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Should I pay for a certificate showing the quality of my manuscript before I submit it to a journal?
Some commercial services sell certificates to manuscript authors.  Frequently these certificates are marketed to authors in developing countries where English is not widely spoken.  These services claim that the certificate indicates that the manuscript meets a certain standard of quality.  Often the certificate states that the manuscript is written in correct English.  The certificate may be accompanied by editing services.
Should I pay for a certificate and send the certificate to a journal?
This is a general question is inspired by this one to avoid talking about a specific service.

Good call on making this a general, canonical question. I added this here.

Note that the quality of English of published articles in most physics journals isn't all that great anyway. The editors are often non-native English speakers, and reviewers typically don't bother with the quality of your English, unless it is extremely poor.

@Count Iblis: From my experience, at least, there are a considerable number of native English speaking authors whose written English isn't all that great.

@CountIblis "reviewers typically don't bother with the quality of your English" I disagree.  I have seen reviewers critique the spelling and neglect the science, which is very disappointing.

The inspiration link seems to redirect back to this question, which makes it somewhat pointless.

@Josiah wrzlprmft got tired of deleting comments on the quality of my English from people who didn't realize I posted a question to help others, rather than myself.  The inspiration link is to prevent those comments.

@AnonymousPhysicist If you submit a paper with more than five orthographical errors, you have no reason to complain. ;)

@Karl Why do you assume I submitted or wrote the paper?

@Karl I could be the editor.  But also the other reviewers see the reviews, at least in the journals I review for.  In some cases, the reviews are posted publicly.

No (reputable) journal is going to give any weight to such a certificate when assessing a paper. If the editor/reviewers aren't satisfied with the quality of the English, they will reject the paper.
Thus, paying for a certificate for its own sake is a waste of money. Of course, if the certificate is issued in conjunction with editing services, there may (or may not!) be value in the overall package.

Echoing this answer emphatically: no serious journal cares about any such "certificate" (and you'd just look foolish for providing it), but, conceivably, English-language critique could be helpful to you. Still, don't rely upon it too naively, because most of those (already dubious) services are not in tune with specific technical English usage.

Absolutely correct. Pay for a service that actually improves the manuscript if you have the money and think that it's useful. Don't pay for a certificate that nobody cares about!

+1, I've once collaborated with someone from a research hospital where that hospital had a policy that manuscripts need to go to an English translation/editing service before submission with whom they had an ongoing contract. With such a long term relationship, one can know that the contractor is up to the technical English of the field.

Could you please write if you know the answer for all fields or only for a subset?

@user111388 This is not field-dependent.

@AnonymousPhysicist: Thank you for the response. I believe the fact that it is not field-dependent should be explicitly in the answer (preferably with reference) as there are often fields with uncommon practises that tend to be overlooked on this site. E.g fields where people usually send papers to.many journal at the same time (with is not the case in maths, physics and CS and thus not so prevalent on this site).

@user111388 Sending a paper to many journals at the same time is always wrong because it is wasteful.  The fact that some people usually do it is irrelevant.

@AnonymousPhysicist:I disagree with you: It is only wrong if you are in a field (most fields) where it is established to send it only to one journal. In fields where there is not such a convention, it is not more wasteful then applying for multiple jobs at the same time (which may people do!)

@user111388 If you know of fields where such "habits" are common, it would be good to name them.

Absolutely no!
I believe as you are preparing a manuscript, you have a good knowledge of English. Technical writing is different from normal writing and you will 'feel' it by reading more papers. The more you read, the more your writing skills will evolve. Take the help of your seniors, colleagues, supervisor. But paying just for English is a waste of money.
Remember, the editor and reviewers will scrutinize your manuscript primarily on the basis of science, not language. They will comment on the language if it's too bad and impossible to understand.

Indeed, a Ph.D. student publishing his/her first article or preparing for the first conference presentation will occasionally get feedback about the use of language that goes contrary to what the student learned in school from English teachers. What matters is how well a reader is going to pick up the important points made. To do that in the best way, you may need to violate the rules for good English writing.

Not a downvoter, but I suspect they’re from people who’ve had to suffer through reviewing papers written in terrible English...

I have reviewed papers with excellent English with poor technical discussion and somewhat okay (but clearly understandable) English with outstanding discussions. It's technical paper, not newspaper or business report. The technical discussion must be top priority here.

I didn't downvote, but the second sentence stating that OP has a good knowledge of English since they are preparing a manuscript is dubious. I've had native English speakers with degrees send me emails in such terrible English that they got caught in my spam filter. Some people don't have much experience with English, some are just terrible writers, and surely some of those people attempt to write a manuscript.

@Paul An additional reason for downvoting is that most of the answer is irrelevant to the question, which is about certificates, not editing services.

As said by the other members, forget about the certificate. If the language is particularly bad in terms of language you may get one of the following:

Desk reject
Reviewers refuse to review until the language is fixed (I did this)
Reviewers complain about the language

Unless you got one of these, even the editing service is not warranted. Even in one of these cases, you are not rejected permanently. You can fix and resend. Thus, do as best as you can, send the paper, read the reply, and act accordingly. Do not waste money on a service that you may not need.

Some commercial services sell certificates to manuscript authors.

Some commercial services prey and steal from unsuspecting authors who can afford it the least.

They use a common ploy to make their offering seem legitimate by optionally bundling some purported editing services. It's not bona fide at all.
There is nothing redeeming about such certificate offers. Such activity is unethical and at least a scam, but possibly just a plain old daylight robbery.
I'm aghast at the circumspect language proffered in other answers. Let's call things what they are. Abominable, abhorrent preying on the unsuspecting - in the same class as phone scams that target the trust of elderly people. Scum. Waste of air.

These services claim that the certificate indicates that the
  manuscript meets a certain standard of quality.

If the English in your paper really meets the appropriate standard of quality, then the editor and the reviewers will be able to see this for themselves.
In more than a decade of publishing and reviewing articles in many different fields, I have never see a manuscript come with this type of certificate, and had never even heard of such a certificate until seeing this question.


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Why do vanity journals exist?
I'm confused about the existence of vanity journals. My impression is that they often charge significant sums of money yet provide no peer review, editing, etc.
If I want to claim I published something to stoke my ego, why wouldn't I just create my own "Journal of articles that were totally peer-reviewed" and "publish" there? In the days when things were published in print I can understand the difficulty in doing this yourself, but now surely creating a "Journal" is no harder than throwing up a quick website?

Are you asking why they exist (in which case "they make money" is an answer), or why people publish there?

Doesn't the title of your question contain the answer already?

Using the term "vanity" in this context is quite unusual. It's mostly used not for predatory journals, but for literature, for books which are not accepted by publishers and the authors then publish them out of their own money, usually at a loss. (Real authors get payed by their publishers, vanity authors pay to print the books to show off)

Not sure editing the question to use the term 'predatory journals' is better though. 1) Considering vanity press and vanity publishing are established terms, it's not that weird to imagine people searching for the term 'vanity journal' so on SO it's typically believed to be a better idea to make this a duplicate of the same question with the right term, thus allowing people to use the wrong term to search and find this answer as well. 2) It invalidates the current answer.

The edit of this question/title to say “predatory” instead of “vanity” doesn’t make any sense because it misconstrues how the OP was thinking and what the question really was.

I rolled back the edit because my confusion related to "vanity" journals. I understand why predatory journals exist, so I am not confused about that.

The term "vanity journal" provides an interesting perspective, because it implies the authors know the journal does not comply with established scientific standards. The term "predatory journal" is in this sense a bit weird, because it implies the journal "preys" on well-meaning scientists, which is not necessarily true.

As I pointed out in a comment this question can be answered from a lot of angles.
On one level predatory journals exist because there's a demand for them. Where there is demand, someone will supply it, especially since it's profitable.
One another level, people publish there for various reasons. Some people are genuine victims, but there's increasing evidence that others are publishing there in spite of knowing the publisher is predatory.
If your question is why publish there instead of set up your own predatory journal, it's easy to think of some reasons:

It's not as easy as you think to set up a predatory journal. Sure it's easier than setting up a real journal, but it's still not trivial. For example, how would you go about setting one up?
It's psychologically easier. You know you're doing something that's not quite right, but you're doing it anyway because there's an illusion that it is OK. In the same way many people are OK with downloading pirated papers off SciHub without checking their local laws even though they probably know they may be doing something illegal.

The link says the opposite of what Allure claims.  @ff524's upvoted and referenced answer says "There is some circumstantial evidence against the claim that most people who publish with predatory publishers are aware that they are not publishing with a regular scientific publisher."

The statement "There is some circumstantial evidence ..." in ff524's answer isn't inconsistent with what I wrote.

We do not call them "vanity journals."  We call them "predatory journals."  They make their money from people who do not understand how journals work.  Their customers do not know that anybody can set up their own fake journal website.  The person who is fooled by the predatory journal might be the author, or it might be the person responsible for evaluating the author's publication record.  Ego stroking is not as relevant.
They continue to exist because they are profitable.

There is also "vanity press" which in some ways overlaps with predatory journals and in some ways is distinct.

-1 per Ben Crowell - by this point it's not believable that everyone who publishes in predatory journals are victims.

@Allure this may have been so in the past -7 to 10 years ago when the phenomenon was relatively new - but it is becoming increasingly hard to not know about this.  The abstract of this paper : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1751157718301962 clearly highlights “ the interviewed Turkish researchers submitted their articles to PFJs in pursuit of rapid academic promotion“ although there are other motivations.

@BenCrowell In that case, it is the school leadership that does not understand how journals work, rather than the author.  It's essentially the same problem.

@Allure Plenty of beginners and the occasional experienced faculty member have been fooled.  Expertise in a discipline does not always lead to knowing things that are obvious to the rest of us.

@AnonymousPhysicist there’s always a bigger fish.  The Chair might be perfectly happy to report to the Dean that his faculty members have published x papers, and the Dean to the Provost, and the Provost to Board.  With every step the incentive to micro-manage a quality-check of the journals dissipates.

@AnonymousPhysicist check the answers in this question: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/80320/do-most-customers-choose-predatory-publishers-knowingly As ZTH points out it's increasingly hard to believe that most people didn't know about this.

@Allure ff524's answer says the opposite of what you claim.  Your own answer says "The author was not able to ascertain if the pharmaceutical companies are aware of OMICS' shady reputation," Of course, this question isn't about pharmaceutical companies, but it's always difficult to determine authors' knowledge.  https://xkcd.com/1053/

@BenCrowell : There are other cases as well. For example, in Romania, a recent law allowed for a significant reduction in prison sentences for those inmates who published books and scientific papers. They had to stricten the conditions later, after it was discovered that some convicts who were barely literate (but had a lot of money) suddenly "wrote" dozens of books and scientific articles each, in just a few months.

I downvoted because I think this answer is wrong. In particular "Their customers do not know that anybody can set up their own fake journal website" seems a plain misunderstanding of the dynamics that drive these journals. These journals exist because there is a large clientele of so-called researchers knowingly looking for easy vehicles for publication of low quality results.

@DanFox : there also must be some gullible genuine researchers who fall prey to them, thinking they are a genuine journal. However, I don't know their ratio.

@DanFox  You claim "knowingly looking for easy vehicles for publication of low quality results" but if they are doing it knowingly then they must think someone else is being fooled, such as their supervisor or funding agency.

@AnonymousPhysicist: Of course. These dynamics can be hard to perceive if one works in a high quality, well-functioning institution in a rich country. In contexts where all that matters for professional advancement are publication counts there are strong incentives for this sort of behavior. When it is coupled with young people not exposed to alternative behaviors, it can become endemic. Those who innocently publish in these journals lack intellectual criteria and skepticism to such a degree that one has to question their competence.

@vsz: I agree with you in the sense that there are many people publishing who are sufficiently ignorant to be unable to distinguish a genuine, serious journal from a pay-to-play predatory journal. This is why some countries only count publications in "indexed" (meaning something like JCR) journals. But there are indexed journals that in my opinion could be regarded as predatory too.

If you’ve ever submitted a manuscript that was eventually rejected, you can understand why people will resort to this kind of publication.  Publishing novel stuff is hard, and not everybody can do it.
First there are the true crackpots who see the chance to finally tell the world about their pet theory.  Friends have always told them they are really smart and so the only reason why regular journals do not publish their stuff is because of some conspiracy.
More common are those people for whom this is a means to an end.  One is required to show a certain level of publishing activity to maintain a job or a salary level, and this is a way to maintain the appearance of productivity without skipping too many fishing weekends with your buddies.
Some do it to keep up with the Jones.  Well after all I should have the same perks as my colleagues who manage to publish crap only because they know the editor, or their collaborators do all the work etc,  but at least I publish my own ideas by myself...
Validation does not come from doing this yourself, it comes when your work is validated by other neutral third parties.
Of course there are also predatory conferences.  Quoting from this Vancouver Sun article:

The debate over such publications often revolves around which academics are genuinely duped by the deceptive journals and conferences, and which academics take advantage of them to advance their careers.

There is of course another reason: naivete.

@BryanKrause Maybe I am naive but somehow I would assign this at the bottom of the list... v.g. https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/investigation-launched-into-possible-breach-of-b-c-profs-academic-freedom

Could be more often intentional than I realize, but I think the whole point of calling predatory journals predatory is that they intend to mislead the authors who pay to publish.

Related to your paragraphs #3 and #4: the other part of the answer is "because often the bureaucrats count these as legit publications in bibliometric evaluations". If we got rid of the bean-counting culture of "you need X publications and Y citations, no matter where they come from", the market for predatory journals would greatly shrink.

all fair points but this answer does have the air of victim blaming

@benxyzzy if they victims, which certainly some are not.

I don't see these journals as being called predatory because they prey on the naive and ignorant, but because they prey on people's desire and need for professional advancement. If you're in a second or third world country and need to have X publications for continued employment and promotion, then you're willing to pay Y dollars for a publication. I'm pretty sure most of these authors understand full well that (i) that system is broken, and (ii) that they do not have the educational or monetary resources to be competitive with first world research/get published in high-quality journals.

Re maintaining an appearance of productivity, the problem is the administrators who measure productivity by publication count.  One can be an outstanding teacher without doing much in the way of publishable research, or one can work on one groundbreaking paper for years, yet be counted as less productive than those who produce dozens of not-very-interesting papers out of the same research.

You mention "true crackpots". You'll also find "serious amateurs" who can write a paper that is not very good, not very important, but also nothing particularly wrong with it, and they just want their paper printed in a journal with their name on it.

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Responding to a reviewer who misunderstood key concepts of a paper
How do you respond to a reviewer who is very critical about your paper but from whose comments you can easily see that he/she has misunderstood the key concepts of the paper?
In my case, the first reviewer had no issues with the paper and suggested only a minor revision. But the second reviewer seems to have not spent too much time on understanding the paper. This reviewer's misunderstanding made the editor suggest a major revision of the paper.
In my response to the reviewer (not sent yet), I used the sentence "This comment completely misrepresent the methodology described in the paper." Is this too much?
UPDATE: I am glad to inform you all that after the second round of reviews, the paper was accepted with minor revisions. I followed the general advice given in the accepted answer for this post. Instead of being too defensive, I agreed in my response to the reviewer that the misunderstanding may be due to wording of certain sentences and changed them. Specifically, I used the following sentence:

"There seems to be a misunderstanding about the methodology, which we
  hope to clear through our responses below and by revising the text in
  the manuscript. Contrary to what the reviewer states, ..."

Hope this update helps someone in future.

The mistaken reviewer probably assumed something wrong because the paper doesn't state the opposite. Make that explicit in the paper so that nobody else can do those assumptions after reading that.

That was my first thought too. But I realized after making the changes that to another reader this would seem like repeating something already mentioned in the paper.

If it is already mentioned in the paper then try to make that mention more clear and then point the mistaken reviewer to that part of the paper. Something like: "We have clarified this further in ___".

@Trylks: I wouldn't head for that conclusion that the fact was not clear enough in the submission so readily. I too have received reviews of people explicitly stating "The user study has been conducted with 40 users." when the subjects of my study were described in their own subsection in the study description, titled "Participants", whose first sentence read "Our study had a total of ten participants." Among five reviews, there is usually one that contains at least one statement that shows how the reviewer didn't read properly.

@O.R.Mapper "I wouldn't head for that conclusion that the fact was not clear enough", the paper may be unambiguous, but "easy to read" is a subjective appreciation, and "clear enough" means very easy to read. For one reviewer it wasn't clear enough, because when he glanced over it he got a false idea. For the editor it's not clear enough, because nothing is enough. You have two options: Either fix nothing and say it's fine right now, or pretend to fix something that was never there and pretend it's much better after that fix, so that everybody can pretend everything is alright.

Unfortunately, for any level of clarity, there exists a level of reviewer laziness sufficient for a stupid review. Although, to be fair, most of my experience with peer review has been positive.

A lazy reviewer is not going to give specific criticisms. He's either going to suggest minor changes, recommend the paper and be done with it, or give very non-specific criticisms (topic not interesting, etc.) If your referee gave specific criticisms, then he likely did put in effort. If he did put in effort and still completely misunderstood the paper, then the paper is likely not clear enough and needs improvement. Also: shrugging off the referee's criticism is probably not going to benefit you. These types of questions are typically subjective and present only one side of the picture ...

... Despite this, people who answer here tend to implicitly assume that the issue is presented in an unbiased way, i.e. your point of view is considered first. The editor will probably not think this way, and won't assume that your assessment is any more correct than the referee's. You are more likely to succeed in publishing this paper if you do take the referee's assessment seriously, and clearly make an effort in your response to address the problems. The reply you quote will make the impression to the editor that you don't want to put in the effort for a proper response.

This comment completely misrepresent the methodology described in the paper.

While it may be technically correct, it is unnecessarily undiplomatic (at least all by itself), as it implicitly places blame on the reviewer for not correctly understanding your paper. Again, if the respective points were made unmistakably clear in the paper (which is something that you can easily overestimate), this blame may be justified, but still you risk unnecessarily disgruntling the reviewer.
I would suggest to assume in good faith that the reviewer did not fail to understand your paper due to incompetence or laziness, but because you failed to clarify a certain aspects. Try to improve your paper regarding the explanation of everything that the reviewer misunderstood and reply with something along the lines of:

This comment seems to be based on the assumption that we were proposing a method to transmogrify apples. However, the goal of our method is the transmogrification of bananas – an aspect, which we have failed to make sufficiently clear. We have amended our manuscript accordingly and now write: […]

Do not worry, if the respective revision turns out to be only minor.
To be prepared if the reviewer insists on his or her misunderstandings, I suggest to explicitly state in your response letter that something different is the case. This way you hopefully have some good argument for the editor in this case.

I once had a similar experience with a reviewer who criticised that we made several claims which were not supported by our studies. However, we never made any of these claims. In a first revision we reformulated a few sentences that the reviewer had presumably misunderstood and explicitly stated in the response letter that we did not make those claims. The reviewer criticised again that some of the same claims were unsupported. We responded again that we never made those claims and reformulated a handful of sentences. Then either the reviewer finally understood or the editor was fed up with this and the paper was accepted. In both cases, major revisions were requested.

Thank you. That's a very nice way to put it across to the reviewer.

Diplomacy is the way to go when responding to reviews...

No one ever seems to talk about this but sometimes... reviewers are terrible.
Not terrible like "Ugh they made me revise my paper" but terrible like "Did this person even read the paper?" I once had a paper where a reviewer made lengthy complaints about the terrible user studies and lack of clarity in user studies for an object. There were no user studies in our paper, there were several clear statements about how there were no user studies in the paper, the 'future work' section detailed the user study collaborations. It was a paper on the method of integrating physical and automated controls, not a paper on user studies. One of the reviewers just... lost the plot. I don't know if they read a different paper, I don't know if they wanted a different paper. The other two reviewers made some excellent revision suggestions which we followed.
It wasn't the first time either. I can't speak for all fields or conferences, of course, but sometimes you just get a terrible review. Terrible not negative, terrible as in makes no sense. Sometimes you respond, sometimes you try to work it in and sometimes you just politely ignore the bits that make no sense. Some fields lend themselves to a wide variety of subject matter experts. Consider, for a moment, robotics. A submission to a robotics conference or journal could be about the mechanical engineering aspect, the automation(AI and Machine Learning) aspects, optimization, computer vision, sensor integration... No single person is going to be an expert in all of these things and some of the most interesting, to me, projects involve some blending of these subjects. It can be hard, then, to find a reviewer from the pool who best fits a submission.
This is the case in many subfields in Computer Science, this may be the case in the field you are working in. When you're talking about research on the bleeding edge sometimes you're talking about stuff that has a limited or restricted audience and, thus, a limited or restricted reviewer pool. There are a fair amount of similar questions about academic research reviewers and reviews here. Typically the benefit of the doubt is given that the reviewer is bringing up legitimate complaints and, to be honest, that is the best policy for everyone to have. But sometimes it's ok to accept that a reviewer is totally out there and the review is unhelpful or inappropriate(in that it does not apply.) In those cases I would respond to the other reviews as appropriate and respond, tactfully, to the review in question with statements directly reflecting how the review does not apply to your work.

Yes! I've been surprised by how often questions here get answers that advise being endlessly deferential to reviewers. Sometimes reviewers are incompetent or malicious, and a good-faith attempt to make them happy is exactly the wrong response.

How did you respond to the first reviewer you mention?

In the specific conference for that you did not respond to reviewers, you just resubmitted the revised paper to the editor and went on your merry way(which seems to be common(ish) in robotics conferences. In another, similar situation where we did have to respond to the reviewers we simply stated that "We have read and understood your review to be a critique of thing which does not appear to be applicable to our submission due to reasons. We have clarified this by blah blah removing any abiguity."

@MattReece: If a the only way to respond to the reviewer in good faith is a major negative change to the paper, you may be right. However, in the specific case, the alternatives mainly boil down to 1) “the reviewer misunderstood our paper” and 2) “the reviewer misunderstood our paper and thus we clarified”, the latter of which should only require a minor change. If the reviewer is being malicious, neither of these options will make him happy. Whether the reviewer is malicious or incompetent, 1) gives him the opportunity to cause an additional round by requesting clarification.

It's a shame there's no review mechanism for reviewers. The fact that you'll get revenge downvoting is irrelevant as it would be evenly distributed over time, and you could compare to the bell curve. You could have standard questions, too - like "Did the reviewer read the paper carefully? 0=didn't even look at it, 5=wow I wish he was my advisor

Yes, I see way too often when a reviewer makes comments that are totally off the mark.

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How to cite a French thesis in an international journal?
What is the right way to cite a French thesis in an international journal like Biomedical Signal Processing and Control? Should I convert the name of the university and the school to the English language?
Example:

Aina Frau Pascual, Statistical models for the analysis of ASL and BOLD
  Magnetic Resonance modalities to study brain function and disease,
  Ph.D. thesis, Doctoral School of Mathematics, Information Sciences and
  Technologies, Computer Science, GRENOBLE University (2016).

Link to the French thesis: http://www.theses.fr/2016GREAM086.pdf

A bibliographical item should allow people to find the referenced work. This means that you should at least report the original title. Alongside the original title, you can add a translation, usually enclosed in brackets (this is not an issue for the thesis of interest because it's written in English). Other elements, like the university name, should not be translated, and you probably don't need to report the school name (but this depends on the bibliographical style).
Thus, I would cite that thesis as follows:

Aina Frau Pascual, Statistical models for the analysis of ASL and BOLD
  Magnetic Resonance modalities to study brain function and disease,
  PhD thesis, Université Grenoble Alpes (2016).

Also some styles may have you point out that it is a thesis/dissertation.

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Using a data set collected against the terms of service of a company?
Many entities (companies, websites) clearly state on their terms of service that data collection is not allowed. For example many websites don't allow scraping.
I plan to collect data and then publish a paper using them. I will state how I collected them.
Can my paper be denied if I do the above?
Note: This is not about possible legal consequences. I am simply asking if my paper will be published or not.

This is a legal question, and we are not lawyers (okay, most of us). I recommend running this by your school's legal counsel first.

That is an interesting question if we extend it to data that entities behind websites do not want us to collect. For instance, public transportation companies are not happy about users scraping their websites to extract timetable information, and even less so when it comes to data about delays.

@tonysdg I am not interested in the legal aspect. I don't think (care if) I will be sued. I am interested for my paper to be accepted.

@O. R. Mapper valid point

@NET_GUY Then I'd say this is a question for the editor of whatever journal/conference/book you have in mind ;-)

Most serious organizations (journals, conferences, etc) have standards of ethics they abide by, and individual peer reviewers also have their own standards of research ethics. In some fields these are very explicit and written out at length, such as with the American Psychological Association (APA) or the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).
When submitting to a venue, there is almost always some statement of ethical/legal compliance which you must agree to. As such, violating any aspect of the codes, ethics, or legal principles the organization (or editors, or reviewers) value is absolutely grounds for rejection of a paper, or retraction if violation is discovered later. The editor is fully within their rights to reject a paper that violates any of their standards, and the individual reviewers are free to suggest the paper be rejected on any such grounds.
Various people and organizations value things differently, so some venues might be more comfortable with some types of violations than others. Some might be OK with violating a terms of service to scrape data, while some others might be happy to reject you outright for such a practice. I'm certain this area is also changing and evolving quite rapidly, so even venues that previously published similar papers might no longer be interested in such methods. Some will even way your methods against the outcomes, and if the research is interesting enough they'll look past the other failings - and some just don't care at all; your research could have been about electrocuting kittens to see how loud they cry and they'd publish it just the same.
I would encourage you to think more long-term than whether or not a paper gets accepted, however. A single accepted paper which shows a researcher to be dangerously negligent, in terms of legal responsibility or ethical guidelines, can quickly find themselves considered a liability to future collaborators, advisers, and employers. Academia heavily relies on reputation, and a reputation of taking short-cuts, ignoring ethical guidelines, and not caring whether what they do is illegal or could result in losing lawsuits...I don't know whether such a reputation will open the kinds of doors you'd be happy to walk through.

Thanks a lot for the answer! To be honest, all I am going to do is scrape a few pages from a site. While this is against their TOS, it's not something terribly "unethical". But I see your point.

Venues do differ a lot.  Information security papers that deal with operating systems almost always breach the ToS of the system they're breaking into.  The prime example is probably the Evil Maid Attack paper (actually papers) which defies the non-tinkering rule in the Apple's OSX ToS.

@NET_GUY It's a bit separate from the question issue itself of obtaining the data, but I should also warn that it also depends on what the data actually is. If it was, for instance, profiles from a dating website, or otherwise data from/about individual people, then that's a completely new can of worms as (again which depends on your field) may require IRB approval. Potentially personally identifying data requires a whole new set of care and ethics beyond, say, scraping stock data.


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Are there publicly agreed-on standards or definitions of what constitutes peer review?
It seems like a very difficult problem to discern whether a "peer-reviewed" journal is reputable. When a journal claims to be peer-reviewed, is there a commonly-agreed-on definition of what this means? Is there a publicly verifiable process to verify whether a journal is peer-reviewed?
This question mentions "vanity press" as a whole class of disreputable journals, and this question mentions Pubmed and Scopus as authorities on what constitutes legitimacy, but I can't find their standards anywhere. Scopus says they vet articles with an "independent review board," but I'm really looking for an answer about what they verify a journal does.

Anecdotally, there are plenty of publications indexed by PubMed that I would give approximately zero credit to.

Pubmed listing is necessary but not sufficient. Some pubmed listed journals are bad. But no unlisted journals are good.

@IanSudbery Pubmed is absolutely not necessary. It is a search engine for databases mostly in life/medical sciences, and very reputable journals in other fields are not (or poorly) indexed.

Sorry, I shold have made that clear - this obviously only applies in the field for which the database is relevant. I was following up on @BryanKrause's  comment.

@IanSudbery I felt it was worth pointing it out, as it is obvious to us, but might not be to the OP.

@fqq fair enough

No, there isn't. Different journals/publishers will have different guidelines.
Here're some examples of publicly-published reviewer guidelines:

Wiley
Elsevier
PLOS One

To illustrate the differences, Wiley's guidelines say "What is the main question addressed by the research? Is it relevant and interesting?" (emphasis mine). Meanwhile PLOS One doesn't care about "interesting". To quote a testimonial: "I published with PLOS ONE because I love the idea that acceptance is based on quality of the work, not whether it's trendy or important in the eyes of a few editors."

These links give a good perspective of what common expectations are for reviewers.

novel does not equal trendy or important.  I do not know how novelty can be excluded, either implicitly or explicitly.

@ZeroTheHero Replication studies could be argued to have minimal novelty, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not important to publish.

@nick012000 the novelty there is often the replication itself by another team, up to changes in sample sizes, controls etc.  PLOS One does not (or at least very rarely) publish the result of the 75th replication experiment unless there is something very novel in those results.

If there were a strict definition and satisfying it became important, then the disreputable journals would find a way to game that.
It's straightforward to determine whether a journal is reputable: ask the experts (the word reputable, after all, refers to reputation).  Experts here means, for instance, faculty working in the relevant field at reputable universities.  I think the average person has a good idea of what reputable universities are.

is there a commonly-agreed-on definition of what this means?

Generally, good peer-review means that experts in your field carefully read your work and evaluate its merit. The definitions of "experts" and "carefully" vary widely across disciplines. Some fields require several rounds of meticulous back-and-forth between author and journal; others are less stringent.

Is there a publicly verifiable process to verify whether a journal is peer-reviewed?

There are several journal rankings, but I think your best bet is to look at the editorial boards/published works. Are they reputable researchers who are considered `pillars' of their respective fields? Are the papers that were published in that journal of general good quality, and relevant to your prospective submission?
Some red flags to look out for when deciding whether a journal has good practices:

Journal is publicly listed on some blacklist (such as Bealle's list)
Journal charges exorbitant fees for publication, and promises a fast turnaround time on publications.
Journal emails you: good, reputable journals don't need to spam researchers for articles. That said, sometimes this is valid (say, you published in a CS conference that has a direct-to-journal track for fast publication turnaround, that is ok).
Editors are relatively unknown people from non-research oriented universities
The papers submitted there are garbage (not 'unclear' but absolutely unreadable/weird)

In general, research publications are about disseminating your ideas to a certain community. It's important to see where your community publishes, and go for these venues.

This doesn't answer the question and has several major errors.

Seems like a lot of other answers echo what I wrote, care to elaborate?

@AnonymousPhysicist defining these “errors” would help all of us...

Unless one defines “exorbitant” and “fast” this is rather vague.  Indeed many predatory journals charge less than top journals and have 2-week turnarounds.  Compare New Journal of Physics (https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1367-2630), a well-respected first quartile physics journal.

I think that there aren’t hard and fast criteria for prefatory. If there were, predatory journals would game them. I’m listing red flags, not absolute criteria

There is no accepted standard for peer review.  This is a good thing.  Different kinds of research need different kinds of review.

different kind of rigor rather as review? You know of Sokal affair? I doubt the review procedure is technically very different in STEM vs. humanities and this explains why the reproducibility rate is varying so much among disciplines as the scientific rigor of the applied methodology is varying very much among them. I can only upvote your answer if it is a wish for the future ;-D

@user48953094 The Sokal affair is irrelevant as the journal advertised that it was not peer reviewed.

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


text:
Is there a rule to rather use points and not commas as decimal separators in academic writing?
I am from Europe and always use a comma as a decimal separator. Thus, in all previous publications I have used a comma as a separator, noone ever objected. We recently submitted a new manuscript and one reviewer comment we got was that we should use points instead of commas as separators. The article was written in English; the journal has a style guide but the separator issue is not covered.
Personally, I think this request is weird, as both versions are widely used and not, like non-SI units limited to very few countries. Also, I don't think that anyone will mistake 2,34 mm as anything other than what it is supposed to mean, even if they would rather write 2.34 mm instead.
So my question is: is there an (unwritten) rule about that point instead of commas should be used as separators in academia that I don't know about or is the reviewer simply trying to change the data formatting to their own preference?

The extended discussion about the usage of commas or points as decimal separators has been moved to chat. Please, if you have a compelling reason for either of the two choices, post it as an answer, and read this FAQ before posting another comment.

(You did not specify the language of the paper, so I am going to assume that it is written in English.)
There is no rule that in academia points must be used instead of commas.
There is, however, a rule that in English the point rather than the comma is used. If you are writing your paper in English, then you should use the point, for exactly the same reasons that you should write quotations "like this" instead of writing them «like this». (More precisely, this seems to hold in every variety of English except for South African English.)
The fact that you feel inclined to use the comma rather than the point is more a question of you importing the conventions of your own language into English, not a clash between your personal preference and the referee's. It's not substantially different from a French person being inclined to write quotations «like this» or a German person being inclined to write "I think, that this is true" with the extra comma.
Of course, this works both ways. If you are writing a paper in German or Turkish, then you should use the decimal comma.
(Beware that I do not work in a field where decimal separators are used on a regular basis, though.)

I'm not entirely sure but I think in British English one would use a comma and not a point as a decimal separator. So the question for a non-English speaker is not of importing conventions of their native language but rather of chosing between British and American English conventions.

My understanding is that British English also uses the decimal point. Either way, my point is: decide what your target language is and then write in that language and follow its typographic conventions. "I am from Europe and always use the comma as a decimal separator" is not a relevant reason to prefer the decimal comma to the decimal point. The OP more or less explicitly says that they use the decimal comma because it is what they are used to from their own language.

I just glanced at an issue of Philosophical Transactions, and they clearly use a decimal point, not a comma. When preparing papers in the past for other British English publishers, it was always a decimal point for them as well. Regardless of how numbers are written by the general public, the decimal point is used in technical journals even on the East side of the Atlantic.

British English exclusively uses a decimal point. The historic difference between BrE and AmE here was that BrE used to prefer a raised decimal point (interpunct), but it's always been a point rather than a comma.

I believe that the English speaking world all uses the decimal point (the US, the UK, Canada (except Quebec), Australia and New Zealand all use points rather than commas).  Weirdly, they also use "L" rather than a script l for liter/litre.

Actually, "like this" uses simple quotation marks, which are generic simplified symbols for easier input, though not suitable for printing. The proper equivalent of «like this» is “like this” (for English), „like this” (for Polish), „like this“ (for German) etc.

I have edited the answer to reflect the comments. @MrVocabulary Your comment is entirely correct as far as printed text goes, but since "..." is almost universally used online instead of “...“, I will let it stand.

@Flydog57 L or l is the official symbol (p. 124). ℓ is apparently an affectation used to distinguish between l and 1, even though the official symbol is L.

The SI recognizes both l and L (but not the script l, it turns out).  You you can measure the water for your bread recipe as either 500 ml or 500 mL.  In general, English speaking countries use L while everyone else uses l

@Flydog57 I'm in the UK and don't remember ever seeing mL. Looking in cupboards, everything given in millilitres uses "ml", although larger items just say "litre(s)" rather than abbreviating. Presumably this is an AmE/BrE difference.

@quarague As an added note: I am not a native speaker, and during my English education (and other instances that have contributed to me learning the language), I have been "exposed" to both american and british English as well as other forms of English. I would not be able to confidently say that what I am writing is any specific form of English, but rather "English". I guess this applie to many other non-native speakers and thus a rule for English in general is usefull.

@Flydog57 You really only ever should use L, because l is an objectively terrible symbol and it baffles me that it's still allowed. Demonstration in three keystrokes: 1lI.

@EspeciallyLime, I agree, lower-case l is normal in the UK for litres. But it's not universal (checking my lunchtime shopping) - I have a 1L carton of milk here.

A reference for comma before "that".

Re "a German person being inclined to write "I think, that this is true" with the extra comma": In Danish as well (though I think the difference in English is taught). But I also see it a lot by users from India (same language roots or misguided text books?).

@AmiralPatate Yeah, sometimes I'll copy and paste a character into Google just to see whether it's a capital I or lower case l (this is also an argument against sans serif fonts).

In American, British, and Canadian English, the decimal separator should be a point, not a comma. The Chicago Manual of Styles says the decimal point is represented by a comma in European countries except Great Britain (16th edition, rule 9.20). The trouble is that in US and British English, a comma is used to separate groups of three digits (e.g., 12,345.00), and therefore it should not also be used as a decimal separator. Not being able to unambiguously interpret 37,012 would be a major snafu.
The Chicago Manual of Style is followed by a great many publishing houses. It also says (rule 9.56) that in SI units, "thin, fixed spaces rather than commas are used to mark off groups of three digits", which removes the ambiguity I just pointed out. Nevertheless, the rule is clear, and US undergraduate students correct me if I use the wrong symbol for a decimal separator.

There is also the Indian numbering system with the 2,2,3 style of digit group separators. E.g., one hundred thousand written as 1,00,000 (lakh) and ten million written as 1,00,00,000 (crore).

If the journal has no preference mentioned then I would stick with the customary one for the country of the journal. Much like you would use British-English for UK publications and American-English for USA ones (unless otherwise stated).

I'm not sure this is a good rule for English-language journals published from countries where English is not the official language. As far as I can tell, these quite often adopt the normal English style i.e. decimal point as separator, even when the convention in their country is for a comma.


text:
What to use as a identifier for researchers?
I am preparing the final document of my PhD and I would like to include some kind of identifier to my person – something like a DOI for people. My intention is to to make it easy for the readers of my thesis to get in touch with me and to have a look at my other work. As I don't know at what university I will work in the future, it shouldn't be something related to my current university.
I feel like ORCiD or Google Scholar could be good options, but there are many others out there, such as Mendeley, Scopus, etc. However, I would prefer to include only one or two links.
What are the most professional, persistent, and commonly used researcher profiles in academia?

Mandatory XKCD triggered by "standard"

And SMBC on the topic of et al.: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/citations-needed

How about UUID. "Dear Dr. 4AB7AC07-9B4B-44c7-AB23-94AC0560B711, ..."

What are the most professional, persistent, and commonly used researcher profiles in academia?

Name, surname and current institution. :)
Everything else is just a new fad that may not stand the test of time. Although, among those that you cite, Orcid has the most potential because:

it is explicitly designed to be persistent and used for disambiguation;
its functioning and access model is more open than those of the competitors, and because of this many independent services have started integrating it;
it is backed by a large consortium of publishers and organizations, including those who make Scopus and Web of Science and most of the other (currently) big players in the publishing business.

If you are worried about proving that you wrote the document and not someone else with the same name, consider including a short bio and a profile picture, like it is sometimes done in journals.

Thanks! I edited the question to reflect my intention for providing an identifier. I would simply like to make it easy for people to contact me and to get an overview of my other work.

@n1000 if you specify it like that, your own website or just the email would be the right way.

@Džuris - I like the homepage suggestion.  Why don't you put that in an answer?

ORCID ID is my recommendation. It's a standard amongst scholarly publishers, and its adoption is increasing. If you're planning on publishing, I think there's no question of competition. Publishers and bibliographic metadata systems have the infrastructure in place to deal with ORCID IDs. It's resolvable, so people can click on it to get to your profile. And you can include links to your other publications on your profile.
In terms of fads and persistence, unlike Google (which shuts down services left right and centre), ORCID has a plan for future sustainability, including what happens if the organisation shuts down. And you can take an ORCID with you when you move institution, and link it to other ORCID IDs if needed.
And regarding Federico's answer, lucky you if you're the only John Smith at XYZ University. Luckier still if there wasn't ever a John Smith before or after your time there. That's not true for a lot of people!
Disclaimer: I work at Crossref, who are the DOI Registration Agency for scholarly publication, and it is affiliated to ORCID. However I'm writing this in a personal capacity.

Thanks for the contribution! I am not claiming names are the perfect solution, and the ambiguity you highlight is problematic; but, as present, they are arguably the "most professional, persistent, and commonly used" form of researcher ID, which is what OP was asking.

My point concerned the 'persistence': there may be other John Smiths after you.

Good answer (including the critique of Federico's answer on ambiguity). +1. BTW, a quick question, if you have experience with that... Do RESTful APIs for DOI minting usually differ between Crossref, DataCite, EZID, etc.?

Happy to try and answer in this box. Yes. DataCite and Crossref are for different things (scholarly publications vs datasets) although they overlap. Only Crossref or DataCite members can deposit, though both have affiliates (e.g. FigShare for DataCite) through with you can. That said, this may interest you: https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc/blob/master/deposit_api.md

Some professional societies provide email or web forwarding services to their members.  For instance, the American Mathematical Society lets members choose an address xxx@member.ams.org which the member can update indefinitely to forward to their current address as they change institutions.

I would be very careful with the long-term lock-in that this solution implies. "Do you want to continue using that e-mail address you put on our article? Pay the $200 annual fee!"

As someone who hast just cancelled membership to the ACM, I'm glad I didn't use their email forwarding!

I originally got an AMS email address with this sort of reason in mind, but in practice never used it.

As an addition to that: Often universities allow (paying) alumnis to continue using an affiliated mail address. However, I was having more of a profile in mind (not only an email contact).

The industry standard identifier is email. It is unique, it is yours, it can be used to contact you. Just use some email that will stick with you not the institution :)
But if you want people to be able to get overview of your work without contacting you, you should set up a personal website. Don't worry if you don't know any coding - there are content management systems that allow you to make simple websites and put some information by pointing and clicking. And don't worry about costs. A domain name will probably cost you some 10-15 dollars per year and hosting goes that's perfect for your needs might go below 2$ per month. So by paying under 40$ per year you could have a website that's entirely yours and it might include email as well.


text:
Can I take a year off during a masters program?
I am a second year part-time masters degree student at NYU, with a full time job. My life is pretty simple and boring in NY. I was looking for opportunities, and yesterday it happened. I was accepted as an "intern" for one of Hillary Clinton's organizations in some other state. And there is this other organization that will be financially supporting me for 6 month. Later, I am expected to get a part/full time job there. This is life time opportunity, big adventure, lots of sacrifice and commitment..
My question is: Can I take a year off during grad school in order to be able to work full time in some other state?

Ask your supervisor and your department

Can you? Probably, but we can't say. Should you? Perhaps the question could be re-written to address this, it's a complex issue.

It all depends on the educational system and the policies of the university you are studying in.

Many thanks for comments. I will speak with the department and the advisor on tuesday. Well, maybe just like Moriarty pointed out, the question is should i? Should I stop my life and comfort zone in NY for a great opportunity? Honestly, I don't know. Open to recommendations.

Should you? It depends what you want to do afterwards. If your aim is to work for an organisation like the one is hiring you, absolutely. If you want to become an astronaut, probably not.

As Bill Barth suggests, you really need to check with your department and institutional policies. Every school, and often departments in the same school, can have very different policies.
The fact that you're a master's student, and therefore presumably enrolled in classes rather than actively conducting research, probably will make things easier, as leaves of absence are less disruptive during coursework than in research (for instance, it's harder to "postpone" a grant for a project to enable a student to take a semester or year off).

Ask, then trust but verify.  There are schools, including mine, that assume you've "dropped out" if you fail to register for a relatively small number of consecutive terms.
So, there are two considerations.  The program has to be willing to let you take the time off and also you have to fulfill the policies of the institution with regard to consecutive terms in residence.
Get it all in writing.  (For the latter consideration, it's probably in the catalog.)

Regarding the should you that Moriarty stated, what is the likelihood that you'll return should you take the year off? If this great opportunity that you are talking extends into the next school year, your chances of returning to school diminish greatly. It is likely that more, and perhaps better opportunities will await you once you complete your degree.
Another question to ask is does this experience with this opportunity outweigh the benefits of your master's degree?
It might seem like an inviting opportunity now, but ask yourself if it is risking your education over.


text:
What should be included in a support letter?
I would like to know is there any format or things have to be aware when writing a support letter?
The letter is to support the application of a student to an award.

In what capacity do you know the student?  As an advisor, instructor, something else?

A great letter of support for a student will include the standard elements of a recommendation.

Your relation to the student (lecturer, lab supervisor, academic mentor, etc.)
The student's significant contributions to the school, the community, and the specific program.
The student's academic excellence
Other important factors. (Why are you being asked for this letter of support? What do you know about this student that supports their suitability for this award?)

In all of these, be specific. Don't just say "X is an excellent student". Say "X is an excellent student, as evidenced by their insightful participation in class, their strong paper (won an award at [student conference in field]), and their continued dedication to learning. I was impressed most by x, y and z."

If you work with them, write about how good they were in the office, how they did work and how it helped the company.

Would you explain what you mean by "helped the company"? A kind reminder: this is Academia Stack Exchange.

How the employee was helping the company increase revenuw, bring more business, team-work, helping co-workers, that kind of stuff!

The OP said: "The letter is to support the application of a student to an award.". Do you assume the student works in a company?

Indeed, my assumption is that the asker is a faculty member at the student's university and there is no "company" or "office" involved.  I've asked the asker to clarify, but I suspect this answer is not applicable.


text:
What is the importance of a very tangentially related minor in grad school applications?
In an effort to keep this question generalizable, I'll try to be as vague as possible.
I'm majoring in a softer science (getting a BA), while doing research in a much harder science which could be considered a super-field to my major. This year, I did a year-long field project in my major field which counts toward a certain sociology minor that's at least somewhat related to my major. I'm interested in said minor and my planning said I could complete it, so I declared it.
However, certain circumstances mean that I wasn't able to complete minor-satisfying courses in a timely manner. If I want to get the minor, I have to stick around an extra quarter. I'm not sure that expense is really worth it to me just for the minor.
I intend to apply to grad school in the harder field, a field in which I have a paper or two and a presentation at a major conference.
How important is an unrelated minor in applying to grad school? Unlike something like music or a language, there's probably not much I could do with it, even in my personal life.

I read this question, but it's about minoring in a related field, not a distant field.

I've tagged this both United States and United Kingdom because I'm from the States but looking at a couple programs that would send me to the UK.

I got lost with all the major and minor. I think it would be clearer if you just name the fields, without too much loose of generality.

Except in unusual circumstances, a minor per se will matter for very little indeed in applying to graduate school.  There may be value in the particular things that you have done related to this minor (e.g., the field project) or reference letters you might be able to get due to your work towards it, irrespective of whether you actually complete the minor or not.
I would not however recommend delaying your graduation and grad school applications just to be able to formally complete your minor.

It actually wouldn't delay anything, I'm taking a year off anyway for personal reasons before applying, but thanks for the answer.

What is this “hard” and “soft” business?
Apply broadly. Good programs will look at your application as a whole and be less caught up with majors, minors, hard, soft, whatever… Your overall academic preparation and performance, and your research experience and scholarly potential are most important.


text:
When to upload preprint (or abstract) to online repository?
I know that it depends on where I publish whether I am allowed to upload my paper to an online repository like ResearchGate (cf. here).
The question is, however, when I would upload the paper.

Can I upload the abstract before the actual publication?
Can I upload the paper (e.g. preprint) before the actual publication?
Or should I wait with both until the paper has actually been published?

For example, Springer only allows you to make your work publicly available 12 months after official publication or later. The policiy does not say anything about abstracts, however.
Since I think that making the abstract available beforehand is good publicity for my paper, I´m interested in

common practice -- when do you upload what?
legal restrictions.

My main experience is with publishing papers at IEEE conferences (the kind where a conference contribution counts as full paper), so I'll stick to that for my answer, although it probably extends to IEEE journals all the same. IEEE are pretty explicit about their rules, this is an excerpt from a document called author_faq.pdf:

Can an author post his manuscript on a preprint server such as ArXiv?
Yes. The IEEE recognizes that many authors share their unpublished manuscripts on public sites. Once manuscripts have been accepted for publication by IEEE, an author is required to post an IEEE copyright notice on his preprint. Upon publication, the author must replace the preprint with either 1) the full citation to the IEEE work with Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) or a link to the paper’s abstract in IEEE Xplore, or 2) the accepted version only (not the IEEE-published version), including the IEEE copyright notice and full citation, with a link to the final, published paper in IEEE Xplore.

There is more including the definition of accepted vs. published version (published version is "with copy-editing, proofreading and formatting added by IEEE") and uploading the paper on a personal website (also allowed), but since that's not the focus of the question, I won't copy it here.
Which brings me back to the core of the question: when to upload the paper?
Actually, in the case of ArXiv, it's already in the name: ArXiv is a preprint server, as the name indicates, uploading happens before printing / publication. At what point exactly is up to the author, I usually uploaded a paper once it was accepted, others uploaded their papers when they submitted them for review.

I'm not an IP expert, but the statement "once manuscripts have been accepted for publication by IEEE, an author is required to post an IEEE copyright notice on his preprint" seems dubious, because I don't think IEEE can retrospectively claim copyright on earlier work.

They don't retrospectively claim copyright, they have you transfer copyright to them before publication

IEEE insist that "an IEEE copyright notice" is placed on a preprint for which the author did not transfer copyright, thus this seems like retrospectively claiming copyright. This might not be the case if the IEEE copyright notice merely asserts that IEEE own the copyright for a derivative of the preprint.

Thanks! This clarifies the situation for me a bit.
In individual cases, I think I should still ask the publisher when and what I am allowed to upload to public servers.

Springer's self-archiving policy states:

By signing the Copyright Transfer Statement you [may] deposit ... the article in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later.

Thus, you may deposit the article in any repository before signing the Copyright Transfer Statement.

Ah, I think you´re right. How interesting! The policy states that prior versions of the article published on non-commercial pre-print servers like arXiv.org can remain on these servers and/or can be updated with the author’s accepted version. (...) Acknowledgement needs to be given to the final publication and a link should be inserted to the published article on Springer’s website (...).
But if I have already signed the CTS, can I still upload the abstract?

The policy clearly forbids uploading the article. I suspect uploading the abstract goes against the spirit of the policy, but it isn't explicitly forbidden, since the policy only refers to "the article," not derivatives of it.


text:
Does more knowledge enhance your chance of doing better and 'original' research (in mathematics)?
NOTE: I had asked this question in here, in my edit, but since it is irrelevant to that question, I moved it here as it is a separate question...
I chose to study bulky books instead of attending lectures or studying lecture notes, because I thought that studying every line of the books would enable me to have a rich access to the largest possible knowledge in my mind (not in the library) to have more creativity in time of doing research. By that, I mean I thought that the more techniques I would know, the more able I could be to test many 'keys' to open impenetrable problems. Unfortunately, due to never being in a university environment (as I am a high school student) I couldn't ask it whether I am wrong or not. I would truly appreciate it if someone would please guide me regarding that issue: Does more knowledge enhance chance of solving challenging problem in mathematics?
(Supposing that someone who has learned a lot of stuff will not forget it with the passage of time)
Added to express my question more clear - My personal opinion is that the more problems (few from each of many different types not many from each of limited diversity) you solve the more expert you become in maths. This can include 'slow'-extension (i.e. not a breakthrough); e.g. after learning definitions and some theorems regarding different types of spaces in General Topology finding their relationships with each other as exercise. This approach can be (IMHO) helpful for many different situations from IMO participants to graduate research students. But, Does it helpful or harmful for being sharp to do a breakthrough research in Mathematics (like works of Gödel or Perelman)?

Heck yes. Why would you expect anything else? But knowledge covers more than book knowledge; and includes the ability to find and learn new material rapidly. The most important things a good education gives you are the ability to research, lean, combine and synthesize knowledge efficiently. In addition to knowledge you need skill, intelligence, wisdom, persistence, networking for new ideas... and a bit of luck.

@keshlam: but how people doing nice researches without bulky reading? comments, e.g. "Most mathematicians don't know all that stuff..."

By doing selective reading, and reading more when they need it, and talking with/working with others and learning from them, and... More knowledge helps, but is far from the only ingredient... it's more a matter of whether you have, or know how to obtain, the right knowledge.

You've been asking the wrong questions. It isn't a matter of raw information load. It's how well you can absorb, internalize, synthesize, manipulate ... and how good you are at coming up with insights that aren't in the books. It isn't an entirely mechanical or deterministic process.

@MKR Despite the fact that I've been answering your questions with "No, you're wrong", I'd like to congratulate you on asking them.  They are not easy questions to answer because they strike at the base of some of the assumptions that often go unexamined for many of us.

Your bounty is an interesting way to go.  I don't think this is an answerable question.  We have a lot of examples of people who achieved great things with little formal educational training (steve jobs, bill gates, albert einstein) and the universities are full of smart people who haven't ever had original ideas.  I don't disagree with a single answer you've been given.

Grothendieck once said, when asked about the derth of books at his university, that they write books there, not read them. That might be a somewhat extreme position to take, but an active, independent mind is crucial.

@Dave Kaye: Despite popular belief, Albert Einstein has a BSc in science with good GPA (though not a PhD). He knew many of the Physics of that time by the age 24, 2 years before his 1905-revolutionary-papers. I set bounty for "credible and/or official sources" since popular opinion is not always same as reality. [BTW mathematics may have a different story so my question's target is maths].

@MKR Einstein's teachers at ETH didn't think much of him, and rather ironically, Minkowski called Einstein "a lazy dog" because he didn't like to study.  He was quite surprised later when Einstein invented special relativity.  Minkowski then reformulated special relativity using his more advanced mathematical knowledge.  Einstein, when he saw the more sophisticated theory, remarked "Since the mathematicians have grabbed hold of the theory of relativity, I myself no longer understand it."  Yet the brilliant insight of relativity theory is Einstein's, not Minkowski's.

@MKS: Einstein received his PhD.  This was in 1905, when he was (about) 26.  (Is it a popular belief that Einstein was not well-educated?)

Intuitively, of course the answer should be yes.  Surprisingly, however, in reality the answer is sometimes no.
A common saying, which to the best of my knowledge has no known attribution, goes something along the lines of: "The fools didn't know it was impossible, so they did it!"
To achieve a significant original scientific contribution, you need to know enough to have a sound basis to build upon.  You also need to avoid immersing yourself too deeply in conventional wisdom and groupthink, or else you are likely to have your originality bleed away from you.
Moreover, every hour spent reading the works of another is an hour not spent producing works of your own.  But of course, you can waste a huge amount of time if you end up reinventing another's idea or miss an important clue in somebody else's work.  So across a scientific life, you will end up wobbling back and forth on a balance between spending more time acquiring knowledge and spending more time generating it yourself.  Early in your career, you will spend most of your time acquiring knowledge, because you need to get to a point where you can understand what is unknown well enough to begin grappling with it meaningfully.  Later you may spend more time working on creating new knowledge, but must also keep up with your reading to keep from going stale.
Even in old and well established fields, however, it's surprisingly easy to get out to the edge of human knowledge and find yourself tangling with some of the interesting things we do not know.  Like, how do cats drink water? We only learned that a couple of years ago.  Heck, we're still figuring out how bicycles work!
If you don't have enough knowledge, you may not notice that there's a problem worth solving there, and you certainly won't have the tools to solve it.  If you're too saturated in the knowledge of others, you might not notice the problem either, because you might end up accepting their explanations instead.
In sum: you must know your fundamentals, know your field, and know how to go looking for specific pieces of additional knowledge.  But knowledge is not originality, and although knowledge often supports originality, it can also interfere with it.

My own experience and observation of how some fellow students became very successful researchers suggests that doing what you describe is actually detrimental.
As someone else mentioned, every hour you spend studying these thick books is an hour away from research.  But the actual effect is more insidious than that.  In mathematics, there are two issues.  One is that often to write a mathematically accurate text, you have to build up a lot of formalities, like definitions of how you use symbols, how you will handle edge cases, and proofs of little things that can actually obscure the main ideas.  The whole point of attending a seminar or lecture is to see how an expert, possibly even the discoverer of the ideas in question, sees the subject.  For research, sometimes this is all you need to know if it turns out you don't need to delve further into a topic, but even if you do delve deeper, knowing what are the main ideas is crucial and often not at all clear from a text, which is usually designed more to be an authoritative reference or complete in its exposition.
The other issue has to do with there being many ways to view one thing in mathematics.  Experts build up very personal ways of viewing mathematics.  I think this might be truer than in more experimental sciences.  Even a well-studied area can be viewed in a way that's still correct but unusual enough to lead to new insights.  A lot of famous mathematicians have arrived at new theories by just trying to understand old theories their own way, without being unduly influenced by the standard ways.  I personally find it difficult to understand a proof that is coming from a different approach than what I'm comfortable with.  To put it simply, sometimes your brain might be more hard-wired to understand something geometrically than algebraically or vice-versa.  By learning to fill in the gaps in lectures your own way, you learn what works for you and you start to develop your own style of doing mathematics.  If you're reading a very detailed or complete text, it can take you longer to understand simply because the author(s) might be more comfortable with using a particular tool than you are.  One could argue that learning that tool is important, but I think there's something to be said for learning tools that come to you naturally.  At the least, it's probably a more efficient approach.

It is a delicate compromise really.
The benefits of having an encyclopedic knowledge of all areas of math are pretty clear.  However, life is short, and you will be judged on the research you do from an early age.
Learning can be a form of procrastination.  You also risk spreading yourself too thinly (learning the easy parts of many subjects but mastering none).  Empirically, I observe that many mathematicians (ignoring Tao etc) are experts in a narrow field, and only have a superficial understanding of other areas.
With practice, it becomes easier to isolate the relevant parts of a proof, and extract the minimal technical information to apply it.  You don't really need book "knowledge" of it.
It's also a matter of taste.  I favour the "just enough education to perform" model.  I am increasingly bored by learning, and prefer to work on new ideas all the time ("new" to me, anyway. I rely on chatting to people regularly as a screen against reproducing known results).  I find it more efficient and fun to talk to people, than learning.  Perhaps it comes down to your philosophy of life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrhzX3dRRiI ;)
On the other hand, many ideas and techniques can be considered "core" mathematics.  I think you basically must know these, if only so that you can talk to other mathematicians efficiently.

I think that, under all other conditions being equal, being exposed to larger knowledge base is (might be) beneficial for quality of research. The "other conditions being equal" condition (no pun intended) is important, as there might be other, more important in a particular context, factors that have greater positive effect on research quality and/or originality than just volume of knowledge.
Several such famous factors come to my mind. The first is the Eureka effect. The second is the deliberate practice concept, which includes the famous 10000 hours heuristic, based on research by Anders Ericsson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book "Outliers". However, note that the role of deliberate practice in mastering a subject domain (to an expert level) recently has been actively challenged by research studies (i.e., see this one). Finally, the third factor that I believe is important (and in many cases might be more important than other factors, including the volume of knowledge) is the ability to see and/or analyze a topic through different mental/conceptual "lenses" (for details and references, see Wikipedia articles on perspectivism and cognitive perspective).
Therefore, considering the points above, I think that the answer to your question is "Maybe".

Yes, obviously.
If you substitute endless passive absorption for active thinking, then it can take away from research, but otherwise that argument is a red herring.
And yes, we all love the story about the PhD student who solved a problem because he did not know it was considered too hard, and the moral should perhaps be that you should always have a go if only to find out what the fuss is about. But it's too romantic to imagine ourselves good will huntings.


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How to deal with insignificant work / wrong methodology in papers, when it is discussed correctly?
I had a strange situation a few months ago:
I was reviewing a paper which was on an interesting problem and the authors used machine learning to solve this problem. Unfortunately, they seemed to have little experience with the methods so they obviously ran into the problem of overfitting without noticing this. Therefore, they drew wrong conclusions from their experiments. (Short summary for people not familiar with machine learning: They did not use the methods correctly and so their results were invalid).
I elaborated on the problem in my review and stated that the result cannot be generalized due to this problem and that the methods were used wrongly.
I was a bit surprised to receive a revision of the manuscript, where my remarks were just included in the discussion section: In fact they did not improve the experiment, but in the discussion they more or less stated that:

it is possible that everything we wrote in here is invalid due to the problem of overfitting.

So in the end they had a paper with a good justification for the project, a maybe working method which was not applied correctly, and they interpreted the results correct – so all in all it was a well documented example for a failure, and it was formally correct.
Still, my recommendation was to refuse the paper, but I was considering if it might be helpful to others because they could learn from the mistakes. On the other hand, publishing such a paper would not be a reference for the authors since this is a severe flaw in the use of methods (and readers might skip the discussion and think the results are valid).
Did you have similar experiences before? And how did you react?

Does the journal have a relevance threshold?

Not an explicit one. But in the end the paper was rejected.

In the end the decision on these sorts of things lies with the editor, not the reviewer. As reviewer you could write back saying

The authors now acknowledge the possibility of overfitting. In the abscence of any attempt test for overfitting (which I believe to be likely here rather than just a technical possibility) it is unclear what value the results obtained might have for the field, other than as a warning to others.

And leave it for the editor to decide.

I haven't personally had similar experiences before, and probably am much more junior than you (only really have reviewed a relatively small number of papers at all still), but here's my thoughts (I am familiar with the specific case of Machine Learning though):

I was a bit surprised to recieve a revision of the manuscript, where my remarks were just included in the discussion section: In fact they did not improve the experiment, but in the discussion they more or less stated "it is possible that everything we wrote in here is invalid due to the problem of overfitting".

Did they really only just add that in a discussion, or did they also adjust other places? Typically, a very short (e.g. one-sentence) summary of results is included in places like Abstract / Introduction / Conclusions, something like "our approach X performs well on problem Y". If there are any claims in any places like that, those would be unjustified in my opinion, and that would be a serious problem. There really shouldn't be any unjustified claims about performance anywhere in the paper.

So in the end they had a paper with a good justification for the project, a maybe working method which was not applied correctly, and they interpreted the results correct - so all in all it was an well documented example for a failure, and it was formally correct.

If the intuition / ideas behind the proposed approach are sound / interesting and new, if it all sounds like it could work out and be interesting... I think there might be some value in publication. Of course this also depends on the venue, some have lower standards than others. I suppose I'd treat it as a paper that simply didn't have any empirical evaluation at all, try to decide whether or not you'd still accept it then?

Still, my recommendation was to refuse the paper, but I was considering if it might be helpful to others because they could learn from the mistakes.

That's not what peer-reviewed papers are for. I do believe papers with "failures" in the sense of interesting ideas that, after a proper evaluation, turned out not to work should be valued more highly than they tend to be (only success stories that "beat state of the art" tend to be accepted). Such failures can provide useful insights when published, prevent others from coming up with the same ideas and wasting their time on them again. But accepting a paper with a methodological flaw so that others can use it as an example of what not to do in a paper? That doesn't seem valuable to me.

Agree.  In some fields, we even wish for a "Journal of Negative Results" as a tongue-in-cheek way of saying more papers should publish non-successes with analysis and insights to benefit the community.
However, this paper seems to be methodologically unsound which means useful insights from the results (even if less than stellar) are meaningless.
I'm struggling to find the value of this paper.


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Is specifying a minimum word count beneficial for academic writing?
As we all know, during our higher-education careers there have been many professors who have assigned academic papers that require a minimum word or page count in some shape or form.
Personally, I feel this simply forces students to create “fluff” in their papers. I can understand creating a maximum word count (this makes students sift out what they feel is relevant to answering the prompt of the paper) whereas a minimum word count encourages one to think more broadly about how to go about the prompt. In some situations this is good – perhaps the instructor expects evidence or more critical thinking – but in most situations this will only lead students to find more evidence to reaffirm their claim (which is not very useful if you can prove your claim with less evidence) or create “fluff” in their paper in order to meet the requirement.
I found a blog post about word counts for people writing stories/articles but this is in the professional world (not academic) and doesn’t actually have statistics, but it does give some interesting perspective.
I want to know if there are any statistics or studies that prove specifying a minimum word-count is beneficial or hurtful in academic paper writing? Does it vary based on subject? Perhaps instructors can give their experience and/or thoughts on this?
So far there have been answers of people’s experiences which is extremely beneficial and I encourage more of them. Inevitably though, I am hoping to accept an answer that has a case study or any research relevant to this topic.

Technically a minimum word count is irrelevant; the instructor has to assess whether the content is fluff or not.

@alexy13 That's true but that is from the instructor perspective. From a student's perspective, they feel obligated to meet this requirement and it could end up hurting their paper.
It's been a while since I have checked in on this question but given the answers, I have temporarily accepted earthling's answer. I still encourage any answers on studies for this question though.

That's true. I had to add up about 200 words on an essay to reach the word requirement recently, and then I was ironically told I was "repetitive".

As we all know, during our higher education careers it is inevitable to be assigned
  essays or academic papers that require a minimum word-count.

I do not agree with your premise here. For my undergraduate and graduate students I rarely include a minimum word count. I do include a maximum word count (which students often want extended) for the reason you wrote: Encourage students to write concisely.
Minimum word counts do promote the things we want to avoid. Writing the same information with fewer words give greater power to the writing so encouraging students to do the opposite does not really do what I want to do.
That said, I do find that I have to be VERY clear with my students that writing too little can cause them to fail. I explain that when it comes to word count, there is a maximum, say 3,000 words, but no minimum. If they can show they understand everything they should understand in 500 words, great! However, unless they are an exceptional writer, they should expect to fail if they submit too little.

I fixed my premise. It was wrong of me to make the notion everyone does it but I assure you there is a large handful of professors who do require this. I really appreciate your answer though.

Well, you don't specify in which area you are. I certainly know that in mathematics and theoretical computer science, only a very weird professor would enforce a minimal length on a solution of a problem (which is a typical assignment: to solve a problem). You simply assign a problem and you think to yourself: "This should be for 2 or 3 pages of proof." To your surprise, the student writes a 10-line proof in a way in which you never treated the problem before (and maybe no one else either)!
So you never put a lower bound on the length of the solution, for the above reason. You can put a upper bound so that the student "can't simply list all possibilities", but even that is not necessary; however, it still of course makes sense if you have many students and a lack of time.
N.B.: One of my favourite scientific paper has 5 pages including abstract and references, and shortens a proof that was previously ~20 pages. Isn't that beautiful?

Let me start by saying I'm an undergraduate, so take me as seriously as you feel I deserve. I've TA'd for a 200-level class with a fair amount of writing, which meant grading lots of papers, and dealing with students who need to have a word/length requirement to be happy. I also have worked in journalism both as a writer and editor (again, college paper), so I've done lots of writing, and spent a lot of time working with writers on their articles.
In class, length is seen as a good thing, while in journalism, it's seen almost as a bad thing (due to space requirements). Dealing with tight space constraints was very tough for me at first, but after doing it for a few years I've learned to write compact stuff. You write better when every word is a gift. You really think about what you can cover in a given space, and how to give every word as much impact as possible. You think about structure more, knowing you won't have room re-summarize later, and you don't bring up anything that's not essential to what you're writing. It's harder, but it makes you better.
Giving long length requirements seemed to have the opposite effect. Topics diverge, and structure can easily be ignored. Writing/syntax is encouraged to be verbose. I see many writers come onto staff used to writing they do in class, and what I've noticed is that their writing often lacks clarity and purpose.
Most of what I do as an editor/teacher is ask questions like, "What exactly are you trying to say?" and "Explain this to me like I'm a 5-year-old." I find that this really helps, and that good writing follows good and clear ideas. This is regardless of the length of assignment, but I think having limited space forces students to do this.

I agree that providing a minimum word count promotes fluff. I have often used an approximate number of pages (12 pt double spaced) expected together with a minimum number of references. The reason for providing anything, is that students ask how much they need to write.
The question from the students is the key, as I see it. They do not know what constitutes good scientific writing and tend to try to quantify knowledge as "number of pages to be read to the exam" and similar quantities they can relate to. How this should be translated into what we usually are looking for "quality" is not at all clear to them, nor us in most cases! This has made we think more about the training throughout the education and how to get the message of "quality" across. I, unfortunately, do not have a patented solution but believe that organized writing exercises throughout the education is necessary. The problem is that most if not everyone in the education have to synchronize exercises across course boundaries in order to build understanding of academic writing among the students, starting with simpler exercises and leading towards essays.
Part of the writing task should also be a clear goal providing a goal for the writing exercise, other than a ten page requirement. what are the goals? to write ten pages? To quickly gather some information on a topic? To handle references correctly? To write concisely? The list can be extended substantially. The goals need to be made clear and then one must have a clear picture of what one expects out of all these goals because a different number of them can be satisfied at different levels of an education.

+1 for your thoughts. Just explain me how you manage to read something double-spaced and not be horrified by the look? I prefer them to use narrower columns instead, which leaves me the space for making notes, but I can't stand double-space writing, it's on a similar level as using Comic Sans ;)

Whether a minimum length is justified depends on the purpose of the assignment.  For a typical problem set, of course it would be ridiculous.  The purpose is to solve the problems, and a short solution is even better than a long solution.  However, I sometimes assign term papers to teach students about technical writing.  Writing a very short essay would defeat the whole purpose of gaining writing experience (and writing one perfect paragraph is very different from writing twenty good pages, in terms of the level of organization and skills required).  In these assignments, the students are given quite a bit of choice regarding the topic, and I offer guidance and feedback.  If the paper is not long enough, then either it's poorly written or the topic was too narrow, and the student should figure this out early enough that the topic can be broadened if necessary.  I'm not sympathetic if someone says "I started writing my twelve-page paper the night before it was due and discovered that I could only think of four pages to say on this topic."  [Of course precise rules are silly, and I make it clear that there's a little flexibility.  I wouldn't penalize someone for turning in eleven pages with no fluff, while twelve pages with a lot of fluff would count as bad writing.]

Generally, I try and provide enough room between the minimum and maximum word counts to accommodate both verbose and terse writers. I use word counts to provide a guide as to the scope and depth I want in the assignment. Generally, the students who stretch out/tighten up their writing to stay within the minimum/maximum range have bigger issues than just being overly verbose or terse.
I would probably see better writing if I let students use their natural length, but generally my writing assignments are about learning a topic in breadth (long assignment) or focusing on a key issue (short assignment).

Minimum word requirements can encourage fluff, but they can also encourage greater research and more depth to the writing. Fluff comes from the students who would rather not have to write anything in the first place. At least that has been my experience. The minimum word requirement is not always successful in accomplishing this.

@DSVA Are you in the sciences?  Because I inevitably do lots of research while writing my articles.  In fact, I doubt anyone that works in literature has everything ready to go to write their paper and doesn't stop midway to go and research one or many new topics.  It's partly why it's common to have an article on the backburner for months or years.

@DSVA Pretty common actually.  I highly doubt that anyone could write a monograph without constantly going back and researching things that pop into their head as their writing, or chunking out entire chapters and leaving them to be reworked later as an article or a separate book.  An article is really just a monograph on a smaller scale, but the same process applies.  As we write, new ideas come into our head, and we incorporate them, but they often require further research.  The humanities writing process is very different than the sciences'.

One useful reason to give both minimum and maximum word counts is to set expectations.
Given some topic I am knowledgable on, I migt be able to write 500 words, 5000 words, or 50,000 words. Each of these pieces of text might be good for the space given, but they are obviously not comparable, and if you were expecting one but got either of the other two, you might be annoyed.