text:
Is being publication oriented bad?
I talked with a professor for possible thesis guidance and mentioned that I aim to publish papers at top venues as soon as possible. The Professor got somewhat offended and said publication is not an aim and that I should aim to be problem oriented.
Maybe true, but I did not understand why that prof got offended and felt so bad about publishing. Do you have any ideas?

Being published is a result of doing good/great work. The professor is likely trying to keep your eye on controlling what you can control - doing the best work you can do.

"Is X good/bad" type questions are generally not a good fit for the StackExchange sites, as they tend to become opinionated. I am sure you can rephrase the question to be less subjective.

That's like the plot of every single Shaolin movie. The main character: "I wanna kick asses as soon as possible!" The master: "Go meditate under the waterfall until you don't want to do that, and no dinner for you tonight." I don't think it's the publication that offended the professor, it's the lack of patience and overlooking of the craftsmanship the process can take.

@Penguin_Knight Great dialogues :)

Literal publication is more a side-effect of doing the work. A purist might say that one should desire to do work hard, to do good work, rather than desiring the side-effect. It might be vaguely parallel to hear someone want to be "a celebrity" rather than "a good actor" (to add to @Penguin_Knight's analogy).

The cynical side of me agrees with you. Yes, you want to publish papers in top venues as soon as possible. However, the problem (of course) is that you can't get papers in top venues unless you find the right problems to solve (with their associated solutions). In other words, the end goal of publishing is a good one but it doesn't make a process. Also, aiming to be problem-oriented is a little longer-term than being paper-oriented. :)

The traditions of writing a monograph as a thesis vs. writing a thesis based on a number of papers/manuscripts and a cover paper to tie everything together vary between university systems (academic cultures). Because many aspects of academia including evaluations for positions and grants to a large extent is based on published papers, the latter system is gaining interest. In my country, Sweden, it has always (in modern times) been the norm. So in your case the reaction can be caused by one or both of tradition and local academic culture.
The professor has a good point in that the aim of writing a thesis should not primarily be to publish papers. Graduate school is about learning both practical and philosophical knowledge of how to conduct research properly with the aim to become a functioning research individual. At the same time, writing papers is a vital skill that must be included in such education so one does not preclude the other and my guess is that the response, hence, mostly is the result of tradition and culture rather than right or wrong. To be offended seems a bit over the top in terms of a reaction but I do not know the person to judge where such a reaction might originate.
I know of many who have defended a monograph but written and published papers on the material included in the thesis. A monograph allows inclusion of much more details on experiments and results than the paper format does. This can be seen as an advantage of the monograph. On the other hand, a thesis consisting of papers usually also contains a cover paper in which the same type of details can be included.
In the end the thesis you write will follow the local traditions or rules and my suggestion is to follow these but to aim to think about papers in parallel. Hopefully you will have an advisor that agrees.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to publish, and wanting to publish more and better. The fact that you are goal-driven can only be a plus, from my and many others' point of view.
BUT the question arises when you start thinking about the implications of wanting to publish more and better. I will be a bit crass here and give a somewhat unconventional metaphor. I guess no one can deny that having sex is a good thing, in a way like publishing. If you go around telling people (especially those who are supposed to be your seniors) that you intend to get laid as often and as soon as possible with the as hot girls/guys as possible... Well let's say they might start questioning your motives and personality.
Putting the metaphor aside, being an academic is mostly about doing research and from time to time communicating your work, primarily (but not exclusively) in the form of publications. Unfortunately the academic society has evolved in a way that how much you publish and where you publish often gets more attention than the quality, originality or the usefulness of the work you do. While I will not go on to claim that the two are not correlated, I personally do not believe how often and in which journals you publish your work is a definitive and descriptive indicator of how good of a scientist you are (anyone is of course entitled to disagree with me).
I believe the professor in question, might have gotten offended by the fact that your primary concern/ambition does not come across as doing good science, but rather solely being successful within the current norms of academic environment.
Hope that helps

I talked with a professor for possible thesis guidance and mentioned that I aim to publish papers at top venues as soon as possible.

One can only speculate, but maybe the professor was annoyed by your usage of as soon as possible more than by your intention to publish (if this was indeed what you said to him in verbatim). Maybe he inferred from this wording that, to you, PhD school is an unnecessary nuissance that you expect to leave behind you quickly, so that you can go on to greater glory.
I think in general a professor should really not be opposed to you publishing in good venues on principle, as this would mean that his students are basically locked out of an academic career for good - and which advisor would want that?
Edit:
To answer your titular question Is being publication oriented bad?:
Yes, if it means you do only "easy" incremental research in order to minimize risk. No, if you just mean that you do not only want to do any research, but are actively looking for topics that are publishable and which will have an impact on the scientific community or, in some cases, industrial practice.

There is nothing wrong in what you said to the Professor. You stated your concrete end goals as clearly as you thought you could. However, its not in your Professors control as to whether you will be published in top journals quickly. Even if he is the best Professor in the world, he cannot make that happen for you. So, what you need to look for is a Professor who is willing to support you in your goals and help you help yourself to get there. In addition, you may want to define some other qualities you are looking for that are not strictly in line with your stated goal.
A Professor is a coach and a mentor.
Here are some qualities of a good coach : http://home.earthlink.net/~tfakehany/point.html and http://www.mentalgamecoach.com/articles/CoachingQualities.html
The main thing is you dont want a judgmental Professor because judgment is the antithesis of research.


text:
Keeping credit for my work
I joined a new lab a while ago, and am having an issue with keeping the credit for my work. Two instances so far:

I co-authored a series of papers with the professor and a senior graduate student. I was always the first author, and it'd be fair to say that I contributed 95% of the research work and 70% of the writing. Somehow the other student was invited to give several talks on our work at various department seminars. I hadn't known until recently when I accidentally discovered his slides in our shared repository. The problem is that, in his slides, he only put his name, and there was no mention of my name/no credit given to me.
Before joining the lab, I developed a research software, which was quite successful and widely used. When I joined the lab, I transferred the development to the lab, and a graduate student helped me to extend the software a bit. When programming, I always sign my code with my name: (C) 2010-2013 by My Name (Email). Just today, when I looked at the code (publicly shared on github), I discovered that the student had deleted my name from all the files and replaced with his name: (C) 2010-2013 by His Name (Email). He even hadn't joined the development until 2012. If people just look at the code, they would think he were the sole author.

Of course I want to keep the credit for my work. But I don't know what I should do. I feel that there is a culture in the lab that people just don't respect the credit for shared work. I don't want to cause heat in the lab. Both those students have been in the lab for longer than me.

There might be two separate issues here. Your first point is a matter of academic integrity, and will probably have to be handled by discussing with your colleagues. The second point could also be considered an academic integrity violation, but beyond that it is a copyright violation as well. (If in the USA or a country with similar copyright laws.) For that, you may have some legal recourse, and in fact you might be entitled to have Github remove the repository if the other student refuses to revert to a revision with proper credit.

P.S. not that I'm suggesting that your first step should be to complain to Github, but the point is that this sort of problem is not unprecedented in the tech world and there are procedures in place to handle it.

Talks with one name only
Here I think that customs vary between having a long list of authors and a long list of collaborators* and only the speaker spelled out on the title, possibly including a long list of authors on the abstract.
* e.g. a slide listing the contributions of all the collaborators.
I'd recommend having a look how other people in the department handle this, and then maybe expressing astonishment (semi)publicly because where you came from it was handled differently. I think it is preferable to have a public discussion and the customs/style of the lab developing in some way than to offend everyone just because your previous lab put authors and not the speaker on the front slide.
Related issue: I like to know who tells what about my work. But OTOH, I think it is quite usual that you don't recognize your own work when a collaborator presents it... There are also drawbacks to being spelled out on the first page of a talk.
Only student's name in code
I think this is much clearer. And, as you say the code is in a git repo, it is still easy to sort out things now.
As a first step, talk to the student privately and request that he rolls back these changes and adds "Contributions by " (ideally a contributions line for each logical step in the development with date and name - but the git messages can do that as well) only where he actually contributed code. Of course, if he is the sole author of new files, those stay "his".
I'm in a field where software isn't (yet) really a category of publication in the mind of most researchers. However, the usual result of not thinking about that is that there is no statement of authorship nor of a license. In contrast to that, deleting author lines is an active step.
As a second step, I'd explain that deleting the authorship lines from source code is as serious as taking a colleague's manuscript and submitting it under his own name without even mentioning the collaborator.
As a next level of pressure, you could explain to him that you talk to him privately as you do not want to unneccessarily endanger his graduation: from a legal point of view this is a clear violation of your author's moral rights (not necessarily copyright - although also the terms of the license could have been violated). Violation of author's moral rights is an offense that is extremely relevant for academia and thus may put him onto the fast lane to being thrown out of his programme without graduation.
Which you also should keep in mind if you need to go to your boss with the problem: be careful not to destroy more than absolutely necessary here.
(Always assuming of course that the copyright is actually yours as opposed to your previous employer's. But, if you find out that you just have author's (moral) rights, but not the copyright that is a point that makes it necessary right now to "heal" the legal issues by putting the proper copyright and authorship lines into the code ;-) )

Regarding the first point, the only conceivable reason for omitting your name is that the student was under the mistaken impression that in a presentation you only need the name of the speaker. It's not an uncommon mistake that students make when they're starting to present work.
But the usual way to fix this is to have a big "Joint work with X and Y" just below the name of the speaker. And there's absolutely no reason not to do that. I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask the student to include your name on all presentations and even on abstracts announcing the presentations (again, using the 'Joint work with..' formulation. If the student resists, then it's time to go to the advisor. There is no reason your name should not be on the presentation if you've contributed to the work.
Separately, how come this other student is giving all the talks if you're the primary author ? Maybe you should ask your advisor if you can give a talk on this at the next opportunity.

In my field it is quite common to have the list of collaborators (often not well separated from acknowledgements) as an extra slide. Looks more like acknowledgements. And it is not only fresh students, but also professors and PIs giving an overview of what is done in their labs. It is less common if the talk has one clear subject, and more common in project meetings/seminars where anyways more or less everyone in the room contributes in some way or other. (+1) for why does a minor contributor give all the presentations.

True. If I give a talk summarizing the work of many papers I will do as you say, but for a single paper I try to place the coauthors on the title page.

Although this is somewhat advice, I am not sure it answers the questions at all.

Let's be real.  They (well at least the grad student) are going behind your back on both of the issues to make themselves look better.
Either they feel they have contributed much more to the project than you believe or they are just really unethical.
When you say that you did 70% of the writing - is that the real writing or does that involve formatting and proofreading?  I just know that a person in my field (tech engineer) who acts as an "editor" would not necessarily be credited on the discussions about the topic or paper but would certainly be credited in the paper itself.
Need to handle this swiftly but show restraint.  You first need to figure out if this is a problem with the lab or the person.  You need to figure where you relationship is with the grad student and professor and whether you wish to continue either.
If you want to stay on good terms with the grad student it is simple.  You go to them and say - "I know you switched my name on code, I know you are presenting these things as yours, please change these things or I will take the next steps."  If this person wonders what the next steps are - and needs the threat as motivation - then they should be done to you.  Then you move on to professor.
If you talk to the professor about these things and he/she seems astonished and takes action see where that goes.  If the professor doesn't offer an opinion you may need to go to the next level.
I know for a fact that students have been expelled from universities that I have had affiliation with for removing copy-write/author information.  This isn't an "ooops" case by the student.  The git stuff is borderline dumb/illegal but the presentations are just the icing on the cake.
Personally I wouldn't trust the student again.  I don't know enough about the situation to comment on the professor.  The other student could have easily conned the professor into thinking the stuff was theirs.  I think some of the other answers are a little too conservative.  If it were just the presentations I might agree with them but changing author info on code is blatant.  I would not start ambiguous conversations acting like what this person is doing might/might not be "incorrect".  They are in the wrong.  Confront them or professor and follow chain of commands at school and git.

I'm an undergraduate student, so I'm not particularly knowledgable about these issues. I had a thought I think is worth bringing up, though: Both of the incidents you brought up involve students. Is it possible that the students are simply unaware of what's expected or otherwise made simple mistakes? If so, talking to them in person would quickly resolve the issues.
I bring this up because it seems to me that you're in a position to get the students in question in serious trouble if you want to, possibly putting their academic futures in jeopardy. If they aren't being willfully antagonistic, it would be cruel to rake them over the coals (although it doesn't sound like you want to do so). Please take a gentler approach to start unless it is clear that they are deliberately acting selfishly.
EDIT: @blankip made me think about my answer some more. The students' unethical behavior might be bad enough to warrant some kind of punishment, regardless of how aware they are of it, not just a heart-to-heart talk. My biggest concern is that it also seems unethical (or at least cruel) to me to try to have the students expelled, subject to legal action, or something similarly extreme when they're relatively new to academia unless it's clear that they were deliberate.

You would think it is all right to erase someone's name from a paper and put your name on it?  I really don't understand everyone's rationale that this is a "dumb" mistake.

Absolutely not. What I'm concerned about is that, on the off chance that these students aren't fully aware that they're out of line, it would be just as wrong to end their academic careers with over-agressive tactics. There's a difference between a significant but survivable punishment and expulsion and legal activity, and I don't think it would be right to give students the latter unless it's clear they're being willfully unethical.

We are talking about a junior high kid.  We are talking about a graduate student.  Are you saying a graduate student doesn't know better?  Not saying that you press to have him expelled but there should be immediate changes.

Presenting Your work
It depends on how the student was presenting your work.  Was he presenting it as something he researched by himself, or was he presenting on some work that the lab had been working on.  It can be valuable to present research results to other labs and even across disciplines.  If he phrased it as just a discussion of the latest work in the field that should be fine.  If it was phrased as "this is what I did", then there's a problem.
Copyright of software
What license was the software released under?  Did you transfer the copyright to the university?  Did you work on the software on university time?
If you worked on it during university time this could be  tricky question.  Normally software is protected under copyright, but this could be seen as individual works for hire.  Either way he shouldn't have removed your name and added his.  The software should probably contain the universities/lab name for copyright with you AND him listed as contributors.  You're an academic, so here's a paper to read on the topic.  http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/article/view/30

Thanks for the link! I haven't read it, but it seems useful. The software was originally developed for my PhD work; the university does not hold the copyright. But I didn't specify any license, just as simple as "this software is open source" and "if you redistribute or derive your work from the software, you should give credit to the author(s)". I guess I should really think about a proper license.

Ask him, politely, like if you were interested to compare your slides (maybe you also participate in seminars) or if you don't, pretend to be really interested in his slides to learn. Again, politely, tell him that you are happy that he used your work ("oh, you did well showing our work" something like this) and force him to include your name.
About second issue, talk to him about it openly. But think about the long-therm consequences and short term consequences. Is it really important to keep that credit? Which are the colateral damages of putting this issue on the table? Are you leaving soon the department? Or, on the contrary, are you in tenure track?
Anyway, if he is not cooperating, think about stealing his girlfriend :D (he'll learn how you felt about your software) And, at the end, you're lucky to be first author, you could be 2nd or 3rd author even doing everything.

Is it really important to keep that credit? — YES!

JeffE, sometimes is not, believe me. It really depends on the department and the country and its policy. I suggest to value the long therm consequences of the decisions and who has the influence and power in the department. It is not a question of fair or unfair, it is a question of survival.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Suggestions needed in my tricky PhD situation
I am a PhD student and I hate my supervisors. they are bossy, do not allow me to explore my ideas because they have their own agenda and vision. Force me to publish in mediocre conference. Force me to cite all their friends and other students even if their work is irrelevant. They do research to further their academic careers rather than the love for science.
I have followed them and have finished 2/3 of my PhD life successfully. They have given me good feedback in recent yearly reports.
But I suddenly realise that this is not for what I started my PhD. I started my PhD to learn and explore Science. Gave up a top position in a company as a scientist to educate myself more and see myself stuck doing nonsense.
Now I am considering leaving my supervisors and alter my direction of study with someone else. Which implies I might have to work doubly harder and spend more time and probably eat up all my savings.
Should I live the hateful life and just get done with my PhD or should I take a bold step and do what I am passionate about. I have no interest in academia. I want to work in industry. I have come here to learn.

Why not polish up your resume, start job hunting, and return to industry as soon as you find a suitable job? Do you need the PhD?

I have invested a lot of time in this and wish to get a doctorate. I also need a Phd to work as a scientist in industry - minimum requirement in most cases.

If you're already 2/3 done, you can probably push to graduate quickly. If you have no interest in academia I wouldn't start another PhD...

You should decide whether you want to punish your supervisors, get a PhD, or pursue your direction of study. These three goals lead in different directions.

I am not starting another Phd. I wish to change the direction slightly and explore more relevant techniques to solve the same problem I am dealing with.

@DmitrySavostyanov I do not care about my supervisors and who am I to punish them. Getting a Phd is a goal and so is my direction of study.

As someone who has changed advisors and directions with it, it's a significant setback that will probably add a few years to your PhD.

@QPaysTaxes It's surely a grey area, but in many cases, it's hard to pinpoint that a work is clearly irrelevant. You can always find some somewhat plausible connection, e.g., identify a common principle, or a meaningful way to combine two ideas.

I'm addressing your particular goal of "I wish to change the direction slightly and explore more relevant techniques to solve the same problem I am dealing with".
One particular suggestion is to use a kind of "red herring" strategy: Work on two directions in parallel. The one direction is the boring/phony stuff that your supervisors want you to do, and that you will mainly discuss in meetings, thus giving them the impression that you buy into their game. The other direction is the direction you actually want to follow. The time to first mention this direction is when you have made some substantial results - you may then calmly announce that you plan to submit them to a specific conference.

I discussed some of the ideas when I was sure it will work. After a lot of fight they finally said that unless some top researcher does it and shows I cannot try it because it seems very new. Then, I decided that I must not work with these people. They just undermine me and want me to publish in mediocre conferences. Moreover, I have been offered help from a previous supervisor and I will have to include his name in a good work I wish to do now. The current set of supervisors will collaborate only with their friends - just a mention of my previous supervisor infuriated him.

@skyislimit 1. My suggestion is to confront them with results, rather than ideas. This corresponds to the idea to "ask for forgiveness, not permission". 2. Your conclusion that they want to undermine you is unnecessarily negative. One can easily assume that they act in good faith and just want to avoid risk, which is indeed always associated with proposing big ideas at big venues.

The problem is simple. I do research because I love the challenge in exploring new ideas and making them work to solve problems. My supervisors do research to make sure they get published and get promotion, funding, new students and fame. New ideas are indeed risky but that is why I do PhD and left industry because in industry we make money -  and they are honest about it. Eventually my PhD should be solving a problem in real life, not just end up as a useless publication which only my group will read and cite.

@skyislimit You're ranting about a situation for which you have the full responsibility: you agreed to working with those particular supervisors. Their research interests is something that you could have easily found out before doing so. Please quit the ranting, it's now time to focus on getting the job done.

PhD times can be very frustrating; still, it's crucial to set aside frustration and clear your mind in order to achieve your goals. Please bear with me as I go over a few points:
You "Gave up a top position in a company as a scientist" but need a PhD to get the job you want (I guess that corresponds to a "top job") in industry? Clearly something is missing in this picture. Do you need that PhD or not? If not, you can stop reading here.
If you really need a PhD to get the industry job you want, then all you have to do is to learn what most of us learn too late in life: compromise.
Yes, in academia as in industry the professors/managers set their own agenda yes they have their supporters and work mostly with them to achieve what is sometimes new science/value-added in the company, and sometimes personal interests/career goals.
That being said, nobody "forces" you to work on some goal off your working hours. And yes you can define "working hours" even as a PhD, they're just perhaps 50% longer :)
Arguing over your own ideas without showing at least a proof of concept won't lead you anywhere. Trust me, I have done the same mistake a million times. Go back home, study your own ideas, experiment with it, and come back to your supervisor only when some results (not ideas) are mature enough. Or if you prefer, take your former supervisor and work with him in parallel. Nobody is going to object if you use your spare time to explore your ideas, as long as you keep churning out stuff for your current supervisor.
If you accomplish something along your independent line of research, surely someone will notice and make room for it. But I insist: to accomplish is not just to have a brilliant idea: is to work its details out until it's clear that it's original enough and carries potential.
If you do that, you can 1) get the PhD title you need 2) get the positive feedback and recommendation letters you might need in the future 3) learn and do all the science you care and need.

Compromising means I have to do things I do not like. My current research area (narrowly focused on one method) is not worth getting published in top journals in my area. So if I pursue this I will not achieve my goal, that is, the top job as I need to contribute in the highest order.

I am aware of top academic jobs that you obtain accomplishing many things, among them publishing in the top journal in your area. And of industry jobs, where the name of the institute from which you graduate really matters, and what you have done in that time may be taken into account. If an industry job exists that focuses on a corner of your research field, that job may not exist by the time your graduate. Companies are aware of technology pace; that's why they hire PhD not just because they're familiar with the stuff they need, but more importantly because they assume you can keep learning.

It sounds like your advisors are risk-averse. This may be a good tactic if your main goal is to finish your PhD. However, you may still be able to sway them to your side by using an incremental approach.
One of my favorite advisors had a lesson she would impart to students eager to switch to a "new and exciting" topic. They idea was: don't come to me saying you have a brilliant idea and want to switch your research agenda. Instead, say that you have spent 2-3 days looking at this and feel the project is feasible and promising for the following reasons. Then ask for a specific length of time to generate "proof of concept." After that the right course of action will be self-revealing.

Unfortunately my supervisors are not motivated by science, but by greed to publish more and claim expertise in their fav. narroe technologies. So they do not let students explore anything else at all.

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


text:
Can I resubmit my accepted paper after I withdraw it from the same journal?
I have withdrawn my paper after it was accepted for financial reasons.
Can I resubmit it to the same journal ?

Have you checked to see if this has been asked already?

yes I checked and I don't found it

Any reason why you couldn't submit to a journal that does not charge authors? They usually come with the upside of being better quality.

@CapeCode depends what you mean by "charge authors". Many highly-respected open access journals charge APCs.

@Flyto I mean what it means: “ask authors for money in exchange for publishing the paper”.

@CapeCode well then, there are plenty of high-quality open access journals that do that.

@Flyto and there are journals of similar and often better quality that don’t. Just submit to those.

@CapeCode the OP presumably had a reason for submitting to the journal they did, and a reason for wanting to resubmit there. We don't know the choices in their field. I was simply objecting to your suggestion that journals that don't charge "usually come with the upside of being better quality". Maybe they are in your field.

@Flyto regardless of the field, when a journal gets money for accepting papers it will accept more papers than it should.

@CapeCode [citation needed]. I don't want to get into the whole open access debate here, but in case you're not aware, that's one of the usual bits of FUD that publishers put around to try to discredit open access.

@Flyto nonsense. what publisher wants to “discredit open access”? It’s a goldmine for them: infinite papers, money for papers nobody will ever read, all that research money going into publishing instead. All of this being advocated for free. Have you bought RELX stocks yet? You should.

@Flyto you make it sound like publishers don't like open access. That's completely untrue. Open access is great for publishers because 1) it's guaranteed revenue, i.e. you don't need to convince people to subscribe and 2) you barely have to do anything you aren't already doing. Take a look around, there are very few publishers that don't offer open access if the authors want it, and it's not because it's less profitable for them. The pure-OA publisher Hindawi has higher profit margins than Elsevier - that should say something.

That depends entirely on the journal itself. If the submission process is automated, you could just try and see what happens. But you could, and probably should, contact the editor for information, explaining the earlier withdrawal and why that isn't an issue at present.
But, I assume some journals wouldn't like to reconsider it. And take care that it isn't a predatory journal. They might want to accept it again, but you may have better options elsewhere.

Journals and editors want to accept and publish your manuscripts. If it has already been reviewed and accepted, that is even more reason for them to publish it. They need citations and a better reputation as much as you do.
If you are unable to pay fees (such as open access fees) at the moment, you should contact the editor if you still wish to publish with them in the future. You do not want to wait for reviews again if it can be helped. Even if the new reviewers approve of the manuscript as well, this is a time consuming process for everyone. It is better to come to some arrangement with the editor or at least notify them in case an automated system rejects your resubmission.
The exact process will vary between journals. Only an editor will know the policy for a specific journal. They will want to help you. Don’t hesitate to contact them about questions of this nature: it is their job to handle these matters.

Indeed. Most (non-predatory) journals that have page charges also have ways to request that the charges be waived based on financial situations. That should have been the route for the OP to begin with.

they want citations also they want your money.

That is true, there are many exemption policies for publishing fees. If you are from a developing nation or don’t have an affiliation (e.g., jobhunting), it is worth mentioning that.

Make sure you know what you're doing before resubmitting.
If you submitted to an open access journal, then it's nonsense to resubmit because it will just lead to them charging you the submission fee again. If you submitted to a hybrid journal, then you shouldn't have withdrawn it in the first place because you can simply decline open access. If you needed a discount or a waiver, you could've negotiated for it without withdrawing.
In a nutshell, if you withdrew the paper because of financial reasons, and this was the right decision on your part, I can't see why you would want to resubmit to the same journal unless you've found funding to pay for open access. If this is indeed the case, then just write to the editor saying so, and do whatever she says.

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


text:
Is it ethical to upload an automatically generated paper to a non peer-reviewed site as part of a larger research?
I'm doing some research on my own as a side-project. In fact, I want no one from my research center to be involved in this research as I feel that they will take credit for my idea, like in past times. Nevertheless, if their involvement is completely necessary, I would consider it.
Anyways, this project requires to upload completely nonsense papers to Arxiv or similar. They are completely nonsense as they are artificially generated. The idea is to see if this is possible or how easy it is.
On the one hand, I don't want to pollute the scientific community with rubbish but in the other hand, I see that this step is necessary to continue further with this research.
My question is, how should I proceed? Should I do it and once I finish my research tell Arxiv that they can delete the files? Should I ask for permission first? Should I not do it at all?
EDIT: Just to make sure that everyone understands, this is not something that I have done yet. In fact, after seeing the responses, it is more than likely that I try to avoid publishing in arXiv. The objective is not to upload a paper to arXiv, is something else, but I was considering uploading it to arXiv as a medium for reaching another goal. Nevertheless, it is not my objective to pollute arXiv or the community.

Not sure why downvotes on this question - I might not agree with what the OP is doing (not as strongly as the answer offered but along those lines), but the question is not bad-posed

Here's a short note from Ginsparg about how arXiv screens (well, screened back in 2014) for fake papers. If you're interested in seeing "how easy it is" to get a paper past the filter (as opposed to more social aspects) arXiv might be interested in collaborating, in order to strengthen their filters.

What are you hoping to learn from this research? What is your hypothesis?

This paper might be of interest. It was reviewed and rated as excellent by this journal.

.... Why spending time on generating automatic rubbish instead of generating automatic valuable content...? As you seem to be a clever person, use it for the good rather than for the bad.

@EricDuminil It is an excellent paper. It has a clear abstract and message, crisp and compact, it really manages to get the story across. Its graphics is pertinent, and it makes also clear what the way forward in the future is and it spawned insights beyond its own initial scope. It is a paradigmatic example of clear and unambiguous communication. It is also not significantly compressible by gzip, which means that there is little redundancy. Every line has something new to say. I am sure this is one of the best papers that this journal has ever published.

@CaptainEmacs: And I absolutely love the directed acyclic graph.

For the matter, something like this has already been done. How does your idea to waste their time differ from it?

Technically this is "an act of mischief", and also plagiarism. AI being quite capable of composition is one thing, and using it as an aid might be another.  Using people as test subjects without their consent may not be ethical.  What is the worst that can happen when this is exposed ?

@CaptainEmacs I'm pretty sure you'd need to convert it to plain text (and maybe a couple images) to discern whether gzip could significantly compress it.

@jpmc26 Technically spoken, you are probably right, jpeg would be a better test. But, you should admit, it makes a compelling argument for the richness of the con tent...

"Shall I poison a well to see how many drink out of it?"
Frankly, the idea of debunking review processes is not that new, and the latest wave started with the Sokal hoax. There were a couple of follow-ups, with computer-generated papers.
The result was a scandal, a journalistic anecdote. It created attention. Been there, done that. It's no longer an original idea. We got it. You can fool badly screened journals and predatory conferences.
But ok, now, you talk about actual "research" with fake paper dissemination. That may or may not be a legitimate research question, but the fact that you talk about "poisoning" arXiv, which is a serious and expressly not peer-reviewed site makes it already very questionable what you are trying to achieve.
It is one thing to embarrass badly screened journals or conferences (possibly even suspected predatory ones - namely the conferences in question) which Sokal and the SciGen people did, but quite another to abuse a perfectly legitimate repository for non-peer-reviewed papers. In other words, it relies on good will and honesty of the submitters trying to submit good quality work. There are minor safeguards in place to avoid obvious scientific spam, but not against antagonistic submitters.
I do not know (and I do not want to know) what you are trying to achieve with this experiment, but the damage that you are likely to do with this can be so substantial in terms of loss of trust of arXiv and preprint services etc, that you would seriously need to pass it through an ethics committee who can evaluate what legitimate experimental parameters for such a large scale social experiment would be.
Without such a permission and clear delineation of your duties and limitations (which your institution's ethical committee has to evaluate), this research will be unpublishable in a serious journal. And frankly, your academic reputation will be finished. Damaging one of the most valuable resources of openly accessibly publications will make you persona non grata in academia.
Let me add one more thing. There are other preprint servers which have a less strong reputation. There, your experiment may do less damage, though also be less expressive. However, even there, I should believe that they rely on good will and that wilful tainting of wells for scientific knowledge is simply maximally antagonistic to the endeavour of science.
TL;DR: I believe the experiment is highly unethical and extremely damaging. However, you may want to see whether your institution's ethics committee can identify conditions under which such a social experiment might be feasible.

First of all, thank you for your answer. The idea is not to see "how many drink from it", it is something that goes further but I'm checking how to do it without damaging Arxiv or the community. In fact, Arxiv was thought to be the tool, no the end result. I will consider how to do this in a different way, if it is going to affect the community so much. Thank you again

@AnonimousPhD Ok, I understand. Perhaps better tests can be done in communities where there is an active evaluation model, such as slashdot, reddit, etc.

Sokal nothing. An auto-generated content-free paper got into a peer-reviewed journal and only got pulled because their attempt to get funding to present the associated talk hit the news.

Any research with human subjects must go through an IRB approval process.  I'd expect in this case that the people moderating the arxiv and reading the arxiv would be considered human subjects.  Typically a key part of ethical research on human subjects is obtaining informed consent, which is not done in your proposed experiment.  I expect it would be difficult to IRB approval for this experiment, but maybe with the right design it is possible.  More importantly though, it's unethical and a serious violation of university rules (and rules of most funding agencies) to go ahead with an experiment on human subjects without prior IRB approval.
So ask your IRB, their answer is much more important than the opinion of a bunch of random people on the internet.

IRB can waive informed consent if necessary to achieve the goals of the work and participants are sufficiently protected in other ways. (I don't think this proposed work meets that bar.)

Without more information on your goals this is highly suspect.  As has been mentioned many times above, the Sokal affair and other similar efforts were designed specifically to show that it is possible to create scientific sounding papers that are accepted, either by legitimate experts in their field (Sokal) or by predatory journals who are in it for the cash.  I'm pretty sure a huge number of researchers have, for fun, submitted a BS article to a predatory journal just to see how far they could take it.  I know I have, but I've never bothered to pay the fee to get it actually published because, as has been pointed out above, it's been done.
So, to arXiv.  arXiv is designed specifically for rapid dissemination of results with the explicit understanding that the papers are not peer reviewed.  It's up to the readers to make judgments about the validity and contribution of the papers.  From that perspective, you're probably going to end up getting one of three types of responses, depending on the person reading it:

An expert (or even someone mildly knowledgeable) will see it for what it is and probably ignore it.
A student who is not an expert but is trying to be will try very hard to read the paper and think they can't understand it because it's too advanced.  Most likely this student will give up, or embarrass themselves by asking their advisors or someone else for help.  That would be mean on your part but, it's the Internet and not really unexpected.
Someone from an unrelated field will come upon it, shrug at how different the other field is (thinking they don't understand because it's not their field), and move on.

The real problem I see is the damage done to arXiv, along the lines of "they'll publish anything".  However, I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.  There are many news articles that reference papers in arXiv as though they are peer reviewed.  Researchers using the service get it, but journalists and the general public may not.  The big question is whether or not polluting arXiv like this would lead to researchers not using it as much anymore.  If you are reasonably sure that won't happen, then your harm is minimized (except for the poor student in point 2 above).  On the other hand, if this leads to researchers having a suspicion that arXiv is not useful and they stop disseminating their research on it, that would be a terrible blow.
I think your next step is to perform a comprehensive study of researchers and their opinions on the service, what they think they would do in this situation, and then base your idea on how to proceed off of that.

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


text:
Can grad school admission recommendation letters be generic for all applications?
Can grad school admission recommendation letters be generic for all applications? (2 or 3, not more than that).
Does it has to be specific to each school ?

Recommendation letters generally do not need to be tailored for each school. Admissions committee members are faculty too, and in an age where people regularly apply to 10+ programs they understand the undue burden this would place on already busy faculty.
Occasionally a more tailored letter may have some advantages, for example if the recommender has close connections at one of the programs, but it is definitely not expected or required.


text:
Can I share my notes of copyrighted materials on my blog?
I make extensive notes on the material I encounter all over the Internet (video courses, textbooks, blogs etc). I want to make my hard earned notes available free over the Internet. But if I do that, then it won't be fair as everybody will want to read the notes and won't buy textbooks.
Is it copyright violation if I share my notes over my blog?

No, it's not a copyright violation, since you hold copyright for your notes. However, I'm curious about what makes you think that your notes are (will be) better than textbooks?

It will include my own practical examples where I try these concepts in real world.

To the best of my knowledge, most textbooks include examples and other practical materials (additionally, most textbooks have their own websites with data sets, etc.). I imagine that it takes a lot of effort, not to mention knowledge and experience, to create all that.

@AleksandrBlekh I see no reason to discourage addition of more material to the world: it may well be different and interesting.

Yes, I agree but some concepts are not well explained. So you go to youtube, blogs, other books etc to understand the concepts better. Further many books have theoretical knowledge without any (or a very limited) code examples.

@jakebeal: I'm not discouraging - just helping to perform a "reality check". I might be wrong, but it seems to me that the OP doesn't fully realize that in order for someone to prefer the OP's materials to textbooks, the former should be of rather high quality.

@AleksandrBlekh I am a coder and am trying to learn machine learning. There is a lot of math involved and most good books on machine learning are all math and no code.  I believe that by trying the math on the real datsets, you learn it better and retain it for a longer time.

@piby180: By all means, feel free to do whatever you feel will help you and, perhaps, other people. I was just slightly alarmed by your direct comparison of personal notes and textbooks. Plus, AFAIK, many ML books contain quite a lot of code examples. Perhaps, you need to widen your literature search.

As a practical matter, how will interested folks (like me) find out about your blog? (I fully expect this comment to be deleted at some point soon.)

@MadJack, if you search the internet for "machine learning notes" and similar things, you're bound to come across such things. I find the chatter here about this a bit surprising. Maybe it's a bit naive to think that someone's personal notes on machine learning could become popular enough to substitute for a textbook, but hundreds of textbooks started out as people's lecture notes (usually the lecturer's, but whatever), so I don't see this concern as all that arrogant. The copyright question is certainly real depending on the approach. See my answer.

Needless to say, this is not legal advice about your specific situation, and if you're really concerned about this, you should consult a lawyer.
However, here are the general rules.  (Law professor here.)

Copyright protects expression, not content.  So if I read a textbook in order to learn something, and then summarize it in my own words to share that knowledge with the world, I own the copyright to the summary, the textbook author does not.
Not all text is copyrightable.  In particular, text that just represents information that can only be expressed one way isn't copyrightable.  The classic example of this is a telephone book (see Feist v. Rural Telephone Services).  But there are academic examples that would fall in the same category.  Off the top of my head, an obvious example would something like the information in a table of mathematical results (although if the table is in a novel structure, the information as laid out in that structure might be copyrightable).
Not all information that is copyrightable is in copyright.  For example, the formulas in a math textbook for a subject that's been around for a while may not be in copyright because whoever first wrote them in that form did so a very long time ago, and copyright is time-limited.
Finally, there's fair use.  That's a super-complicated subject, but broadly speaking, noncommercial uses of small amounts of copyrighted work tend to be ok for purposes like teaching and critique.  But for that, it's best to do lots more reading and tread carefully.  More information.

I just want to remark that this answer only applies to the US (which is not mentioned anywhere on this page). In the EU for example, point 2 does not apply in this generality (Directive 96/9/EC) and fair use is usually much more restricted.

Excellent answer! The one point I would add is that if the OPs notes quote extensively from the original textbook, he may be in violation of copyright. That would depend whether his quotes were considered fair use. In the U.S. the law specifically says that there is broader tolerance when material is copied for educational, non-commercial purposes, as seems to be the case here. But he certainly cannot, to take an absurd extreme, post the entire contents of somebody else's book on his site, add a few notes, and claim it as original.

If your notes are entirely your own writing, you're probably fine. I.e. if you summarize, paraphrase, and the like, then you shouldn't have much to worry about. The fact that your notes might substitute for book itself is just the facts of life in the marketplace of intellectual ideas.
All that being said, if you copy literally from the book, you might find yourself having to deal with legal threats, DMCA takedown requests, or an actual lawsuit. None of us can (or should) tell you how that might go. You should consult an attorney before you post anything if you intend to copy liberally from the original sources. You may have a number of defenses if legal process should commence, but that doesn't help you save on attorney's fees and other costs. So be careful that all your words are your own.

FWIW, if you or your host does receive a DMCA takedown notice then there is an option available to avoid attorney's fees: take the material down. Of course if the notice is over-broad or just plain incorrect then you aren't going to find out without legal advice, so you leave yourself open to taking down more than you need to. And the "roll over and play dead" approach doesn't apply to all conceivable legal threats, since someone might ask you for more than you can (reasonably) give them.

@SteveJessop, unfortunately, the DMCA only gives "safe harbor" to the host if they take it down. Even if you personally take the content you've posted down in response to a DMCA notice, you've still potentially violated copyright, and you can still be sued.

@Olathe: sure, if you don't have safe harbor then you can be sued. You'd need an attorney to deal with that if it happened, I just meant that you don't strictly need an attorney to deal with a DMCA takedown if that's all you're facing.


text:
How to dress for PhD interview at US institution

Possible Duplicate:
Dressing etiquette for interviews in academia

I have been invited for a PhD interview day at an institution in the US. I was just wondering how formal/informal these interview days are. I know I will be meeting a few professors for which I have expressed interest. I definitely do not want to be underdressed but also I do not want to overdoit. Especially because I have noticed in my field ecology/biology the dress code is quite loose. (I remember this colleague of mine that would come to work with a shirt full of paint stains because he was painting his house, that cracked me up every time)
Would nice pants, a buttoned shirt, and elegant black sneakers be good enough? Should I wear a blazer as well?

This is much more specific and also country specific. Also using the search function I was not able to locate the question you mentioned. Perhaps we can improve the tagging of the other question.

The answer to the question quoted by @EnergyNumbers is also the answer to this question. Both are tagged with interview

@BenNorris: The linked question asks about dress for either faculty or student interviews.  However, none of its answers currently addresses student interviews specifically.


text:
How can I enter into the mathematics field at the graduate level when I only took a few math courses as an undergrad?
Background
I was ignorant as an undergraduate and didn't focus heavily in any specific area. I finally graduated with a single math/computer science degree that consisted of 5 math classes beyond multivariable calculus and a few relatively basic computer science classes (algorithm analysis, SQL database design, etc.). My only research experience is in economics.
Now, I work at a research institution in economics where I primarily write Stata/MATLAB code.
Question
I'd like to get more mathematics under my belt over the next few years in order to either enroll in a PhD program in economics/finance or a M.S. program in finance. What are my options for getting more math experience that I can use in graduate school admissions?
Options
These are the options I thought of so far, but I would like to know more if possible.

Study enough courses through a system like Open CourseWare to gain enough experience to enroll in more advanced undergraduate classes part time, which my employer might pay for, and then ideally move into an M.S. program in applied math.

Return to my alma mater for a M.S. degree in math that would at least give me a basis to either move into another math graduate program with higher rankings or a lower-ranked graduate program in the fields of my choice.

Join the Air Force and hopefully take advantage of the GI bill to take more courses somewhere and gain entrance into an M.S. program in applied math.

(Sadly) Forgo advanced mathematics and find a consulting job, which although unpleasant in the field of economics (in my opinion), wouldn't be difficult to obtain given my research background in the field.

Do I have any other options? I also plan to take the GRE subject test in mathematics to prove that I have at least minimal knowledge, regardless of what course I pursue (since many graduate programs will require it).

Just to clarify...  It appears that you are in the US.  Yes?

It sounds like your best bet would be to contact the graduate officers at the economics and finance programs you're interested in attending, and ask them what their minimum entrance requirements are. It's a much more efficient route than just deciding to take more math courses, and spending significant time, energy, and money on a quixotic goal.

Based on the experience of people at my current institution, I fall below the minimum mathematics requirements for entrance. I may be able to qualify for an MSF program, although I'm not sure, so contacting graduate officers might be a good idea. I wasn't aware that many graduate admissions personnel were open to that (since the websites often speak to the contrary).

Part of the job of the admissions personnel in a department is to field questions like yours. A few minutes' investment could bring them a very good candidate or help them rule out someone who won't really be competitive. On the other hand, if they can't be bothered to answer any questions before you apply, what do you think they'll be like afterward?

To clarify for future folks, I doubt that economics departments will have stated minimum entrance requirements, beyond perhaps calculus, but asking them what successful applicants typically have may be helpful. (Economics and finance are about more than just math, and I've been told faculty like to have the option of enrolling "interesting" promising candidates who may not have extensive math preparation but have demonstrated skill there.)

There are several schools that offer a post-baccalaureate or "postbac" program in mathematics.  These are typically one-year programs intended for students in precisely your situation: interested in pursuing graduate study, but lacking sufficient preparation from their undergraduate degrees.
Here are the top few I saw when googling "math postbac":

Smith College (aimed at women)
George Washington University (transitioning to a similar "Graduate Certificate Program")
Indiana University Kokomo

Unfortunately, in my city, no such programs in math exist at the major universities, and I don't have the funds to move elsewhere at the moment (since my research institution will pay for my graduate courses if I stay here).

@JohnBensin: I see.  Do note that financial aid is generally available for these programs.  Also, don't just look at major universities; many of these programs are specialties of smaller institutions.

You likely don't need a 'postbac' program.  You likely can just take the pre-requisite courses as a non-degree student.  Most 4-year public (and some private) colleges/universities with a Math major should be able to accommodate you.

@MikeP: That's true, but the postbac is usually designed to meet the needs of this specific audience and give you everything you need in a short time.  Taking classes a la carte, you might spend more time working through chains of prerequisites, classes scheduled on top of each other, etc.  Also, many postbac programs include research experiences, mentoring, and other services valuable for those bound for grad school.

You could enter a mathematical finance masters or a financial engineering masters. There are also math masters designed for non-math majors, but I would find it hard to enter a straight math masters without a math major.

Until the moment I read your post, I was absolutely not aware that there was any attempt in the whole world to offer "math masters degrees" to anyone who did not have (some equivalent form of) an undergrad degree (thinking about the U.S. here) in mathematics. It's not that mathematics is "so special", morally (!?!), but that the live issues are not widely visible, nor appreciated, etc. For that matter, maybe a person wants a different thing, and not a math masters... depending.

Perhaps you could study for the Math subject GRE and use that to support your admission.
I believe admission into Math Masters programs should be quite possible even for someone without a math major undergraduate background. PhD is possible too but harder.
Math masters (self-funded) usually have lower entry requirements than PhD. So you may want to look in that direction first. Possible route is self-funded Masters --> funded PhD.
Also see Math Major and Grad School -- Necessary? which is related to your question.

I have to take issue with the idea of studying for the math subject test GRE as a short-cut: it's crazy enough as it is, and only becomes less ridiculous if doing well on it is viewed as a side effect of a few years' prior preparation in broader mathematics...

In my experience...
I needed a few business classes before I'd qualify to apply for the MBA.  So, I simply took a few business classes, after my BS.  Then, I had all of the undergrad requirements for the MBA program.
Figure out which advanced degree you want, find out the pre-requisites, and you should be able to take them, either at your undergrad college, where you want to go to grad school, or even somewhere else, or online.

Unfortunately, the possibility of this approach is simply unlikely in many geographical regions. Math grad school, though possibly less remunerative money-wise than "business school", requires (at the least) some advanced course-work which is definitely not typically available from community colleges, or even universally at four-year colleges. And, unfortunately, the on-line pretenses toward such courses are almost entirely misleading and worthless. And, besides, one needs letters of recommendation, which will not be forthcoming from many of these improvised approaches.

I did this at well, enrolling is some one-off courses at the top 20 university in my city under a program for non-degree seeking students.


text:
What skills are needed to sustain a research group?
As a young academic, I am struggling to set up a research group that produces papers or proposals on a regular and sustainable basis. I had my share of PhD students, but nothing structured in a proper group or centre. I am also aware that when an academic starts collaborating with others, s/he sooner or later realises that several skills are needed to achieve a quality submission, and that not everyone can excel in all the needed skills.
What type of skills are needed in a cohesive academic group or research centre?

Since you have some responses below that seem to answer your question, please consider marking one of them as ‘Accepted’.

Some team-related skills:

Interviewing. You have to build your own team, and that team has to fit together very well. Given that your research group will likely be small and that your work can be measured in years, a few mistakes here can be very costly to your ability to produce. Be sure you know who you're bringing in, whether you can work with them, and whether when they can work with the rest of your group.
Delegation. There's an art to knowing what to delegate and what to do yourself. This will vary from researcher to researcher, and from one graduate student/postdoc/lab technician to the next. Make sure you don't give someone more than they can handle, and make sure that each person has enough to keep them busy.

i really like these ones, I must admit, because at least for the "interviewing", it seems obvious but it has to be done properly. I am sure that as anyone else, I tend to select people with a mindset similar to mine, but I am sure that this was is not the optimal one

a related question on interviewing is here

I try to only work with people who are capable of excelling in all the skills needed to perform and write up high-quality research.
That's not to say that some of them (particularly students) won't need training in those skills in order to excel, of course.  But I definitely don't believe in having 1 guy who only collects data, 1 who only analyzes data, and 1 who only writes (or some such scheme).  If you pursue such a scheme, you may be crippling people.  They'll likely have a hard time in their next job, when nobody holds their hand through the other parts.

thanks. I do not know your experience, but I also try and work with high-calibre researchers. What I meant with the question is hopefully not to cripple anybody! But inevitably, individuals are better than others at certain tasks, some become very good at several skills (writing a good story and being on top of the related work), while others naturally evolve a tendency to e.g. leave the data crunching on a side, and focus on how to have a good "product". I wonder if there's an optimal set of people that would successfully run a papermill

@ElCid: Graduate students and postdocs, in order to be successful, will need all of those skills. Having people with specialized skills only helps if you're hiring full-time technical staff.

@aeismail: i agree that when working with new students you must be able to pass as much knowledge as possible. But when working with professors you realise that they've done their lot of data mining, and they're much more "useful" in checking that the storyline makes sense, that the sections fit together and so on. So, do I need a full-time professor with these characteristics in my group?

@JeffE: it must be appearing in the top-10 books of all our PhD's and post-docs... :-)

@ElCid My (former) advisor still does a lot of his own programming, data mining, etc. Many of the best senior people I know in my field still do too.  And I think that's part of why they're the best.

@DavidKetcheson: I am sure he does... I had builders in my house recently and the "manager" was a builder too, in the past. He still knows how to fix/build things and sometimes he was helping out his workers. But he's sort of the supervisor now, gains the contracts, insures that the schedule is respected and so on. Basically he delegates others to do the main practical work. Sadly (or not), I feel that I am moving into that role too, and I do not have time to do my own programming, my writing up and so on.

Setting goals: As a PI, you need some skills on top of the obvious (like writing grants). One important skill involves setting goals. You need to be able to set reasonable and attainable (but not necessarily easy) short-term goals for your group. At the same time, you need to be able to clearly articulate the overarching long-term, big-picture goals of your research. Good goal setting will help you attract capable researchers to your group.

together with the "interviewing skills" i like this the most. Should a group have a webpage setting clear objectives? I like this and this can be done easily

Coherent research focus:
Try to make sure that the members of your group work on topics that are  close together, to create synergy between topics and allow  experienced members to work closely with less experienced ones to allow their skills to pass on and build an environment where  internal collaboration is the norm.

so far the first part of this experience seems to be functioning fine (working close together, cohesive environment, etc), but it's the "pass-on" phase which is tough, since the turn-over is stuck. Also, I'm never quite sure whether to select the non-sociable geek, or the all-sociable-but-slow party-goer, or... should one be selecting specific skills or personality traits when building a group from the ground-up?

One way to attempt to "pass on" the skills is to get people to work together on a paper and make it clear what the roles of the various members are. For instance, you could put a fresh PhD student on a paper with a post-doc and have the PhD student follow along in discussion, make comments on the work and perhaps do some of the writing. Alternatively, you could make the PhD student do the bulk of the work, with the post doc acting as a guide, trying to resist the temptation of jumping in and solving the problem for the student.

"Don't hire crap people" is the first rule. I'm still working out the rest.

as a follow-up to this answer: I think that any researcher has "phases", at the beginning having sort of a wide spectrum of interests (anything to get a publication :-) and later s/he becomes more focused on one or two clear aspects. The "secret" is being "lucky" and "far-sighted" to detect early an important research focus to be coherent to

@DaveClarke, if you have an objective and useful method for not "hiring crap people," there are software engineering companies that will pay you millions and millions of dollars for the method...


text:
Choosing reference letters
I'm applying from Europe to US or US-styled Ph.D. programs and I'm wondering about who to choose for referees.
I graduated 2 years ago and my undergraduate professors don't remember me well, or at least I don't think so. In those two years I have worked as a research assistant in one lab, with three different post-docs. Should I diversify the source of my references and try to get references from my undergraduate institution or should I just opt for the people that I've been working with?
I think the latter group knows me better and has, generally, a better opinion of me and my work. Then again, I'm afraid that the single source of references will be suspicious.
I mentioned having studied in Europe because the undergraduate research options are typically limited, compared to American institutions where research experience is strongly encouraged. I only did a research thesis during my undergrad.

Having sat (as a graduate student) on my department's admissions committee for two years, I can provide a few thoughts from my own personal experience.
First off, everyone has "good" references - it's very rare that a reference writer will say something negative or even something neutral. What sets apart the really good ones is that the writer can provide a specific, concrete anecdote that demonstrates an applicants skill set, attitude, previous successes, etc. So in that regard, knowing you the best probably trumps almost everything.
That said, having three letters from postdocs (none from professors), all of whom are in the same lab, is likely to make your letters somewhat redundant. If you worked with each of them on very different projects, or you know that they have very different things to say about you (in particular if they can speak to different aspects of your work or personality), this might make sense - but to have all three from the same place might be a bit much.
Not knowing anything else about your situation, it would seem that perhaps two letters from your current lab and one from a professor at your undergrad institution would be a reasonable balance.


text:
To what extent do monetary incentives encourages researchers to publish in ISI Journals?
There is an argument in my institute that ISI journal publication incentive (in ISI journals only) should be omitted. However, the opposition, including me, believe that such monetary incentive would motivate young researchers who are low paid researchers to publish their work in ISI journals. I checked some of the international universities and found similar discussions tend to agree that incentive is necessary for young publishers and researchers.
What is the status in your institutes and to what extent do you think payment for ISI journal publication encourages researchers to work more seriously?
NOTEs:
1- Please consider that the focus is on legitimate peer reviewed ISI journal publication ONLY, not any other publications such as conference or predatory open access journals.
2- FYI, in Computer Science, publishing in a legitimate peer reviewed ISI journal takes from 6 months to 2 years. If a novice researcher can publish in 6 months, he/she is considered very lucky and brilliant.

Do you mean personal money or research money?  At our institute, there is significant money for each publication, but it's all research money and tied to the group as a whole (although PhD students some rights to claim part of it for work-related expenses).

without research money work is hard. No money, no research :) I mean personal money that encourages researchers to rigorously publish.

It seems like you are mixing apples and oranges here. Incentivizing authors with potential payouts won't shorten the time it takes to publish (it might actually have the opposite effect, if publications get swamped with marginal work in hopes of cash payouts). Moreover, many research efforts take years of work before they have matured enough to submit for publication. If young researchers aren't motivated by the opportunity to (a) get all that hard work prominently recognized, and (b) put their "name on the map," so to speak, I wonder how much a few hundred bucks would add to the motivation.

What are "ISI journals", "legitimate ISI journal publications", and "legitimate peer reviewed ISI journals"?

@Jukka: It's these.

@J.R. you are right, but we do not discuss about those big research projects that takes several years to end. The focus is more on master or PhD level works which is publishable in 1-2 years. Moreover, students have limited time to publish; so there is no time to try and fail by reducing the content for increasing the number. A good research student has chance to publish only few journal papers in 3 years of research. That money can help him not to be discouraged by out of scope decisions, long review process, loss rejections, and harsh comments, I guess.

I would think getting a job after you finish your degree would be sufficient incentive to publish in reputable venues.

RE: "That money can help him not to be discouraged by out of scope decisions .. and harsh comments." I don't see how it helps if the paper is ultimately rejected, because there would be no money then. There's also a chance that some of those "harsh comments" are actually legitimate criticisms of the work, and what's really needed is a mindset change. Instead of being disincentivized by the "criticisms," an author could be thankful for the feedback, and improve their paper. Sure, some criticisms are petty and some rejections pedantic, but, again, I don't see how money would fix that.

(cont.) Money might even make the situation worse. If some reviewers feel the need critique harshly to protect the integrity of the journal or profession, those same referees might be even more harsh knowing that part of their dues will be lining an prospective author's pocket. You might incentivize the young author, but you might also ratchet up the criticism, too, thereby exacerbating the root problem.

Watch your wording! "Rant?" I did not ask anyone to solve any problem; I asked what is in their institute and in their own mind. Read the question carefully. In all these failures, author will likely give up for any reason (injustice or even insufficient and insignificant work). Point is not why referees reject; but is that incentive may fuel desperate young researcher's engine to restart and work to improve the quality and address comments to publish it.

@Espanta: For the record, my "rant" remark was not directed at your original question, but at your six subsequent comments. Nonetheless, I've deleted that comment, since it seemed to offend you.

@coderinnetwork thanks for your hard work to connect me to a country without having enough clue on what you are talking about! Probably Iran is the only country you know in the world. Better to study more and think twice before labeling a country as this or that. Please go and read about research funds in Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and many other countries who hire researchers for ISI papers to elevate in World rankings for attracting intl students.

Although it seems incomprehensible for veterans, it is also kind of true that master and phd students are being treated like 'slaves' considering of their low payment or none at all. Academia world tends to value volunteerism and expect it from other people too. From the academician's point of view, the low payment also relates with the quality of the students' work, most students' work quality could not rival the veterans. But the low income of master and phd students is not false afaik and quite saddening. Often, academicians' salaries are even less than other industries' too (depends).

Also, I think the region plays a major part too. Developing countries tend to pursue more ISI journals because that's what the higher-ups set as success/hiring measures. Also researchers from developed countries has far more research budget due to their culture appreciating research more, can afford giving more money to research than to alleviate the poor people and developing the country (for example), and the huge gap of currency. Thus, young researchers in developing countries are much more lower-paid than the developed-countries' counterparts. just my opinion

What is the status in your institutes and to what extent do you think payment for publication encourage researchers to work more seriously?

I've never worked in an environment with payment for publication, so my impressions are based on observing it from the outside.  I'm sure it encourages publishing more papers, but publishing more papers is different from working more seriously:

Publication payments encourage mediocre submissions, since success is defined by having a paper in a certain type of journal, regardless of how good or bad the paper is.  In many cases the optimal strategy is not to work hard on writing a few excellent papers, but rather to write as many mediocre papers as possible and then submit them repeatedly in a search for lenient editors and reviewers.
In addition to the quality issue, payments per paper create an incentive to break work up into least publishable units.
Publication payments complicate coauthorship decisions, based on how the money is awarded.  If every coauthor receives a fixed amount, then it creates a financial incentive to add honorary authors.  On the other hand, if a fixed amount of money is divided among all the authors, then it creates an incentive to remove less important but legitimate authors.  (And if it's just the "first author," then that magnifies the importance of who that author is.)  Either way, authorship is being decided based partly on financial pressure, rather than intellectual contributions.

Of course, all these issues are already serious problems in academia, with or without publication payments, but adding direct financial incentives just makes them worse.  In addition, using a fixed formula heightens the tension by removing ambiguity.  With hiring, one might worry that hiring committees will count papers instead of judging their quality, but at least some of them will prefer two great papers to five mediocre ones.  By contrast, the incentives with publication payments are unambiguous, which strengthens their effects.

I guess (not sure) world university ranking agencies need publication multiplicity when ranking universities and this is what growing universities need. Am I right or wrong?

Your points 1--3 are a perfect example of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

this is what growing universities need — [citation needed]

"I guess" indicates that there is no citations and is personal guess only.

There is one incentive: publish or perish.
Without publishing, young researchers will have a limited chance of a good career in academia. Without good publications, obtaining grant money will be difficult. Without grant money, you will be given more teaching duties and less chance to research. Without publications, you will not be granted tenure. You may end up with a teaching position, which is fine if that's what you want, but the chances of doing research will diminish.
Telling a long term story is perhaps a good way of motivating students.
We certainly don't pay them to publish, though they do get the opportunity to go to conferences to present their work, but only if they have work to present.

Your point about grant money is interesting. One could argue that, if the research was funded with grant money, you've already been paid to do the research, so why should you get paid again to publish the results? That would be like double-dipping.

@J.R. Possibly, except one never actually sees any of the grant money as cash-in-hand.

@J.R. Many young researchers, especially students are low paid researchers who have no interest to publish, but to finish their study and get the degree. Especially for those students who are under pressure of publishing paper in ISI journals (not all ISI journals, valid and high quality journals, no predatory journal) incentive can be a hoping point.

@Espanta: I guess you are not talking about PhD students. PhD students who have no interest in publishing  are in the wrong business.

@DaveClarke: As you mentioned, without publication there is limited chance of good academic career. But, still money is a vital need of human. If you have $10000 in account you surely survive for a while, but if you have 1 or 2 ISI paper, you may not survive unless someone employ you. Though publication facilitates and enhances chance of recruitment, still it is a marginal privilege. Also, what about those who are not interested to be in academia? Many need to learn research for industry. Do they need publication? do they perish without publication? can't we pay & ask them to publish?

@DaveClarke, MANY young researchers, not all of them ;). PhD is not all about publication, right? PhD is a comprehensive training program and is the highest educational program. Publication is only one step of it. I know many of my friends and colleagues pursuing/ending their PhD who hate publication and are/becoming a successful industrialist. Though I have published more than 7 papers in my 2 years of PhD, still what I learnt from PhD is more than what I learnt from publication.

@Espanta: A PhD is about research. I really question the value of doing research if it is not published. In our faculty, you cannot receive a PhD unless you have published.

@DaveClarke: I have no argument about publication itself. One may publish his work in a conference in 2 months (in normal review process) and get 1000 citations out of that, that is absolutely right. But what I am arguing is the journal publication which may take upto 2 years to get accepted. After 12 month and 3 stage of revisions one of my colleagues paper is rejected based on silly excuse. Look at publication from this perspective too.

@Espanta: The fact that the question was about journals only was not clear.

@DaveClarke: Thanks, I further modify the question. If further modification needed pls donot hesitate to do it. I appreciate that.


text:
What are examples of appropriate journals to publish new mathematical conjectures?
The paper I want to publish is just a conjecture.

There are several ways in which conjectures propagate, and each has its own method for publishing.

As future work/further direction on a set of theorems you proved. In this case, you submit the paper based on the set of theorems, and the conjecture is just a bonus. Your primary contribution is the original theorems.
As a reasonable technical lemma to use to prove a difficult theorem. One again, submit as you would a paper proving any other theorem. Your primary contributions is the interesting/non-obvious consequence.
As a consequence or expected result based on a novel model. In this case the empirical model is usualy motivated by some sort of science, attempt to publish in the relevant scientific or applied math journals. Your primary contribution is evidence in the reasonable model.
As a synthesis of connections between many different areas of math that your conjecture brings together. Publish this as a survey that unifies the areas of interest. Your primary contribution is the connections between fields.

If your paper does not have any results apart from the conjecture, then such are usually disseminated informally. Tell your friends, colleagues, publish a blog post, ask for a proof on MO. This is a great way to find someone to work with in helping you turn your conjecture into a theorem.

To add one more example: As a general statement which unifies many more technical proven cases. You usually can't get into a top journal with this, but I have proven papers that prove "X is true for series-parallel matroids" and "X is true for transversal matroids" and "X is true for matroids of rank at most 3"... where the central theme of the paper is "Conjecture: X is true for all matroids". My advice here would be find a journal which would be interested in the truth of the conjecture, and aim a bit lower than if you had proved the full conjecture.

If your conjecture is supported by partial result, then as pointed out by Artem Kaznatcheev, a journal suited to this results is the good choice.
If it is supported by numerical computation, you can aim at "Experimental Mathematics".
If it is not supported, or supported only by previous results, then it would probably be difficult to publish. Sometimes conference proceedings can be a suitable place, but informal dissemination would probably be the most common practice.

Try The Journal of Brief Ideas.


text:
How to organize the referee report of a paper?
One part of the work of any researcher is to referee the work of other scientists in his field. This is a time-consuming and volunteer work, that is made with the idea of service for the community.
My main question: What are the standards of organization for the referee report of an article?
For instance, is a "general comment" section (mostly, explaining why the paper should be accepted or rejected) and a "specific comments" (in the form of a list of precise comments e.g. "Page $2$ line $4$: typo. It should read X instead of Y") enough? Or do people organize the review under specific sections like "Typos and writing", "Missing definitions", "Scope of the paper",etc...
I wish my report to be as useful as it could for the author, so I am inquiring about the best practices for referee reports.
PS: It may be a field-dependant question. I am mostly interested about standards in mathematics, but answers for other fields would be interesting too.

There are no real standards (at least in math).  But I've never seen specific sections for "typos" versus "missing definitions."  Typically, there is a general review (summary and context of paper with your opinions on ot), then a single list of specific comments (e.g., p. 4, l.2 xxx is undefined...).

There are no standards but there is a reasonable logical progression that can be followed from the general and larger to the smaller points. I would therefore structure a letter as follows:

An introduction highlighting the merits of the topic and the study. Often this paragraph ends by stating that certain revisions may be necessary. It i snot the reviewers task to state whether he or she feels the manuscript should be rejected, under go revisions or be accepted. That should be stated to the editor only.
Following the introduction would be more general aspects such as structure, language etc.
Next larger scientific issues that concern more general aspects of the study, not tiny details. The points would concern entire chapters or sets of paragraphs and usually be the cause for significant reworking of the manuscript.
The final part, and usually the longest may be small issues or questions concerning aspects that need clarification or correction, usually pointing at the page and line where the problems occur.
The letter should be capped off by summarizing the review and making a statement as to whether you think significant or minor reworking is necessary. Note that I am not speaking about a verdict but an assessment of how much work you think is necessary to complete the short-comings you have identified.

"It is not the reviewers task to state whether he or she feels the manuscript should be rejected, under go revisions or be accepted. That should be stated to the editor only."  (As ever, I wonder about field-dependence, but...) In most reports I have written and received the referee does make a recommendation as to whether the manuscript should be accepted and whether there should be revisions.  In fact this is probably the most important part of the report, and the language used is read carefully by all parties.  What would be gained by not including this as part of the report?

So you write to the author about a decision an editor will make later? Well, you can and I have also seen it done but I feel that undermines the editor to some extent.

@PeterJansson I'm comfortable pushing the editor when I really dislike a paper...

@PeterJansson: As a referee, I am not writing about the editor's decision.  I am writing my own recommendation, which is what I was asked to provide.  If a referee makes a recommendation which is not the one the journal ultimately follows, then it seems to me that the author has the right to know.

I organize my reviews in the way that I would like to receive them, sorted from most important from least important.  My general structure is:

First, I summarize my understanding of the the key ideas and contributions of the paper.
Next, I give my judgement and main reasons for this judgement.
Third, I have a "Major Issues" list of other scientific problems that I think absolutely must be addressed before publications
Finally, I give a "Minor Points" list of nitpicking, language issues, typos, etc.

The first two sections show that I have understood what the authors are trying to say, and the big picture issues.  The third gives the contributing factors, but tries to make it clear that fixing these without fixing the big picture issues won't change my basic judgement (if that judgement was negative).  The final is things that will improve the paper but aren't really affecting my judgement.

When you say sorted from most-to-least important, do you mean overall (as in the sections you listed) or within each section also? For instance, when you go through your "minor points," do you list them in the order they appear as you read the paper, or in some order of importance regardless of where they appear in the paper?

@tpg2114 I'm not anal-retentive enough to organize within a section as well.  So within a section, I tend to write them down in no particular order, which ends up generally in order appearance in the paper.

Fair enough -- just wanted to clarify.


text:
Who launches a private non-profit university?
Universities are normally non-profit. For public universities, it is understandable that governments invest the taxpayers' money for education purpose.
However, investors of a private university should invest a huge amount of money (campus, buildings, facilities, staff, etc.) without ambitious hope for financial gain. At best (after a few years), a new university can earn enough money (tuition fee and donations) to operate without financial benefits for its original investors.
Who invests in private universities?
It cannot be financial investment, and not all cases are charity. Then, how does this system work? as it is rapidly growing in many countries.
Who makes the huge initial investment?

As I understand it, most private universities are in fact "charity" in the sense that a wealthy private person funds them not as an investment, but as a contribution to the community. (just a guess, hence no answer)

@xLeitix with the number of new private universities, it is hard to believe that charitable people are dramatically increasing. Considering the fact that the startup budget is significantly high (probably higher than other charity projects).

Is the number dramatically increasing? Certainly not where I live - I know of exactly one private university being funded in the last 10 years in my neck of the woods.

Who funds any not for profit business? (I'm not certain this can be answer here).
I distinguish here between a not-for-profit bussiness and a more general not for profit organisation (such as a charity). A not for profit business may still have many employees (even a CEO or V.C earning 6 figures.)

For public universities, it is understandable that governments invest the taxpayers' money for education purpose. — I can think of 50 governments that disagree with you.

How common are private non-profit universities?

@gerrit: In the US, extremely common. With a few exceptions, I bet that every US university you've ever heard of, that doesn't have a state in its name, is a private nonprofit. (And even a few that do have states in their names, such as New York University.)

You can maybe indicate which part of the world you are talking about. Because the growth rate of new universities in western Europe for example, private or public, is close to 0.

@Jigg I meant ratio of private-to-public. In almost any country which new public universities are established, there is a tendency for private universities too. In any country with a good market (students).

@JeffE I meant those governments who believe in free or supported higher education. Anyway, can you name some of these 50 governments for the reference? I knew that some politicians are against free education, but I did not know that this is the dominant policy of such a huge number of governments.

@user13854: It's a joke, sort of.  JeffE is thinking of the 50 US state governments.  They do provide various amounts of funding for their public universities, but in general it has been declining.  As far as I know, none of them provides for free higher education, though most have some tuition subsidy for state residents.

I'm only familiar with the US, but my understanding is that most (if not all) private non-profit universities were started with a single large gift from a wealthy individual, family, small group of individual, or a charitable foundation (usually started by one of the above).  In many cases the institution is named after that person.
I'm not sure in which countries the number of private non-profit universities is "rapidly growing".  I only know of a few recently started institutions in the US.  One with which I'm somewhat familiar is Olin College.  According to their web site, the college was started with a $460 million gift from the F. W. Olin Foundation, which in turn was founded in 1938 by Franklin W. Olin and funded by his personal wealth.
Such gifts are considered "charity" in that their main purpose is to benefit the community, and the donor doesn't receive a financial benefit.  Of course, any given donor could certainly have personal motivations other than a genuine desire to do good (attention, guilt, fun, taxes, etc.), but there is really no way to guess.

isn't the number of new private universities in the US comparable with new public universities? If there is a few new private universities, it is because the US has already many universities, and there is not a good market for more.

@user13854: I couldn't find any data or comprehensive lists of new private or public universities.  If you can, I'll be interested to see it.  My impression is that the founding of a new public university is also quite rare, but that depends on whether or not you count an existing institution opening a new campus.

@user13854: I think the founding of any university is a fairly rare event in the USA.  I agree with Nate that I'd be interested to know the source of your claim that the number of universities is rapidly growing.  As an example, the California public university system (UC and CSU), which is the largest in the US, has added a total of only four schools in the last 40 years.