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Academic progression in Germany, what happens after a postdoc? What is the next step?
As a follow-up to this question, I am wondering whether or not there are intermediate positions between a postdoc and a tenure in the German academic system.
I was told that there isn't really a step up from postdoc (like an assistant professor) until you get a professorship (for which you have to do habilitation among other things). If I understand things correctly you can be a postdoc for 12 years (?!) in Germany, and if you're successful (and lucky) you can get a professorship.
Is this accurate? Or are there more intermediate positions? Specifically I noticed there is a "junior professor" position, which would seem to fit the bill. What are the differing qualifications of a junior prof (W1) and a senior postdoc (either E13 or E14)?

@Roland "excellent and competitive PhD" are not quantifiable merits. Does that mean it's a bit of a case-to-case decision? As I mentioned in the other question (linked) my question stems from the fact that there is an offer on the table for a postdoc and I am told there really isn't anything in between a postdoc and professor, which I find kinda difficult to believe. I could understand for example if the difference is such that for a junior prof you need to bring in your own money in form of a start up grant or something of that sort.

After a postdoc in Germany, generally you hop from one short-term soft-money position to the next, until you realize you want to have a life and a family, and then you drop out of academia.

@David sure, are you hiring a staff bioinformatician by any chance? :)

Do you speak Spanish? If so, send us your CV!

@David Lamentablemente no.. :)  Jokes aside, this question was with an academic progression in focus, not to mean that company job isnt relevant

I was told that there isn't really a step up from postdoc (like an assistant professor) until you get a professorship (for which you have to do habilitation among other things).

In Germany, there is generally a greater variety in career paths than, say, in the US, where the vast majority of new full profs have been assistant profs at some point. It's indeed common to go from post-doc to professor (W2 or W3) directly. Other options include a junior professorship (W1), and a "research group leader" position, based on grants like the Emmy Noether and the Heisenberg stipend.
Habilitation is still mandatory in some fields; others will accept "Habilitation-equivalent achievements", like a strong track record in research and teaching.

If I understand things correctly you can be a postdoc for 12 years (?!) in Germany, and if you're successful (and lucky) you can get a professorship.

The 12 years probably refer to the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (WissZeitVG). According to WissZeitVG, you cannot be employed more than 12 years as a scientific assistant, which includes both the pre-doc and post-doc phase, without a specific reason. However, there are various exceptions, including field-specific ones (in Medicine it's 15 years), personal circumstances (you get an extension for each child), and the case that the research institution is willing to hire you permanently (which almost never happens).

What are the differing qualifications of a junior prof (W1) and a senior postdoc (either E13 or E14)?

A junior professorship is similar to an assistant professorship in the US. The main practical difference is that most junior professorships (90% or so) are not equipped with a tenure track, which makes them considerably less attractive. However, there is now a trend to change this situation towards more tenure-track junior professorships.
In comparison to a post-doc, a junior prof will usually have more teaching duties. The benefits of a junior professorship are the higher prestige, the usually higher salary and the longer time span, typically 6 years (with an intermediate evaluation after 3 years).
Junior profs may also be offered more freedom to build their own research profile. But this really depends on the interpretation of the associated department and research chair, and should be brought up as a topic in the hiring process. I've seen both "glorified post-doc" junior profs that were hired to bring special knowledge to some larger research group, and post-docs who were given the opportunity to build their own small research group.

Let me add a remark to this very good answer: In the last couple of years there has been a considerable increase of tenure-track professorships both at the W1 and at the W2/W3 level in Germany. The intent is to close the mentioned gap and to allow to hire younger candidates for a professorship without immediately committing to a life-time appointment.

To add another little thing to this excellent answer: in my field a successfully evaluated junior professorship counts as a more or less automatic "Habilitation-equivalent achievements".

"in the US, where an assistant professorship is a mandatory step on the way to becoming a full professor."  It's not actually mandatory, just very common.  In the US each institution makes its own rules.

In support of @AnonymousPhysicist, paths from PhD/post-doc to full professor might go through industry or a national lab before moving to a university. That is not uncommon at all (well, industry less so now that Bell Labs and other industrial research labs are not as common as in the past).

The "Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz" does not mean you can't be employed longer than 6/12 years, but it prohibits fixed-term contracts without specific reason ("sachgrundlose befristung") after that deadline. You can still work on research projects with fixed-term contracts (common) or on permanent positions (less common). It is an exception to the general law which prohibits fixed-term contracts more strictly.

It is even stronger than what @MaartenBuis says: The successful evaluation of a junior professorship is by law equivalent to a habilitation. Some committees would like to disagree, but courts would rule differently.


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Is professorship (assistant/associate and full) a title or a position?
Unless I am mistaken, somehow, if you have defended a PhD then you have a Doctorate degree, which means you are a "Doctor". That remains to be the case, even if you leave academia and go work in industry, or travel the world or whatever.
Does the same thing apply for professorship? In other words, is it so that once you receive professorship, you are indeed always a professor? Or is it connected to your employment as a professor?
And of course there is the middle ground, where you might have assistant or associate professorship and choose to leave academia? Do you then revert back to being a "John Smith, PhD"? Or remain to be "John Smith, Assoc Prof"?
As a follow up question: Does this vary from country to country as well, or is there a generally accepted rule of thumb?

It is a position and not a title. You can keep your titles while you are promoted and you can be called "Prof. Habil. Dr. Dr." XYZ ZYY but not "Prof. Assoc Prof. Dr." because you lose it as soon as you quit your Assoc professorship position.

Adding a country tag might help to answer this question.

In the US there are no legal rules. I think that few people would use Associate Professor as a title, but rather as a description of the post they currently hold. They would probably use Professor as a title, however. It is a descriptive title even before elevation to Full Professor. Students normally call them "prof" in many places. But the "title" is descriptive, not formal. It is a term of respect when used in this way.
However, if a person leaves academia for some other profession, it is unlikely that they would use professor and variations as a title. They might describe themselves as "former professor".
After retirement you might be "professor emeritus", again a description. On your tombstone you might be "Dr. Stone, Professor of English", the final description.
Other places are more formal about such things, but in the US, not so much.

I am actually "Professor Emeritus", which I interpret to mean that I didn't unforgivably disgrace myself before I retired.

In The Netherlands, the title professor (prof.) is protected and is only allowed to be used by a hoogleraar (US equivalent: full professor). Once retired, they are allowed to use the title emeritus professor (em. prof. or prof. em.). This is not allowed if they stop before their retirement.
So:

Does the same thing apply for professorship? In other words, is it so that once you receive professorship, you are indeed always a professor? Or is it connected to your employment as a professor?

Only when you are employed as a full professor or retired.
Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_ranks_in_the_Netherlands#Full_professors

In the United States, titles (such as Doctor and Professor) are not protected and anyone can use them. In my opinion, referring to yourself as "John Smith, Assoc Prof" if you are not actually employed (anymore) as an associate professor would be a bit odd -- but it's not illegal.
In most other (not US or Canada) countries, the title "Professor" is reserved for full professors. An assistant or associate professor does not get to call themselves professor. Somebody who retires from a Professor position is often referred to as Professor Emeritus, and so (in some sense) gets to keep their title.

Professor Irwin Corey was quite famous, actually.

In the UK there are many "visiting professors" at a university who have never actually held a professorial post in that or any other university. There is nothing in English law that would forbid them to use the title "Professor" and some of them do use it and are given the title in official documents, for example, when they give evidence to a parliamentary committee.
But I have never heard of anyone who might once have been an assistant professor, but no higher, use the title later on. Frankly, it is just too junior a title to boast about.
England being England, however, beware of laughing at academics who boast that they are or were "Students" of Christchurch, Oxford.  In that college, in that university 'student' has a technical meaning much more glamorous that one might think.

source: Stack Exchange

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Single application for several postdoctoral positions
I just finished crafting an application's cover letter for a particular lab (if it matters, area of research can be broadly classified as computational social sciences). The situation is that they have several postdoctoral positions and I feel that I am a pretty good fit for either one of them (how modest ;-).
However, I think that it makes absolutely no sense to send three separate cover letters for each of the positions, as 1) they are affiliated with the same lab (and, even, one of co-PIs is the same for all of them); 2) the positions share a lot of subject domain areas (I, actually, expressed this point directly in my cover letter - I hope it will not be considered offensive or otherwise inappropriate).
Therefore, my two related questions are:

Would it be appropriate to submit a single application with a single cover letter to those positions, based on my points above, even though they are advertised separately?
Is it acceptable that my cover letter (that single one) is almost two pages long (including all appropriate vertical spacing and 12pt font size - trying to be gentle with the readers' vision)?

Can you not email someone and ask whether they'd prefer one application or three?

I don't think you can assume that one application is okay.  I can certainly imagine situations where the lab would want a separate application for each position.  Maybe they are going to be reviewed by different people or committees.  Maybe they have complicated HR procedures that you don't know about.  Maybe when reviewing applications for position X, they want to see an application that specifically addresses your qualifications for that particular position, and doesn't mention other things that are only relevant to position Y.
So the safest course of action would simply be to ask.

Dear Professor MMM,
My name is NNN, and I am a graduate student at UUU, working with professor SSS.  I see that your lab has some postdoc positions open; I believe that I could be a good fit for any of the positions XXX, YYY, ZZZ.  (Briefly explain why.)  Would you prefer that I send a separate application for each position, or a single application addressing my qualifications for all three?

This could also get you other useful information, such as "I think you would be a better candidate for XXX; for the YYY postdoc we are specifically looking for someone with expertise in BBB."

Thank you for your answer - definitely useful (+1). While, as I mentioned, all three positions share significant areas of subject domain as well as a co-PI, I agree with you (and others - thank you, @avid) that asking is most likely the safest choice. So, I will send an e-mail, asking for clarification on that.

At my university, you would have to apply separately to each position as listed in our job application system. That's just how the site works. I think it would be fine to use the same cover letter text and CV for all the positions as long as you spell out in the letter that you have applied for all of them and why you think you are qualified for each of them, which it sounds like you have done. I think the extra length is probably also fine given the circumstances, but some people are more sensitive to convention on this. There's a tradeoff between offending people's eyes with smaller fonts and narrower margins and offending their sensibilities that cover letters must be one page and one page only. If you can edit it down a bit, you might be better off, but I wouldn't sweat it too much.

The cover letter hopefully isn't going to an HR pod-person. If so, the extra length will make no difference under the circumstances!

Nice answer (+1) - appreciate your advice. One aspect about application process (sorry, I forgot to mention it in my question) that might have changed your advice on that is the following. Separate applications indeed make sense, when a website processes them automatically. However, in this particular case, applications materials are requested to be sent via e-mail to the same address. Hence, my point on submitting separate applications making no sense IMHO.

@AleksandrBlekh, agreed, but I wanted to make a more generic answer here. If you are just emailing in your application, make it abundantly clear in your cover letter that you are applying for all the openings. Either way, I think you're covered.

@aeismail, you are probably right, but I have seen professors and other hiring managers display pod-person behavior before.

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Citation style for research statement
As I understand, I'm rather free to choose a publication (and, thus, citation) style for a research statement. While being in graduate school (master's and doctoral programs), I've used APA, as it was school-wide standard and a requirement for Ph.D. dissertation. As a result, I'm quite familiar with that publication style. However, most of research statements that I've seen, use citation style that is different from one of APA style's (don't remember the name of that citation style, if it exists).
While the main part of using square brackets, etc. is easy and natural, I'm a little concerned about formatting differences in reference list, so I'd prefer to use familiar to me APA style's conventions.
Question: will using APA style's citation scheme have any negative effect on my research statement's readability, overall acceptance and, ultimately, on search committee's decision making?

Will the one you plan to use be in common use in research papers in your field?

@TobiasKildetoft: Excellent point. Yes, it is quite common and even, perhaps, dominant. However, I have seen a significant number of research papers in my field, using alternative publication styles.

As long as the research statement ends up looking like research papers in the field, then whatever style you choose is probably fine (and then picking one you are comfortable with is a bonus).

@TobiasKildetoft: Great advice - I subconsciously felt that this is the case :-). Please feel free to convert your comment(s) to an answer and will be happy to upvote and/or, depending on other answers, accept it. I appreciate your blazingly fast feedback as well.

I prefer to leave the answer to someone who is hopefully more familiar with your field (or just with admissions). I am still just a postdoc myself, so I can only speak from what I have perceived to be the case, rather than from experience with admitting people.

@TobiasKildetoft: No problem - thank you, again.

This is the last thing I would worry about.

@henning: Good point :-).

No sane search committee member is likely to care about your citation style as long as it looks "professional." Nobody is grading you here, so really, you're just looking to avoid raising red flags.
So, what is "professional"? By that, I mean that it looks pretty much like something that they would likely see in a publication.  Most fields have a range of citation styles found in different publications, and thus pretty much anything that fits within such a range is likely to not be remarkable, and your goal for your citations is simply that.
One last note, though: it seems that your choice of citation style is being dictated significantly by inertia of familiarity with APA.  Since you will likely be required by future publications to use a range of citation styles, you may wish to switch from manual citation to using citation management software, which will help simplify compliance with a wide range of styles.

Good advice (+1) - much appreciated. I kind of expected that type of feedback, but just wanted to make sure that there are no potential issues that I'm not aware of.

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Listing professors' titles/ranks in CV
In my CV's Education section, in particular, in its Ph.D. part, I listed, along with the full title of my dissertation and the date I defended it, titles and names of my dissertation committee members. Two of them are full professors and one is associate professor. I have decided to list them as such, but I am having some doubts about whether in this context "Professor AAA" should imply a full rank or just a title (so, no "Associate Professor BBB"). Your advice will be appreciated.

Very closely related question: In the United States, is associate professor a subset of professor, or a distinct category?.

@scaaahu: Thank you for the link (+1) - both questions are indeed very closely related, though mine, as I mentioned, is specific to the CV context.

Please be aware that this is very cultural (e.g. Germany vs USA), field (e.g. math vs medicine) and context (e.g. academic vs industry) dependent.

@DannyRuijters: I forgot to note in my question that its context includes US academic environment and information systems discipline. I realize that answers to most questions on this site are geo-, field- and other context-dependent. Nevertheless, I appreciate your comment.

In general, a CV is not a place for innovation: your choices for what to put on it should be most heavily motivated by whatever is expected and most common in your field and especially among your peers.  If you are thinking of doing anything "nonstandard" on a CV you should get a few opinions on it, and in particular show it to your advisor.
Is it common in your field to list your entire thesis committee?  I have looked at thousands (no, really) of CV's in my field (mathematics) and I have never seen this.  In fact it is about 50-50 whether people even list their thesis advisor on their CV (I had to check just now to see that I do not).  I should say that the name of your thesis advisor is considered to be important information that would be provided elsewhere in a job application; it is part of the standard "AMS coversheet" that most job applicants in mathematics fill out.  Moreover, there is a wonderful website called the Mathematics Genealogy Project where you can sate yourself to your heart's content with information about professional lineages.  If you (a reader) are a recent math PhD, I would highly recommend that you add yourself to this page: you can be added by other people and if you wait long enough you will probably be added by someone else, but still it seems better not to chance it.
In the webpages I've seen where people include the name of their thesis advisor, they typically include just the name.  Unless your advisor is at a different institution from you (unusual but not unheard of; it is not so rare to see this at Harvard/MIT for instance), you do not need to list institutional affiliation.  Moreover, anyone who wants to look up information about your advisor can certainly do so.  I don't see why you need to include their academic rank on your CV; and by the way, if you got your PhD ten years ago, do you include their rank at the time or their current rank?
I don't really care about the thesis committee of even a recent PhD.  In my field, being on the thesis committee doesn't necessarily mean very much at all, and the people who are on the committee in an important or meaningful way are likely to be writing recommendation letters anyway.  I certainly don't care whether someone's thesis committee member is an associate professor or a full professor.  To be honest, a listing of the academic ranks of all the thesis committee members on a CV would make a somewhat negative impression on me: such a person would seem pretentious and without an understanding of what is actually important.

Thank you for your answer - you list some good points (+1). For the record, I don't list my committee members' affiliation, as I assume that a reader, seeing their titles and names under the names of my university and graduate school will imply the affiliation. As for your last comment of potential impression of an author as pretentious, it is quite contradictory to your own comment you've made to the other answer (about construed as "rude"). Anyway, my rationale for including that information is not so about not being rude, but certainly about being respectful.

"As for your last comment of potential impression of an author as pretentious, it is quite contradictory to your own comment you've made to the other answer (about construed as "rude")." What is the contradiction?  It can be construed as rude to list some people's proper titles and withhold others.  It is not the same thing to list names only and not titles.  If someone asks me who my thesis advisor was, I say "Barry Mazur", not "Professor Barry Mazur".

The (indirect, hence my "quite") contradiction is that you say in the comment below that withholding professor's title (for a particular professor) could be construed as rude. Thus, applying the same logic, withholding titles from all professors (in my CV case) could also be construed as rude or, at least, disrespectful (however, in my case, you advise to exclude titles, thus, contradiction). Hence my comment.

Just saw your update to your comment. I agree with you to some degree. IMHO, a decision whether to use a title or not totally depends on the context. I would use "title + name" scheme in two situations: 1) informal, but where I want/need to emphasize my respect to a person's professional abilities and/or seniority (age- or rank-wise); 2) formal, which includes cases of listing people in CVs. That's my rationale.

@Alexsandr: As a mathematician, I take claims of contradiction very seriously.  I don't know what an "indirect contradiction" means.  On the one hand, I have characterized the behavior of, on the same page, using proper titles for some people and omitting proper titles for others as rude.  On the other hand I am saying that in some contexts titles are not needed or desired, for anyone.  If you really think this is a logical contradiction, then: best of luck to you; I will have to bow out of the conversation.

As to whether you should list people's titles on your CV: look at many other CVs in your field, and do what people do.  If you are unsure, ask your advisor.  In the context of this conversation I looked up 10 CVs of people I know who list their advisor.  None of them listed the title.  So I feel confident that what I'm saying is standard in my field.  You need to find out whether it's standard in yours.  As I said in my answer, it's not a matter of reasoning it out; CVs are very standardized.  If you stray too far from what everyone else does, it looks weird, and some people won't like it.

Your points are very well taken - thank you, again - I will consider revising my CV, once I make sure that my field is not much different than yours in that regard. As for "indirect" logical contradiction, think of it as one within the fuzzy logic context :-).

OK, sounds good.

Just as a note, I think it is still a good idea for new PhDs to list their advisor's name on the CV, as I don't think this information is reliably available elsewhere in general. MGP is good, but you can't add yourself until after you've graduated, and even then there can be a nontrivial delay.

@Nate: Well, if you're applying for jobs, the information will almost certainly be provided on both the cover sheet and (especially!) the advisor's recommendation letter.  Still, I can think of no good argument against the practice, so I guess people should do it.

I've applied to many jobs that didn't request an AMS-type cover sheet, and for which recommendation letters were sent separately (or only requested from semifinalists). If I didn't put my advisor's name on my CV, they wouldn't know who he was, at least not initially.


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What are academic resources that provide open source lecture notes?
I have just answered a similar question on ResearchGate website and thought that it could also be beneficial for the Academia.SE community to share my answer here as well (as a wiki). Obviously, corrections and contributions are very welcome. Please see my answer (initial wiki post) below.

It looks like I don't have enough privileges to convert this Q&A into wiki - moderators, please help in that regard. Thanks.

To those who voted to close this question as off-topic: please clarify how this Q&A (on open course notes and textbooks) is not about academia.

Re: the cited reason for closing. As I said from the beginning, this Q&A is intended to be a wiki collection of useful academic resources on the topic. Therefore, it IMHO doesn't belong to the category of "shopping" questions and, thus, should be reopened and converted to wiki post, as requested.

Have you tried to ask on the meta?

@Ooker: I don't feel a need for this. I have provided my arguments and, if people disagree with them or ignore them, then so be it. I value my time more than an opportunity to defend a single question from closing.

If you want a Q&A here, that's fine. But, where is the question in your question?

@scaaahu: The question is in the title. It about resources, but it's a valid question anyway (for wiki, that is).

There exist a significant number of repositories that, in one way or another, contain open source lecture notes and similar or related information materials.
First and foremost, large open courseware repositories contain information on various courses, for many, including course notes. For example:

MIT OpenCourseWare;
Open Course Library by Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges;
repository and search engine by The Open Education Consortium.

The second significant source is represented by a multitude of repositories of open source textbooks on various subjects. Such repositories include:

OpenStax College repository;
Open Textbook Library by Open Textbook Network;
MERLOT repository by California State University System and its partners;
Open Textbooks repository by Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources;
Open Access Textbooks project by Florida Distance Learning Consortium;
College Open Textbooks search engine by The College Open Textbooks Collaborative;
The Global Text Project;
Wikibooks and Wikiversity projects.

Finally, additional stream of information can be traced to individual university departments, groups, and labs. Usually, such resources are quite narrow in their coverage and might apply to specific areas of a discipline or a course. For example, see the ETH's open source course notes on advanced methods and strategies in organic chemistry. Also, many (IMHO, most) individual professors share their own course notes on their personal university-affiliated websites.


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Value of placement services for non-members
I am curious about what people think about value of limited period (typically, a year) placement services, provided by academic professional organizations, such as Academy of Management. For example, see this page. In particular, I am interested about the subject in the context of first-time academic job seekers, like me, targeting junior faculty or, more likely, postdoctoral opportunities. The reason I am asking this question is to determine the value and feasibility of those time-limited placement services, considering the availability of nice and free resources, such as HigherEdJobs.

It looks like the service provided by this organization is to post your anonymized resume on their web site for a fee, wait for employers to read the resume and contact the organization expressing interest, and then put them in touch with you.  I have some trouble believing that search committees are spending time trawling sites like this to try to recruit viable candidates.

@NateEldredge: Thank you for the comment. I was also not sure about feasibility of using such services, considering the existence of unrestricted outlets, like HigherEdJobs - hence my question

For industry jobs recruiters are very important for a first time employee seeking contract work.  However for academic jobs I doubt they're of any use.  Like you said there are academic job sites like Higher Ed.  Each discipline also usually has a career website.
If you're looking for postdoc positions your advisor is the best resource because many are given out by word of mouth alone.  Finally each institution is usually required to place job announcements and applications on their HR's web page.  So spend some time going to each University's website.

Thank you, Mark and @shane (+1 to both), for your insights. I agree with you. I was skeptical about such service(s), but just wanted community's confirmation of my thoughts.


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Publishing on Scholarpedia: Experiences & feasibility (early career)
Some months ago, I ran across a peer-reviewed open access encyclopedia Scholarpedia and became rather excited about the idea and the implementation. So far I haven't had a chance to publish any materials there or, even, initiate that process (obviously, I'm talking about rather small and focused articles due to my limited research experience). However, I am curious about people's perceptions about the site (from both perspectives of an independent publishing outlet and an addition to traditional journal publishing) as well as your experiences, if any, with the publication process there and interactions with the site's editorial team. Also, what do you think about the feasibility and career value of publishing on Scholarpedia for a beginner researcher and scholar?

I've never seen a citation to any article in Scholarpedia, so at least in my field,  publishing there has negligible professional value.  (The same cannot be said of Wikipedia, StackExchange, or personal blogs.)

@JeffE: Perhaps, your field (CS, I assume) is different. However, if you would look objectively at the content at Scholarpedia, you might agree with me that most of it is quite rigorous and is peer-reviewed by experts in their respective fields. So, I would definitely place a post (article) there higher in terms of academic value than Wikipedia or personal blogs (not necessarily StackExchange, though). Current limitation of Scholarpedia is its focus at the present time on select fields of study. However, I'm sure that it is just a matter of time until its coverage will be expanded.

Don't get TOO excited. There is no real alternative to standard journal / conferences (CS) peer review publications for academic career purposes. Even the established Arxiv repository is complementary (early dissemination, preprints) to peer review publications and not for completely replacing them (unless you are Mr famous and everything you put out will be cited anyway). So, stick to traditional peer-review publications.

@Alexandros: Thank you for your comment. I certainly will be considering Scholarpedia as a complementary publication channel.

Also, what do you think about the feasibility and career value of publishing on Scholarpedia for a beginner researcher and scholar?

It sounds feasible enough, but the career value depends on your job and goals.  If you are aiming for a job in a research university, then research publications are far more important than survey/review/expository articles, and Scholarpedia would fall into the latter category.  Occasional high-value survey articles could help your career, and a Scholarpedia article might fall into that category if it got a lot of citations (but it wouldn't have the benefit of appearing in a prestigious venue, so you'd need some argument like citations to get hiring or tenure committees to take it seriously).  Writing lots of Scholarpedia articles would actually look bad, by giving the impression that you are taking time away from research to do that.
On the other hand, if the job you have/want is more concerned with active scholarly engagement than original research, then Scholarpedia might be just fine.
If you devote a lot of time to Scholarpedia, then you'll probably have to deal with questions like "What is Scholarpedia, and is it any good?" in your job applications or tenure case.  It's worth trying out this discussion with colleagues or mentors, as a test case for gauging how hard it might be to convince other people later.

I appreciate your insights (+1). I certainly do not intend to "devote a lot of time to Scholarpedia" and write "lots of Scholarpedia articles". However, consider it as a potential platform for thoughts consolidation and writing practice as well as a good secondary publication channel, similar to arXiv.org.


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Selecting license for personal professional site's content
It seems that creating personal professional websites by aspiring and experienced researchers is a mainstream trend today (that includes full-featured sites as well as blogs). Based on multiple recommendations from people's answers and comments on this site as well as my own opinion on the subject, I have decided to jump the bandwagon and create my own full-featured personal professional site. I still plan to maintain my profiles/pages on various professional/social sites, such as LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, about.me and some others. However, I envision the planned site as a centerpiece of my personal professional branding strategy due to higher independence (no platform lock-in), much more flexibility in creating, managing and styling content, thus, providing much better opportunities to express thoughts, which is essential to any scholar.
Working on my website, I included slightly customized versions of free templates of Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. The latter document contains references to software licensing, but does not address the licensing of the website's contents and users' contributions, which I think is important.
In this context, I am curious about pros and cons of selecting particular content license, including the Creative Commons license. When answering this question, please keep in mind that, while significant part of the website's context will be related to academia and research, some planned materials will (might) be of dual nature, that is, focused on either academia or consulting, or both.

Clarification: I realize that using the phrase "personal professional" seems like an oxymoron. However, I intentionally use such term to distinguish the corresponding specific type of content and outlets from the extremes of purely personal and corporate (organizational) professional.

For licensing personal content, you almost certainly want to either use one of the Creative Commons licenses or else declare your content All Rights Reserved.  There is actually not one, but seven Creative Commons licenses, which span a wide range of preferred usages (here is a handy tool for choosing a license to use), and the licenses are  well-maintained and highly compatible with themselves and others, even internationally and in complex remixes.
In general, then, if you want your content to be shareable, you should choose a Creative Commons license, and if you want it to not be shareable, your should declare it All Rights Reserved.  Alternate licenses for shareable contents are generally not as compatible, well-maintained, or well-understood by others as the Creative Commons family, and thus will generally be no better (and often worse) for sharing.  Alternate licenses for non-sharable content are generally intended to support particular commercialization relationships, and would be negotiated when such a relationship is being established.
Of this set of options, for a personal website, I would generally recommend CC-BY.  This is the most lightweight and flexible sharing arrangement, and thus generally allows the most potential for increased personal visibility (attribution is always required).  If you're planning to put up major works that you think others will want to publish commercially, then you might want to consider using All Rights Reserved for those works, but probably not for small works or for the web pages that contain them: at an early stage of your career, attention and credibility will be much more valuable than the largely non-existent possibility of some sort of royalties.

+1. Thank you for excellent advice. Especially valuable is the point of using CC license globally for the website in conjunction with having the flexibility to locally license some specific materials with commercial focus otherwise.

In the United States and other Berne Convention countries, all written work is automatically copyrighted by the author at the instant of creation.  There is no need to explicitly declare "All Rights Reserved"; all rights are reserved by default.

@JeffE You are absolutely correct.  However, for somebody who's wondering if they can share or reuse your work, it's a lot nicer to find an explicit copyright statement (even "All Rights Reserved") rather than wondering whether there's a carelessly placed license statement that you just aren't finding.  For example, I've encountered an entire RFC series released under generous CC licenses, but poorly labelled such that they appear All Rights Reserved unless you happen to use a particular distribution interface and scroll all the way down to the footer at the bottom of the meta-data page.


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Caption for a figure reproduced from a CC-licensed document
In a research paper for a journal, which uses Science magazine publication style, I'm reproducing a diagram from a document, which has a Creative Commons (CC)-based open document license. The diagram (figure) itself doesn't contain any license references, as is typical for most CC-licensed figures, however the whole original document contains the following statement:

This work is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons
  Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License,
  creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

Question: What should be the content and style of the borrowed figure's caption, considering the journal style and the document license? In other words, should it just be (X is reference number)

Figure 1. The title of the figure. Reproduced from Reference X.

or

Figure 1. The title of the figure. Reproduced from Reference X (CC BY-NC 3.0).

or something else?

I wonder whether the non-commercial clause prohibits reproduction in a (probably) commercial journal?

@Silvado: This is a very good question, and is not agreed upon.  There has been much discussion about that clause here: https://blog.creativecommons.org/2009/09/14/defining-noncommercial-report-published/ and elsewhere.  The general consensus is that a loose interpretation (erring on the side of permissiveness rather than defaulting to all rights reserved) is probably best, unless explicitly stated otherwise by the works' author.  The journals themselves will look into this sort of thing before publishing anyways and will likely request formal permission.

@MekkiMacAulay, that is a dangerous path. Look at it this way, I offer X and allow A, B, and forbid C; you go and use X, making use of A and B, and go ahead and also do C "understanding loosely". I might agree and say "what the heck", or I could get mad and sue you. Both strictly within my rights. And if I stated unambiguosly "don't do C", there is nothing to "loosely" understand "you can do C". You can not interpret a legal document "loosely". If in doubt, ask.

Very good points - thank you for the comments. So, it seems that it is potentially "dangerous" to include the diagram in question as is. It is quite sad, as my boss (professor) likes it very much. Perhaps, I can request an official permission from the copyright holder. IMHO that would override the default license and I would be able to include the diagram, adding "Reproduced with permission" claim. The only problem is that we are short on time.

@Vonbrand: You misunderstood.  "Forbid C" does not mean it can still be loosely understood.  That's an explicit statement.  The only place it is "loosely understood" (recommended by the people who created the license) is there if is no explicit or specific forbidding of certain interpretations, but rather only the default of "all rights reserved" that generally applies to copyrighted material automatically.

@AleksandrBlekh: Yes, official permission would be a separate license, unrelated to the default license.  The journal you submit your article to will likely take care of that if/when it is accepted for publication.

@MekkiMacAulay, each time I did publish something in a journal I had to fill out and sign a form telling them I had permission to use figures and such (even when there were no figures at all). They don't handle this for you.

@MekkiMacAulay, if I tell you "you are not allowed to do C", I'd certainly be furious if you do C, and come with a excuse like "loosely interpreted, 'no' means do whatever you want".

@vonbrand: Perhaps it is journal-specific then. Good to know.  I agree that asking is certainly the right thing to do in this case and if the journal doesn't do it, the author should.

Including the license terms in the figure caption isn't necessary.  "Attribution" in CC licensing is usually interpreted as "provides name of author and/or source of original", which you do fine with just "Reference X".
EDIT from comments: As pointed out by @ff524, the CC guidelines suggest including license terms. It makes sense to include title, author name, source, license in the reference section.  Not necessary for the image caption though.

According to this CC page, the ideal attribution includes title, source, author, and license.

Right.  Which would be done in the reference section,  not the caption.

I have never seen any reference style that includes license information, but if that's your answer, you should include it in your post. Have you ever seen such a reference style? Do you have an example?

Thank you for your answer - your point makes sense to me (+1). BTW, I was curious enough to visit your profile and LinkedIn page. I was glad to discover that we have a lot of interests in common :-).

@ff524, at least in standard BibTeX there is a "note" field in all (most?) entry types, you can add that there. In the worst case, there is a misc entry for, well, not easy to classify/special entries ;-)

Thank you for the update. However, the problem with @ff524's suggestion and your subsequent advice is that sometimes (or, perhaps, often) the content of an appropriate citation recommended by license and publication style differs and, sometimes, significantly (such as in my case). So, which side an author should align with? Or, in other words, which entity's guidelines override the other's?


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Is there an overview of alternative approaches to voluntary and ideal review process?
I was chatting with some colleagues earlier and we talked about about a case where a reviewer was caught consistently asking the authors of the papers reviewed for up to 30 or so of his/her own papers cited. The conversation steered towards how this kind of abuse would not be caught earlier and the idea of professional refereeing was debated around the coffee table.
One of the seniors said that paying reviewers was tested several times and in general was more problematic than not, which got me a bit curious if there is an overview of what was tried and how it was evaluated. I would be very interested in any publication that looks at the concept in a more rigorous and less anecdotal manner.

For people reading the question without knowing the details: this is the reported case

You can refer to the following article: "Why do peer reviewers decline to review? A survey" to begin with.
The following extract from the results abstract is quite interesting:

Most respondents agreed that financial incentives would not be effective when time constraints are prohibitive (mean 3.59 (SD 1.01)). However, reviewers agreed that non-financial incentives might encourage reviewers to accept requests to review: free subscription to journal content (mean 3.72 (SD 1.04)), annual acknowledgement on the journal’s website (mean 3.64 (SD 0.90)), more feedback about the outcome of the submission (mean 3.62 (SD 0.88)) and quality of the review (mean 3.60 (SD 0.89), and appointment of reviewers to the journal’s editorial board (mean 3.57 (SD 0.99)).

So basically, this study confirms what your colleague mentioned about financial incentives not being the best approach to incentivise reviewers (maybe though for different reasons that you might have expected).
However, keep in mind that people in academia are not motivated only by money (as in that case they wouldn't be in academia in the first place). There are other means to motivate people that are keen to review papers, such as acknowledgements or free subscription to the journal they review, as the article states.

Another good incentive is to give the opportunity to write editorials/commentaries.

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


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Is it rude to sign off mails with a shorthand
This may seem a bit mundane or silly to many but I figured it might be useful for others besides me, hence the question.
My boss (postdoc mentor) is a very kind person, who pretty much exclusively writes in grammatically correct, well articulated sentences and ALWAYS have a nice but relatively formal greeting at the end of the mail. No matter how many times we mail each other in a given day. Even though we are not formal at all when we talk to each other.
As per usual in Scandinavia, we have a very flat hierarchy here, so everyone (from project students to professors and indeed the dean) is on a first name basis with each other, and there are little formalities that may be commonplace elsewhere.
We have been working very closely on this project, with almost daily meetings and near 10-15 mails exchanged throughout the day. My previous experience has always been so that once the formalities have been observed, the communication defaults to shorter, more direct mails.
Given the high-paced exchange between us, I was wondering if it would be rude to write shorter mails that are straight to the point. Specifically I often find myself signing off a mail with a shorthand greeting, e.g. "mvh" instead of "(med) vänliga hälsningar" (which is significantly more formal) or just by writing my name. [The Swedish expressions roughly correspond to "BR" - "Best Regards", respectively].
I thought of asking him if he prefers a more formal tone in our written communication but I don't wanna come across as a pedantic person. Suggestions?

Maybe he is using a preset automatic email signature?

@101010111100 Or he's been doing it so frequently, and for so long, that it's become a habit, rather than a conscious act. Either way, if the actual content of the email becomes more direct through repeated exchanges, I don't see any reason why the pleasantries shouldn't either. I'm no expert of etiquette in Scandinavian countries, however.

I have commonly seen MVH in formal emails. And I rarely bother to sign my emails.

Out of curiosity: during six years that I lived in Sweden, I never saw any e-mail or letter with a formal opening or closing.  They appear to start everything with Hej, or even with nothing at all.  What would be a relatively formal greeting in Swedish?

@gerrit Kære (dear)... But mostly older (elderly) people use this. Most people use "Hej"... or as you say, nothing. The North American way of being extremely polite, would annoy most of us.

Do whatever you need to do to get the messages off your desk and where they need to go without wasting too much time on them.

(Am also currently working in Scandinavia, have previously been in universities in the UK, US, and Canada.)  Abbreviations are almost certainly fine; but look at what others in your department do.
In most departments, you should be able to see a wide range of colleagues’ emails (thanks to admin lists/announcements, etc).  Look at what they do, and the range of ways they write.  Additionally, note that emails between close colleagues (e.g. within a research group) may tend to be slightly less formal than emails to wider audiences.
You will probably see a fair range of styles.  So long as you are within that range, you are probably fine; you don’t have to exactly match every individual correspondent.  In case everyone at your department writes particularly formally, then it may be worth doing so yourself — but even then, I would be pretty surprised to hear of anyone in Sweden taking offence at use of “Mvh” as a signoff. I’ve received it in emails from students, professors, and administrators, so at least in my department, it’s considered fine for a wide range of professional relationships (though definitely towards the more informal end of the spectrum).

I have also worked in Scandinavia and also in other places in Europe. After a couple emails in the day, I switch to not using a greeting at the end of the email. In the first e-mail, I would probably use a "Best,".
I never liked mvh, it felt like being bored to write all the sentence, and to write all the sentence, it would seem too formal.
In general, given the flat hierarchy, I wouldn't worry too much about how I close the emails. I don't think they mind as long as you are polite.
PS. On a sidenote, I remember how awkward it felt when I learnt that the common salutation is "Hej", only to realise later on that it refers to "Hello" rather than "Hey".

Have this conversation with your adviser! You seem to be getting along quite well. This would make for a nice question on etiquette in your community over a cup of coffee!

As long as you address the receiver properly, I don't suppose this would be much of a problem. I see both assistant and senior professors use these sort of short hand mail signing all the time. It is just a matter of preference.


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For a list of references is it better to give full links to a research group or just the address to the faculty homepage?
I am in the process of writing a contact list of my references. I noticed a inconsistency in how the different individuals include links as a reference (e.g. in mail signatures or business cards). Essentially there are two options when providing a link:

to the specific pages of the research group or individual
to the department/faculty pages to which the individual or research group belongs.

Option 1 feels more appropriate as it provides a direct access to the person who's supposed to be contacted. However, this option typically has the negative drawback of having a long, often ugly links containing many encoding characters. These links typically break the visual appearance of the document.
Option 2 alleviates that problem by problem by providing a short and clean address, however implies that the reader has to dig into the faculty/department pages to find the person/group that is being referred to.
I have considered link shorteners but that does not feel legitimate in such a document. If I was a recruiter I would be vary of a short random link of a document.
Any suggestions?

I'm having a hard time seeing how there is one correct answer to this question - it would appear to be entirely personal preference. If the list is for use by somebody else, I would go with whatever the person provided in their signature/business card - they have weighed in with their preference.

@JonCuster I understand your point, fair enough. But the same rationale ("whether or not there is one correct answer") could easily be applied to any CV related question here.


text:
Value of "nonresearch articles" section in PNAS
I noticed that PNAS website contains the section for the so-called "nonresearch articles" (original orthography is retained), otherwise referred to as "collected articles": http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/collectedpapers.xhtml. Upon a brief look at the section and its categories, it seems that articles published there range from "core concepts" articles (somewhat similar to a brief Wikipedia article) to a topic or field review articles and beyond (papers, based on symposiums and other events).
My question is twofold:

what is the level of acceptance, if known, for articles, targeting the above-mentioned section;
what is the scientific, academic and career value of publishing in that PNAS' section (in other words, is it worth considering targeting this outlet [particularly, for a beginning researcher])?

Please note that this question is different from my other question on publishing in PNAS in that the former is about publishing in a specific section of the publishing outlet, whereas the latter is concerned with publishing there in general.

I had a look at the latest collection paper (Megafauna and ecosystem function from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene). This turned out to be a PNAS Direct Submission, which appears to be a pretty standard peer-review process and definitely the standard way to submit papers to PNAS ("Direct Submissions now account for more than 95% of papers submitted and 78% of papers published in PNAS"). I couldn't find out any sort of invitation for collected papers, so my guess is that these are papers that have already been published through standard peer-review, which have been grouped after the fact by PNAS editors. So this isn't a "PNAS section", but just a thematic collection of papers that have been normally published in PNAS (which, in 2014, had an acceptance rate of 17%).

I appreciate your nice answer (+1). It has valuable information and insights. However, I suspect that your conclusions might be applicable only to certain, but not all domains, represented in PNAS. Hopefully, my question will pick up some additional interest (I have posted a small bounty for it, but, ironically, it has expired just yesterday) and people from other domains could clarify the situation in this regard. Again, thank you for your feedback.


text:
Multiple outlets publication
Perhaps, it's a naive question, but I'd like to have some clarification of my own thoughts on the subject. I'm curious about what is the rationale or need of 1) transferring copyright from authors of an academic artifact (paper, chapter, book, etc.) to a publication outlet and, consequently, 2) an inability for the authors to publish their work via other publication outlets.
I realize that the above is somewhat questionable from the ethical perspective of accumulating publication credit for essentially the same work. However, I think that this problem has an easy solution (which I've seen used by some people) - specifying in CVs and other materials that paper B, published in journal BB is the same (or lightly changed) as paper A, published in journal AA.
Assuming that the ultimate goal of scientific research is to enrich the human knowledge on a global scale is much more important than the above-mentioned slight ethical concerns (which can be easily alleviated), publishing scientific artifacts via multiple outlets IMHO makes quite a lot of sense from the perspective of exposing the work to a larger potential audience, which, ultimately has a positive effect on scientific research knowledge sharing and distribution.

What is the question exactly? How to publish the same work to many journals to increase publications (which is unethical) or how freely distribute already published work (which can be done through arxiv if the journal policy permits it).

@Alexandros: The question is pretty clear and is concerned about the obstacles for wider distribution of scientific artifacts (your phrase "if the journal policy permits it" actually confirms one of the reasons for asking this question). As for the ethical aspect, I have mentioned it in my question as well as indicated the solution for preventing potential negative effect. So, why the downvote?

As with many questions about giving up  (or not) versus retaining it, and why one should give it up in the first place, a criterion of something like "added value" is clarifying. In the first place, why "publish" with anyone who needs/wants to take the copyright from you? Duh, because those same people seem to have the power to grant status (nevermind the arguable business of "peer review"/correctness). Thus, from an economics viewpoint, many/most publishers are entirely happy to give you "status points" while making money by charging a fee for access to your work.
Naturally, as long as such publishers control the status-game, they will be happy to grant status while charging fees for access.
Naturally, there is an ambient confusion cultivated by for-profits about the supposed benefits-to-all of this system.
Naturally, in the short term, it is hard to generate status-points by "free" (but, therefore, mostly not "peer-reviewed") publication. (In fact, the very word "publication" in academia no longer seem to mean "a thing that has been made publicly available", but only something that has entered the formal peer-reviewed (and mostly corporation-controlled) "publishing" game.)
Now, yes, maintaining a web-site is not really "free", especially worrying about long-term maintenance. Filtering manuscripts even for basic sensibility is not trivial... It is a slightly pathetic form of "luck" that for most submissions to refereed journals, nothing is claimed that is sufficiently scandalous, or perhaps even widely interesting, to invite too serious skepticism, so that even if it's wrong or garbled, it really doesn't matter. In all that, and in light of recent years' journals' comments to referees that it's not our responsibility to verify correctness (!?!), but more "appropriateness for the journal" (this is about status), unless some alarm goes off about significant content... "peer review" absolutely does not guarantee exact correctness. Maybe ball-park correctness, on general principles of sense... which should be ok most of the time, etc.
So, for the time being, we are caught in a legacy system that had insinuated itself into the very fabric of academic function... and will be hard to surgically remove without endangering the patient, etc.
Still, some (especially not-for-profits, but not all not-for-profits!) are willing to negotiate limited-rights-transfers, ... which makes sense. But, even these days, one must speak up, or the default is that you surrender all rights, which is senseless.

Excellent answer - much appreciated (+1). You make good points, however... Firstly, I'm not sure that free is mostly not peer-reviewed. For example, Scholarpedia looks like a very promising initiative; I think that arXiv can follow similar model and add peer review functionality to their open access model - people would earn academic reputation not by attaching their work to a journal "brand", but, instead, use collective wisdom and opinion, similarly to StackExchange reputation model. (to be continued)

(cont'd) Secondly, since a lot of scientific research activities involve public funding, it seems quite natural to me to extend that funding (insignificantly) in order to implement publicly-funded peer-reviewed journals and/or repositories.

Publishers have to eat too, and if you can take the same thing you published with them and publish it again with someone else, who will buy it from them?  Their argument is that they invest in the publication process and need to get a return for it.  I have some skepticism about this argument (these days, universities could pretty easily and cheaply operate open-access online publications, etc. etc.), and am personally a much bigger fan of open access, but that's the standard argument.
N.b. there's also a (smallish) benefit for authors in having a central place to go for things like reprint requests.
Also, many publishers these days are ok with a certain amount of republication.  For example, most copyright transfer agreements I've seen for journal articles explicitly allow the author to republish in a larger book, e.g., a collected papers book or a follow-up.

Thank you for the answer (+1). However, I disagree with your argument that, if an artifact is published via an outlet A, then publishing the same artifact via outlet B prevents A from selling the artifact. Sure, it reduces the chances that it will be bought from the original publisher, but not so much. Additionally, publishers with stricter copyright rules IMHO risk losing some authors, who might prefer more flexible outlets. Therefore, the former ones should think twice about benefits of strict rules even from business perspective.


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Are university salaries public information in Sweden?
I am currently in the process of negotiating position both on the academic side and industry. I was told certain numbers on the spread of salaries for a specific position at a specific place, however I cannot locate the source of this information.
So I am wondering whether or not salaries at a university are public information, specifically in Sweden. My understanding is that they are/should be, especially considering that even emails sent/received via university mail servers are covered as public information.
On the other hand, labor unions like (such Sveriges Ingenjörer) typically give salary statistics is one of the major reasons why you should be a paying member. Why would I want to pay for information that is publicly available?
Follow-up: If salary information is indeed publicly available, then where can I find it; do I contact the institute of interest directly or do I get in-touch with the national tax agency (i.e. Skatteverket)?

Yes, individual salary information at Swedish universities fall under "offentlighetsprincipen" (the principle of public access to official records), unless they are explicitly classified, which would be very rare. (See for example this document from Stockholm university describing how "offentlighetsprincipen" applies to university matters.)
The easiest way to obtain them is probably to contact the HR department (personalavdelning) at the university/faculty in question.


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How should I pursue my interest in AI and/or machine learning?
I'm a first-year student at a top 100 university studying computer science. I have looked at all the different fields of software for which I can get into and I am personally most interested in exploring a career in AI and/or machine learning.
Basically, I am wondering what my college studies should look like in order to make my interest a reality. Its obvious that I need to learn computer programming but are there any other less obvious topics which I should study up on? I have heard that I need to know every field of math, quantum mechanics, physics, and a bunch of other stuff, what is the reality of this?
Last question, is graduate school necessary if I want to go into an advanced field like AI? Are there any paths other than graduate school which I can use to get into the career?
Thanks for your help.

[I]s graduate school necessary if I want to go into an advanced field like AI? Are there any paths other than graduate school which I can use to get into the career?

"Go into AI" is pretty broad. What sort of job do you want to be doing? Theoretical research? Software development? Engineering? To get an idea of what jobs are out there you can look through the job postings at Google Research, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Amazon Research, and so on. All of these do ML and AI.
They have position all along the spectrum from things that only require undergraduate degrees to things that require PhD's. I have no experience with the non-PhD path, so I can't tell you much about that, but a lot of their internships are geared to ML/AI PhD students spending their summers there, and then those same people get their degrees and apply for research jobs at those companies.

I am wondering what my college studies should look like in order to make my interest a reality.

I can tell you what is useful to know for ML and AI, besides programming: In computer science, you need to have a good grasp of the theory, taught in courses like Theory of Computation and Algorithms. Some schools also teach an undergraduate AI course. Machine learning can be viewed as the intersection between computer science and statistics, so basic statistics is important. A lot of AI and ML has to do with (mathematical) optimization, for that you need a good grasp of linear algebra and multivariate calculus. Some methods (like neural networks) require understanding differential equations and partial differential equations (but I would put those down as fairly optional, you'll learn the relevant material if you ever need to).
The reality is, if you are going to go to a graduate program in AI/ML, you'll learn all the AI/ML-specific things you need to learn there. What you need to know to get accepted into the program is very variable on a program-by-program basis, but the reality is that the coursework probably won't be the most important thing in the admission process. If you're going straight for a job out of college, employers probably won't care much about your coursework either. It will be all about how you do at the interview, which will be very variable on an employer-by-employer basis.

At the end of the day, my suggestion is to think about what job you want to end up doing and work backwards from there to figure out what you need to do to get it.

Thanks! I would either like to work on software development or engineering of AI technologies. I will look at those companies and see what their requirements are in terms of employment. I guess how I do on the interview is mostly dependent on how well I understand whatever concepts their asking me about which goes back to the coursework in someway. Thanks friend!

Firstly, I congratulate you for thinking in these lines at your initial engineering days itself.
My answer for you is that, no subject is ignored to make a machine (lifeless object) intelligent. But still focus on these subjects like Eng.Maths, *data structure (code it understand it), compilers design, os, dbms, nlp, ai, etc-- to expertise in the space of Artificial Intelligence. Don't consider them just as a subjects learnt it like a Pro.
For most of the C.S.E students completing their B.tech, will have two option either research or Development.
But many of them  will fail in understanding what they are capable of. For this matter I would ask you to get good mentor first and do some projects on ML, AI. Understand the algorithms. You should do the projects that you are nowhere less than a typical AI developer.
Having all this done, by the end of your course you will be able to figure out either to go for research or development.
As per me,
If any student wants to explore more insights of the Algorithms/Mathematics or want enhance the existed algorithms or really passionate to design a new algorithm they can go for Research.
If any student wants to make business out of the existed technology then they can go for Development.
Hope this will be helpful to any cse student.


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Should a Ph.D. be done with a low h-indexed professor
I live in a 3rd world country and at one of top universities in my country a professor offered me a PhD position. I will pursue a part time PhD while working full time. I have to decide on whether or not to accept his offer.
My PhD chances in U.S. or other western countries where an established academic community exists is infinitesimal. This is due to my undergraduate degree is from another nationally lower ranked school than the nationally top ranked university I mentioned. Professors at my undergraduate school have no connection with western researchers and no cares about them, my undergradute professors also do not care about the international academic community.
Though the institution I was offered to pursue a PhD is nationally reputed and having a PhD degree from there carries a nationwise reputation, I believe that my postdoc chances from decent to good schools in western countries are very low. My professor has a title as Professor, but his h-index is extremely low (< 10), while his western colleagues usually have an index of greater than 30, and usually renowed ones have an index of gretaer than 50. Also his students do not seem to secure good postdocs.
I have started to dislike my professor too. I may work with him a few years and apply for a PhD after obtaining some publications, but still I will need his connections.
This might be my only chance for a PhD and I am not sure what to do. What are my chances in western academic system after this PhD ? Should a PhD done with a professor whose work does not receive much citations and who publishes rarely ?

Welcome to Academia.SE! However, this post addresses a few different questions at once. Please consider scoping question to address a single issue (for example, only about low h index OR only about professor in a third world country with not much collaboration with Western research). You can ask a few different questions, but please, do it in separate threads. That way, it will be possible to answer your questions in a meaningful way and answers will be usable also for others.

What do you wish to do with your PHd once you get it?

I don't know if you can do this, but if your main goal is to end up in Western academia, you might consider doing a masters in a Western country. I did that and it made a world of a difference when it came to applying to PhD positions.

Having a low h-index doesn't mean that your professor is a poor scientist, in the same way that having a high h-index doesn't guarantee he/she is a good one. The primary reason is that the h-index is bounded from above by the total number of publications, so people who have entered the field recently have a lower h-index than those that have been working there for decades, simply because the former haven't had so much time to publish enough papers. Additionally, the h-index only cares about a minimum number of citations per publication, and it doesn't take into account the total number of citations per publication or the importance of those citations. For example, if I publish two papers in Science and then retire from academia, my h-index will never be higher than 2, even if those two papers are completely revolutionary and get cited a kazillion times by the biggest guns in the field. In contrast, if I publish 20 papers reporting trivial and mundane results in North Dakota Community College Engineering Bulletin that only get cited by a bunch of my colleagues in a seventh-rate journal, I can potentially get my h-index up to 20.
A better way of deciding if you want to work with this person is to spend an afternoon reading through some of his recent work, and then to ask yourself: Does this person's work look interesting enough that I want to spend the next several years talking to him every day?. Or If I was already a professor, would I advise my own students to go get a PhD under this guy?. Or, if in doubt, ask these questions to your current mentors, who probably will have a more informed opinion than you do.

I think the question of how good your advisor will be is of secondary importance here because the real question is will you do a PhD or not? PhD positions are not easy to come by (depending on the field of study.) This may be your only chance.
The role of advisor is of course important, especially when it comes to getting your post-doc positions. You need to ask whether you are confident enough in your own abilities to write notable papers that are going to compensate for the shortcomings of the advisor. Have you discussed  with him the projects that he will want you to work on? The biggest danger is that he will want you to do something that you are not inspired by. If you like the projects he proposes and feel confident that you can do well even if your advisor's help is limited then you should go for it.
At least you will still be working part time so you have a backup. Why not give it a try and be prepared to drop out after one year if it does not look promising (but don't tell the prof that obviously).
One more thing, if you do go for it try to have a more positive attitude. No advisor is perfect but they are usually on your side.

I had a similar dilemma when I decided to pursue the PhD. The rank of the program is important but the intersection of your advisor's work and your interests is the critical factor. If your research is not related to that of your advisor, he will not be able to offer insights to guide you along. You can get in-depth guidance about literature searches, literature reviews, and selecting and arguing a thesis from many outstanding reference books. Furthermore, your advisor cannot cover the breadth and depth of these reference books in the few short meetings that will be allotted to you. What you need is concise, trenchant insight that is relevant to the research.

To address your last question:

Should a PhD done with a professor whose work does not receive much
  citations and who publishes rarely ?

There are many considerations as pointed out by other answers.  H-index is one measure that might help you understand, at a glance, things about a scholar, but given the seriousness of your situation (wanting to do a PhD) you should dig deeper.  For instance, does the professor have a low H-index because he is new to the field (as mentioned by Koldito)?  Or is the H-index low because his area is highly specialized, and quite small?  These might be reasons for relaxing how important this metric is in making your decision.
If, on the other hand, his H-index is low because he does not publish often (e.g. he does not value publishing as a scholarly work), or because he publishes in venues with low impact, these might be good reasons for concern.  Similarly, you note that others in his field who would be experts from the west would have an H-index > 50; if this professor isn't an expert in the field then I would consider that cause for legitimate concern too.
You asked a second question:

This might be my only chance for a PhD and I am not sure what to do.
  What are my chances in western academic system after this PhD ?

Your insight that his previous students don't tend to get good postdocs is something to consider, especially if other students in the university are able to secure quality postdoc positions.  My personal experience has been that if you want to secure a position in the western academic system you need to do something there first (a degree, a postdoc, etc.), so making sure your PhD puts you on the path to achieving this sounds like it is important for your goals.  I would encourage you to ask the adviser directly who he collaborates with and how you can get experience through the PhD working with scholars worldwide.  Be explicit about your goals.  If he decides he doesn't want to work with you because of this, then he probably isn't the right supervisor for you.
And a final note of advice, your social networks and institutional affiliations are more important when you are looking for that first academic job than your h-index.  H-index is used more regularly for judging things like tenure, promotion, etc.  In the western system, from my experience, you want people to know at a glance that you have credentials that are rigorous and prestigious.  If doing a PhD with this professor won't put you on this track then you should seriously consider your other options.  But dig deeper than the H-index to investigate this.

I have been working as a graduate advisor for many years and I am giving you suggestions based on that experience. I hope I don't sound overly critical, just a couple of things I usually tell incoming PhD students about their expectations of graduate school. This may be because I work mostly with undergraduates transitioning directly into graduate school, so often I have to play the antagonist in these discussions to challenge my students to think about their own plans for their own future. And to be realistic. So here goes:
Most importantly, I think that you should also consider the amount of effort you are willing to put into the PhD. Typically, PhD students are asked to commit full time to it, and though this varies with the discipline, my experience working with PhD students  is that the more time they spend developing themselves as academics and masters of their field, the better they do professionally.
I am concerned that you do not like your mentor/professor much. Are there others on your committee (or academics you are considering to be on your committee) that you do prefer? It's not unusual to not see eye-to-eye with your mentor - it is unusual that you don't want to continue working/ knowing him after your graduate - but rather his connections. Typically, his word to his connections is what begins your immersion in his network - so you will have to be careful to either keep that disdain in check or work will not be fun and challenging (as it should be) and will end up being a chore and make you more frustrated - and isolated.
Finally, about rising in the ranks of academia. Being a part of the Western academic society is not the ultimate social status. Being a highly valued academic in your chosen field of work is.
Good luck!


text:
Is time from acceptance to publication purely a matter of space issues?
While it is clear to me why time from submission to acceptance can vary a lot (given that this involves that most fickle of creature: the reviewer), it is less clear what determines how long it takes for an accepted paper to be published.
Is this purely a matter of all accepted papers being put in a queue and then the journal selects from the top until they fill out each issue (possible going a bit further down to make the page counts fit)?
Or is it common that papers are "pushed" forward in the queue based on various factors (and if so, which factors)?
If it makes a difference, I am mostly interested in math journals, but I am also curious about possible dependency on the field.

I'd say your second option, various factors impact the progression of an accepted paper.
Commissioning editors might decide that they commission an edited issue with academics deciding on the selection and groupings of articles, and that will disrupt the 'queue' of all accepted articles you mention.
Otherwise, commissioning editors might notice that some recently-accepted articles fit nicely around a specific theme or share a common characteristic that make publishing them together valuable, regardless of the order they were accepted.
Essentially, publishing is a human process, with the advantages and drawbacks that entails. If publication was only down to space, things might be very different.

Do you have direct experience of editing? I don't, so I could be wrong, but most of the journals I have read have no obvious "theming" of articles in the same issue (except in the case of special issues). Maybe it varies by field.

Could be a field difference.  Either way, bottom line is: there more to publishing than going through a 'queue' of accepted papers.

Just as a real story and completion to the answer of @G-E, I report some examples from Elsevier and Springer.
Recently Elsevier and Springer publishers have provided information about the review process and publication time (Online publication time and paginated ones).
While this information is not completed for all of the journals, but for some of them in a variety of fields are accessible, such as Advances in Mathematics, Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis (Online Article Publication Time).
In Springer, the information is not as easily accessible as Elsevier but there exist some information about the journal including the review process and publication time, Journal metric Flyer.

While I appreciate this information, it does not really address the question.

-1. If there is information in those links that directly addresses the question then you should summarise it in the text. At the moment this does not provide an answer, and it's not even obvious that the links do either.


text:
What does one do the summer between graduation and graduate school?
I am about to graduate with a B.S. in mathematics and will (hopefully) be attending a PhD program somewhere starting in the fall.
What is one supposed to do the summer between?  I don't have any money, so I can't "travel."  I would love to do another REU, but I don't think they generally admit graduates.

possible duplicate of Master student pursuing PHD: how to spend summer break?

@gerrit while it is related, I don't think it is a duplicate. I think their might be differences in the advice for someone who has started an academic career (i.e., has a masters) and someone who has not.

I guess it would be very irresponsible to recommend that you spend the summer having as much intense fun in the company of other people as is humanly possible (without permanently harming anyone's health). But anyway: do that.

A couple of my undergraduate professors gave me math books as a 'present' when I graduated: Bressoud's Lebesgue integration and Stewart's Galois theory. I spent the summer going through the latter in a leisurely manner. Some others in my incoming class were contacted by faculty from the graduate program and told that their background in so-and-so might need some brushing up, and they spent some of their summer learning, say, point-set topology. But, take it from a fellow math PhD student, you're not going to get a break again till after the PhD, so make the most of it!

have fun and enjoy 4 months of being normal human being

As someone who jumped keenly straight from my undergraduate into graduate school (we could start at any time), my advice is to rest. Even if you cannot travel, spent time with your parents or grand parents or anyone who will give you a room to sleep in. Maybe help out at a local charity. Clear your mind. Read some novels. Go hiking.
This could be the last extended break of your life (before retirement). Enjoy it.

Seconded. Take a break - you'll be grateful for it.

Third'd, focus on resting and leisure, so when you go back to the PHD, you do it with 100% batteries and dont "drift" away becase "you let your summer go by". Good luck on your new proyect!

Gosh.  The last break ever- what an intimidating statement.  It's a lot of pressure to try to recharge all my batteries after how my undergrad went.  I am so exhausted.  I feel like I don't even remember how to 'just have fun.'

@SamuelHandwich - It is a little exaggerated, but the main idea is that you must take advantage of these "free days" and just relax, take time to yourself, brush up on basic knowledge for your courses, and just have an altogether "fun time". Just so you don't end up missing that time later.

Your mention of REU makes me think you are in the US and you say you don't have any money. My suggestion would be to get a job. You will come out anywhere between 5-10k ahead. US stipends tend to be low. Not having credit card debit at the outside of grad school is really nice. A small amount of savings will provide a large percentage increase in your monthly budget. Dipping into your savings for 1k extra per year will give you something like a 10 percent increase in your monthly budget. Having savings/reduced debt might be the difference between having to or not having to take a non-academic job. It might also allow you to afford a laptop or self fund a conference trip or buy some much needed reference books.

I agree completely with Dave on his answer. There is one instance that I think is worthwhile to do some preparation and that is if you are doing a particular grad program and in one of the fundamental areas relating to it you don't have a good foundation. Lets say you are going to do a Master's in Applied Mathematics and you are not good at dealing with differential equations. If that's the case then put in some time now and sort it out rather than later when you will be drowning in coursework, exams, projects and all the rest.

You might want to consider being a counselor at  a math camp for high school (or even middle school) students.  This is a good job, albeit a fairly relaxed one, as these programs often aspire to achieve the dynamic of a big, happy family that really loves math. You’ll get good practice teaching without facing the administrative issues that one might encounter as a TA.  There is something wonderful about seeing students at this age understand a concept for the first time; everything is new to them, and the excitement is infectious.  Finally, on pain of sounding overly focused on professional development, experience like this looks great on a CV.  Some programs you could consider include MathPath (program for middle school students, rotating location), PROMYS (program at Boston University, focused on number theory), SIMUW (program at the University of Washington), and the Ross Program at OSU.

I totally agree: Take a break and enjoy it!
I changed from my masters to doing my PhD on a weekend. The last exam was on Thursday, the first day on monday.
I regret it. I also moved to a new country during that weekend, so this was a very stressful time, with finishing the thesis, a breakup and all. So, compared to that, the first couple of days in my new job where relaxing, even if this was and still is a really hard time. But, with slightly less adrenaline powering me, I immediately became ill. Not a good first impression.
The beginning of a PhD is not a walk in the park, especially if you change topics like me. You want to be fit for this time.
In retrospect I should have taken a little holiday, even if it meant taking up a small loan. Doing my PhD I earn enough to be able to pay something back. A simple relaxing holiday does not require a lot of money. You need a place to sleep, some food and maybe a couple of beers. Try to empty your ToDo-list as much as possible, or it will haunt you in the years to come.
Using this time for preparation is probably a bad idea. You will have time to get to know your topic. If you start relaxed and undistracted (ToDo-list), then you will have a great start.
Good luck!


text:
How important are classifications (ACM, AMS, PACS...)?
For paper submission, I have recently spent some time struggling to find appropriate classification. The main question is: who needs this information and why?
At first I thought that they could be used by the editor to find an appropriate editor or referees, but I have had two experiences contradicting this hypothesis. In the first one, I was only asked to provide classification AFTER the review process. In the second, I was requested to point myself to appropriate editors and referees.
In my experience, I do not look at those numbers, and that is true for other colleagues. The only exception is when I am trying to find appropriate classification and look at other related papers for inspiration. In such occasion, I sometimes found classifications which did not seem to match the content of the paper. Apparently people do not care much for this. Another aspect of the question is: how bad is it to have a bad classification?

"who needs this information and why?" This is a question I also ask myself whenever I have to provide classification terms. After 6+ years in research I am still devoid of a good answer.

Sorry I did not get what do you mean by this question. Do you mean why one prefers publishing in ACM and not in AMS? in what field?

No, I wonder about the use of any of these classification systems. Namely, who needs them on a regular basis and in order to do what? I merely gave these three examples (which are the ones I know about) to not restrict the discussion to one field.

From the ACM page "How to use the Computing Classification System":

An important aspect of preparing your paper for publication by ACM
  Press is to provide the proper indexing and retrieval information from
  the ACM Computing Classification System (CCS). This is beneficial to
  you because accurate categorization provides the reader with quick
  content reference, facilitating the search for related literature, as
  well as searches for your work in ACM’s Digital Library and on other
  online resources. It also ensures correct placement when a review
  appears in Computing Reviews.

There's similar verbiage for the AMS MSC.
In other words, the institution needs it for their own databases and search mechanisms. The AMS probably needs it for something similar. So your use for the classification system depends on how much you expect people to search for your work using the classification structure provided by the institution. For math, I'd expect it to be used a lot: for CS, not so much.

I've been doing applied math research for 6 years now and I've never searched papers by MSC classification code. I suspect I'm not the only one.

I'd expect it to be used about 100 times as much in math as in CS, which is to say, not at all.

This classification would normally be used by librarians to catalog the books/journals/proceedings accordingly. There is more than ACM and AMS - there are at least other 10-15 frequently used systems, each meeting needs of a specific customer - be it a library or consortia of academic institutions. Almost any publisher, beyond ACM, would use one or several classification schemes.
In theory, the classification of proceedings should depend on terms you provide for the article, in practice, it is not necessarily the case, as you say. There are a lot of things to be improved in classification, also using semi-automated approaches for finding right keywords for papers.

It's for classification purpose.
From practical side, I've heard that they use it for matching referees or seeing for what you can be a referee.
I've never met any scientist searching according to such classification. (Except for scientometrics or similar purposes.)


text:
What year do you give for results, arxiv or journal year?
When giving a talk, if something is past ~1990, there's only the journal publication year to give to the audience. When something has only an arxiv year, then that's clearly the appropriate year. However, sometimes things take a long time to get published (refereeing and/or backlogs) and end up making things become anachronistic. One can now have a result that was posted in 2014, then published in 2016, while another paper is posted and published in 2015 that generalizes the paper in 2014.
How do you give coherent and consistent choice of dates in a talk that are clear to the audience? Is there a guideline of which year to cite?
(I'm in mathematics if that is relevant.)

I would always give the date at which the result was published (when I actually give a date, which I rarely do, especially not a precise date).

I just realized I was ambiguous with the word "published" in my previous comment. I meant when it was first made available, so if there is an arXiv version which contains the result, that is the year I would give.

Both, I think...

"In 2003, Captain Crunch proved the infamous Crunchberry Theorem [Crunch 2008]."

I think you are trying to do two different things in one:

Give references: This should help others to find relevant literature and in fact, during talks one often uses just "Author Name(s), Year" to do so since this information often allows to track down the reference (at least in mathematics where people do not publish too many papers per year). If you want to do this, you should show the year of publication (you could also explicitly refer to the preprint version, but would need additional space…).
Give historical background: You may want to give the audience a feel for how things developed. My two cents here: I usually do not enjoy the talks that do this very much - I go to talks to learn new mathematics and "historical background" or anecdotes distract me (and also it seems hard to deliver them good). One exception is plenaries of people who are in the business for decades and really have something interesting  to say. Back to the point: If you want to give historical background you may need more space and should say "The result, obtained between 2013 and 2015 by A and published in three papers in 2015 and 2016…"

As a consequence, I think that this is a case in which consistency and clearness are not the same thing…

The convention I've seen, universally (at least in math), is to site the arxiv year until a paper is published, and the year of publication once published.  When this is genuinely confusing, usually because publication dates are inconsistent with the intellectual history, people point out when a paper was first available (often in words rather than on slides), but still cite the publication date.
(Anecdotally, due to the vagaries of the refereeing process, a paper of mine was published the year after someone else's paper that built on our definitions and generalized our results.  I've seen several talks where describe how Y (2009) extends X (2010), which always looks strange, but everyone in the audience can figure out what happened.)


text:
ResearchFish: Which publications count?
In the UK, for grant-holders there is an annual need to report all publications via ResearchFish to the UK government. In mathematics, it is confusing which papers should be included. Do I include arxiv postings? Papers that have been published since the onset of the grant? Both? I want to do the most ethical thing, but these lines seem much more blurred in mathematics--there's times where papers will take >2 years to get published so the "products" from a grant would be shunted to the next grant, etc.

Do I put in work that was started before the grant and then was finished during the grant?
Do I include arxiv postings?
Do I include published work that was on the arxiv before the grant started?

Thank you for your time.

I work at Researchfish now but prior to that I was at one of the research councils (MRC). I have had an ongoing involvement in the system, and particularly in defining the question set/information collected. The main aim is to collect outputs against the relevant funding i.e. a paper should be associated with the award if that funding has in any way contributed to or supported the research or other activities to produce the paper.
So, with regard to your questions:
Do I put in work that was started before the grant and then was finished during the grant?
- yes, if the grant has supported some of the latter parts of the work whether in resource, salary etc.
Do I include arxiv postings?
- my understanding is that arxiv is for preprints, funders tend not to need to know about a paper until it is published, although there are some exceptions so you should check with your specific funder. If your funder does want to now about papers before they are published this will be done through the additional sections of questions, rather than the main publications section.
Do I include published work that was on the arxiv before the grant started?
- this is less likely, unless there is significant change in the paper between the preprint on arXiv and the published version. Again, please think about the funding.
I hope this helps, but your funder should be able to clarify this further.
Bev Sherbon
Impact & Evaluation Adviser, Researchfish