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Is there data or research on the tradeoffs associated with revealing how a student's grade on an assessment compares to the rest of the class?
We're building a teaching platform for projects, and one of the goals is to provide rich feedback to students concerning their performance.
I'm fairly data-driven as a student and always appreciate seeing a lot of data about each project submission (min/mean/median/max/histogram/percentile/rank...)
My advisor argues that this drives competitiveness unnecessarily, and while it may help the best students in the class, it would discourage those who are struggling. He would prefer to optimize the learning experience for each student in the class.
Is there published data or science of learning research regarding the tradeoffs between driving competition by revealing grades and ranks after every homework/project submission?

To describe comparisons with other students as "data-driven" I think puts a too innocent and misleading face on it. One might argue abstractly that "having information" is good, but what the question refers to as "data" is only information about (the taken-for-granted) competition. It is not about the subject matter, for example. Unless the subject matter is an otherwise meaningless filter (as, for example, many low-level math classes often are), acquisition of the subject matter should be primary, and could be excellent even if/while everyone else "does better" in the "competition".

@paulgarrett, We're trying to tie each graded component to a well-defined learning objective (LO). The assessments are online and adaptive to ensure that the grade matches the acquisition of an LO. The absolute score on a submission is still the primary identifier of whether a student has learned the subject matter (and we have this down).  (1/2)

My proposal is that by providing relative score indicators (ranks/percentiles/distributions), students will be driven to perform "better". This could be measured by A/B testing with two groups of students in the same cohort and comparing: i) the mean/median scores of the two groups, and ii) the number of extremely low/high scores per assignment in this cohort. (2/2)

If you Google something like "pros and cons of ranking students" or something similar you will find several websites and other resources that deal with this topic.
Ranking students is common in education. The best examples are standardized tests that always include a percentile ranking (SAT, ACT, GRE, etc.). This is one form of norm-referencing, which is a common tool used in assessing. However, since standardized testing is nationwide, it is hard to be too competitive with the person sitting next to you during the exam, since you probably do not even know their name.
Within the classroom context, ranking could be detrimental if there is a higher consequence of the ranking. For example, only the top 20% will pass and the rest will fail. This could lead to some cutthroat behavior and really lead to a negative learning environment. If the ranking lacks deeper implications, students may not even pay attention to it.
In the end, whether or not to rank or not depends primarily on a person's philosophy of education. Some believe this is beneficial while other do not and there is empirical support for both positions. It is impossible to say that this should always be used or never be used.

Thanks @DarrinThomas. Even with your search and other similar searches, I did not find anything that was very relevant from any "good" publication (SIGCSE, L@S, ICLS, JEE, RER). I should add that the ranking is not meant to have any deeper implications. You mentioned: Some believe this is beneficial while others do not -- I'm hunting down published research on either side of this divide.

There is not much on class ranking. However, there is a lot about ranking universities. It might be useful to look at ranking universities and see if you can extrapolate principles for class ranking

I don't think it maps well. The absence of existing publications is an opportunity for me though :-)


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Are the ISBNs of two copies of a book the same?
I want to know whether the ISBN of two copies of the exact same book is the same or different. By exact copies, I mean to say same edition, title, publisher, country, price, author etc.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this has nothing to do with academia

There are a few places that you could get the answer: http://www.isbn.org/faqs_general_questions and https://www.isbn-international.org/content/what-isbn. I found it by just searching for "what is isbn".

@Ric Having spent some time in the past as a librarian, I disagree on both counts.  Books are often critical primary sources, and the "almost-but-not-quite-unique" nature of ISBNs can pose some subtle problems for scholars.

As noted in the comments, the purpose of an ISBN is to uniquely identify a set of books, all of which contain precisely the same content.  Thus, it is reasonable to expect that two books with precisely the same ISBN will have precisely the same content.
It is worth noting, however, that the reverse does not apply.  Two books may have precisely the same content but be issued different ISBNs because they come from different printings.  Likewise, printing errors, etc., can in rare cases render two books different despite having the same ISBN. For nearly all cases, however, the one-to-one relationship holds.

Thanks @jakebeal for you answer.You are so helpful unlike some "Wise and Learned Men" out there.

Note that paperback and hard cover bindings of a book will have different ISBNs.

You may also get different ISBNs for otherwise identical books aimed for different markets (eg another country). "Almost-but-not-quite" is certainly a good way to describe it!

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Is it legal / ethical for a professor to monetize course content videos?
I am a college student who is currently enrolled in a class where the professor posts lecture videos online with ads enabled. I was wondering if this is legal; the professor is being paid by the university to lecture, but is also making money from ads on his lecture videos.

It's probably legal; I doubt there is any law against it (but we don't know what jurisdiction you're in, so no way to know what your laws are).  But it probably violates the university's rules against conflicts of interest.

Is it legal ir ethical to write a text book and make a little money?

@JonCuster: Yes, but whether it's ethical to make said money off your own students is open to question.

Yes, because textbook writing involves no interactions with students. If the video is the recording of a lecture, really, how does this involve students in a major way?

@JonCuster the textbook analogy would apply if purchasing the textbook was mandatory. As students, we are required to watch these videos. I would say that publishing your own book and making it a required purchase is inherently biased and is similar to this scenario (albeit without monetary cost to the student body)

@WilliamAnderson Recommending own textbook is widespread and also close to mandatory. And unlike posted videos, students directly pay for it, while watching the videos makes student no extra cost (and most probably not more than few cents income to the prof), while I can see the usefulness of it.

Is the professor really making money from the ads?  I mean, does he really get a share?  Content online do involve maintenance costs, i.e. server storage, upstream data, general website maintenance.  Services often do ads to cover these costs and then make things available for free to the uploader and the watchers.  (Whether the service makes money on top of it, it probably does, is another question)

If you're worried about privacy, open up an inprivate or incognito session.

How public are these videos? Do you need a login that is only available to students who are enrolled in the class, or is it completely public (e.g. youtube)?

@grochmal Good point: hosting yourself and paying the bandwidth can be a cost. Also, assuming that there are not more than a few thousand students in that class, Youtube doesn't even pay a cent to the Prof. Similar is true to other video services, too. Most classes are more like 100-200 students max. OP seems overly focused on money here.

Who knows? Maybe the university pays some staff person to prepare/post/monitor/update videos, and they hope the income from ads will help pay for that person...

@Greg I don't believe I'm "overly focused on money," my question is not concerned with the professor getting rich off of this, rather it is about whether or his actions are ethical given his contract with the university. The videos are hosted on Youtube on his personal account and I believe monetizing a video is a deliberate action the user must take.

@WilliamAnderson Since you are asking about monetization as your main question yes, it is an important question if we are talking about zero money or 2 cents.

Unless they're' getting a huge audience beyond the class (who have not paid tuition), they won't be making much ad revenue. It will be peanuts if only the students in the class are watching on a platform like YouTube, especially wth the current "adpocalypse".

One of our professors, actually, the dean of our college, represented Tobacco companies in court (as the dean. not a private citizen), and got paid a lot. He is still the dean.

Legal? Probably yes, depending on university policy.
Ethical? Universities and politics nowadays encourage academics to be business-savvy and profit-oriented (I guess, as long as the uni gets a cut). So, while the described constellation indeed carries a "smell", it may be perfectly in line what society wants academics to do.

To the downvoters: note that OP was talking about "ads enabled". We are not talking about entertainment videos, but education.

AS wishizuk has pointed out in another answer, the presence of ads does not mean the professor is making any money from them.

@BobBrown I think ads without monetization is a new thing, I answered what the OP asked (which included the assumption that the prof is making money).

I am a college professor, and I have literally thousands of lecture/example videos on YouTube.  Since I did not want any advertisement to interfere with my videos, I have not monetized my channel; however, YouTube started to add ads to some of my videos anyway.  To be honest, it made me think about monetizing my channel if they put ads on my videos anyway.  I have not looked into the policies the college I teach at has in place, though.

How does this answer the question?

@user2316602, to my perception, it strongly suggests that the ads on the professor's videos possibly were added by someone else, and not in their control.

If the institution provides the server and other necessary resources to host videos, then the students are essentially paying for this through their tuition and shouldn't have to put up with ads.
However, if the professor provides the recording equipment etc., and has to arrange for the video hosting, etc. without this being provided by the institution, then I don't see anything wrong with this. It might even be that the video hosting site imposes the ads and the professor doesn't profit from them at all.

Even if the uni offers hosting, there might be limitations in size, availability etc that makes less desirable then Youtube. Also, the teacher may want to make it available for a wider audience than his/her students. In that case, using the university hosting would be the unethical solution.

I have created video content for my students almost since I began teaching, and I created extensive video content starting with H1N1, when we were told our students couldn't be required to come to campus to attend lecture.
Our materials must be accessible.  (And morally, ethically, should be!) Youtube was the first platform I could use that offered closed-captioning, so I moved my content to Youtube and uploaded the transcripts as captions. (Required -- the automatically generated captions don't count for ADA purposes, or so I am told, and I agree that the capitalization and punctuation is important.)
The videos for my students are "unlisted," so I can't monetize them, but Youtube still puts ads on them.
I wish they didn't -- I wish educational content could be advertisement- and distraction-free, but I guess it's the price I've paid for being able to offer accessible content.
My college since has purchased a server that supports closed-captioning, but it's clunky to use and I'm not going to port the hundreds of videos per course that is my current set over to a new server.
I've told my students, once I noticed the ads, that my channel isn't monetized. (The outspoken ones indicated it would be good for me if they were.) I don't think there's necessarily an ethical issue if they were, and I think the textbook analogy is a good one. Youtube videos are another form of publishing, and we are allowed to require books that we have published and receive royalties for.
I do think there's potentially an issue if a faculty member has a monetized channel and they're requiring students to view content that is motivated more by clicks than pedagogy, but that is a different area -- material that isn't appropriate (sufficiently intellectually challenging, e.g.) for a college course, which is a separate issue.
It is interesting to me that this student is bothered by the faculty member potentially making money on the channel.  Is it an erosion of trust?

To start with a useful analogy, it has long been the case in academia that professors can assign their own (commercially published) textbook for a course, and even make this the "mandatory" text for the course.  This is considered legitimate even if the professor has the power to provide a free version of the text instead, but chooses not to do so.  Universities have generally taken the view that it is reasonable for students to incur basic costs (above the course fees) to obtain materials for the course, and that it is okay for the professor to make commercial profit from the material in this case.  Whilst there is arguably a conflict of interest in this situation, universities have not generally been concerned about this, and they tend to see it as a necessary consequence of having experts who write textbooks teach their courses.  The only time this might raise an issue is if the university draws the conclusion that the assigned commercial material is unreasonable in the circumstances (e.g., tangential to the course objectives).
Similarly, while there is arguably a conflict of interest in the case you describe, is is extremely unlikely that a university would have any problem with their professors using online teaching videos for their courses, even if they have a commercial stake in those videos, or gain advertising revenue from those videos.  On most platforms the advertising is built into the platform, but even if it is something enabled by the professor, that is still roughly analogous to gaining profit from selling a commercial textbook.  As with the case of an assigned textbook, the university is unlikely to have a problem with this unless they draw the conclusion that the material is unreasonable in the circumstances (e.g., tangential to the course objectives).
I am not aware of anything that would make this practice illegal --- it has been common practice in universities for generations.  One could make ethical objections to the practice (on he basis of a conflict of interest), but solving this might impose bureaucratic rules that are more destructive to the quality of courses as the present practice.

The fact that something was a common practice for generation does not make it a good or a right thing. Not every status quo deserves to be maintained.

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Dealing with professor's death on my thesis
My professer, regrettably and very suddenly, passed away yesterday. He was my mentor for my graduation thesis. His teaching capabilities were not great, but he was a great man. Always helping out with everything he could and very supportive. I have very fond memories of him.
I have to hand in my thesis in two weeks time. Currently, I have his and another mentor's name on the front page to make it clear they are my supervisors.
How should I proceed with his name? I'd prefer not to erase it from my thesis, as he helped me and supported me. Would it be appropriate to leave it? Is it appropriate to add a little symbol like a cross next to his name to mark his passing? Should I just leave it the way it is now?
If it matters, I'm from the Netherlands.

It depends more on your institution that anything else. But I'd guess that you just put both names and that's it.

My sincere condolences. I would write a small note on one of the first pages. Ask your other mentor.

In the UK, I wouldn't be surprised to see "The Late Professor M Jones" used. I've no idea what convention is used in the Netherlands.

You should check with your department on how to precisely handle certain aspects, because in some contexts your supervisor's name reflects his contribution to your work, and in other contexts his name reflects his approval of your thesis. For the former, obviously you want to still include his name and you probably have some choice in the matter whether or not to highlight his passing. For the latter, he cannot approve your final thesis (even if he was obviously approving of your work overall), but there may still be an appropriate way you can indicate his name to not leave him out.

Is this about a PhD thesis or a Master's thesis? For the former rules are more strict in general and I would recommend contacting the "pedel". For example, in the university where I did my PhD the title page of the thesis had to be approved by the university before you would even be admitted to the thesis defence procedure.

It will always be Mozart's Requiem, never Sussmeyr's Requiem.

@AndrewLeach That's a normal way to refer to a recently deceased person in running text but I wouldn't expect to see it, e.g., on the title page of a thesis.

You should definitely keep the name. I've seen that people who passed away during some endeavor usually have their names surrounded with a rectangle.
You can also consider putting some In Memoriam page for your mentor somewhere at the beginning of the thesis. You should consult other people within your institutions culture to make sure that this doesn't come off as pretentious (although I see no reason why it should).

He supervised you to the end. He should be listed as superviser. How you treat his passing away is a separate question.

Interesting. I normally see a dagger/obelisk after their name: Dr. John Doe †

Yes @guifa is right, I don't think I've ever seen a bold rectangle in the Netherlands to indicate a deceased person. A dagger/obelisk is commonly used for that in the Netherlands.

Rather unfortunate that it's called a "dagger"...

Thanks, I think I shall stick to the dagger symbol. I have never seen the use of a rectangle around a name in a paper in the Netherlands.

@guifa: Note that the cross can be in direct conflict with footnote symbols used in some publications to indicate affiliations or contact info.

@O.R.Mapper that's true, but how many styles still use the asterisk series for footnotes? (I'm sure they exist, but it's been a while since I've seen one). Another variation I see that would resolve the ambiguity is Dr. John Doe († 2017)

Pardon my ignorance, but what makes a rectangle "bold"? Is it a color? A thick line? Can we have an example? Or other examples?

@AaronHall A think line I suppose.

You could also consider "(late)"

@guifa Isn't that supposed to represent a Crucifix?

@MateenUlhaq It's perfectly normal to write "the late Professor Smith" when talking about a recently deceased person in running text but I've never seen "(late)" added to a name.

@SGR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_(typography) :
"The dagger is also used to indicate death,[3][24] extinction,[25] or obsolescence.[1][26] The asterisk and the dagger, when placed beside years, are used to indicate year of birth and year of death respectively.[3] When placed immediately before or after a person's name, it indicates that the person is deceased.[3][27][28][29] In this usage, it is referred to as the "death dagger".[30]
[...]
The dagger should not be confused with the Unicode characters "Latin cross" (✝, U+271D), [...] and other cross symbols."

@AaronHall I agree that "bold" is an extremely vague statement in this context and I removed it. As for an example, I devoted some time to find something adequate, but haven't had any luck in picking the right search term. I saw it on different occasions, from movie credits, book title pages to papers. It is very possible for it to be a "local" custom. Be it a dagger, crucifix, asterisk, or the "bold" rectangle, I think the point is the same: some designation, that makes it clear that the author is deceased.

My sincere condolences. I am in the same situation: one of my advisors passed away 6 months before the end of my PhD.
Here are the issues I faced:

My thesis had to be supervised until the viva. OP (as it was the case for me) seems to have another supervisor. Talk with them and this shouldn't be an issue — especially if this other supervisor is in the academia. The PI of my research group also offered me to review my thesis even if it was not really within its field of expertize. You might otherwise find a more adequate other researcher ready to help you in your institution (just make sure that everyone in charge of your graduating program is in the loop when contacting new temporary advisors).
I had to put names on my thesis' cover. I just listed names of my two original supervisors. (I don't think that temporary supervising a thesis for two weeks is worth being listed as supervisor.) You can find here ideas on how to indicate your supervisor passed away. The solution I chose was to indicate nothing on the front cover, to add a dedication page ("In the memory of Professor John Doe") at the beginning of my thesis, and to thank the temporary advisor in the Acknowledgement section. In this section, I also refer to my deceased supervisor as "the late Prof. Doe".
Reason for no special symbol on the cover is that your deceased supervisor was de facto your supervisor for your thesis. It thus must be listed. But my opinion is that you won't change your thesis cover in the future if another person passes away. So I think that the purpose of the cover is to indicate who supervised you (here, both supervisors, hence both names listed), not their current state (hence, no indication).
The dedication page, imho, already makes obvious that this person passed away short before graduation.
This supervisor co-authored papers that were still under review. With the consent of my second advisor, I sent a note to journal's editors at the next round of review to explain them the situation. I asked them if it was possible to keep him/her acknowledged as author.  It is then up to editors. Some journals have strict policies (e.g., having the written co-authoring consent from all authors regarding the accepted version — which we obviously cannot have.) Their name was then listed in the acknowledgment section. Most of them don't. What happened for a conference paper is that the name was listed along with the others, with a footnote explaining that the paper was finalized after their death.

TL;DR: You should list both names in your thesis. Regarding indicating that one of them passed away, I would keep it short and subtle. (My opinion is to add no specific indication on the front cover — see above.) For what regards on-going publications, talk with the editors the next time you contact them.

In my country we put a frame, with the name and surname inside the rectangle. This means that the author died in the process of creation.

I have seen this also, mostly in documents/papers from Europe.

Yes,@GEdgar this country is in Europe

I would make sure this practice is common in OP's country. Indeed, I am from western Europe. I have never seen such a practice, and I'm not sure I would have understood it without further context. (Appending a dagger to one's name † is the standard in my country.)

@ebo Sometimes journals use the dagger like an asterisk for annotating institutions in an author list, for example. I'm going to have to start paying attention to where those journals are based, maybe they are expressing their opinions of certain authors in a way I didn't recognize...

@BryanKrause You are right. The sequence *, †, ‡, §, **, ††, etc. is the usual way to indicate multiple (foot)notes when preferring symbols over numbers) [cf. §14.20 in the Chicago Manual of Style. 16th ed.] However, my intuitive reaction is always to think these authors are deceased when I see a dagger append to their name -- I only realize after a few moments that it links to their institution/email/etc. instead.

@ebo Exactly. Note that I didn't mean my comment seriously, I was just recognizing for the first time that the dagger had a different meaning to some people, whereas I have always seen it just as part of the asterisk progression.

What country is your country?

@ebo I think this practice came in my coutry from Benelux, which is one of OP location

"the author died in the process of creation" - let's hope the author's death only coincided with the creation phase.

Hmmm. @O.R.Mapper creation of any sort, either book, or movie or series,

@SSimon: I was alluding to the possible misunderstanding that the author passed away as a direct result of the creation process, rather than just at the same time, for other reasons.

it doesn't have a sense in this context, but yeah, It can be in some circumstances, one actor died on the set and they put this rectangle when broadcasting a movie. so I think your allusion can be correct.

@ebo While a crucifix may indicate that the author died, a dagger surely shouldn't be used for that.

In case it helps, I want to add an answer from my own experience.
My PhD Supervisor suddenly and unexpectedly passed away before I handed in my PhD memory. The bulk of the work was already done, but I still needed some advice and supervision to prepare the final document.
My University allowed me to keep her name in the records as first supervisor. I added a cosupervisor, who really helped and encouraged me to finish the job.
I wrote some special words to my first supervisor in the 'Acknowledgements' section of the PhD memory, and also added a special text at the end of the document (more precisely, I added the poem 'When Great Trees Fall' by Maya Angelou) which was implicitly dedicated to her. The thesis was in Spanish, but I kept the poem in English.
A full electronic version of the PhD thesis can be found on http://hdl.handle.net/10251/46373 .


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How unusual is getting a Masters degree in a slightly different field than Bachelors?
Would it be out of the ordinary to get a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering and then go for a Masters in something like Civil or Structural Engineering?
I don't know a lot about how transitioning to a Masters program works.. Do people usually continue on in the same field, or is branching out common?

What do you mean 'common'? Of course this happens and from my experience it happens quite a lot in fields that are somewhat connected. You might want to specify your question a bit more so it can be answered more exactly.

It is quite common for related fields.

This depends on where you are. In the US, this would generally not be too difficult, particularly if one uses elective courses at the bachelor's level to take some of the courses in the "new" field.
Here in Germany, it would actually be almost impossible to switch as you've suggested. The reason for this is that the "prerequisite" for enrolling as master's student in a particular field is usually taken to be the bachelor's degree in the same field as taught at the university!  This is known as a "consecutive" degree requirement, and makes life very difficult for people coming from outside Germany.

I agree that the German Bachelor/Master system is modelled for continuity, but I don't think it would be as difficult to switch as you put it. I now several Master programs in Engineering where the formal requirement is to have a Bachelor in Engineering, so a switch as mentioned in the question would be feasible. Depending on the exact regulations, it may be necessary to do a few courses from the other Bachelor program, but it should usually be possible.

@silvado: You are describing "nonconsecutive" master's programs, in which the degree choice is somewhat flexible. But these are relatively "modern" programs and are often designed to be interdisciplinary. "Traditional" programs, such as civil, electrical, or mechanical engineering; natural sciences; or mathematics are normally "consecutive" programs, and as such are closed to people who do not have a bachelor's degree in that discipline.

I received a Bachelor's degree in physics in Germany and I actually had the possibility to switch to a whole bunch of fields, including mechanical engineering, for my Master's. However, the converse (engineers becoming physicists) is not possible and I understand it's the exception rather than the rule.

In the Netherlands, and not talking about 'hogescholen', a single Bachelor program has a logical continuation in one or multiple Master programs at the same university. However, it is possible to follow a completely unrelated Master, even at a different faculty or different university. In some instances your Bachelor diploma is enough to grant you access to this Master, in other cases you will need to do an entry test or even have a bridge year. I assume there are cases in which this does not apply. I know you cannot become a lawyer if you have not finished a law bachelor and master.

At least in the US, that is very common. Obviously, it's not as common as getting a Masters in the same area as your Bachelors, but it's still pretty run-of-the-mill. This is especially true when there's some sort of overlap in the two fields, as there is between Mechanical and Civil/Structural Engineering.
A lot of top schools accept applicants into engineering Masters programs who lack engineering undergraduate degrees and even discuss this on their websites (Berkeley, Purdue, etc; I know those particular links are not for civil engineering, but they should at least highlight that it's pretty common for students to tweak their interests between undergrad and grad school). A simple Google search will bring up even more examples.
There are even programs out there specifically designed for people to make these sorts of switches (and even bigger ones). Boston University's LEAP is one example where students can have majored in just about anything and convert to engineering at the Masters level.

It's pretty common, at least in the US. I, personally, have an undergrad degree in Anthropology, and am studying Management Information Systems/IT Project Management in grad school. I just had to take a few prerequisites before I could start my master's classes. The way it worked for me is I was granted "conditional acceptance" to my master's program, with the condition that I had to complete all the prereqs (3 classes, in my case) within a year. Talk to the advisers in the master's program you want to do, they should have all the information you need.

I know it is defintly possible. My father is a civil engineer and a couple of his coworkers have gone that route. I also know if you are trying to go into civil, many civil engineering companies like to hire a few mechanical engineers.


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Who hires a visiting professor?
When a professor stays in another university as a visiting professor during his sabbatical leave, his salary is partially paid by his home university. Then, he is not a regular employee of host university, but how is the official processing?
For example, he needs lots of employment stuff such as ID, parking, etc. Thus, he should have a profile with the human resource.

Is he hired by the university (HR) or directly by a department?
Does he need to provide regular documents such as academic credentials (diploma, transcript) or an employment status from the home university is enough?
Following these questions, when he teaches a course or supervises a student, what is his employment reference in official records? I mean can a guest professor teach/supervise without official records in the university HR?

EXAMPLE: A full professor goes to another university on sabbatical leave whether for teaching or research. He needs ID card, and normally HR or similar central unit issues the ID card, not individual departments. Shouldn't he have a record in the HR files as the reference for the ID card issued?
My question is: When the HR is creating a file for a visiting professor/scholar/researcher, what documents should be supplied?

This is likely to vary from university to university. Why do you want to know?

Too broad because your question is highly dependent on the host and home universities' policies.

Parking permits have nothing to do with employment. The contractor who fixes the photocopier probably needs a parking permit and he's not an employee.

@DavidRicherby easy mate, it was just an example!

@StrongBad I am searching for a visiting position in North America or Western Europe, and thus, I wish to know more about possible circumstances.

Let me clarify some terms:

Despite the language,  Visiting Faculty are not usually faculty who are gainfully employed at one university who are just staying at another university during their research leave.
Most visiting faculty are "Visiting Assistant Professors" who are (usually recently graduated) scholars who do not yet have full-time employment and are hired as one-year (or two-year) replacements for professors who have gone on sabbaticals. This is different from an adjunct as the recipient university is hiring you full-time (not per course) for a term of one or two years.
Visiting (Full or Associate) Professors: Only rarely would a tenured, senior faculty use their sabbatical year to go to another university solely to teach. Exceptions would be: 1) they aren't being paid during their sabbatical year and need the money; 2) the recipient university has resources that they would like access to (archives, etc.); 3) they  want to live in the recipient city for a year, etc. This last one is the most common -- especially with American faculty visiting European capitals (sigh... Paris...).  Some faculty are contractually forbidden to use their paid sabbaticals in outside teaching -- at my university, a sabbatical is a leave from teaching responsibilities but it is ultimately a time when I am supposed to be doing research.
There is also the category of Visiting Researcher - this is the category which most visiting full faculty would use on sabbatical at another institution if they had no teaching responsibilities. It would not normally come with pay or any benefits except library/archive/gallery access, e-mail, and an office.

Thus if Prof. Smith@UniX goes on sabbatical, then Visiting Asst. Professor Jones@Unemployed is hired by UniX to replace Professor Smith.
To answer your specific questions, UniX is entirely responsible for Prof. Jones' salary and benefits.

Hiring is usually done by the department who needs a replacement. Often a full search is not run and sometimes the hiring is done on the Chair's prerogative. While HR of course handles the details after the department makes their choice, it is rarely HR that runs the search from the very beginning.
Credentials may not be checked as thoroughly since it is a temporary hire.
Visiting Faculty have appointments in their recipient universities and can serve as the instructors on record for courses. Depending on their term (and the rules of the institution) they can also serve as readers for senior essays, but usually they do not serve on doctoral dissertation committees. They are also usually exempt from most service work.

Biographical note: After I received my PhD, I taught for a year as a visiting assistant professor, as a sabbatical replacement. This was before I received my first tenure-track job. [note: simplified version of a complex reality]

I know a few examples of math faculty taking visiting professorships elsewhere during their sabbatical year. I think the usual idea is that they want to work with a particular person or group during that time, and if they are going to live in another city for a semester it's nice to have some extra salary even if they are being paid for the sabbatical. (They may now have two housing bills, etc.) There is so much teaching in math that, at a large school, if the department chair wants to, she can almost certainly find a few courses for someone to teach.

Again, all this varies from one university to another, and from one department to another.  Public universities tend to forbid their faculty from teaching while on sabbatical; private universities tend not to.  Replacement hires for faculty on sabbatical are more often called adjunct faculty or lecturers, rather than visiting faculty, in my experience.

Ok, I'll weaken my language on frequency.

Language weakened. @JeffE - adjunct are usually local folks teaching a single course ad hoc (sometimes multiple ones).  Visiting usually implies a full-term employment.

I have seen many meanings of "adjunct". I once worked for a university where the official title for one-year full time faculty was "adjunct", as in my position of "adjunct assistant professor". This was required by the state policies governing the institution. Other schools use "adjunct" only for part-time faculty. (Also, my fixed-term postdoc was just "Assistant Professor", with no modifier before "assistant")

Another note is that at many institutions, the standard sabbatical is "one semester at full pay, or one year at half pay".  Someone who takes the half pay option would certainly be allowed to pick up some teaching duties at the host institution to help make up the difference.

Assuming a professor will teach at a temporary university during sabbatical, the official processing can be done several ways, depending on the situation and the specific institutions. Because the teaching is something extra, the professor would almost certainly expect the temporary institution to pay for it.

Some institutions just hire the visiting professor as normal, the way they would hire an adjunct. If the sabbatical already has some pay, the professor receives pay from both institutions.
Some institutions would make a deal with the professor's home institution. In this type of deal, the temporary institution sends money to the home institution, which then continues to pay the professor's salary as normal, and the professor receives no direct pay from the temporary institution.

In any case, setting up this type of visiting position during a sabbatical requires planning well in advance, so that both institutions can approve it.
To address some specific questions:

In the U.S. I am only aware of hiring by HR departments. I have never heard of someone hired "directly by a department". The department will make an offer, with the approval of the dean, and then the actual employment is always done by the university HR department.
It's likely the visiting institution will need to review his academic credentials, as part of their hiring policy, but that is really just a minor detail.
The third question seems to be very university dependent. There will be some form of record keeping.


text:
What limits the number of PhD students in universities with and without PhD tution fee?
Universities normally (as far as I know) do not limit the number of PhD students a research-active professor can have as long as he secure the funding for his PhD students. For example, if a professor have enough research fund can get 10 PhD students (instead of research associates) and pay them directly. Then, they pay their tution fees, and university/department can increase its capacty for PhD enrolment.
In fact, the university/department can increase its capacity as long as they are paying students, but I don't understand how this scheme works when PhD study is free (in some European countries).
In the latter case, the professor provide research funding for the PhD projects and their wages, but the university should invest for courseworks (pay more teachers for these unexpected students).
What limits the number of PhD students in universities without PhD tution fee?
And when there is normal tution fee, isn't there any limitation for the number of PhD students as long as there are good candidates?
EXAMPLE: A department arranges the admission of 10 PhD students (assigned appropriate professor for the courses). Now, a professor fund 10 more PhD students for himself. Now, the department head should plan new classes/courses (this needs budget). He may need more resources, which is normally approved by the Dean.
I understand that more PhD students fuels the engines of an academic unit, but the department head is not bothered with overload of PhD coursework. In other words, does the department head encourage professor to get more funded PhD students, and saying "don't worry, I will take care of coursework"?

What limits the number of PhD students in universities without PhD tution fee?

I'm not sure countries exist without a PhD tuition fee. Rather there is a scholarship system in place to cover the cost of tuition. The limiting factor here is the number of scholarships allocated by the government. So the answer is the government.

And when there is normal tution fee, isn't there any limitation for the number of PhD students as long as there are good candidates?

This would be dependant upon the institution. There may be a hard limit imposed by the faculty. Otherwise there is a soft limit in the number of students one professor can reasonably manage.

At my university, every PhD student with a teaching or research assistantship has their tuition waived. Those students don't pay tuition, and nobody pays it for them.

@JeffE This is what I meant by scholarship. In your case it's an assistantship and I guess that the number of those available is governed by the university.

There are plenty of countries with no tuition fees at all, so in particular none for PhD students. For example the Scandinavian countries.

The logic is that in those countries the PhD students aren't students at all, they are (junior) employees. They are either explicitly employed to do their PhD research (e.g. the Netherlands) or are 50% employed to work on some project, and are "allowed" to work the remaining time on their dissertation (e.g. Germany). There is little cost to the university as there is no formal curriculum they have to offer to the students, so they can adjust what they offer the students based on the number of students.

@TobiasKildetoft in Sweden there are tuition fees for PhD students, and they are quite high. The thing is, you don't see it because the PI pays it for you along with your salary (but they have to secure the funding for it).

the number of those available is governed by the university — It's not that simple.  The number of available teaching assistantships is determined by the college (based on numbers of students taught over several recent years), whose instructional budget is determined by the campus, whose instructional budget is determined by university, whose instructional budget is determined by the state.  The number of research assistantships is (roughly) determined by the number of grants, gifts, and awards given to faculty in the department by either federal government funding agencies or industry.

There is no hard limit. The soft limits are what you would expect: availability of funding, availability of excellent students who are interested in doing a PhD with you, how much time it takes to supervise a PhD student, etc.

The question seems to be based on the premise that more PhD students is somehow "bad" for the university in a system without tuition fees. However, this is not the case. (In this answer I will try to explain the system that we have here in Finland, but I do not think the situation is that different e.g. in other Scandinavian countries.)
Let us compare two cases:

A professor gets a small research grant and hires 1 PhD student.
A professor gets a large research grant and hires 10 PhD students.

Let us assume that all else is equal, these are excellent students, all of them finish their PhDs on time, each of them produces the same amount of high-quality research, and in both cases the professors still have enough time for their other duties (teaching, administration, etc.).
Now case 2 is actually fairly attractive for the university and for the department. There are two main reasons:

The basic funding of the university depends on how well the university does. This is measured with numerous indicators, but producing lots of PhD, producing lots of excellent research, and attracting large research grants are among the important indicators. Hence in the long run, the university will get more funding, and the university will also reward the department.
Research grants do not cover just the salary of the PhD student. All the money goes through the university budget, and the university always takes part of it for all kinds of "overheads", which cover in part the costs of running the university (facilities, administration, IT, libraries, etc.).

Furthermore, PhD students will also serve as teaching assistants (e.g., 5–10 % of their time is allocated for teaching activities), so a fraction of the grant also goes to support the teaching activities of the university.
(That said, there are some corner cases that may be a bit more difficult. If the students are not hired by the professor but they fund their own studies with e.g. personal research grants, then it is not as clear that having lots of such PhD students is a win-win for everyone. The universities do not get their "overhead" share from the grants, yet the students would expect the universities to provide office space for them.)


text:
What hours do researchers work in the Unites States?
After staying in a US university (specifically MIT) as a visiting scholar, a colleague of mine says that most of research labs are still working at midnight. I suspect that he is exaggerating. Don't Americans have life?
I know that there is no working hour limit for research, but based on my experience in UK, people used to leave following the official working hours.
Apart from exceptional cases, is it really common for research labs in the US university to work at night?
NOTE: I did not mean competition of early-stage researchers, I mean the common working styles. In any country, student might be in the library during the night (and similar in the lab). I meant does a US university professor expect to keep his lab active during the night? And does he visit the lab at night?

Possible related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8542/how-hard-do-early-career-academics-in-the-united-states-work-really and http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/27936/is-it-normal-for-an-advisor-to-expect-80-hour-workweeks-from-phd-students-and

Addressing the non-duplicate aspect: experimental labs often work around the clock based on the nature of the experiments.  For example, biologists I collaborate with may have an experiment where they need to do something with their cells every 6 hours for several days.  Then they'll take a couple of days off to recover.  Or they might need a particular shared piece of equipment and only be able to sign up for it in the middle of the night.

Having spent time at several universities in the US, I'd say it really depends on the school.  MIT definitely has an "up all night" culture.  West-coast schools like Stanford and Berkeley, maybe not so much.  I think people work just as hard on the West coast, but maybe do it from home and don't flaunt it (whereas at MIT maybe long hours are seen as something to brag about).  Just my very anecdotal experience.


text:
How to gain skills in project management?
So far, my master thesis had an initial plan, and I would keep in contact with the PI as I need. However, now that the academic course comes to an end, all the students in the lab (3) we have to finish our projects. He is also applying to grants that have tight deadlines and supervising 1 PhD thesis that will be presented in a month, together with addressing the reviewers of two papers and supervising a new one (with part of my work :). This is a lot of work (I am sure other people are more stressed though) and sometimes I feel I am not given all the advice I could due to poor project management of the lab and projects (yes, I tried more frequent meetings but they keep being postponed).
I would like to start a PhD soon, and later to have my own research team; what project management skills should I learn for a successful PhD/career?
Some skills I thought as important are:

Time management
I found useful answers here at the tag time-management
Multiple (parallel) projects management
My current project started as to analyze some data and ended up analyzing data and developing, testing and prove a new method. (That's another reason why I consider my project was poorly thought out.)
People management
?

And more importantly, how can I learn them through the master thesis and PhD?

The only good way to gain skills in project management is to manage some projects. (See also: Every other human activity.)

I am managing (to some extent at least) my own master project but maybe I could do better. To rephrase, how can I make out the most from managing my project?

Watch successful and unsuccessful efforts (not necessarily projects), understand what went wrong in each and learn. There are plenty of books, but they tend to imagine a project manager being a dedicated and assigned role. I expect your challenge instead will be to lead projects involving yourself, your peers, and your supervisors. If you've played team sports you might have a leg up on this. The skills you ask about are the ability to listen in all its forms, to work sympathetically, to understand what success means for the effort, and to understand everyone wants success.

Time management: I recommend to everyone the book Getting things done by David Allen. It is briefly summarized in different YouTube videos and is about personal organization and stressfree productivity.
Project management: For project management and a good visualization of your process (e.g. of publishing a paper) you might want to look into IT Kanban and use a real Kanban board or a software like Trello. If you work in a team on that project, look into Scrum. Also, shared calendars are helpful (e.g. Google calendar).
People management: For teams, it could make sense to use a team collaboration tool like Slack (or Mattermost).

I don't see how Scrum can work in an academic team. In an academic team you usually have one or two members that actually do all the work. Also, who is going to be the product owner?

@Bernhard Thanks for your comment. I had the same doubts. Scrum is agile project management and agile is the main thing most academic research teams have to be. There are good websites and implementations like this. The professor or a post-doc could be the product owner for example.

Still doesn't make sense to me. That whole story still assumes there is a team of researchers. Being agile also means that you are agile in your methodology. Sticking strictly to Scrum is not agile actually. Agile, in academia, obviously, goals msy change as you go. Scrum is just a waste of time and effort

Some parts of this answer assumes I can push changes to the group I am, like introducing the Google calendar to set goals and milestones, or managing people like I am a manager while I am the last monkey :D

There are various ways to approach project management, so what works for some people may not work for you. So, take advice for what is is - advice and not a formula for success.
That being said,there are many resources on leadership and management that may be helpful, as suggested by felice. A good start is to develop and maintain good organizational and people skills. The latter can be difficult for academics, because we tend to work in isolation for a good portion of the time. However, using organizational and communication tools that are available to you will help with managing projects. For instance, google docs and calendars are tools that can help a team communicate project goals and timelines with one another.
Also, check with your university's research and HR departments. They often offer courses on research project management and management in general. For instance, I once took a workshop at my former institution on research budget management. If you are able to enroll as a student, you can gain the skills you want in a more formal setting than just reading a book. Good luck!

Thanks for your answer, however I haven't found any courses on research project management. There are courses in research integrity, not budget management (I have a subject about building a company, which is not the same as managing grants)

Maybe there are some mentors at your institution who manage large grants? You could invite them to coffee or lunch and ask them for tips on success.


text:
Is it fine to submit a paper to a journal via arXiv without updating on arXiv?
I have uploaded a preprint of my article to arXiv and it is published there. After that, I made several changes to it and I am submitting the same to a journal which allows submitting via arXiv (Physical Review E, to be specific). My question is, is it okay to submit the article without updating it on arXiv because I am submitting via arXiv?

I'm not sure that this is really the right venue for this question. But if I'm interpreting the journal's submission FAQ correctly, they will download the article from the arXiv, so you should update the article on the arXiv first, and then submit to the journal. ("[The arXiv identifier] can be used at submission to automatically download files from the e-print server.")

They allow replacing the files during submission though.

Oh, I see. But it seems doubtful that the journal will actually update the arXiv entry to reflect the new version. So my take is that you should update the arXiv entry anyway. This has two advantages. Firstly, anyone viewing your paper on the arXiv sees the newest and best version of the paper. Secondly, if a referee decides to just grab the paper off the arXiv rather than downloading the version the journal sends, they won't end up with the wrong version of the paper.

Journal can't update on arXiv anyway. My question is whether is it problematic to use arXiv preprint number during submission when the two versions are not the same.

Right—and I think the answer is yes, for the reasons I gave. It may not be problematic in the sense that the journal will doubtless consider the paper anyway, and won't check to see if they're the same. But a reviewer may end up reading the wrong version, and that could well be a problem.

Can you elaborate why you do not want to upload to the journal directly? Also, how could the journal possibly obtain your updated version if you are submitting via Arxiv, but do not update the Arxiv version?

Interestingly, this is being considered as "opinion based". It is not. Updating on arXiv takes a day and so if somebody wants to wait for that time, it is perfectly fine. But the question is this: Does journal want the arXiv preprint number or the updated version?

If I understand correctly, the answer is "no" and seems to be obviously so.
The journal needs the latest version of your manuscript.  The journal will acquire your manuscript from arXiv.  Therefore, you must put the latest version of your manuscript on arXiv.
In any case, there seems to be no reason not to update the version on arXiv.


text:
Should we put the references in slides/poster when we already have them in paper?
After reading this question about slides making and asking myself two questions about poster making and TED talking, I realize that these activities are for showing what you found, make the audience be attracted. If they need further explanation, they should read your paper, which has successfully defensed and proved that your work is validated. One important thing when you attempt to attract people is concentrate on the important, which means unnecessary things need to be trimmed. I think the reference is one of those. So, should we put the references in slides/poster when we already have them in paper?

I am wondering whether there should be separate questions for posters and presentations. I think those are two pretty different beasts.

@xLeitix I also think that these two should be asked in different questions.

@EnthusiasticStudent: but I think they share the same priciple

Norms again vary from field to field. I'd usually give a short reference key for any concrete result that is not yours -- [Bloggs et. al 2013] -- and give it a subtle colour. Most importantly, this removes any doubt that you are presenting/claiming the results of others. If you don't mention the concrete results of others, don't have references. No need for a bib slide: the key should make it obvious enough when combined with the paper.

@badroit: why does it need to have a subtle color?

Just to distinguish it from the main text I guess. :)

My rule for presentations is:

Don't say anything that an interested member of the audience will not be able to remember.

This includes tables, but also bibliographic references to things that are not absolutely central to the presentation. There is a caveat: if the conference is recorded or the slides are available offline, you could write them in a non intrusive way (but not mention them during the talk).
Posters are different, as an interested reader may spend a longer time reading it. But then, the rule becomes:

Don't include anything that an interested reader will not be able to remember, or won't bother to write down.

This trims away "previous work" (except, perhaps, a single very good review) or citations for the exact value of a certain constant you used; but you should include things that are indeed central.
And of course, by all means, you should include the reference to your own paper, so it is easy to find.

So, for summary, you suggest that we should trim references if they are not important, am I right?

I always include key references (i.e. ones necessary to ground the work in the literature including my own refereed work) in my slides and on my posters. I absolutely consider the references to be important as they ensure appropriate credit for prior work and to demonstrate one's understanding of the current state of the field. I do this in one of two ways for slides:

Include the bibliographic reference by author at the bottom of the slide. This is my preferred way for conference presentations where people familiar with the field will likely already know the article you refer to.
Provide a bibliography at the end of the presentation. This approach can be useful if there are quite a few references, or especially if the presentation is likely to be used as a resource in its own right. This can be the case if you ever upload slides to e.g. your personal website, or if it's for a tutorial-style presentation.

A bibliography at the end of a presentation is next-to useless. Anyone who wants to read it will find it in the paper. Anyone who wants to find out what reference [10] means has to wait 'til the end of the talk.

Everything is useless when it's not the right time :D

Authors can make their slides freely available online, whereas conference organisers or publishers may make papers difficult (or expensive) to access. In this case, access to a list of references in the slides can be more quickly and cheaply available to an interested party than the paper.

I'd like this answer better if you could replace the phrase "for academic rigour" with something meaningful.

@badroit Thanks, I've removed it and tried to clarify

If you subscribe to the "slides should be teasers to motivate people to read the paper" view (I don't), then make sure you provide full bibliographic information for the paper at least. If the paper is not published yet when you give the presentation, take the time to edit your presentation once the paper is published, if you can still access the presentation - e.g., if it is on your website.
There is little more frustrating than looking through an old presentation about a paper that nowhere tells the reader which paper is being talked about, so you have to scare up the presentation's author and hope he tells you. (As likely or not, he may not even remember himself which paper he was talking about.)
And then you can certainly skip references in your presentation.
EDIT: And I would suggest the same for a poster: if you make the poster available even after the paper was published, e.g., as a download, add the info what paper it was about.

I've used a placeholder URL for that.  A "not done yet" page that is later replaced with the paper itself.

@StephanKolassa: I am one of those who upvote that answer :D. You are saying about presentation, what about poster?

Good point. I edited the answer. I don't say anything about the case when the paper is not yet published - I'd follow the other answers here in that case and include the most important references.

Just give the references in the shortest possible manner, e.g.:

(Smith et al. 2004)

There is no need to provide a full list of references anywhere. Such a minimal reference is sufficient for the following purposes:

It clearly shows that this particular result is not from your current work.
The year of publication helps to clarify the relative timing of prior work.
Smith et al. in the audience will appreciate your talk.
The few experts in the audience can guess which work you are referring to, especially if this is a very well-known paper in the field.

So does that mean that I can trim the references section as long as I use this formatting?

This is good advice - I'd just add that giving the Journal name (e.g. (Smith et al 2004, Science) can make it even easier to track down a reference.

I've only done one of these.  I followed the same rules I'd follow in a paper.  If the poster mentioned the work of another, there was a citation in the poster text and a  reference at the bottom of the poster. That resulted in ten references (out of about 100) on the poster.  http://scis.nova.edu/~robebrow/dissertation/cellular_automata_poster_brown_robert_20131209.pdf

Do you think that the references should be indexed/numbered?

I used the APA format, so citations were name and year, references alphabetical.

@BobBrown Did you prepare the file with powerpoint? I really like the colors, sectioning and the "further information" part specially that bar-code (was it your idea or existed in the conference's template).

Yes, PowerPoint. I can take credit only for the content.  The QR code was not part of the template, but I had seen them used before.  The color palette is part of the University's official branding, and the layout is due to Colin Purrington's excellent advice.  This page has some poster links: http://scis.nova.edu/~robebrow/poster/

There's different schools of thought on that, and I don't think there is any really dominant convention (at least in my field). By and large, for conference papers, I tend to only include citations when it seems particularly important to do so (for instance when citing something in verbatim), or when I want to stress that an opinion that I am presenting originates from a different author.
It is somewhat different for defense-style talks (thesis defense, job talks, etc.). I tend to use more (self-)citations in such presentations, as it seems more essential here to make immediately clear that I am not making my content up as I go along, i.e., that the material is actually peer-reviewed. Also, having references to good papers of yours directly on the slides is a subtle but powerful reminder that you were able to get your research published in good venues.

In the defense talk, you actually have your paper version readily, so you can base on it to support your arguments.

One important consideration is whether any of the people who wrote the references are in the audience. It can't hurt to mention them because academics like to have their egos tickled. Of course, this doesn't apply for posters.

Why does this not apply for posters?

@Ooker I suppose it could apply for posters as well, but I was thinking that announcing that you read someone's paper in front of an audience makes them look more impressive (and is probably more gratifying to them) than mentioning it on a poster.

According to
https://wilkes.libguides.com/c.php?g=191944&p=1266692
If you have a handout to accompany your poster, you may list your references on that. If not, you should list them in small type at the bottom of the poster.

I always try to put references to papers of people that are likely to be in the audience.
I noticed that it draws their attention and keeps them alert throughout the talk.


text:
Who is the target audience for the $60+ academic books?
I like to read philosophy and some of the books published by academics are sold at very high prices compared to average layperson books.
I was wondering who is the target audience/customer for these published books. As the average reader is very unlikely to consider paying more than $20 for a book.
To give some example, many books from OUP Oxford.

Can this be tagged philosophy? In the sciences, $60 for a book is very cheap

Indeed, textbooks that are well over $100 are common in undergraduate STEM disciplines. And those are books that actually sell compared with a niche monograph.

Yep, after those $400+ aerospace books, $60 sounds like a bargain...

@JonCuster: One should probably add, though, that this seems to be somewhat specific for the United States and its tradition to base undergraduate courses on specific textbooks. For instance, undergraduate books in math in Germany don't tend to be particularly expensive.

Also, many academic books are aimed at professionals, not students, where institutional budgets support the cost, not individual wallets.

$60 is not that much for a technical book, even outside of academia. In the 90's as a kid, I had to save up for months to buy this book for $60. That's ~$110 in 2024-equivalent dollars.

if you know where to look or if you know the right people you can get em without paying for it

Salaries among people with college education vary greatly; liberal arts or teachers in the U.S. are often paid poorly or have non-permanent contracts. But there are many with degrees in finance, engineering, computer science, medicine or law who simply buy any book they want to without thinking too much about it, as I can tell you first-hand ;-). Therefore, the answer to your question is (besides the obvious institutions) "the well-off professionals and enthusiasts in the field".

Prior to internet-related stuff, libraries, especially college and university libraries, were a significant part (I don't know that stats) of the reliable market for high-end/high-cost technical books.

My professor had a monograph from CRC, priced at (with Amazon's discount) closely to $160. Its audiences are researchers and advanced graduates. So many factors come to equation when setting a price: what the publisher would get, what the author would receive, how much estimated sell etc.

@JonCuster Expensive text books are probably an American thing? Like, if the student already pays 30,000$ a year tuition, it does not matter to pay some hundred more for textbooks?

The target audience is presumably other researchers. Researchers normally buy books from grant money or university money, not out of their own pocket, so they are not terribly concerned about the price.
Note that in many fields it's not terribly difficult to find these overpriced books online (e.g. on LibGen), if you're willing not to be too scrupulous about copyright law.

I would much rather have seen the last paragraph as an explicit warning not to embrace this ethical lapse rather than a hint that it's not too serious a one.

@EthanBolker I included the paragraph precisely because I don't see an ethical lapse in a curious layman using these kinds of websites to get access to academic books/papers primarily intended to be bought by professional researchers from university/grant funds. Imo there is no ethical obligation to slavishly follow the law. YMMV of course.

@EthanBolker let's not confuse something being illegal with it being unethical. In my view, what's actually unethical is to unthinkingly funnel the taxes of our fellow citizens as well as donations intended for medical research to these publishers which do nothing but rent-seek on the basis of academic output they had no part in producing.

I heard a professor reacting to hearing his paper/book is on libgen: "Good, then people are reading it".

I have never written such a book myself, but I suspect that there are three target audiences for such books:

students who are forced to obtain the book because their professor strongly recommends it or is required to follow the course;
university libraries;
researchers in the field.

I am a "normal" person who has purchased expensive books on occasion for purposes that deviate from the original intent.  I once bought a book called, "Regional Integration in Early Modern Scandinavia" because my ancestors were from Denmark and I was looking for a source on their earlier Norwegian origin.  It's published by a university in Denmark.  I may not be their "target audience" but some more casual researchers also rely on such books, and sometimes a premium price is ok because the research is so niche there are no other sources.

You can often find the intended readership on the book's webpage or a marketing flyer put together by the publisher.
Example:

Example:

If the price is high, it's a sign that the intended readership is narrow, and therefore that it is aimed at advanced level.

"If the price is high, it's a sign that the intended readership is narrow, and therefore that it is aimed at advanced level." -- it may also be a sign that the intended readership is (a possibly large number of) undergraduate students who have no choice whether or not to buy it or not if they wish to take a certain course.

@ajd Aren't those students quite likely to buy the book second-hand anyway (or more like tenth-hand in practice)? At least where I'm from, the average student doesn't really buy dozens of expensive textbooks brand new and then keep them for the rest of their life. Of course, this makes the market for brand new books even smaller, pushing the price up, but I wouldn't really see anything nefarious in the pricing.

@TooTea If no one buys them new, then there will be no second hand copies for people to buy.

@TooTea Here are the problems I ran into with buying used copies of books in school. The professor insists on having the latest version of the book, the books have some digital tie-in that can only be activated once, and the difference in price between new and used is negligible.

Other forces that support high prices for all kinds of products are institutional budgets (including writing things off as a business expense), financing (e.g., student loans), and earmarked funds that cannot be spent on other things (e.g., 529 plans).

@MiniRagnarok, plus in some of my classes, the professor was one of the authors of the text! Luckily in one of my classes the professor was using us as beta testers/proofreaders of a new edition so we got electronic draft editions for free. In another course the professor hated how expensive his books were becoming so he e-mailed us all the chapter PDFs to thumb his nose at his publisher.

@TooTea All too often, publishers release new editions of texts every year or two.  I suspect that this is, in large part, to kill the secondary market.  Right now, I am stilly trying to support four different editions of the calculus text that we teach out of. :/

@ajd the same textbooks are often twice as expensive in the US as e.g. in Germany, one large difference is that in Germany there are usually no required textbooks. There are recommended ones, but in most cases you don't need a specific textbooks and especially not a specific edition of one. I think it is very plausible that university courses that require specific textbooks are a big factor driving costs here.

@XanderHenderson: And why not just use your own notes?

@user21820 In the fall, I will be using only my own text for precaculus.  It has taken me about three years to get the point where I feel that I have the material prepared well enough to be useful, and that the problems (and solutions) are basically complete.  The big challenge is having  a collection of well-aligned problems for students to practice with, and that just takes time. :/  I'm hoping to start work on calculus next year (or the year after---soonish).

@XanderHenderson:

No book is or goes useless when it comes to readership. There are so many libraries (public or school/universities) that buy the latest editions of every types of books. I am from the STEM background, where every new book on technical subjects costs more than USD100. You can find readers of the books from every genre possible otherwise it would not exist. Paying or not paying for the book is a separate topic. I can talk about myself at least. Even though I am not educated in the field of interior design and architecture, yet they fascinate me a lot. And not only that I like to read such publications (books, magazines, etc). I don't like to spend money on things that have shorter lifespan and books are one of them as you read them once and they spend rest of their lives in a nicely decorated bookshelves. I find it unfair. So, I either head to library or ask in my local book circle if someone has or can borrow me or even sell at a cheaper price tag.

I was wondering who is the target audience/customer for these
published books. As the average reader is very unlikely to consider
paying more than $20 for a book.

Exactly: the target audience is not the average reader. The target audience is the scholar, professional (or advanced amateur) community. How the scholar community pays the books, it is another topic.
Let's make an example: you need a screwdriver, you can buy a random screwdriver for 2$ or a (brand starting with W and ending with urth Zebra) for 15$.
A 7x factor for a screwdriver, but I think we can agree the average layperson is very unlikely to consider paying more than 5$ for a screwdriver.

I think I bought a screwdriver 2 years back for $20 from the Home Depot because it was the cheapest one i could find

@SidharthGhoshal a bit overpriced, but I remember Home Depot had good quality tool (early 2000s). Do you still have them? do they still work? And since we speak about screwdrivers ... do the screws still have their heads :D ? Very hard screwdrivers are easy to make, and they easily destroy screws ...

when im at home i usually just use my dad's tools that he acquired in the 1990s (idk where he bought them). For that particular screwdriver the company I was working for needed it for a small robotics project and so I went and bought one and probably wasn't surprised by the price because of "I think i'm buying this for life" expectation. (Edit: 3-4 years back not 2, how time flies)

To add to the other answers, it may help to understand that these fees are often not paid by real working academics, but are passed on either to university libraries, or to grant funds, or to students (if the book is a textbook). Many universities also have programs where academics can order the book directly through the university library. So the researchers actually working in a field do not experience the cost directly. Unfortunately, that means the publisher can basically set the price to be whatever they want, without any major repercussions.

These books sell in such small numbers that they're barely profitable at these prices.

First, $60 is not really that much for such a book. These days, $20 (which you mention) is the price for a relatively small paperback book. For example, my most recent purchase is Reality is not what it Seems by Carlo Rovelli. This is a short book (c. 250 relatively pages) and it's in paperback and the price was $18 in a regular bookstore. Another is The Investigator by John Sandford. That one is a mystery and truly mass market. It's a very small paperback and about 400 pages. Price was $11.00.
Second, the economics of the book business are such that the author will get a relatively small portion of the cover price. I don't know the exact numbers (which will vary by book, author, and publisher) but I would guess that an author is lucky to get 20% of the cover price and 10% might be more likely. So, that's (say) $10 per copy of that book. And books in niche areas are unlikely to sell many copies. And they take many, many hours to write.
Third, others have mentioned some of the audiences for the book. But, for sure, they are not the "average reader". But I'd like to make another  point. I also like to read philosophy. If you look at "price per book" they are indeed expensive. But if we look at "price per hour" they are not. The Sandford book I mentioned took me about 6 hours to read. That's $2.00 per hour. I haven't read the Rovelli yet, but I'm guessing it will take me about 5 hours, that's $4.00 per hour. An academic philosophy book? That will take many hours. They are typically quite long and often fairly dense. 20 hours would be $3.00 hour, and some such books take me longer than that!

I would like to add a much more extreme example:

€1855 (new edition yearly): Janes Weapons, Infantry 24/25 Yearbook (directly from publisher, in April 2024)

This book is not intended for individuals at all. A very narrow range of organizations and specialized libraries are going to buy those books. When I was looking for a copy of the book for academic work, the only copy available through the library search system of my country was located in a library in the capital that is specialized on the general topic (defence) and was only available to read on-premise (unless you were an employee of certain government agencies).
Usually when you think of books, you think of them as a medium for mass distribution of information. But sometimes a book can also be something else, like a subscription to a kind of database in my example. Something which is expensive to compile and the information changes regularly, so before it spreads too wide it's already outdated and a new edition of the book has to be bought.

If only there was some kind of global computer network that could make this information available without the cost of publishing and distribution; and which could be updated easily and cheaply. But then, greedy publishers wouldn't get to bend readers over and violate their wallets quite so much, would they?

Sod ... I expect the cranks will swamp such any such network that bypasses publishers...

Anyone who wants them badly enough to buy them. That includes me. I'm a former academic and I read them for fun and enhanced knowledge. Learning from a textbook is sometimes also a cheaper way to learn than going back to university if you have the prerequisite knowledge and the self confidence to try, if you are picking up a related subject to something you already know. I have heard people refer to this, if it is relevant in any way to your career, as "continuing education", though often that involves a certificate or conference of some sort. But investing in your own knowledge, skills, and credentials is always worth the time!

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


text:
Writing personal information in a teaching statement
I'm writing a teaching statement for a cs/mathematics teaching position. I start the statement with a section "Personal Background" in which I simply say that both my parents and brothers are involved in teaching in one way or another and that makes me encourage different students to find their own learning methodologies.
The idea I wanted to convey was that I believe that no matter the specialization, a student can reach as far as they wish if they use the right methodology. However, a colleague reviewed the statement and mentioned that part was weird to him.
Question: is it ok to give personal background such as this in a teaching statement?

I don't really understand what "both my parents and brothers are involved in teaching in one way or another" has to do with "that makes me encourage different students to find their own learning methodologies", so in that sense I find it a strange claim to make too. What is the causal relationship supposed to be there? Are people whose family are not teachers known to be less inclined to "encourage different students to find their own learning methodologies"?

What level of teaching, what type ot student, what area of subject (programming? knitting?)? (elementary? private-tutoring HS or SAT? college? vocational?) Suggest you spell out the missing link why "[my relatives] are involved in teaching in one way or another" ... "makes me encourage different students to find their own learning methodologies".

@Adam Přenosil: I was mentally formulating a comment similar to your comment as I was reading through the question, then glanced at the comments before beginning my comment and saw your comment. I was going to say something about needing to "connect the dots" regarding this inference because I can easily imagine a situation in which the opposite conclusion is reached when "both my parents and brothers are involved in teaching".

Without reading the statement exactly as it is, it's very hard to judge.

While, in general, personal experience is fine, even good, I don't think the example you give will help you. It is irrelevant to your own motivation.
And, I think your statement about "finding their own learning methodologies" is actually harmful. My experience (30 plus years) is that students often don't know how to learn and need to be taught how to do it. Too many think that memorization is the key. Many think that cramming for exams is somehow related to "learning". In fact, you job, beyond the technical is to help them find the learning path.
I've had a lot of students that thought they'd learned something simply by listening to my lectures without taking notes.

The cited statement is sufficiently general and imprecise that one could also interpret it as in line, in one way or another, with what you write. Consequently my personal belief is that what @user1868607 wrote will neither help nor hurt. It just doesn't say that much.

The more notes I take, the more I remember, but the less I understand. There's probably some decent middle-ground (and having the lecture notes helps, because then I can just note some important additions or clarifications, rather than trying to summarise everything that was said).

As with the already-existing good answer, and comments: the question seems to be conflating two things... first, the questioner's personal context, in which teaching is a very honorable, important thing to do with one's life. To mention that is harmless, and possibly a small plus. But it seems to me a non-sequitur to connect this with "encouraging ... students to find their own learning methodologies"... especially as most students are not really competent to make decisions about that. Conceivably re-directing that to something about respecting possible varying "learning styles" ... ?

Perhaps OK. If you do include it put it at the end not at the beginning, and don't try to connect it to your philosophy or experience.
I wouldn't mind seeing this kind of "teaching is in my blood" comment at the end of a teaching statement, though I don't think it would sway me much.


text:
Does arXiv do peer review and can a high school student submit to arXiv?

Is it necessary to publish in a journal after writing paper in arXiv?

Is arXiv peer reviewed journal? If yes, then will the editor
consider and send to other experts in that field?

Can a high school student publish paper in arXiv? If not is there any other way a high school student can share scientific knowledge (only if they have discovered something new)?

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11195/can-something-published-on-arxiv-or-optimization-online-org-be-mentioned-in-my-c

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/115825/does-arxiv-count-as-publication

https://arxiv.org/about

Thank you Jet Chung, for the papers of your friends. I have a doubt that is, the second paper (arxiv.org/abs/2009.00708) has no endorsement and how it got agreed by arxiv.

And also is there any need of PhD qualification to publish in arxiv. I mean during registration as an author they ask us info about university, what should a high school student at that point.

Getting a paper into arXiv should not be called "publishing".

(1) There's no requirement that you have to publish in a journal after putting a paper on arXiv. However, in my experience, most people who put something on arXiv do also submit it to a journal, although this depends on which field of science you are talking about.
(2) Arxiv is not a peer-reviewed journal, there are no editors or referees. This is why a lot of people submit to both arXiv and a journal.
(3) Probably not by themselves, but they could if they can convince an established researcher to endorse them.
Unless the student was already affiliated with a known university or research institute, they would usually have to get an "endorsement" to be able to submit. An "endorsement" means that an established researcher confirms that the paper being submitted is appropriate for an arXiv submission and that the authors have some idea what they are talking about.
If the student knows any researchers in the field they want to publish a paper in, they could ask them to have a look at their paper and give some feedback. If they agree that the paper is above a minimum standard they might agree to endorse.
If the student does not know any researchers, it is more difficult. They could find out who the experts in the field are and email them directly, in a polite manner, but should be aware that out-of-the-blue requests from someone unheard of are likely to be ignored.
There's more information about how endorsements work here: https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement
There may not be any shortcut to this. The best option might be for the student to wait, apply to study the field that interests them at university, and after learning more about the subject and getting to know some professors there, ask them if they'd be willing to look at their research. If they thought it was good, they would be able to endorse the student for submission to arXiv and give advice about the publication process in general.

They might be able to get an endorsement if one of the teachers at their school got an account there while doing a post-grad degree.

@nick012000 I would expect that most high school teachers don't ever do a research-oriented post-grad degree and would not have an arxiv account. I.e. that it's possible that one of their teachers would have an account, but that would be a rare coincidence.

@Peteris: I don't know which country the OP is in, but in the U.S. high school teachers typically have to take continuing education/certification courses during the summers, and these enrollments might provide a year-round .edu email address. Also, many teachers will be working on Masters degrees over a period of several years. In fact, in New York (the state) teachers must earn a Masters degree within 5 years of beginning teaching in New York in order to remain licensed to teach in New York (see "Step 7" at this web page).

@DaveLRenfro, yes, "continuing education", but most of that (in my own observation, and from understanding requirements) is not in the subject matter (e.g., math), but in "education". In particular, there'll rarely be contact with mathematicians, as opposed to math educators... which will not be the right set-up to get an endorsement for arXiv, I think. Could be wrong!

Although not peer-reviewed submissions are nevertheless moderated: “ Submissions to arXiv are subject to a moderation process that classifies material as topical to the subject area and has scholarly value.”  This keeps crank submissions out of the site.  Note also that only “Registered users may submit articles to be announced by arXiv”; I have no experience as to the requirements to become registered if you are a high school student.

@nick An account is not enough to provide an endorsement. It requires a certain number of papers on arXiv in the category one wishes to endorse for.

Thank you all for massive response for my question

@paul garrett: After reading your comment just now, I realized that I confused "student having an .edu address" with "teacher having an .edu address". The teacher can use the .edu address to post at arXiv, but unless the teacher actually does so (which I agree is extremely unlikely), the teacher cannot endorse the student.

@ZeroTheHero Here's a story to add to that. Yes, submissions may be rejected by moderators.

A high school student (with an endorsement as twestley laid out nicely) can publish on the arxiv, but very likely a high school student should not do this.
In my field, the arxiv is read daily by everyone in the field. There is no peer-review process, but we do self censor quite a bit. We usually circulate our research through our networks and get feedback before posting. Putting something on the arxiv that is low quality has serious impacts on your career. Your name is attached to that forever, and afaik you can't take it down and erase its history. Plus you can't undo anything to the wide audience that will see it the first day it gets posted.
In some sense, posting on the arxiv is more dangerous than going through peer-reviewed channels. If you submit something embarrassing to a journal, they won't publish it. The arxiv has no such safeguard.
Unless you know someone who you think can serve the purpose of a peer reviewer, and who can give an informed approval that your work won't be rejected by the community and reflect poorly on you, I strongly suggest you do NOT post to the arxiv. It could hurt you professionally if you end up in an arxiv-popular field. If you end up in an arxiv-unpopular field, then posting wouldn't really benefit you much either (as it's not a real journal). It's just not a good gamble.

Very good points! The people who decry a loss of "peer review" often seem to overlook both the self-censorship and the risks of too-hasty publication-to-the-world, regardless of whether it's "traditional publication".

Rings especially true because of the OP's previous statement that their research is "related to million dollar prize problems" (posted yesterday: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/156363/will-arxiv-accept-papers-without-university-affiliation). It might benefit them to read Henry Cohn's short page of advice: http://math.mit.edu/~cohn/Thoughts/advice.html

In cause you're curious (as I was), the author of this answer works in theoretical physics (from their user page)

It is not too hard to submit to the arxiv. It won't be difficult to get "endorsement" if that is still a requirement. I actually thought that was gotten rid of.
Once you are done your PhD, if you do decide to do that, the arxiv preprint will be so old that it certainly will not have much impact one way or another. If some idea in it still interests you then, you will have the option to reference the arxiv preprint (wording like "as we showed in [3].") If you don't do that, I highly doubt that anyone will notice this old preprint. Certainly, for example, a hiring committee is not likely to dig up an old preprint, and check that is is really the same person.

I always look up the full bibliography of people I'm considering collaborating with. There are search engines like Inspire that link to the arxiv and this paper will appear in the front page of the author's name until many more publications are accumulated. My guess is it would easily haunt them through a PhD and into the postdoc search.

I actually thought that was gotten rid of --- It's the other way around. In the 1990s and early 2000s, an endorsement was not needed, but then the requirement was put into place. Naturally, Murphy's law applied to me, and when an endorsement wasn't needed, I was teaching and had an .edu address (so I never worried about one day getting some of my unpublished work put there for others, so I just continued to tweak the manuscripts at my leisure), but about the same time the requirement was established, I no longer had an .edu email.

Publication on ArXiv is not considered as a formal publication, as it has not been peer reviewed.  A few journals ask you to submit to ArXiv first before submitting to the journal, although this isn't very common.

Arxiv is not peer reviewed, there is a barrier which a submission has to surpass in order to be accepted as an Arxiv submission but I'm not sure how high it is.  Bear in mind that once you submit something to Arxiv you need a reason to withdraw it and you can only withdraw the PDF file, everything else will remain on Arxiv.

I don't know, perhaps you could submit to Arxiv as an independent researcher.  Otherwise, the easiest thing would probably be to somehow convince a researcher at a university that you have something publishable, then polish it together and submit it as a joint publication.


text:
Should I include a paper published in a non English language in my CV?
I have written a paper in my own language. Is it right to write it in my CV as a published paper?

Has the paper been published in a workshop/conference/journal? Then yes, I'd include it in your CV

yes, it has published and I have had a 20 min talk about it.

@HamedBaghalGhaffari please, include these details in the question.

Of course it is.  Especially if it's a paper you are proud of.  Especially if you hope someone might one day be interested in translating it.  And especially if you want someone to see it.

It depends. Where are you going to send your CV to? For what purpose? You don't have one CV. You tailor it to the application, just like a cover letter. Without it, this question seems to be unanswerable to me.

@Bernhard I can't imagine an academic CV that didn't include publications. So, as long as this question is about a CV to be used to apply for academic jobs, no further details are needed for this question.

@David I am not sure if you should include all papers, rather than just a few key paper. In any case you are now just assuming this is for an academic application. If it is, then it would make a difference depending on the kind of position.

@Bernhard I'm assuming it's for an academic position because, if it's not, then the question is completely off-topic, here. I've never seen an academic CV that didn't list all the person's publications and I can't imagine an academic position where you wouldn't want to list them all. Academic CVs are very different to ordinary business CVs; it sounds like you're not very familiar with them.

@DavidRicherby So for a professor with 200+ papers, you would just list them all on the CV?

@Bernhard Yes. (Though somebody with that many papers is probably so well known that it doesn't much matter what they put on their CV.)

If you have published a paper, you should include it in your CV.  It does not matter what language the paper is in.
For the aid of people who do not speak the language, however, you may wish to include a translation of the paper title as a note, e.g.,:

J. Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico [Commentaries on the Gallic war], Caesar House Press, 49 BC, (in Latin)

-1E-20 for the translation (should read "Commentaries on the Gallic war")

@Bort Thank you, fixed it: it's been a long time since Latin class.

I would go with: J. Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallacio [Commentaries on the Gallic war], Caesar House Press, 49 BC, (in Latin). It's good to put the English title earlier, and to mention the language of the works.

@yo' That's a nice way to format it: I'll incorporate it into the answer.

Behold, my beautiful bikeshed!

Ah, hadn't heard the term "bikeshed(ding)" till just now.

Of course you should. It is well known that the best journals are in English but there are others that can be not bad and they are not necessarily written in English.
In South America there are a couple of journals that are not on the top ten, but maybe on the second quartile and they have articles both in English and Spanish.
Also, you worked on that paper so this may not add a lot to your cv but it is better than nothing! :)

"The best journals are in English" — that's going to be highly field specific. The best journals in my field are definitively not in English.

It is not true that all the top journals (e.g., in mathematics) are in English, though many are.

Now, this is just too subjective and too bold. Also, this does not answer the question.

You are right, this is too field specific. I was,of course, thinking about my field, where all the top journals are in English, but it may not be the case for other disciplines. However, even in my field I would include a publication written in a different language.

You should, if you consider this work worth mentioning. Interestingly, this could trigger the curiosity of the reader, with if often nice when people receive hundredth of resumes.
If  you "have had a 20 min talk about it", I guess it could be at a conference. It could be tagged for instance with "National conference" (if it was indeed national), and the title translated as suggested by  @jakebeal.
However, international conferences exist in other languages than English, so it could be an international conference, and you should mention that, to help the reader evaluate the context of publication.