier comment, I think working for industry provides fewer opportunities for most people to propagate their own work, not more. One of my biggest reasons for quitting industry to get my PhD was the opportunity it gave me to do work of my own choosing if I could convince funding sources.

@pjs "They don't get to tap that money for projects of personal interest" Your work is your work, whether it's of personal interest or the business's interest. The OP asked how to get your work recognised and respected, not how to pick what you're working on.

@nick012000 Perhaps I read too much into the "tech giant with deep pockets" of your title line.  Others have mentioned that the high cost of R&D in some fields can rule it out for individuals. Your title sounded to me like advice that if somebody works for one of the FAANG companies the expense would be covered and the work would have credibility. I don't see it, since the credible work would belong to FAANG. Their budget wouldn't help you with your own work. If your research isn't costly, you can do it weekends and evenings, but being a FAANG employee doesn't affect your costs or credibility.

@pjs I see it the other way around. Being a FAANG employee is what gives you credibility, because the work belongs to the FAANG company. The company is what gives you credibility as an individual who works for them. The stuff you do on weekends and evenings isn't what's credible, the stuff you do during your work hours is.

@nick012000 Working for a reputable company doesn't automatically translate to credibility for you as an individual. I've met too many people over the years who can do great work when properly supervised, but are totally bonkers without external guidance. If "the stuff you do on weekends and evenings isn't what's credible," then how does your answer address JEs9X's question? Isn't this whole thread about how to establish credibility for an individual's work outside of the peer review process?

@pjs "Isn't this whole thread about how to establish credibility for an individual's work outside of the peer review process?" Yes? You don't think that the work that someone does at work counts as their work?

@nick012000 "Companies generally don't care about peer reviewed research" I had the pleasure of meeting people in my academic career that were head-hunted by Google and Facebook specifically to head their research divisions. All of them were highly-published, highly-cited profs with an excellent peer-reviewed research first, which was the reason FAANGs approached them. As "just" a person with high technical skills and maybe an OK research record, you may apply yourself or even get invited, but only to an engineer role, not research (if very lucky, an eng in a research team, but still an eng)

@nick012000 "You don't think that the work that someone does at work counts as their work?" No, not for external credibility purposes.  In my non-academic days I worked for , a Fortune top 50 company, first in applications and then in R&D for my division. The R&D work required more creativity and brightened my reputation within the division, but at the end of the day it was tasked by  for their own interests, yielded proprietary results, and was not publishable. Had I wanted to self-publish personal work, my work at  wouldn't have made one iota of difference.

@pjs Of course the work you did at BigCorp wasn't publishable due to being proprietary- but the OP was asking for alternatives to publishing. If you went and spoke at a conference about the work BigCorp was doing, that'd have been credible.

Of course, this only applies if your work is of interest to FAANG

To me, this answer is a bit like if someone complains to you about the cost of gym membership and your answer to them is "become a player in the NBA, then you won't have to pay for gym membership."