text:
What should I do If I find out that there is a typo (repeated many times) in a recently published paper of mine at Elsevier?
I've recently published a paper. It's available online, but not published on hard copies yet. What should I do If I find out that there is a typo (repeated many times) in a recently published paper of mine at Elsevier?

Could you be a little more explicit about the typo?

possible duplicate of Are spelling and/or grammar mistakes a cause for submitting Errata?

It can't hurt to get in touch with Elsevier and ask them.  They may tell you it's too late to make any changes (this is almost certainly the case unless you returned the proofs very recently), or they may tell you the early copy online now isn't finalized yet.  Either way, you'll find out.

@Wrzlprmft I think that even though closely related, this is not a duplicate because it is a) not yet through the publication process and b) "many times" as opposed to just one.

Contact the editor you worked with and let them know.  They will advise you of your options and hopefully work with you to update the online version and (if possible) either delay or fix the print version.

There are two pieces of information missing in your question, but it might be better to consider each case anyway, so that my answer might help others. The first thing is whether the typo may lead to misinterpretation of your work, is an error in formulas, or anything that will harm the scientific meaning of your work. The second thing is whether you or the publisher introduced it.
If the typo is not misleading in any way (e.g. embarrassing but harmless spelling error), it is probably not worth doing much, whoever made the mistake. If the preprint version of your article is on your web page or on a repository, you should ensure it is free from the typo, and you might want to point out that the published version has this typo, but I would not see the point of going further than that.
If the typo is actually harmful, may cause misinterpretation of your work or may make it partly unintelligible, then who made the error is more important. In any case, contact the publisher and the chief editor to see how to handle it. Of course, if you did the error, you have to be apologetic while if the publisher did, you can be more demanding. The most probable outcome is that an errata will be issued. Most journals have only one version of each article, and thus cannot afford to change anything between electronic publication and print publication; however strange it may seem I saw many errata being printed in the same issue than the article they correct. Maybe electronic born journal are in a position to handle this better.

For the story, my very first article got published (both electronically and in print) with a repeated "typo": half a dozen of $n/2$ and $(n+1)/2$ where replaced by $n^2$ and $(n+1)^2$. I realized that when I received the offprints, and could not believe it. I knew I did not made the mistake, but at first I thought I did not checked the galley proofs closely enough. It turned out that the typos where introduced after the galley proofs. This made a strong case, and a corrected version of the article was reprinted entirely in a subsequent issue.
I think it fair to mention that the publisher was Springer, but I have heard similar horror stories from most big, expensive commercial publishers.

What's the big deal? You only would have had to wait a year to post a corrected version.

I recently had a similar case with Elsever in which I returned proofs with corrections to be made, but the corrections weren't made correctly (in particular, a URL got mangled by the type setters so that the live link was broken.)  The Elsevier system doesn't give the author a chance to confirm that the corrections to page proofs were done correctly, and simply tells you that it's impossible to make changes after the type setters are done with the article.  I was able to get this problem resolved, but only by contacting the editor in chief of the journal.


text:
How to learn to make a meaningful study without having an academical background?
I am an autist who had been in therapie for 8 years. In that therapie I learned a lot about my own and later about others psychology. I also developed over the years an tendency to just experiment with my own and others perception of situations/interactions and evaluating the differences/similarity of different people's reaction. The amount of information I was able to gain and by that learn from it made me become kind of an experimenter by heart what started taking over to all aspects of my life.
Very often, I had already an idea of doing an experiment I should document because it might be interesting (but not meaningful) for others aswell, but I decided not to, as I had no idea how to do it.
Now through all the therapies I had and especially in group therapies, I figured a really big problem in getting an autism diagnosis is that the criteria for the diagnose are kinda subjective and many therapists hesitate to give it, as its hard for them to give a final judgement if someone has autism or not. I have an idea how this process could be improved by giving the therapists additional backup, so they could make a decision with more certainty and hence reduce the hesitation in the process of giving an autism diagnosis. I talked already with my therapist about my idea and he agreed that the idea sounds very interesting but that he knows from his field, that there are so many different opinions on what are the important criteria for an autism diagnosis, that my idea couldn't be generally applied due to the fact that it had to be individually phrased for anyone to find acceptance.
After that conversation I couldn't anymore let go the idea of making a study proofing that my idea would work. So far, I have an aim with that study, which would be improving the required time and precision of spotting the presence or absence of the criteria required for making an autism diagnosis.
I have a concept of how my idea could universally be applied in form of a questionnaire (despite I haven't considered yet, what questions had to be asked in specific). And I have an vague idea of how to design an experiment that possibly would proof (or disprove) the premise of my idea.
What from my understanding should be enough to (dis)proof a concept.
Now the only thing that prevents me from doing this study is, I have no idea how to perform such a study in a way that it has any means. I don't know how to check what related research others had already done or if someone made this study already before I did. I have no idea how to figure whats the threshold of candidates to participate in my study had to be, so the result is meaningful. I have no idea how to avoid or spot irregularitys in the results of the study. And I have no idea how to actually reach out to possible candidates wanting to participate in that study. As the around 30 other autists I know from which I could be lucky if half of them was interested to participate, I suspect by far wouldn't be enough for getting an meaningful result.
tl&dr
So my question is, if I have no academical background and don't know how to design a study in its detail, how could I learn or find help for doing so outside of academia?

There are books on experimental design. But in any subject that involves human subjects you will probably need an external agent to certify that you are doing things ethically. In the US it is called an IRB (Institutional Review Board) and most of them are associated with universities.

Ah darn... I see. Anyways, looking for a book is an helpfull advice already... Sometimes its so obvious you can't come up with yourself.

You also need to consider that what you are thinking of has already been done. It will take time in a good library and online to see what is related.

@Buffy: Thanks for that point. I noted that one already in my list of things I don't really know how to approach. So no tools available that might help one with to figure if someone else had done this before?

Designing, conducting the experiment and analyzing the results all by yourself would be a very big work, and as you can see yourself there are parts of the process where you might need help (literature, ethics application...). There are many researchers already working on autism who could help you with all of this: they could tell you how new it is, suggest reading some related articles, make sure the experiment design is correct, etc. So I think you should try to contact such researchers in the perspective to find academic partners. Maybe your therapist could help you contact them.

It's not really your question but I know a person who has a different health condition, this person eventually decided to start a PhD themselves in order to implement and evaluate an idea they have about improving life for people with this condition. In case you're interested, you could consider entering academia yourself to do this research as a master or PhD thesis. This way you would have access to supervision, resources, and you would have more control over the academic side of things.

@Erwan: I was already considering that. But since I don't even have a bachelors degree and am actually am starting building a career in IT industry, I can't really decide putting in a hand full of years just to learn the prerequisites of preparing that path to doing this research. Interesting idea, but wouldn't actually give up a very well paid job for this.

Given the comments of yourself and others here, let me make an orthogonal suggestion. Instead of exploring this on your own, you might try to contact someone in either medicine or psychology at a university or research center and speak to them about your ideas. You might provide a useful resource to someone who might be interested in following up your ideas, perhaps by guiding a student already under their guidance.
But alternatively, your conversation might reveal to you that what you propose has already be well researched. Such a professional contact could, perhaps, point you to the answers you seek.
This would result in minimal impact on your career, and might provide an interesting research problem to someone.
Personal contact via an office visit is probably the best and most efficient way to get such a conversation started. An email might be ignored. Your therapist might be able to point you to a researcher.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Amount of edit after submission (conference paper)
I will be submitting a conference paper that proposes a new method for analysing a particular kind of data within the next 2 weeks. However, I think that I may improve the method slightly during the following 4 weeks that the reviewers use before giving feedback. The improvements will be minor, but it would be nice to include. It is out of the question to wait with submission for another conference based on this potential improvement.
Is it okay to simply replace the old results with the new results if the results improve after submission? More generally, how much can one add to a conference paper after it has been submitted? Is it only allowed to add elements that the reviewers request?

The general rule of thumb for conference papers is that nothing you add should be such that it would cause a reviewer to worsen their opinion of the paper.  That's a very fuzzy boundary, though, and it's certainly possible for somebody to make changes that would be considered too much.  Moreover, such changes would likely go unnoticed for most conferences, since there is often little checking of differences between the initial and final versions, except in the case of borderline papers.
Personally, I tend to use the following rubric to decide:

Are the changes a strict improvement?  Sometimes improving one aspect causes degradation in others, and that's not OK.
Is the improvement worth its own paper?  Post-acceptance additions should be incremental only.
Will adding new material require dropping anything else significant?  Conference papers often have strict page limits, and new material should not displace material important for acceptance.

What you describe sounds likely to pass this rubric.  Even if it does not, however, remember that in fields with peer-reviewed conference publications you can typically publish an "extended version" as a journal paper.  Such extended versions are an excellent place for any incremental improvements too large or too late for the conference version to go.

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

authors: Игорь Баранов


text:
Timing and length of 'author response phase'
I've submitted my first scientific paper to KDD, an academic conference with a decision deadline of May 12, 2016. However, before decisions there is an "author response phase" (see below). I'm a bit surprised that we haven't heard from the reviewers yet as there is only about 5 weeks from now (Apr 3) to the decisions deadline.
Is this normal? Also, how many days are authors usually given to formulate a response? It seems like we'll have very limited time so I'm slightly concerned with how intense the author response phase will be (seeing as I also have other ongoing projects).

Papers will be reviewed by members of the KDD program committee and
  decisions will be emailed to all authors by May 12, 2016. Note that
  there will be an author response phase between submission and
  decisions.

It's still relatively rare for conferences to have an author response period at all, and when it happens, it's typically very different from the response to a journal submission.
For a journal, you are expected to submit a revised version explaining how you've changed things to deal with reviewer criticism. For a conference, on the other hand, the author response period is typically more an opportunity for quality control on reviewers, in which the authors get a chance to say things like: "Reviewer #3 claims that this paper should be rejected because we didn't do experiments, which we find confusing because several key experiments are presented on pages 4-5."  The program chairs then use this review/rebuttal pairing to make decisions on which papers will be accepted and whether they will need shepherding to ensure quality of the camera-ready (for those conferences that use shepherding).
As such, the response time is typically quite short, often only around a week, and typically happens not long before decisions are scheduled to be sent.

+1 This. Author response phase for CS conferences, is a not a major revision. a) It is for clarifying slight misunderstandings and b) If the reviewers have understood everything (even if they did not like it) for a specific paper there will be no  need for response phase for this particular paper. In this sense, the OP might not get a response phase at all, i.e., it is not obligatory.

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


text:
How to mention non-archival CS workshop publications on resume
I'm a new PhD student in a CS-related research area with a very limited number of publications. As part of working on my current research projects I've managed to get some non-archival publications at workshops of top tier conferences to show my work in progress.
These non-archival publications range from 3 to 8 pages and contain enough good content to make it into a decent number of mid-range journals/conferences. I'd say that this is quite different from what you would know from workshop publications in e.g. social science, and I would therefore like advice from others with a similar research field to mine.
I'd like to show this work on my academic resume, but what is the preferred approach? Should I list it alongside my "real" publications and mark each one of them with a note saying it was non-archival, should I list them separately or should I do something completely different?
Edit:
Things are a bit complicated as I also have 2 recent non-archival papers from a more tangential field to CS. These papers are not workshop papers, but similar in scope in terms of amount of content. I guess I also need to fit these in the same category. Note that some of my non-archival papers involve presentations and some posters.

List your contributions as accepted presentations for workshops, not as publications, and make a separate list for presentations of this sort. For the more tangential contributions, ask yourself if they are important to mention on your resumé. If they are indeed important, then you may want to group your presentations according to the subject area.


text:
Is it worth going to preview event for accepted students?
I've been admitted as a grad student to a US university. There's a preevent for admitted students, which seems to be a weekend of introductions and minor social events (I don't have that much information yet).
Is it worth traveling from Europe to such an event? Do you have a feeling for how important these events are for building social relations with students/faculty?

If by "admitted (accepted)" you really mean "those who accepted their offer," it's just a nice, welcoming gesture. During course work, you'll work so closely with and next to your future fellow students that you needn't worry about falling behind socially if you don't attend.
If people have been admitted but still weigh offers from different schools, it's a marketing event in which faculty and current students will try to present their program - and the campus it's on, and the city and state it's in - in their best light. While it would certainly be nice to get to know other prospects, it is probably more helpful to use such events to get a feel for how you might get along with professors and such, and if the city is too busy - or not busy enough - for your taste.
If you're not rich with extra time to spare, it's probably only necessary to fly in from Europe if it's case 2, and you have genuine questions or concerns. These can be nice events, but I'd think twice before flying for 6-10 hours each way on your own money - as long as you can't combine it with a longer vacation or so.

Though if the grad school is willing to pay for foreign prospectives, it might be a nice trip.

@Kimball: oh, sure - but that's a bit unlikely at the Ph.D. level, isn't it?

Well, I thought so, but to my knowlege foreign prospectives aren't usually even invited to grad school open houses (at least in math).

My school gives a flat sum of money for travel expenses. The folks coming by bus locally are very happy; the sum might be enough to cover airfare for people coming from the midwest; and the folks coming from the other coast or internationally will be out of pocket a bit.

@gnometorule, it's not impossible. My department flew a prospective PhD student from New Zealand to the eastern United States. She was visiting several schools (2-3 hrs apart) and asked each if they'd consider paying for part of her flight, making her only slightly more expensive than a local candidate.

I definitely wouldn't go just to "build social relations".  You can do that when you start school in the fall.
The reason to go is to help you decide whether you want to attend.  If you're already decided, then going is not worth your time or money.  If you're undecided and they're paying for travel, go.  If you're undecided and you have to pay for travel, you must weigh the cost of airfare against the benefit of seeing the place firsthand and meeting people before you decide which school to attend.


text:
Mycology Laboratory, Department of Biology; Does it sounds strange?
Mycology Laboratory, Department of Biology
As we haven't had the fixed term in our native language, so I am trying to find the suggestion and idea from everyone here.

It sounds absolutely fine to me (as a native English speaker who’s worked at several universities in North America and Europe).

Great @PLL, I am very pleased!

Your name sounds fine to me, but I'd use Laboratory of Mycology, Department of Biology (just because I think the two "of"s sound better and more official!) or a shorter form of that, such as Mycology Lab or MycoLab.
All the labs in my department are just referred to by the PI's last name, though, so that would work also!

thanks. After a long time of research, such things like this also make me nervous :) In fact it is a new division of our department.


text:
Advantages of taking the Subject GRE exam in April
Background (skip this if you want): I'll obtain my master's degree in about June/2018 or so (if everything goes smoothly), and I intend to pursue a phd in the US. Thing is, I'm from a country in the south hemisphere and the academic term here is different than in the north hemisphere, and so I'm a bit paranoid with deadlines for graduate applications. Looking around at questions such as here and here, and around in some universities' sites, I understood that graduate applications are usually open from October through December, and the academic term would start around September.
Question: is there any reason why someone would want to take the GRE in April, other than if he or she were actually retaking the test trying to get a better score? I know that they keep the scores for five years. The bottom line is: I'm unsure whether I should take the GRE in April or in September. April seems too soon, the fee is expensive and I'd like to do it only once, preferably being well-prepared. I'm sorry if I'm missing something obvious or common sense, but I'd rather ask than remain ignorant. Thanks!


text:
Advice on whether to pursue a PhD or not
I know this question has been beaten to death over here, but I'm still not sure what to do in my case. I've been given an offer to do a PhD in electrical engineering in a top 10 university and I'm very confused on whether to accept the offer or not.
Initially I only applied for the MS program and a PhD was not something I wanted. After a few professors interviewed me, they asked me to consider changing my application from MS to MS/PhD and mentioned how much I would be paying if I did MS only since there is absolutely no funding for MS students. I was worried about the cost of going to grad school without funding, so I caved in and changed my application to MS/PhD.
For starters, I don't know if I am willing to put the time necessary for completing the PhD: I somewhat like the things I would do research on if I accepted the offer (information theory and coding theory), but I wouldn't call myself passionate about the subject or any subject in electrical engineering for that matter. Also, my priority (and possibly the only thing important to me right now) is financial security and being as financially "well-off" as possible, so would doing a PhD really make a difference in that regard if it's from a top university? This is the only case where I would be willing to put in the effort for PhD.
Please note that I am not asking people to decide for me, I am asking for different perspectives or points of view to make the decision easier for me.

If you have to ask then the answer is no...

@Roland in Physics industry pays PhDs more than Masters.  However, correlation is not causation.

Don't get a PhD unless you are absolutely sure you want one.

So if you accept a PhD offer in the US, you can normally leave in the middle with a master's. This is better than enrolling in a master's program since you don't have to pay (in fact, you'll get paid a small stipend). I recommend researching your institution's policy on this.
If this is the case, you can begin your PhD program now and then decide in a few years whether to leave with the master's or finish the PhD. I do not know whether the PhD is a good investment in your long term financial plans, but I'm reasonably certain you will need more than a bachelor's.

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


text:
What is the correct `seminar etiquette'?
I'm a new PhD student studying AI and I've never attended seminars before. When I attend the seminars held within my lab (a lab member presents a paper) now, I have a lot of questions about the details of the theory. But I rarely see anyone asking about the gory details of theory. Do I have the wrong approach here? the approach being, going with a mindset of learning what the paper being presented did and how they derived everything and not thinking about what it's useful for and how their contribution can be applied?
For example, if someone shows a loss function I've never seen before I instantly think of the notation, the symbols and what they might possibly mean (in a graphical sense mostly). But the presenter always rushes over these mathematical equations and derivations alike.
Another way to ask my question is- Should I be thinking of the bigger picture of a new AI solution (say, what the input is, what the output is and how its evaluated) or should I continue to think about the smaller picture (the mathematical formulation and derivations) first and only then the bigger picture.
To extend this question to seminars of any field, my question is- What is the correct attitude to assume when attending a seminar? (this encompasses thinking about the paper, how to ask questions properly and other factors I might not have thought about)

I feel like there are a mix of different questions in here, it would be best to focus on just one of them. Also, what do you mean by a "seminar", as there are many types.

By `seminar' I mean when a member of the lab presents a work that is interesting to them. PS. I didn't know there were different types of seminars.

This is a lab you're in? Yeah, a lot of things get called "seminar"; some examples in my personal experience would be: 1) A talk by an invited speaker or student, 2) A short standalone course usually not part of a degree program that you pay to attend to learn something, 3) like 2, but part of a conference, 4) a credit bearing course as part of a degree program that focuses on review of academic literature rather than a textbook with lectures. There are additional meanings outside the US.

Yes this is within the lab I'm in. Thank you for the outline of the different seminars.

This is far too narrow for us to answer here. Groups have different norms.

Advice ... For now, limit your self to one question per session.

@Bruce Murdock In my experience, people glossing over the equations like that is either because they personally don't find them interesting and/or don't want to get sidetracked and "into the weeds" talking about the derivations rather than the applications of the method, or they don't understand the derivations and so gloss over them quickly.

The answer by @Bryan Krause is already good and for sure it makes sense to ask your advisor about this, but here's my take.
Your question is an interesting and complex one, and it reflects well on you that you ask it.
The question has several aspects, in particular behaviour in the seminar vs. how you should think.
In principle both the "smaller" and the "bigger picture" are important. Care for the details is a good thing as important things can go wrong without it. But it's also important to not get lost too much in the details so that you lose the bigger picture from your view. To what extent you need to focus first on the "smaller picture" depends to some extent on what kind of person you are, how you work, and how you think. If you can, really try to care for both.
In particular, the fact that currently there isn't any discussion in these seminars on such details doesn't mean that you are wrong thinking about them. Often there is no agreed etiquette for seminars like these, and how they go is a product of social processes. Many people just adapt to what seems to be the dominating style without much thinking, and if the first seminars went rather randomly in a certain way, it may well happen that then all later seminars are like this. Also many students are shy and are worried to say something wrong or to reveal that they lack some fundamental knowledge if they ask, and so they won't.
Such social processes can be changed, and will change to some extent automatically if somebody comes in and behaves differently. In principle I imagine (of course I don't know the background and "history" and the people involved) that you can just ask what you're interested in even if nobody else does it, and some may well be happy that you do that and may even be inspired and start asking stuff as well.
But be careful; it is possible to overdo it. You will find out later yourself that time is never enough to present everything that is interesting and to explain everything in full detail. If currently there is a habit of not having questions, presenters will be "optimistic" about how much material they can present, and they will prepare for it. Many presenters are grateful for questions (I certainly am), but a problem can be that a presenter is eager to go through all the prepared material, or at least to discuss some later parts, which they may not reach if too much time goes into questions earlier. Normally I expect a presenter to leave a certain amount of time for questions, so I expect that you can well ask a question here and there, but people may not be happy if you take a considerable percentage of somebody else's seminar time for your questions, particularly if they are not used to this happening.
Many questions that you have in mind may probably be legitimate and good, but as there is so much to say, there will not be space for everything that is potentially of interest.
So I'd encourage you to start asking one or a few things as a trial. Consciously only take a limited amount of the seminar time of another presenter. See how it goes and adapt, depending on experience. You can bring in your style and thoughts; this should be enriching for the group, but be aware of the dangers.

Since this is just a seminar in your lab, why not ask? Not as part of the seminar, just in your informal conversations with the people you work with. These are people you should be conversational among. You don't even have to ask it as a question of etiquette, you can start with just the observation you have: that people don't talk in depth about the "theory" in the way you see it. If you want to know what you should be focusing on, ask your advisor. I think the questions that other people ask are a good hint of what they are focused on but not necessarily what you should be focused on.
It's possible that some of the things you're questioning are considered apparent to people who are not as novice, and maybe as you pick things up you won't have those questions anymore. Alternatively, maybe those details go right over the heads of the people talking and they don't actually know how any of it works. Both of these patterns are familiar to me in the impressions I have of the field you are in: mathematicians like to skip steps they find trivial, and AI/ML practitioners often get training and expertise in tools rather than actual mathematics.
In my experience, a seminar like this is mostly for the benefit of the speaker, to let them practice presenting their work and also to encounter the questions and challenges they'd receive when presenting to an outside audience. As such, it's not usually a time to educate other people in the group, but it varies; sometimes it's worth it to everyone to go into a deep dive about a particular decision and sometimes you may find that the person doing the work didn't even think about the alternatives or implications.
I'll add that sometimes having a new person in a group is a great way for a lab to identify patterns they've fallen into and to break out of them, and academia really benefits from this since there's a constant rotation of new students in that have had exposure to different things. I wouldn't push too hard on changes as a new person in any group, but that doesn't mean you can't ask questions and add your perspective, just be prepared to learn from the responses you get.


text:
Limited number of displays (figure + table) according to the journal
I just wonder according to Nature journal, we are allow to have 6 displays including figures and tables. However, my paper has 8 displays (1 table + 7 figures). Is that fine to have 8 displays for an initial submission?

Contact the journal.

The number of display items in a paper is so easy to modulate that there is really no good reason not to comply with a journal's requirements, even on initial submission.
If you have too many display items for their preference, you can easily reduce the number without reducing the actual content by these two techniques:

Turn figures into sub-figures in a multi-part figure.  Most papers in figure-limited journals (including Nature and Science) have multiple sub-figures inside of them---sometimes many panels taking up a whole page with small images and graphs!
Move some figures to supplementary information.  Journals that require "short-form" papers (including Nature and Science) typically have large amounts of supplementary information, including figures, associated with each article.

If you don't comply with the formatting instructions, you risk rejection without review.  Maybe it's only a slight risk, but since these techniques make compliance easy, why bother to take that risk?

Thanks @jakebeal, I just wonder since my supervisor said don't worry about that, I am too worried to take the risk. By the way, he is a well-known scientist in the field.

@user2842390 Personally, I'd still probably do the easy thing and change the figure out.  If your advisor has a lot of experience with the particular journal (and specific editor!), then they're probably not wrong, though.

My experience with other journals published by Nature Research is that they will have an editorial assistant check for rule adherence before forwarding it on to the editor. I find it hard to believe that Nature wouldn't be at least as strict on this front, so most likely you'd be told to reformat your initial submission.
Contact the journal before submission if you want to try to get an exception. However, your research probably has to be something quite special for Nature of all journals to make such exceptions. Other options are to include multiple figures into a single display panel, or to make use of what Nature calls "extended data figures". These are not shown in the print paper, but can be referenced in the text, and are included at the end of the online/PDF versions.

Thanks Anyon, yeah, they should ask, I wish they do. I'm worried to take the risk although my supervisor said don't worry about that ???!!!!


text:
Rampant sharing of authorship among colleagues in the name of "collaboration". Is not taking part in it a death knell for a future in academia?
I am a final year PhD student in chemical engineering. Since the start of my PhD, I was clear on one personal philosophy. I will put my name only on those papers where I have made substantial contribution. And I will put my colleague's name on a paper only if he/she has contributed substantially. That's what collaboration means to me and anything else seems fraudulent.
However, my group members frequently put each other's name as co-authors in their papers even if they work on completely different topics and have no contribution in the paper. Now, this is unethical in my perspective, on the other hand, they have 10-15 papers by the time they graduate which increases their chance to secure a postdoc position or a tenure track position.
My advisor says, granting of co-authorship is entirely up to the first author and she doesn't interfere with the process.
I have experienced similar sharing of authorship during my masters degree as well. Past PhD members or postdocs were given co-authorship in spite of not contributing anything.
I will be getting 4 (first author) + 2 (co-author) papers from my PhD, which is far less than my colleagues' output.
My colleagues often say that I should have been more collaborative (i.e. share authorship without contribution) as that would have increased my publication count and helped everyone. I simply can't see myself doing that.
Have I severely affected my chance of a future in academia by not taking part in the authorship sharing practice?

As someone who is currently applying to grad schools, it is sad and a little off-putting to hear this. If I get in, I intend to handle it just like you have. I have little interest in putting my name on something that I've had no involvement in.

If you apply to places where they share your philosophy, you would have the advantage as they would also avoid hiring people with obviously conflicting principles (a big publication record of low author positions in disparate subjects being a pretty dead giveaway to anyone looking). The question would seem to be: are there places in your field where many people share your principles? The honest broker only gets ahead in a market where people value that type of honesty, can reliably detect it, and have an active choice. You don't need everyone to agree with you - just enough. Is there enough?

I share the sentiment.  That's why I only value papers where a person is the first author.  For co-authored papers, the only information I use is who they know; e.g, they have a connection to a big name professor.

Voting to close as opinion-based. The final paragraph literally says "what's your opinion". The question is nothing but virtue signaling bait for everyone to pat each other on the back and brag about how they would totally do the right thing even at the expense of their careers.

@Trusly For a novice researcher as myself, who's hoping for a future in academia, is it not possible to have a genuine concern about the long-term effects of not participating in a practice that seem prevalent in my field? And what other place can an inexperienced researcher ask about the perspective of well established academicians/hiring committee members than acadSE? I don't agree that my question is virtue signalling bait, as helping others by sharing one's own experience in the academic world is the core objective of this forum. And that's what I am asking here.

If you really want to ask here, I would start with https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask . As it is, your question violates many don'ts, and fails to do many do's from that page. As for alternate discussion forums, recommendations are outside the scope of this site but there are certainly many of them. I would start searching on Google.

Is this Europe?

@Trusly I disagree, the question is not primarily opinion-based, this is a specific question about ethics, an experienced academic can give a reasonably objective answer. And there have been many ethics questions on AcademiaSE where answers warn the OP against being too idealistic in the face of an ethical dilemma.

@Erwan From the question: "What's your opinion about this?"

@Trusly the sentence can easily be edited out, the question doesn't rely on it at all.

@Erwan Then let's put it on hold, and reopen it when it's edited, before it attracts opinion-based answers.

I agree that what you describe is unethical. However, are you sure that what you describe is actually what is happening? In particular, are you sure that people become co-authors with "no contribution in the paper"? It is possible that people in your group simply collaborate more than you do. It can be difficult for an outsider to ascertain who contributes to a project and who does not.

"My colleagues often say that I should have been more collaborative (i.e. share authorship without contribution)" <- This is not collaboration, but collusion. I've encountered similar misuse of the term "team player", in that certain toxic individuals will characterize not bowing to their every whim or not taking the fall for them as "not being a team player".

I suspect that your description of the situation wouldn't elicit agreement from the people you're describing. In fact, I suspect that they simply have different criteria for what to consider “substantial” contributions. Case in point, there's historical conflict between wet-lab and computational biologists as to what constitutes substantial contributions. The latter contend that classical biologists under-share authorship, unethically. All this to say that there are two sides to this.

It is indeed frustrating that you aren't able to add to your CV "... but unlike others, I actually wrote those papers I'm listed on."

"My advisor says, granting of co-authorship is entirely up to the first author and she doesn't interfere with the process."  ... I think this part is critical and correct.   What is substantial support/contribution?  Two friends happen to be commiserating their respective roadblocks in their research.  One has an epiphany, and shares it with the other, and that is just the breakthrough needed to complete the research...is that worthy of mention?  Only the author initially can know how much weight that "participation" has in the work. Abuse-able yes, but what isn't

I can tell you from the perspective of a person who was on hiring committees that these kinds of ethical indiscretions are easy to spot and are not well received. To the point, we rejected several applicants because we suspected they weren’t sufficiently independent after graduation as they weren’t lead authors on enough publications.
First of all, word gets around. If a PI lets their group slap their names on random papers, hiring committees will take notice, and will not take these applicants seriously. Second of all, we ask questions! If you obviously know nothing about papers you coauthored (yes, it’s obvious), that reflects very badly on you. Finally, if I were you I’d emphasize that on the few publications you have you are the lead author.
That said, your colleagues can partly get away with this: publishing is a numbers game and I don’t know how hiring committees think in other places or fields.

+1 — Even in fields where authors are religiously ordered alphabeticaly, this type of ethical indiscretion is easy to spot.  (I've been on dozens of hiring committees, and I've even run a few.)

Spark I agree with you. But if OP is from Europe I think they favor candidate as OP describe, because of H index. Very important for funding agencies

Unfortunately, it is wrong that "that these kinds of ethical indiscretions are easy to spot and are not well received". In a country like Spain, where curriculums are generally evaluated according to rigid scoring schemes that assign point values based on the quartile or tercile in the ISI rankings of the journal in which the article is published, this sort of unethical authorship sharing is directly beneficial in many contexts.

Given your last paragraph, perhaps you could clarify what your field and country are, just for added context?

Sadly, there are countries where corruption is rampant even in academia. Professors with good political connections routinely force those beneath them in the pecking order to ghost-write articles for them, and they have to comply if they want to keep their job.

Fraudulant "collaboration" is caused by perverse incentives
One of the main things that contributes to this problem, in my opinion, is having ridiculous anachronistic academic and citation metrics that do not adjust for authorship (e.g., the raw h-index).  Ironically, there is a large and well-developed academic literature on metrics that adjust for authorship contribution, but this has not made its way into the practice of universities.  Most universities still look at crude citation metrics that do not adjust for the number of authors on a paper, and this creates an incentive for the kind of fraudulent cross-authorship of papers.
Authorship adjustment is quite a complicated field, owing to the fact that the contributions of authors on a paper may be unequal, and the authorship order can give information on this (depending on the field).  Nevertheless, the basic principle of every proper metric is that the "total value" of a set of papers to a set of authors should not be able to be increased (or decreased) by spreading the authorship in a different pattern.  Even the most crude authorship adjustments remove the perverse incentive problem that leads researchers to game the system by cross-authoring papers where they haven't done the work.  If you adjust authorship metrics for authorship then this problem disappears --- being the full author of one paper with 100 citations is as good as having fifteen papers each with 100 citations and fifteen co-authors (inclusive of yourself).
I can understand why you are concerned about this problem.  It punishes researchers that do papers as sole authors (or in small groups) compared to similarly situated researchers who do research in large groups.  Over time, it would be my hope that university practice will catch up to the development of the literature on this problem, and authorship-adjusted citation metrics will start to be used in practical decision-making (e.g., hiring, promotions, etc.) instead of the anachronistic indexes.  If that occurs then you will eventually see this practice dissipate, since there will no longer be a perverse incentive to do it.

Partly it's an academic self importance problem, and perhaps something that is reflected in the perception of American individualism (see edit below).
In some ways the PhD 'clarity of contribution' is about ensuring that students 'know themselves', and it also a mechanism to simplify assessment by others (possibly the real reason).
In some areas the need for collaboration is massive, such as in engineering, or some big astronomy (see the black hole imaging papers. The key is being able to identify your personal contribution (and hence also being distinct about the contributor elements), rather than claiming fame by 'involvement' in a mega project (as in being the tea boy/girl).
It's even worse in engineering as you rarely get published anyway, but at least ChemEng is (can be) well paid ;-).
If you are clear about who contributed what, then being a little more collaborative is likely to be beneficial as it also enhances your network of those in academia and engineering. Give credit where credit is due, and it will come back to you.

Edit: from comments:  from a UK/European perspective, a lot of the SO/academia rhetoric, which appears mainly US based, does have an expectation of idealistic individual work without any linkage to others. The questioner stated their personal philosophy that they want to provide a substantial contribution to a paper with their name (e.g. needing say >30% contribution). This is not the same as having made a small but substantive contribution to some element of the work (e.g. 15% of 15%), hence the philosophy could be detrimental. The key is to "clear about who contributed what" to the team.

The "perception of American individualism"?

I was waiting for an elaboration on the "individualism" point, too. I'm guessing it's supposed to be a dysfunctional reason to not collaborate, but I'm not sure how that connects to the question.

@Grault, from a UK/European perspective, a lot of the SO/academia rhetoric, which appears mainly US based, does have an expectation of idealistic individual work without any linkage to others. The questioner stated their personal philosophy that they want to provide a substantial contribution to a paper with their name (e.g. needing say >30% contribution). This is not the same as having made a small but substantive contribution to some element of the work (e.g. 15% of 15%), hence the philosophy could be detrimental. The key is to "clear about who contributed what" to the team.

Thanks, that was my guess, but I felt it should be called out. You may want to edit that explanation into the answer.

@Grault edit done.

No in the US we value collaboration. I think you are confusing individualism with leadership. To get a phd (and much more to get a tenured position) requires you to also be able to lead research, not just help out. My school, for example, required an equal number of first and second author pubs for graduation.

hi @ASimpleAlgorithm, while collaboration matters, the USA has a stronger bias toward individualism, from Bruce Willis action films, to First amendment rights, over-active plagiarism measures, etc. There is also a lot of community collaboration as you note, but it did concern the questioner (gogeta). A PhD, by itself, does not really need leadership (of others), and most will not get tenured leadership positions. My original point was that the biases are different in the global community and that "rampant" (their term) co-authorship should be seen as normal, as long as contributions are clear

And most lawyers never stand in court, but it's the degree for that nonetheless. A PhD is essentially an apprenticeship with an academic. As for the US, it is a much more competitive and open system than perhaps you realize. Funding must be won competitively, as opposed to a hierarchical system where funding is doled out to schools first. In a competitive system, we need leaders to get things done, since the govt and school administration do not make the decisions, beyond a broad choice of areas. Leadership is especially valued in areas where lots of collaboration is critical, not ironically.

@ASimpleAlgorithm that may be true, but do most PhDs become long term academics (who chase the funding)...? Let's push this piece of string from the right end. The majority will end in industry, which has different 'publishing' criteria. And even as an academic, the collaboration issue is at the heart of the question regarding number of authors on a paper.


text:
Fermi problem: How much of the published primary literature is never cited and will this number increase relatively?
I stumbled over this to me interesting Q&A solving a fermi question by estimating the right order of magnitude. In the age of publish or perish in my opinion it becomes a crucial question for young researchers/PhD students without permanent position to decide which way to go:

publishing high impact articles/letters in renowned journals and/or high-quality/effort research that can yield a lot of scientific feedback
trying to publish as much articles as possible in peer-reviewed journals

When I talk with chinese researchers (physics) more and more of them get evaluated by the bare numbers of their publication record, less by the quality of their work. Also, among professors (in germany) I see different agendas (internal incentives/charges at the university, country...) to rather go to one extreme and I already often face discussions with my professor how to split up results into papers.
For young researchers, which in the end are self-responsible for their career and cannot rely on good choices/incentives of the university/professor the question is: As long as I have no permanent position, should I try to accomplish outstanding research or publish as many short articles/letters as possible?
For me, as a physicist, I make my decisions on facts & numbers. I made some estimations based on data given here. But I don't want to bias answers and I know some researchers in bibliometrics also analyse such questions professionally.
Can you come up with the right order of magnitude for STEM, how many percent of published articles never reach a single citation?
To accept the answer I have to see which assumptions and factors went into the estimation. I know publishing outstanding research is the safest way to get permanent position, but the question is how to balance the good/many publications ratio. And for this I find the answer to my question quite interesting. If there is a saturation limit in the current exponentially growing numbe of publications and also journals and when this might be reached, whom to collaborate with because he might have very different incentives...

Saturation limit ... I saw a study some years ago where they found that when a field gets too large, it subdivides itself into more specialized subfields.  Most citations occur within the subfield, so the number of citations per paper will stay roughly constant.

@GEdgar This would mean that the average number of publications per researcher was, is and will be always stay roughly the same, which is very unlikely as it would mean efficiency, productivity, publishing pressure, collaboration rate in academia are also roughly constant. You can rule this out and therefor I don't understand why the question is not allowed. Maybe not interesting to others, but I see so much personal subjective advise Q&A here that I probably didn't grasp the concept of this website?!

As with your other recent question here, you seem to be asking a research question. Are you hoping others here will do the research to be able to answer it? That isn't the purpose of the site.

@Buffy So why is the linked question allowed and my ones not? If someone wants to answer this, why not let him? Closing this question before he can just makes no sense to me seeing so many personal student situation questions here I find rather uninteresting to most other readers here. It's like homework questions on physics.se. I'm a physicist wondering about status quo of academia, both questions are important to me, but I don't deal with bibliometrics, I'm no expert in this. Doing googling/research to answer other questions on skeptics.se, history.se is the normal case!? Strange sub-site...


text:
Are there apart from single, double-blind... review other common categories focusing choice/number of reviewers
A current question here reminded me on the Sokal affair/hoax initiated by physicist Alan Sokal in 1996 by publishing a nonsense article in an social journal.
I am wondering whether this triggered any major changes of the peer-review practices among journals or new categories of peer review (number of reviewers, can read review of other reviewer, reviewer suggested by author, etc....)
Reading the wiki article I could not see which type of peer review (single, double-blind,...) was applied by the journal Social Text at this time. The wiki article also suggests to me that the problem was maybe rather the choice of the reviewers (no physicists, although physics is "somehow" a topic of this article).

I removed your sidenote questions since we prefer to have only one question per question. Feel free to ask them separately, but if you do, please clarify “the type of review system applied by a journal […] is more important and put more weight on by the editors”. I fail to make sense of this since the editors do not choose the journal.

The linked wiki page says At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.

@StrongBad which I don't believe quite and I'm in general skeptical on wikipedia articles, otherwise why should have Sokal send the hoax, if he knew this. Some kind of review probably was in place which he wanted to disprove? But this doesn't change the title question...

@MichaelSchmidt A big part of Sokal's point was to show that, in spite of Social Text being considered a top journal, it did not have meaningful standards of review.  The editors actually did ask him to revise and improve the article, but they did not understand it enough to recognize that it was entirely nonsense.  Moreover, when Sokal refused to make changes, the editors decided that it was more valuable to have a physicist's participation than to have the article's writing made more comprehensible.

@Buzz I see, but quite shocked a top journal could have no apparent standard at all in 1996?! So the editors where famous crocodiles which reviewed the articles also or sometimes? They should call it socal myth :-)

Reviewer reports and author responses can be openly available, which is called open peer-review. There is open single blind peer-review, e.g. the publisher Copernicus uses this type.

Check out this oral history of the Sokol Affair, which includes quotes from one of the editors explaining their process:
Ruark, J. (2017, January 6). Anatomy of a Hoax. Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. B6–B10.

Could you make the question clearer? What is it exactly that you are asking here?


text:
How much political influence is involved in the academia in Poland?
I heard that Polish national politics influences the appointment of tenured positions in their universities.
E.g. if some party is in power, they would like to see somebody loyal to them as the head of a faculty or even the rector of the university. Also, if someone is loyal to the party in power, his PhD students have better chance of getting into the university and obtain tenure.
I also heard that, even getting a "Habilitation" requires a lot of political backing.
To what extent is it true?

I rolled back your last edit because the former Warsaw-pact states are quite inhomogeneous nowadays and all the problems mentioned before still apply (the situation in Eastern Germany and Hungary is arguably quite different today). You want to know about Poland, so it’s fine to ask about this. Answers about Hungary won’t help you. Polish academia is not so big, so you may have to wait for a while for somebody familiar with it sees this question. You can also add a bounty to attract more attention.


text:
I have fewer relevant publications than I can highlight in my application
I am applying for a tenure-track position. I am allowed to add up to five particularly relevant publications. I have four first author papers and a bunch of more or less important co-authorships, nothing that directly relates to the topic of the position or were I am only one of many co-authors.
Should I just add something to the list, or stick with four papers?
A separate publication list is included.

Just don't give the idea that you have only four publications.

I'm having a bit of trouble understanding what would be an "irrelevant' publication when applying for a tenure track position. Even one in a completely different field might have relevance, I think.

@Buffy: I've known some people who would count a publication about teaching or pedagogy as a negative publication.

@user111388, can't tell you how sad that makes me.

@Buffy: Me too..

I’d only add the four relevant ones, unless you have one that particularly speaks to your narrative about your research, etc.
The search committee can read your CV already. What they want is something they can grab onto and think about deeply, and generally I’ve found that “The applicant is a co-author in the middle of the paper” just gets it discounted.

"just gets it discounted" - that depends a lot on whoever is reviewing. In my circles having a deep network of collaborators is very, very important, and the best way to show this is having co-authored papers (good if they are with different people, best if your supervisor is not on the list).


text:
Correct typo error in the article title that published Early Access of the journal
I have a accepted  article that published under early Access.
Today, I have got the proofs from the journal to approve some changes. I have found a typo error in the title "Commutation" instead of "Communication". I have already sign the copyright form that contains the paper title.
What should i do?

Make your changes in the proofs, or at least tell the journal what changes to make. From what you describe, "Early Access" means the paper hasn't been published yet; the journal just put whatever was accepted onto their webpage. In that case the proofs are your chance to make changes - this is also the most convenient time for them.

I agree and at the same time, I would just like to add from my experience that such "minor" corrections tend to be ignored by the journal staff (despite being returned well within the time for proof corrections). Guess this heavily depends on the actual publishing house and journal.


text:
Doing a postdoc anywhere except USA even worth it toward becoming a professor?
If your main goal is to become a professor in a fairly ranked university anywhere in the developed world. Will completing a postdoc in any country except the USA (namely: Australia, China, Japan, France) be even recognized when applying for professor positions also around the world?
I read in the web that in the USA and in general, most developed countries, doctorates from anywhere else aren’t recognised, but only from their own country or from the USA.

This question seems ill posed. A postdoc anywhere is an opportunity to extend your research. If you do that effectively you can move on. A US postdoc isn't some automatic ticket to success. People are evaluated on their record, not on the place they did their postdoc(s).

I must admit the suggestion that doing a postdoc anywhere else except US would not be “recognized” is preposterous and easily debunked, unless one dismisses the (very high quality) work of the very many professors who did postdocs in Cambridge, Oxford, Max Planck, Pasteur, Paris, Rome, Vienna, and the (very long) list goes on.

The last paragraph is certainly false in Europe and all “developed” countries I know of.

See e.g., https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/75618/19607 and links therein

Not everything you read on the web is correct. Pick a "ranked university" of your choice, go to their website and look for staff bios, and you will very likely find plenty of professors who did their postdocs elsewhere. Some universities are more prestigious than others, but there are plenty of well-respected universities outside the USA (and some within the USA that are not well respected...)

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/107964/is-obtaining-a-phd-from-an-asian-country-really-a-career-suicide You might be interested

Will completing a postdoc in any country except the USA (namely: Australia, China, Japan, France) be even recognized when applying for professor positions also around the world?

If you are achieving good research results inside or outside the US, your postdoc will be valuable for your academic career.
If you are not achieving good research results inside or outside the US, your postdoc may not be valuable for your academic career.
Even if you do your PhD or postdoc in a place nobody has heard of in a country where academia is not as well-developed as elsewhere — if you have good publications in highly ranked journals, you are in a good situation.  It might be harder to achieve this when you're not in a well-established research group, and personally, I would be actually more impressed if someone achieved this while based in Bangui than while based in Toronto.

I read in the web that in the USA and in general, most developed countries, doctorates from anywhere else aren’t recognised, but only from their own country or from the USA.

This is false.  Most doctorates from serious universities are recognised.  There may be some exceptions; for example, I knew a PhD student from Russia who said her PhD was not recognised in Russia unless she translated her PhD thesis into Russian.  Since she had no intention to find academic employment in Russia, this didn't matter to her.

User gerrit has already given a general answer.
In addition, here is one more specific and more concrete data point: in German academia it is (at least in STEM fields; I don't know about other fields) typically considered to be an advantage careerwise (rather than a disadvantage) if you have gained some experience abroad (be it by a postdoc position or by a PhD).
And no, "abroad" does not mean "in the US" here; it just means, well, "abroad". (Although I should probably add that one might meet a non-negligible amount of prejudice here regarding positions in developping countries.)


text:
To apply to PhD eventually, how important is it to do an MS program with thesis if I have strong undergrad research experience?
I want to apply to PhD in chemical engineering in the US.
I have had three papers as undergrad (one first author), but my undergrad GPA was rather poor, at around 3.2. GRE scores were all over 90 percentile and recommendations should all be good. Since grades are my weakest link in my application, and I have demonstrated my ability for research, I was thinking of doing a coursework-only MS program to show that I can handle classes and exams as well before applying to top schools in my research area of interest.
This has the advantage of taking less time than an MS, and I am skeptical of how much research I would be able to get done in an MS program anyways because professors are more concerned with supervising PhD students, and I may only end up getting on a paper as a second or third author.
I have noticed that basically everyone says that to apply to good PhD programs, a thesis in the MS program is a must. The only exception is my prof; I talked to him about it, and he thinks that I would be okay with just doing a coursework MS to show that I am capable of getting a good GPA as well. Is a thesis still necessary in my case, since I have a strong research background from undergrad?

Your concern about professor focus in a research-focused MS seems out of place when you have what seems to be a lot of research experience as an undergrad - and I don't know of anywhere where undergrads get more help/focus related to research than at a research-focused grad school, even at the MS level. Yes, it can be a concern in making sure you pick a good program and a good adviser - but that's always true no matter what you do in academia!
If you just want an MS to prove you can get a good GPA, honestly that seems like an uninspiring goal to have for 2 years of work. I would be concerned for your enjoyment of the time and ability to stay motivated if research and a PhD is your interest. And being out of the research loop will not help you write a good application proposal for research, or help you identify more specifically what research you want to do and who you want to work with - which are perhaps the most potentially valuable things to get from an MS if you want to continue with research.
My other concern for you is that all that research as an undergrad looks great - while you are an undergrad. But people almost always weight recent information more heavily than older info. So if you apply to grad schools and write about all the research experience in undergrad, and how well you did in courses in an MS...that's exactly backwards, and it seems like that would make someone think you weren't really that interested in research. I mean, you started in undergrad - if you really enjoyed it realized you wanted a PhD then, how did you take 2 years off research to focus on grades?
I'm not saying your proposed plan would be a kiss of death or anything, but it seems like a non-optimal strategy. I'd suggest you think now how you will talk about the experience in a PhD application, if that is your goal, and what story will be the most compelling and intelligible. And what will truly prepare you for the best to have a great PhD experience, and beyond? Keep in mind that after you are admitted to the program, grades only matter in that you need to not fail classes - but beyond that, no one seems to care - not for finishing the PhD, and not for your career beyond.

Thank you for the detailed answer. However, I was planning to take only 1 year for the courses, since most coursework-based MS programs seem to be completed in only a year (and maybe a summer) if done full-time.

@W.Dafaq Doing it in 1 year certainly does help cut down on the time cost,   but it doesn't necessarily help with the other facet of the GPA - which is that everyone knows that keeping up a good GPA is harder when you are balancing both coursework and research, so it would dilute some of the signaling ability of the GPA alone. I think otherwise my suggestions are unchanged, and perhaps only slightly softened with the reduced time. It would still be a whole degree/year with no additional research experience to point to. Again, not death - just not ideal.


text:
Is it possible to complete the last year of a German Diplom in another university if ineligible in original university?
I have a friend who was studying civil engineering in Dresden, Germany. He somehow got a very... VERY bad case of electronic addiction (he would just play online games and only procrastinate) and he lost connection to reality. He also had to go to rehab for this.
He is doing a Diplom, he has to write his final dissertation. He has over 20 semesters in the degree, it was a bit of a start and stop. This is a German 'diplom' meaning it is equal to a masters' so he holds no previous degrees.
Now he is ready to do the last part of his degree but he has been waiting for a decision from the university as to if he can continue his degree.
My question is, if this decision from the university is a "no", is it possible for him to complete his education? I mean is it possible for him to enroll in another university only for the last year. I think it is not possible in Germany to do this (something to do with having done too many semesters already), but maybe in another country.

In general, failing a degree prevents being enrolled for the same (or a sufficiently similar) degree at other universities in Germany. However, the definition of "same" (or "similar") is up to the enrolling university, and I've seen wildly different practices. Also, it sounds like there is a serious medical component here, which usually allows special dispensation. In particular, if he was never actually exmatriculated, he should be able to finish his original degree (especially if only the final thesis is missing).

But really, this so much depends on the specific situation that it's impossible to give a definitive answer here.

Your friend seems to be very lucky, as the the civil-engineering diplom programme in Dresden is one of the very few in Germany that did not switch to bachelor/master yet (source). So if he did not automatically fail his studies due to some rule, he is likely to be able continue almost where he left them. For details, you would really have to check the university’s guidelines.
If this is not possible for some reason, there are a few universities where the diplom programmes have not fully ended yet, but I would judge it unlikely that any of them allows for new students to enrol, even if they only need to write a thesis.

More generally, there is a general German law (Hochschulrahmengesetz § 15 (3)), that allows students to transfer accomplished achievements:

Zum Nachweis von Studien- und Prüfungsleistungen soll ein Leistungspunktsystem geschaffen werden, das auch die Übertragung erbrachter Leistungen auf andere Studiengänge derselben oder einer anderen Hochschule ermöglicht.
(For certifying studying or examination accomplishments, a point-based system system shall be created that allows to transfer accomplishments to other degree programmes of the same or another university.)

authors: Ирина Карпова


text:
What to do if predatory journal won't withdraw paper after acceptance?
Last year, I’ve started an independent research in hopes to be published one day.
Fast forwarding a year (a couple of weeks ago in fact), I have finished my manuscript in which I was planning to submit it to an open access journal called Journal of Emerging Infectious Disease with OMICS. At the time, I did not know that OMICS was a predatory journal (after seeing Beall's list) and I’m at the final stages before it get published.
To clarify, my manuscript has been accepted for publishing BUT during that time, I found out that it was a predatory journal and requested that I retract my manuscript from this journal.  I did not sign anything or pay anything to OMICS. What happened was that they sent me the acceptance letter saying my manuscript got accepted for publishing. They gave me 48 hours to request any changes to the final project of the manuscript before publishing. In that 48 hours, I found out that they were a predatory journal and messaged them accordingly. At this point, I did not sign anything entailing that I sent copyrights to them or payed any fees and it's not published yet.
They advised me that they have made the DOI and it is impossible for them to retract. At this point, I did advise them that I will not approve anything going forward and that they appreciate my request to retract from the journal.
Given the story that was mentioned above, I was wondering if you have any advise on going forward and if possible, see if there is a possibility that my manuscript will not be published in this predatory journal? I was extremely shocked that these type of practices by journals existed and extremely glad I caught this before accepting anything to be published. I greatly appreciate any advise you will give and hope to hear from you soon.

Also see What should I do if I submitted an article to a predatory journal?

@user57188 any new updates? What happened to your case?

There are three issues here.  Have you signed a publication agreement, have you paid them, and has the paper actually been published yet?

If all three have happened, then you are probably stuck.  Retracting a published paper is a big deal, since it involves
changing the permanent scholarly record, and you can't do this just
because you regret the choice of journal.
If you have signed and paid, but the paper has not been published yet, then legally they have the right to publish it but you may
have a chance.  An ethical publisher would not publish a paper over
the last-minute objections of the authors.  (Of course the publisher
would be legitimately upset with the authors if there wasn't a
compelling reason for the withdrawal, but they wouldn't insist on
publishing anyway.)  Unfortunately, there's no reason to expect that
a predatory publisher will behave ethically, but it can't hurt to
ask.
If you have signed but not paid, then you have some leverage.  Legally they may be able to demand payment, but actually suing you
would be more trouble than it is worth.  They probably don't want to
publish the paper without being paid, so you may be able to negotiate
a withdrawal.  On the other hand, it's conceivable that they would
publish the paper in order to strengthen their legal/ethical case for
getting paid.
If you have not yet signed, then there's nothing they can do, since publishing the paper without your permission would be a
copyright violation.  You should be polite but firm, and they will
have to accept that you have withdrawn the submission.

I was going to say much the same except the last paragraph. It's entirely possible that a predatory journal might take the risk of publishing without the copyright transfer in hand. If they are overseas from you and not in an accessible place, they might take the risk that you will not spend the money to travel to their location to sue them. Can you afford to fly to India or Malaysia where the laws may be very different about copyright transfers and statutory damages? If you sue them in the US, you may be totally unable to collect if they are remote or a remote court invalidates your judgement

@Bill: I suspect that a  predatory journal housed far away from the "academic first world" is afraid not so much of a formal lawsuit but of the negative publicity that comes with such a profoundly dissatisfied customer.  In order to function properly (i.e., profitably), predatory journals work hard to cultivate a veneer of legitimacy.  Getting accused of copyright violation by someone who sounds like they know what they're talking about and is willing to keep talking would be very bad for their business.  I would expect them to back down.

OP says "in the last stages", so if the journal is indeed predatory, it's likely that they make sure the signing is done at an earlier stage. (For one of my papers, I signed my copyright transfer agreement and few months after it had been published...)

Hello Everyone, thank you so much for all the advise&let me clarify on my end what had happened. Firstly, i did not sign anything or payed anything of some sort to OMICS. What happened was that they sent me the acceptance letter saying my manuscript got accepted for publishing. They gave me 48 hours to request any changes to the final project of the manuscript before publishing. In that 48 hours, i found out that they were a predatory journal and messaged them accordingly. At this point, i did not sign anything entailing that i sent copyrights to them or payed any fees & its not published yet

I hope that i clarified any confusions that may have occurred on my end and i would greatly appreciate any advise going forward and what i need to do to successfully withdrawal my manuscript from publishing.


text:
Background review in a multidisciplinary paper
I am writing a paper which will include concepts from statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, relativity, information theory, and thermodynamics. Potential readers will probably not be familiar with all the different fields. I need to find the right balance between assuming that the reader knows all of the concepts, and explaining all the concepts from the beginning.
Any tips on how to find this balance?

This sounds interesting. I'd like to get a copy of your paper when you are finished.

I'll link it here when we are done ：）

Write the introduction to the paper last. Start with the content: the data, the proofs, the discussion of pseudocode, whatever it is. Then think about your target audience. Who read the kinds of journals you are hoping to publish in? Who attends the kinds of conferences you are hoping to present in? Then add whatever perambulatory context those people need to understand the paper. Hoping to accommodate everyone who might be interested is hopeless.
Let's say you want to make your paper accessible to general knowledge physicists. You can assume that they all have a good understanding of undergraduate physics. You probably can't assume that they've kept up with all the coursework they did as PhD students, but the kinds of things covered in the first year or so of classes should be pretty common across disciplines. You're reminding people of the content from those courses, not teaching them. But anything that's at an advance graduate level or research level probably isn't something someone is going to know, unless that's their field.
If this is being published in a journal on GR, you can give less but deeper GR context because readers of GR journals know more about that. Spend more time and less depth presenting the thermo or QM topics.

Proposed solution.
Add an appendix. Appendices are designed to allow authors freedom to go into levels of detail that are not appropriate in the main section of the paper.
The best policy is to assume the reader is familiar with the concept (if they're not, then can always read the detailed description in the appendix, after all), and reintroduce the relevant conclusions necessary for the paper.


text:
Best license for an applied research project
I am looking to incorporate a license in the source code of a research project of University A, in which I was the last contributor. Historically the computer-science school has not forced researchers to publish the code with any specific license; they mainly care about the ranking affected by publications, and releasing the code publicly is suggested but not mandatory. Obviously researchers cannot sell the code as the commercial use is reserved to the institution (although software patents are very rare in my country).
Given that the project could benefit from a dissertation that I have been developing on University B, what is the best license that fits for this case? I personally prefer to release the new improved version in a compiled format, and keep the new source code private, so GPL is not an option for me. Is the MIT license a better candidate? (It says “and/or sell copies of the Software” though.) The project in University A is an applied research based on state of the art that have existed freely for a long time.

Yes. MIT should be the first license anyone considers these days for an open source project, and you should choose against it only if you have a good reason to. MIT is very permissive, and so others are allowed to read your code and learn from it.
With many of the copy-left licenses, due to their derivative works clauses, many people in places like national labs are not allowed to even read GPL-licensed source code because their lab doesn't use a GPL-compatible license and thus any "derivative work" would be license breaking (I know a few whose lawyers have been very adamant about this). Thus, you should think of GPL as "closed source" because, except in the GPL-only circles, lots of people cannot ethically read your code and work from it. The GPL license is made to make sure people contribute code back, and thus if this isn't your purpose you should avoid it. LGPL at least lets people link to it safely, so though still closed in some sense, it's not as bad.
Along with MIT, BSD is a very good and popular permissive license. The no-endorsement clause means that if someone uses your code to do something, they can't use your name. A lot of academics closely guard their name as their main product, so in some sense this added protection may be useful.


text:
Is there a professional etiquette regarding jackets in academia?
So, I’m sure we all know about the stereotype of the professor in the tweed jacket. Based on a cursory web search, it looks like the stereotype started because tweed was a relatively cheap but warm material, and professors were a relatively poorly paid class of professionals, so they kept wearing them until the elbows wore out and they patched them.
I’m aware that these sorts of things can get a degree of momentum of their own, though, so I was wondering if there was any etiquette in modern academia regarding jackets? I’m a master’s student who is planning on doing a PhD afterwards with the intention of getting into academia; would buying a tweed jacket to try to look professional be viewed as presumptuous or anything?

Flip flops and a floral shirt then... :). Still think it will be location dependant are there differences between the coasts...

That's Harris Tweed (tm), dude.

I think it wildly depends on the field, too. From my experience in math, you won't see most people wearing a jacket (as in, they dress more casually). The exceptions I can think of are either due to a personal style (usually towards less casual, though there are some people frequently wearing loose shorts and the like) or more strict requirements of managerial positions. One professor I know was wearing a suit every day as long as I had known him up until the point he stopped being the dean --- I think I have not seen him in a suit since.

Also, I have never given a talk (other than a defence) or a class wearing anything more fancy than a t-shirt (and a sweater depending on the temperature --- which I would always take off after warming up myself) and a pair of jeans. I don't think I have strayed from the standard in the slightest. But again, this is very field specific.

@tomasz, and also place specific. Israel is generally fairly informal when it comes to dress, I think. But I was going to guess, first, that you were at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

@Buffy: that is certainly true. I'm not sure if I have seen anyone wearing a suit except for haredim and the security guards near the prime minister's office... But I was also referring to my experience in Poland and at international conferences.

@Buffy: And I should mention that in my alma mater, this varies between disciplines. I don't think you would catch a professor of law or economics without so much as a dress shirt.

@tomasz, I have a CS colleague who teaches at Technion. I only see him at international meetings, but he generally wore a jacket. Not a full suit, but not sweater and jeans. He is probably older than you, of course. Of course, without a (tweed?) jacket, where do you carry your pipe???? ;-)

@Buffy: Sure. More senior people tend to dress a bit less casually (I guess most wear buttoned shirts, though not dress shirts, for instance), but not enough for more casual dress to be considered unusual, or a breach of etiquette (well, as far as I know).

Here is my answer to a slightly different question.  But, in my answer, I went into detail about the dressing norms I saw across two graduate degrees in the North East of the US.  In my second degree, I was older, concurrently working as a high school science teacher, routinely wore button-down shirts, khakis, and sportcoats, and was often mistaken for faculty.  https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/122795/dressing-down-to-impress-in-academic-settings/122827#122827

Simple, smart, clean clothes
Stick to conventional office clothing, if you want to convey efficiency. Do not waste money on expensive clothes to impress, but also do not look shabby or unkempt if you can avoid it.
You will (or should be!) judged on the quality of your work, and not on your clothing, unless it is dirty or outstandingly ill-fitting.
I am a professor of medicine. I am glad you are asking your question here, anonymously and you are not one of my students asking me in person: I would rebuke you for wasting time thinking about trivialities, and perhaps even for thinking I am so vain as to spend my every last penny on clothes! I can certainly afford far, far more expensive clothes, car and home than I have, but I don't want to.
When presenting at an external meeting, though, try to look smart. This does not have to be expensive. Wear the clothes your teachers wear in such occasions. If you don't know what they are going to wear (say tomorrow), then make an estimate and "round up". If you are slightly overdressed, nobody will notice. If you are markedly under-dressed, it might attract unfavourable attention.
In my field, the most cost-effective approach for students who don't want to spend much is to have a standard interview suit, and use it for presentations in front of big groups or external audiences, and for interviews. And then stop thinking about it. Work on your research instead.
By the way, my personal approach for myself? I always wear black trousers. They are interchangeable. Any time I need to give a presentation, I use any one of a handful of black suit jackets I keep in various places. It vaguely looks like a suit, in the sense that nobody notices it isn't, and nobody cares. The moment you start to get different coloured suits, you are in for a world of expensive fiddling around where you have to have the particular matching set, and damage to one part of one thing messes up a lot of money in one go. I save my brain cell
time for funner things than colour-matching, like StackExchange.

What is conventional office clothing and whether this ranks for academics strongly depends on country and field. In my field, you would certainly be overdressed with it, same goes for wearing a suit at a presentation.

I don't know if I'd call it an etiquette, but there are certainly different ways to dress in different subfields of disciplines. If you attend an academic conference and notice such things you will see the variety by clique. As for tweed, my partner and I wore it as students (bought second-hand in Edinburgh) and we were mostly viewed as the eccentrics we are, as far as I know. Dressing decently generally shows respect for others, though a few people find it an affront to their class consciousness. Dressing expensively can be seen as distancing from those who can't afford it. The main thing is to be confident that you are presenting yourself as who you really are, so then if there are any concerns you can hopefully laugh them off or explain your dress as a matter of personal taste and/or a concern for general aesthetics.

When I was a masters student (management science) at Imperial College 50 years ago, I chose to wear a suit and tie. Fortunately for me, I must have had other characteristics that compensated for the obvious eccentricity of my dress, so I survived.
I am now a PhD student (statistics) at a leading UK university. I have seen no evidence that any of the academic staff, including full professors, know what a tweed jacket is, let alone would wear a jacket of that or any other kind in their daily work.
From what I know of Australia, I would suppose that it tends to be less formal than the UK.
My conclusion is that you are likely to be overdressed in daily academic life if you wear a jacket. That might or might not be a disadvantage: a friend of mine claimed that his professional career took off because his taste in collars (stiff and high) meant that people remembered him, but he did of course have outstanding professional skills as well.
It all turns on whether you think people will think of you as "that weird guy who wears a jacket all the time" or as "that brilliant guy, you know, the one who wears a jacket."

As it happens, I was also a student at Imperial College 50 years ago. A student in suit and tie would have really stood out.