text:
Do most customers choose predatory publishers knowingly?
In this comment, it was claimed:

Predatory publishers thrive because when you apply for a job or a grant, few read your papers. They check the papers you pinpoint and the number of publcations. That's where these publishers step on and that's why people choose them. Not because they don't know. Of course there might be a few accidentally doing it, like the OP in this question, but most of the people who are in academia for a while select them only to increase faster their publication list.

By contrast, I cannot remember a single case of somebody reporting their experience with such publisher on this very site that submitted a paper to a predatory publisher knowingly (except for exposing them). Now, there is no denying that there is a strong bias here since people who intentionally choose a predatory publisher are less likely to admit it or ask questions here.
So, I am curious: Is there any data or good argument to support the claim that people who publish with predatory publishers are aware that they are not publishing with a regular scientific publisher?

Imo the comment merely states that the authors are aware that these publishers trade a lower standard of quality for a faster review process and a higher acception rate. They are not necessarily aware of the "predatory" label. And low-impact factor journals are not all predatory either.

@T.Verron: I disagree with your interpretation of that comment. Anyway, this question does not depend on this. Also, I am aware of the distinction between a low-impact journal and a predatory one – this question is exclusively about predatory ones.

I can only add anecdotal information. One of the people on my team regularly and enthusiastically passes on to me the automated "solicitations" from "journals" that (to me) are obviously fraudulent, asking if we should write the review or whatever that the "journal" requests; fully believing the offer to be sincere, in spite of me repeatedly pointing out that the "journal" is fake. English is her third language and I can only assume that the obvious red flags are not as obvious to her. Without my input, she would certainly have submitted articles unknowingly.

Indeed, I was refering to low standard, fast review, high acceptance rate journals. Besides, lists like Beall's list reports "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers", so (in my perspective at least) the term predatory can be ambiguous. It's true that inexperienced authors might be inclined to submit to a journal sending repeated invitations (probable predatory), but I think everyone most probably has a more experienced colleague to get advise from. If the (very interesting) data in the very nice answer provided below show something is that

... new authors have higher chance to pick a "predatory" or low quality journal. But they don't show their motivation. It could be because "I can publish quick and boost my publication list" or because "I received an invitation but I didn't know they are low quality". But I think we are in an environment where we can investigate the quality of the journal we select either by asking our colleagues like @iayork or by searching more thoroughly the right lists. Sorry, but I still can't exclude the first motivation...

And to end my mumbling... most biomed works have several authors. It can't be that all of them have no publications at all...

There is some circumstantial evidence against the claim that most people who publish with predatory publishers are aware that they are not publishing with a regular scientific publisher.

Many authors of papers published in predatory journals are inexperienced with academic publication. From [1]:

The majority of authors who publish in predatory journals have no other publications, whereas the second largest group consists of authors with fewer than five journal publications elsewhere; very few authors have published more than 10 articles. In contrast, the histogram reveals that group 2 authors, those who publish in OA journals that have a robust review process and subsequently rejected Bohannon's false submission, generally have a stronger publication record. With the exception of a few new authors, most group 2 authors have published journal articles previously; in fact, some authors have published more than 30 articles.

(Group-1 journals are open-access journals with low-quality or no peer review; group-2 journals are open-access journals that have more rigorous peer-review process than the journals in group 1. All are biomedical-science journals.)
Many prospective authors are unfamiliar with predatory journals and unaware of predatory practices in the academic publishing industry.
In a survey of 145 medical and veterinary science participants in a scientific writing workshop [2]:

Thirty-four of 142 (23.9%) respondents were aware of the DOAJ; 7/143 (4.8%) were aware of Beall’s list, 33/143 (23.0%) were aware of the term “predatory journal”, and 24/142 (16.9%) were aware of the Science article about predatory journals.

In another (very small) survey of U.S.-based authors who published in criminal-justice journals on Beall’s list [3]:

Just under half (44%; 4 respondents) of the respondents had heard of the “Scholarly Open Access List” and one-third of the respondents had heard of the term “Predatory Journal.” Furthermore, all but one of the respondents was not aware that they had published an article in a journal associated with the predatory journal list. One respondent questioned the accuracy of their association with a predatory journal, and stated

… should not be on the list. They had more referees than any other journal I’ve pursued and I’m [the] author of 20 peer reviewed papers (sic).

References:
[1]: Xia J, Harmon JL, Connolly KG, Donnelly RM, Anderson MR, Howard HA. Who publishes in “predatory” journals?. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 2015 Jul 1;66(7):1406-17. DOI: 10.1002/asi.23265
[2]: Christopher MM, Young KM. Awareness of “Predatory” open-access journals among prospective veterinary and medical authors attending scientific writing workshops. Frontiers in Veterinary Science. 2015;2. DOI: 10.3389/fvets.2015.00022
[3]: Noga-Styron KE, Olivero JM, Britto S. Predatory Journals in the Criminal Justices Sciences: Getting our Cite on the Target. Journal of Criminal Justice Education. 2016 Jul 8:1-8. DOI: 10.1080/10511253.2016.1195421

Good answer although quite surprising to me. Your references are a few years old, and since then at least in my environment, people are much more aware of predatory publishers than they used to be only two to three years back.

Considering there are hundreds of thousands of papers published in predatory journals, it stretches belief that all the authors of those papers aren't aware of what they're doing. Increasingly, it seems like there's a supply and demand situation here: academics need to get published (demand), so predatory publishers provide the means to do so (supply). See this article by the New York Times about it, and references within (especially this one).
This article has a section about big pharmaceutical companies that publish with OMICS, a publisher widely regarded as predatory. The author was not able to ascertain if the pharmaceutical companies are aware of OMICS' shady reputation, but finds it's not impossible that they are, and are just looking for quick and easy ways to publish. For example, Pfizer published an article about the costs (in dollars) of severe back pain, which would probably have been rejected by the leading medical journals because of cost studies are notoriously unreliable.
This article claims "[some German] scientists appear to have taken advantage of the lack of editorial oversight ... to report their results quickly and without the risk of rejection."
As one might guess it's not an easy topic to get accurate data on, because nobody is going to claim they knowingly published in a predatory journal because they wanted to report their results quickly and without risk of rejection.


text:
Advisor's bad decision results in co-authored mediocre publication. How to prevent this from ruining my career?
I  happen to be involved in this project in which my advisor has made such a bad decision that the result turned out to be mediocre/uninteresting. While I am not the lead author, I will be one of the co-author for this. In that case, why should I endorse for my advisor's bad decision, when I don't have any means to change the course of this project? I know I won't look as bad as the first author, but still this will be one of my publication. I doubt my advisor will say something like this in the rec: "Oh yes, the bad publication was my idea, my student just followed my direction." How can I prevent this from ruining my future career?

Just because a result is uninteresting does not mean that it is unpublishable / unworthy.  This is what happens in research!

Personally, I can't imagine that being coauthor on an uninteresting paper could "ruin your future career" or even damage it significantly; a paper is a paper, so I think at worst it has a very small positive value.  To actually be a negative, the paper would have to be horrifically wrong or plagiarized or something.
Also, not to question your judgment, but you do probably have a lot less experience in the field than your advisor.  It's just possible that the project is more interesting to the community than it seems to you; when you're deep in a project, it's often hard to see the context that it fits in to.  Consider discussing the project with other researchers in the field (check with your advisor first to make sure you're not giving away too many details too soon), and see what they think.
Even if the project is really worthless, as I said, I don't see it actively damaging your career.  Just wrap it up, get it out the door, and start working on something more interesting!

My advisor would say whatever him do is interesting and he did that all the time.in the end, it's student work for him wasting time on his trivial topic. I can only expect more trivial topic coming from my advisor than anyone else.

So stop whining and find a new advisor.

As Nate Eldredge wrote in his final sentence, stop worrying about the past project and start thinking about your next project.
You will be judged much more strongly based on your more recent work so just make sure that your upcoming work is more interesting. You cannot change the past so don't spend time worrying about it. You should spend your time on your future.
One uninteresting publication is not going to sink you unless the science is bad. If it shows you do not know how to do research that might hurt you. If the science is really bad, you might consider removing your name from the paper but since you only complain about the results being uninteresting, let it be and move on to something better.

Judging by your past five questions (in fact, every question that you asked on here), you clearly have issues with your advisor.
I doubt that your advisor is actually that bad. No one can be that bad, and survive academia. It is most likely the product of your not actually caring about your advisor's interests (and vice versa), and the lack of communication between the two of you.
If there is still some time left, I recommend that you seek out another advisor instead of ranting about your advisor on academia.SE, which doesn't actually solve your problems in real-life.
If you are close to graduating, I suggest that you "pay your dues" to your advisor; he let you use his lab and equipment, not to mention granting you access to his expertise, for the past 5+ years. The least you can do is to "suck it up" and pretend to care about your advisor's interests (and put some work into it). After all, you'll need your advisor's letter to stay in academia!

While other ppl can use big toy in the lab, My advisor treat me like a office lady helping him do all the data processing so my name can hang somewhere in the paper. My advisor is all new but he act like a boss and create knowledge that don't sell.

Any chance of a goo rec suck it up?

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Is it acceptable to use mainly websites in a literature review?
I'm writing a literature review for a project and due to the nature of the project (website and database) I haven't used any books etc. I have used a number of websites to get information on subjects such as hosting a website and a database using Azure, is it acceptable to use websites in a literature review?

Why do you think a website would NOT be acceptable in a literature review?

Because of the word literature. Look at the answers below

I think the better question would be "How can I identify reasonable websites to use in my literature review?" At which point Penguin_Knight's answer is perfect.

Website or not website is not the point. Printed journal articles are favored over website because i) they are peer-reviewed, carrying some degree of authority, ii) they are archived and retrievable, with payment or free of charge, and iii) once published, the contents do not change until they are formally revised, rebuked, or retracted.
So, it would mean that when citing websites, a few more steps need to be done to increase their worthiness. First, you'd need to assess the credibility of the website and be able to critically evaluate the contents. In journal articles this step is done to some degree but in websites you're on your own. Second, you may need to do most of the archiving (including downloading, dating, and archiving the data sets you may download, or printing and dating website into PDFs, etc.) or use website archiving to save a cross-section of the websites. There are free services like http://perma.cc and http://www.webcitation.org available.
Once they are archived, in your paper, it is a good practice to cite both original link and the archived link as well as the date you accessed the original link. For details, consult the project leader or editor. Some journals specialized in publishing Internet-related research such as Journal of Medical Internet Research may also provide useful format-related examples in their guide to the authors.

You can definitely put into references the official user documentation of your web server and database engine, as this software have not been just invented by you from scratch.
While websites can also be used in references, it seems to me that you may need more in depth coverage. Try to Google and find some real publications. If the topic seems too broad, it should be some reviews. If there is a Wikipedia article, check which references it uses.

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


text:
How many times can you present the same material at different conferences before it becomes stale?
I just finished my PhD in Mathematics and am in between my PhD and postdoc positions.  I was very fortunate to have the ability to present my research to seminars and conferences over the last couple of years. My complete results all reduce to a standard storyline and I feel like I have spoken about it to various audiences a lot, especially the specialists in my field. I have a conference coming up with the specialists again and I am a bit concerned about giving a talk that is just a minor mutation from the talks before.
My question is therefore:

How long can one talk about the same material in the conference loop until the talk becomes stale?
Is a repertoire of multiple research talks expected of a recent PhD?

I have removed the questions not directly related to "overexposure" - please post them as separate questions.

My PI still talks about isodesmic reactions; it's the central figure of our group's research. If you have a specific interest, do new things with it, but keep talking about what drives you.

How long can one talk about the same material in the conference loop until the talk becomes stale?

As other answers have pointed out, certainly the answer is not going to be "N months" for any value of N.  Here are some things to think about:
1) You say that "my complete results all reduce to a standard storyline".  Yes, but that's true for entire subfields of mathematics.  I like to tell the story about how I heard a close friend in grad school give a talk about his thesis work just as he graduated.  I heard him speak again when he came back to visit almost a year later.  As we were catching up afterwards, I somehow let on my surprise that he gave essentially the same talk both times.  He looked at me in disbelief and told me "There was hardly a single result in common between those two talks".  It turned out that -- not withstanding that we were both arithmetic geometers -- I simply didn't have enough knowledge in his subfield of speciality to penetrate far enough beyond the standard storyline -- Galois representations, big rings, some filtered semilinear algebra, perhaps an R = T theorem... -- to see what was new about the second talk, despite the fact that an expert would say that it was all new.  I have found this to be one of the more profound experiences of my professional life and I tell it often in a variety of contexts: e.g. I mentioned it to a linear algebra student who said that she was largely following the lectures but sometimes was having trouble understanding the differences between what we were doing from week to week.  When you tell an undergraduate a parable, it's probably safest to spill the beans and tell them the moral: I recognized her perception as an indication that she was farther away from engaging with the material than she herself realized.  In your case the moral is admittedly a little less clear, but I think that part of it is that we can build a highly successful academic career by hewing largely to a "standard storyline": the devil, and thus also the glory, is in the details.
2) So I have a question: is your concern about giving cognate talks or literally giving essentially the same talk over and over again?  Let me assume the latter.  It's harder to know how often you should simply repeat yourself, and I am wary of giving advice because I know myself to be close to one end of the spectrum: I don't usually travel around and gave the same talk multiple times.  The one time I really remember the feeling of repeating a talk more than once was when I was on the tenure track job market, when I did it four times in a couple of months.  The last time I gave that talk, it indeed did feel stale and I remember not getting much in the way of feedback from the audience...and then I got offered the job.  I am much more likely to want to take every given talk as an opportunity to speak about what's on my mind that month or that week: this is not necessarily a good thing, but I try to make it work.
I think though that you are rightly concerned about giving the same talk to largely the same audience of specialists.  When that starts happening, might you not simply be speaking too much?  One thing to do is look around: if you're in the same group of specialists, they are also speaking frequently, I guess.  Do you observe others around you -- at a similar career stage and also those who are more senior -- largely "repeating themselves" in the talks they give?  (Sometimes a really good talk is worth repeating.  I remember fondly having heard Manjul Bhargava talk about the "15 Theorem" at least twice, probably three times.  Each time I grasped the picture more fully and thus liked it even more.  Obviously Manjul could have talked about other work; he chose to revisit this amazingly beautiful well, and his insistence on promoting his own good taste has had such a positive role in influencing later mathematical work, including some of mine.)
Here's a piece of advice: when someone invites you to give a talk, before you accept or decline, ask them what they have in mind for you to speak of (be ready to follow up immediately with a list of options).  If you think that the person who is inviting you to speak has heard you speak about the same topic before, or if a lot of the audience feels the same way, ask them explicitly about that.
Another thing to do is to consciously update your "standard talk" to reflect recent changes in your thinking about your research.  You're right that a talk is a story, and the story can change even if the core results remain the same.  Reinterpreting your past successes in terms of what you're doing presently and are trying to do in the very near future is a big part of research.  I have heard James Maynard speak about bounded gaps between primes; I would gladly hear him speak again, even if I were a seamless expert on his paper on the topic (note the subjunctive!) just to hear at the end of his talk what he is thinking about now.

Is a repertoire of multiple research talks expected of a recent PhD?

Multiple disjoint talks?  No, probably not.  It is not too soon to start working on a "non-research talk", i.e., a much friendlier broader talk that you could give to undergraduates, but I think that's not what you're speaking about.  I do think that having multiple projects is a good thing even for a young mathematician nowadays, but one does not want to sacrifice breadth at the expense of depth.  If you have basically one research talk that you've given half a dozen times or more over a period of a couple of years, by now that one talk is probably really good.  I would concentrate on further refining and updating that one great talk rather than just feeling you should start from scratch in order to show "multiplicity".  (Again, I am conscious of being unusually lured by the siren song of multiplicity.  Oh, well: we all need to identify the good career advice which is not good for us.)

It's important also to look at your audience. If you're likely to be giving the same talk to two audiences that overlap significantly, then the time between talks is less important than the fact that the audiences will perceive the talk as 'stale'.
For example, you might give a talk at a general interest conference, and then a slightly modified version of it at a workshop with specialists, many of whom may not have attended the general interest conference. That would be fine. You might then go on the colloquium circuit and give the talk at venues with only small overlap with the specialist group.
But if you gave the same (or similar) talk to the same (or similar) audience more than once, that would be a problem.

Excellent point. It's OK to give the same talk when there is little overlap between audiences (either because of geography, or because the main topic of the conference is very different).

A recently minted PhD would not typically be expected to have multiple seminar-length talks at her disposal, because in general the PhD work should be presentable as an integrated whole. However, once one starts getting substantially into the postdoc phase and beyond, one should have more than one research talk available, as there is greater diversity in one's portfolio of work.
With respect to "staleness," this is also somewhat of a concern, but only partially. Research progresses in time, but that doesn't mean the older work is made irrelevant (or unimportant for audiences to know about). However, you should revisit your talks periodically (before you give them, of course) to determine what is still "fresh," and what is already well-known enough to gloss over in less detail.
As for assigning a "shelf life," that really depends a lot on your field. Some fields progress much faster than others, so a blanket statement such as "never talk about results that are more than a year old" is unlikely to be helpful.

Presumably you can improve the talk each time you give it. Even if the core mathematical results are the same, you could perhaps ...

Make the notation cleaner or more consistent
Improve the motivation — explain better why your results are important
Add pictures/diagrams to illustrate the ideas.
Add new example uses of your results.
Add new connections to other results, especially very recent ones.
Add new ideas about future extensions.
Add some related open problems.
Add some discussion of attempted solutions that didn’t work.
Remove material that you’ve found to be incomprehensible except to a few specialists, based on previous talks.

For conference talks, this shouldn't be too much of a problem - fully outlining a complicated paper is very difficult in ten minutes, and often leaves listeners confused as you've tried to cover too much information in too little time. I've given a few talks on my dissertation work, which is based on relaxing a particular assumption in competitive strategy (that substitute technologies are mutually exclusive), by altering how a simple utility function is modeled (decomposing it into a summation). Trying to get through all the implications of that in ten minutes, as simple as the core idea is, is just too much. But focusing on a single point can still get audiences excited.
I've given a talk on the tension between creating the single best technology, or making a technology that is still useful even if a buyer has already adopted another technology. That is 2-3 pages of the paper, but is enough of an idea that the audience can walk away knowing they've learned something new, and can think about things in a new way. Another talks about indirect complementarity - where two technologies appear to be substitutes, but behave as compliments in the presence of a third technology. That's another few pages, but another single point that audiences can take away, knowing they've learned something. A third presentation is the empirical test of my idea, which is context specific, and requires a bit of explanation to highlight 1-2 more key points. Each of these is part of the same story line, but each still represents a distinct takeaway - and if your audience takes away one new thing from each talk, that's quite the accomplishment compared to most talks. This is especially true if talking to specialists, who know enough of the background for you to focus on mechanisms in isolation, with some depth, to convey something new. For a general audience, I would still think about how to concisely convey the big picture, and then focus in on one piece of information you want to be sure they get out of the presentation, even if it's not to the same depth as you could get to with a specialist audience. This allows you to keep things fresh over time, and also ensures you understand the phenomena enough to communicate the component pieces clearly.

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


text:
What percentage of PhD candidates drop out in computer science?
I'd like to know what percentage of PhD candidates in Computer Science does not graduate with a PhD and thus drops out of their PhD program.
This number probably varies quite a bit for different countries (e.g., in Continental Europe one usually has to have a Master's degree before being eligible to start with a PhD, while in the US one can "drop out" with a Master's degree) and possibly also for different sub-fields; I'm mostly interested about German speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and PhD candidates with a focus in Algorithms and/or Theory, but any answer "x% in this subfield in that country/at that university" are also welcome.
Background story:
Currently thinking hard whether I should go for a PhD in Algorithms at a German speaking university and not a 100% sure if it is the right thing for me. A professor (not the one I'd do the PhD with) urged me to at least give it a try and said that there is always the possibility to drop out if it isn't working out.

I don't really see how your question will help you in your background story decision. Knowing whether 30% or 70% of total strangers drop out of similar-but-different programs in similar-but-different countries will yield a very weakly informative prior at best. Better to think about what you want/need to do.

It's worth distinguishing between different sorts of dropping out.  One Ph.D. student might love their academic work and do very well at it but decide to drop out to run a start-up or accept an exciting and high-paying job in industry.  Another Ph.D. student may dislike their academic work, do poorly, and eventually leave to take a pedestrian job they could have started immediately after college.  These are radically different experiences, which shouldn't be conflated.

While I agree that knowing the information may not be useful for the background story, I disagree that the question is too broad.  There maybe a nice comprehensive study out there that has collected and analyized the data. I don't think an answer needs to be a book, nor do I think we need tones of answers (I.e., one for each university and department).

The Times Higher Education looked at PhD completion rates in the UK. In the UK, PhD programs are nominally 3 years long, and the Times reported that, averaged across all fields, 70% of students obtain a PhD within 7 years. They predict that 80% of students who start a PhD in the UK will obtain one within 25 years. There are some data for MIT students which shows completion rates asymptote at around 80% after about 8-10 years. There is a fair amount of variability across fields in how quickly the asymptote is reached (e.g., the average PhD in Business is short compared to Medicine), but in all fields about 80% of students obtain a PhD. I was not able to find any numbers for German universities or CS specifically.
These numbers, however, leave out the substantial number of students who stick out grad school because they do not want to "fail". While trying out grad school might sound good in theory, just make sure you are the type of person willing to drop out if it is not right for you.

"leaver out the substantial number of students who stick out grad school" - so they just stick around until eventually a PhD certificate finds its way on their desk?

@mort the people who are "sticking it out" continue to work at their PhD, often harder than the people who want to continue in research, but they tend to hate (maybe too strong of a word) a good portion of their life. It is kind of like training for a marathon. Some people give up on their first training run, others enjoy the training and the race, despite it being hard work, and go on to do other marathons, and a third group complete the training and run the race despite hating it. Most of the third group never run again, but a few change their mind when they get to the finish line.

The completion percent will vary between universities.
For USA, I can introduce you to the NCES ( National Center for Education Statistics).  All univeristies are required to report information each year about the university students, faculty, salaries, demographics, degrees, retention, etc.
There are many data tools within NCES.  You might find the IPEDS tool (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) most helpful for your question.  It allows you to pick specific universities and examine data.
I do not know if the countries you mention have similar data collection systems.
Many students complete the course work but do not finish the degree.  This is know as All But Dissertation (ABD).   I don't know if you want to count these folks as they haven't officially dropped out.  However they have not ( and several will not) complete their dissertation.

As far as I can tell, the needed data are absent. At the University level I can see how many graduate students enrolled in a given year and how many graduate degrees were issued in a year, but some students may get multiple graduate degrees (e.g., an MD-PhD student who gets an MS and MPhil along the way). Ignoring that, I would still need to track incoming students and outgoing students over a couple of year period. While there is some field specific graduation data, there is no field specific data about number of incoming students.


text:
Professor/supervisor switches from writing emails in his native and local language to English - how to react?
A professor of mine, who's native language is German and who is teaching a class in English in a German speaking country, suddenly answered an e-mail which I wrote in German (I'm a native German speaker too), in English. I'm wondering why he does that? What the proper way for me to react is, i.e., should I use English when sending him e-mails from now on?

I'm aware that I have (technically) asked two questions. However, I think that the second one can not be answered properly without answering the first.

It's very normal. My prof were acting same. Maybe its the way  they want to teach students about official English language. It was useful for me to know how to email other foreign  professors or answer reviewers. @mort

My French and Japanese professors both use their native languages when communicating about topics for class (mass emails to the class, assignments, etc). For communication where they feel it is imperative that the student(s) understand and that there is no mistake, they use English (our native language). I have found that they use it to encourage students to practice the language(s) they are learning. I also see no difference in the faculty-to-faculty communication who share the same native language. For the most part they use English, holding to the same standard they set for students.

English is The Law! I spent 10 years studying German and now I don't have to use it at all. Except for watching American movies dubbed in German on YouTube sometimes. Now seriously - answer in English of course. Exercise your English = profit! You know German anyway!

Could you clarify if the professor is teaching a technical class? As Massimo Ortolano answered below, technical jargon is largely composed of English loanwords and proficient English speakers often prefer to switch the language entirely if it becomes distracting.

The class is very technical; however, the e-mails I exchanged with the professor were not at all technical.

I wouldn't worry about it too much: given the bilingual nature of his work, your professor probably context-switches back and forth between languages frequently.  If the professor is very comfortable in both languages, they might not have even realized the switch, e.g., if responding to your email in the middle of a large block of work in English with their head in "English-mode".
If you want, however, next time you see the professor in person, you might ask if they have any preference for language in their communications with you: it could easily go either way (e.g., in English to make forwarding to non-German speakers easier, in German for personal comfort, or even no preference at all).

+1 for "English mode". That happens more than monolinguists might imagine. The professor might not even realize he changed languages on you.

+1 I have 4 closest colleagues (plus me it's 5). I speak: CZ, EN, (FR), my supervisor speaks DE, EN, FR, my mate speaks IT, DE, EN, FR, my supervisor's mate speaks IT, FR, the teamleader speaks FR, EN. We seem to constantly switch between four languages, and as far as nobody says something that someone else wants to understand but is unable to, we seem to ignore the melange.

I agree that when you can use English fluently, frequently you will recall jargon faster in English (English mode as you say). However, that mode works for jargon only, I think. How can you forget normal words like I, you, this, that? If the professor of the OP's respond is a mixture of English and German, I can understand. I still don't understand why he switchs the language completely.

As Jake said, this does happen more often than monolingual people would realize. Changing languages is not simply a matter of changing the specific words involved, but the entire grammar and mindset behind the sentence. (Or: Changing of language is not thing only of changing each word individually but more of requires structures grammatical different and a mode mental different. See?) More surprisingly, the ability to seamlessly change from one language to another requires a surprising amount of fluency in both, much beyond what's required to live and work in either.

Another +1.  My wife is a native speaker of Chinese and speaks passable English.  If she's around other Chinese-speakers it's not all unusual for her to speak to me in Chinese--despite the fact that I speak only a few words of Chinese.  She knows I can't understand it, she just doesn't realize she's speaking the wrong language until I stop her.

@Ooker switching languages takes a lot of effort. I prefer to stick to one language and not switch for short tasks like writing an email, and switch back again. It is not a matter of forgetting words (though my native tongue has suffered since I live abroad), but more a matter of avoiding switching between languages.

Once me and my friend were talking, me in one language, he in another. It went on like that for quite a while, we didn't realize what we were doing until his girlfriend interrupted us laughing hysterically.

To somewhat back this up and offer some other explanation why this might have happened: I sometimes accidentally answer or comment questions written in German (my native language) on the German Language SE in English, just because for example I briefly looked at a related question written in English. (Also, if watching a movie in English, my wife and I (both native speakers of German) often find ourselves talking about it in English.)

Switching does not always take effort and can happen unconsciously. I've even asked, in Japanese, whether the person I was speaking to understood English in reference to a sentence I had just said in Japanese but had sincerely thought I'd said in English (we both laughed really hard a moment later once it was apparent what had happened). Consider driving on the "other" side of the road: your own memory of which side you were on in an event can get mixed up based on your locale when remembering. Sometimes I'm unsure what language a book was in that I've read over a year ago. Give him a break.

@E.P. I wonder if it's the level of fluency that determines whether someone finds it easy to switch or not. I find myself constantly switching languages: documenting or programming in English while talking to colleagues in my local language. I even tend to take notes in English during a meeting in my native tongue.

suddenly answered an e-mail which I wrote in German [...], in English. I'm wondering why he does that?

He might think that since the official language of the class is English, all communications should be carried out in this language. Or, maybe, if you're asking a technical question, he prefers to use English to avoid confusion between the technical terms employed during the lessons and the corresponding German terms.

should I use English when sending him e-mails from now on?

Given that the official language is English, this should arise no complain on his part. But you can also ask which is his preferred choice between the two languages, given that you are a native German speaker.
In Italy, I teach in a couple of courses which are taught in English: many of the emails I receive from Italian students are written in English, and I typically answer in that language. It's a good practice for both.

This is essentially what I addressed in my comment on the question, +1! It's almost a standard in my department (Modern Languages and Literature) that faculty encourage students to practice the language they are learning.

I would not interpret too much into this. I have to deal with such questions (in which language should I write an email?) almost daily in my function as an assistant professor. My native language is German, but I teach at a Dutch university (some courses are in Dutch, some are in English). With Dutch students, I usually communicate in Dutch (a language which I speak at near-native level), with international students in English - but when it comes to Germans, it already becomes complicated: It seems natural to communicate in German, but at the same time, although German is my native language, it is sometimes just easier to express a thought in a language I use daily in research (English) or teaching (Dutch or English).
Second, I sometimes write in a specific language in order to be able to forward, (B)CC or archive the mails. It's just not very practical if you cannot share something with a colleague because of language issues. Also the other way round, you sometimes copy/paste things without wasting time on translating things.
Third, I honestly am sometimes just unaware of the language i use. If I just have been talking in one language with a colleague, I might use that one in a mail that as well, without it being a concious choice. The hard part of working in several languages are not the languages themselves, it's switching between languages.
So, I would not put too much weight into this issue. However, it might also be that the professor wants to make a statement: I have some colleagues who want to make a statement by communicating only in a courses "official" language to avoid the impression that they would differentiate between students.
But, of course you can just ask what language the professor prefers. I get these questions occasionally, and - to be honest - I usually don't care too much.

I live in Germany since long ago.
On my experience, German are doing this mostly because 3 reasons:

they won't worry because of your (for them) bad German.
they are suspecting, your German is bad and maybe your English is better. It happens mainly on noisy phone lines, where they suspect mostly lingual problems and seldom acoustic.
they only want to train their English (which they can't do with other Germans, but with a foreigner). Talking on German with a foreigner doesn't have any benefit for them, but talking on English means a possibility to a little bit of free training.

I think that the difference between the native and a non-native language is always very strong and prof always knew if they changed it. Maybe it is possible if he replied his twentieth mail on the day to his undergrads and all of them communicated with him either of German or on English with various levels.
In your place I replied to the prof on English, but mentioned on the first row some like this: "Ich würde gerne weiters mit Ihnen auf Deutsch kommunizieren" (I would be glad to communicate on German with you).

It's standard to respond in the language being taught to give the students opportunities to practice the use of said language.
This is even more important if the students feel uncomfortable using the language.
No pain no gain, as they say.


text:
What kinds of reference letters sound best to letter readers?
Since I'm only starting my mathematical career, I've only ever requested letters from my advisers. So I was wondering what kinds of letters sound good to people reading reference letters? How does a neutral but good reference from a famous researcher compare against a strong letter from someone not-as-well-known?
This is admittedly very situation dependent and subjective. But I thought I'd solicit opinions anyway, since they're always interesting to read.
Edit: I'd appreciate it if you could share your personal experience too. When you were on a faculty hiring committee, PhD/postdoc admissions committee or anything else, what sort of letters had the most effect on you?

Reference letters for what?  Summer internships? Graduate school?  Postdocs? Faculty positions?  Tenure?

@JeffE, my interest is mostly in postdocs, faculty positions and early career grants.

For the targets you mention, the perception of the letter is highly biased by prior familiarity with the letter writer. It's very common to say things like "Well Prof. X doesn't like anyone, so if they call this person 'decent' they must be pretty awesome", or "Prof. Y loves everyone, so this letter is more useful for what it doesn't say than what it does", and so on.
Having said that, some of the things that help me when I read a letter (for postdocs or faculty hiring)
(Caveat: I'm at a US university and am most experienced in reading letters from US-based researchers, so cultural differences are important)

Who writes the letter
the nature of involvement they have with the applicant: "was a student in my class" is barely adequate, "was my summer intern" is not terrible, "worked with as a colleague" is excellent, "was my Ph.D student" is important, but can also get downweighted.
The level of specificity in the letter: "We worked on problem X and Applicant came up with the key idea and did all the work" is good. "We were stumped on problem Y for ages and Applicant made the breakthrough" is even better. "We all worked on this problem and Applicant contributed ideas to it" is lukewarm.
Points of reference: "You've probably heard of Prof. Awesome who works in this area, and Applicant is awesome-er", or "there are 5 people on the market this year in this area, and Applicant is at least 2nd best".
Things not said, or said in code: "Applicant prefers to work alone" could sometimes mean "Applicant is an obnoxious lout" or "Applicant has no social skills", depending on the context. "Applicant works hard at their presentation skills" could mean "they give lousy talks". And so on. Here again, some prior familiarity with the letter writer helps.


text:
In general, do students like or dislike classes that are taught jointly?
This is a question that I originally posted to matheducators.stackexchange.com but it was suggested that I might get some more answers here.
My department is considering using more than one lecturer (sequentially, not in parallel) to give lectures in our large first-year classes (e.g. 500 students doing engineering mathematics).
In other words, one lecturer does the first 4 weeks, a second does the next 4 weeks and a third does the remaining 4 weeks.
There is enough content of disparate nature (e.g., linear algebra, calculus of various types) to split into three distinct blocks so that each lecturer teaches a coherent block.
Is there evidence, ideally published research studies, about the effectiveness of such an arrangement, and whether the students view it favourably or otherwise.
My inability to locate for myself any research studies may be due to the large number of different meanings of the phrase "team teaching" or "joint teaching" or "co-teaching". Just to clarify, I am not talking about dividing a large class into sections, nor am I talking about two lecturers in the same class. Just the material being divided up and presented in separate blocks by different lecturers.
Given this inability to locate research studies, I am also interested in anecdotal evidence if you have any horror stories or great successes to comment on.
(My suspicion is that the precise details of who the lecturers are, and whether they are good lecturers etc is more important than the distinction between "one lecturer" and "two lecturers", but I'd like to have some evidence one way or another.)
Added in response
Thanks for all the useful responses, which lead me to believe that we can proceed with caution. In what follows, a "unit" is a 12-week class that occupies 1/4 of a student's time, what other countries call a "class" or a "course" or even a "paper" (in NZ).
In our situation, the unit's content is defined by a unit reader that was collectively written when the unit was first designed, and each lecturer would need to cover a specified set of chapters / sections from the reader.
While the contents of each lecture is not specified down to the last page, we know from previous years approximately how much can be covered in each lecture. So different lecturers cannot really deviate much from this if they are to complete the same material in the same time.
The final exam will be written, again with many years of past examples at hand, by the unit coordinator, and marked (mostly) by casual teaching assistants, to a fairly rigid rubric. So the lecturers will not really affect that.

I think https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.05904 is not describing precisely what you want, but might go at least into that direction.

I'm voting to close as opinion based.  It seems to me, as you mention yourself, that there are a lot of variables and it's going to depend on the details, including cultural ones.  I'd also add the cautionary point that just because the students like something doesn't make it a good idea.  I had several lecturers who were (superficially) dull or boring compared to others, but who, in hindsight, provided clear explanations of concepts.  I had a couple that were very entertaining but were not good at explaining concepts.

Looks like a perfect opportunity for a poll.

@StephenG In terms of quality of education, it is my experience that students like the dull-but-good instructors better than the entertaining-but-bad ones. On a purely personal level, they may like the entertaining ones more, but when you ask a student whether they ‘like’ a teacher, they will generally assume you mean whether they like them as a teacher and answer accordingly.

@StephenG-HelpUkraine Actually I asked for references to research studies or empirical observations / data from people who have actual experience with joint teaching.  Some people have answered with what appears to be their opinion without citing specific evidence, but I didn't ask for that. But in fact, when I look at the front page of this forum, almost every question is a variant of "What should I do in situation X?" whose entire purpose is to canvass opinions from the general forum.

I believe the only general answer is "Yes, in general students like or dislike this."

Do students like or dislike a jointly taught class (singular). 'classes that are taught jointly' sounds like an honors program with two or more required classes, where failing one of them gets you kicked out of the program. If I'm there to learn things then that can be an awesome experience. If it's for credit hours, then [profanity].

I can't point to any research but given that you ask for anecdata:
This approach is fairly common in the UK and related systems. A module (class) may be a single entity for administrative purposes, but in practical terms it may be split into several pieces taught by different people. I have even seen modules where every single lecture is given by a different person.
In general this approach works well. There needs to be one person who has oversight of everything, and who can act as a defined point of contact for student queries that don't fit elsewhere. In the UK this person would likely be known as the 'module convenor'.
The teaching team need to make sure they are all very clear about exactly what is to be covered by each person. If there are any ambiguities about nomenclature, notation, etc, the team should agree their approach. This is probably the biggest source of legitimate student complaints - inconsistencies, holes or duplication between different lecturers. You also need to consider how you're going to handle disruption to your schedule: what happens if - for whatever reason - someone isn't able to cover all their material in their allotted time? Is this going to cause a cascading series of problems for subsequent teaching?
The second issue that can exercise students is assessment: make sure that multiple lecturers does not equate to a (perception of a) greater assessment burden for the students. Note that some students may attempt to play one lecturer off against another ("Oh, but Prof. X told me that I didn't need to do this exam!"). To avoid this, it may be desirable for all 'significant' administrative matters (extensions, dispensations, notification of examination arrangements, etc) to be handled by the module convenor.
A final consideration is the need for synthesis. This will vary between topics, but chopping a class into pieces risks losing sight of the bigger picture - how do they all fit together? Where are the important similarities and differences? Lecturers may require encouragement to think of their segment within the broader context of the class, and not as a stand-alone entity. In some cases it may be appropriate to have one or more lectures at the end of the course that try to draw together all the different threads developed elsewhere.
Edited to add: One significant potential pedagogic benefit of using multiple lecturers is that it can help signpost - and enforce - the division of a topic into distinct logical units. A change of personnel sends a clear visual message that one chapter has finished and a new one has begun. It may also encourage weaker or struggling students to attempt to re-engage: psychologically, at least, it offers an opportunity for a 'fresh start'.

That all sounds sensible-in this case the unit is a list of topics required for engineering students who will only specialise later (into civil, mechanical, electrical etc) and so it can easily be divided into parts that don’t overlap.

(Also in the UK) I've only seen every single lecture given by a different person at Masters or postgrad levels.  But splitting a module into clearly-defined sections with different staff is reasonably common.  When I've seen this, and especially when I was involved, one academic - often but not necessarily a senior one - had overall responsibility for the course.  That included the synthesis material at the (beginning and) end.  It was apparently well-received when I had the junior role in such a setup

I see a further problem: exam content and grading. The Convenor, as you call it, should be very clear about what's the scope of the exam, otherwise you may give a false perspective to students on how they will be tested and graded. An anecdote from my old Uni days as a student: the Italian university system had just underwent a reform and new courses were being created. The "old" Electronic Engineering course was split in 3 courses: "new" Electronics Eng., Computer Eng. and Telecom Eng. (5yrs master-level degrees, at the time Italy didn't have a lower level degree corresponding to BSc). ...

...  This required some classes content rearrangement and shuffling. The 2nd year "Physics II" exam became a juggernaut class with all the "leftover" modules of other classes. Some modules were taught by different people. We had a 2-week crash-course module on quantum mechanics, covering 1D potential barriers. At the exam one exercise required to solve a 2D problem about a free electron hitting an infinite slab of copper! Ofc. none of the ~100 students could solve it. ...

... Later the person who had "taught" us QM said in front of us with genuine puzzlement "No one could solve the exercise. Funny, it was a simple generalization of the 1D problem we examined in class." and the "Convenor", who was present, was so embarrassed that he couldn't keep a straight face (he seemed like he was about to do a double-palm-face, but he didn't say anything to the lecturer).

I don't have research to point to, but I think we need to make a distinction between introductory topics and specialised topics.
For specialised topics, dividing the lectures can be very much in the interest of the student.  During my Master course, we had classes where almost every lecture was given by a guest lecturer who was a world-class researcher and teacher in the speciality.  The official course-responsible lecturer would introduce the different lecturers, take care of the exams, and of course make sure that there was a clear thread throughout the lecture series making up the class.  It worked great.
For introductory topics, it would seem the division might be there not to benefit the students, but to benefit the teachers (less teaching load).  In the best case, benefiting the teachers indirectly benefits the students.  But there is a risk that this approach is not beneficial to the students.  Maybe we can split up the lectures OK — but someone should take the lead to take overall course responsibility for synthesis, examination, etc.  Otherwise one might be better up teaching the class as multiple classes, so students can expect differences.

I had a similarish experience in my past, and I found it that from POV of student, the main point is that all the courses play into each otehr. For example, if you are talking about the Jacobian in Calculus, but haven't covered all the operations one can do with Matrices in the Linear algebra class, then it would be quite awkward.
If the lecture courses play into each other they can be quite good. But, at the same time, there is a chance of overloading the student if they play into each otehr too well, since one would need to do good in one course to do well in others. For this, one remedy would be to give reviews of topics, eg, a topic done in a linear algebra course could repeated back in the calculus course.
Tl;dr: Check for curriculum clash, make sure each course can is complete in some sense, and so on.

I experienced this in my first year physics lecture ("Physics for Engineers"). It didn't feel weird, professor A would present topic X (mechanics, IIRC), then professor B would take over for topic Y (probably optics).
It didn't feel any different to professor A doing the lecture "XYZ 1" one semester, then professor B doing the lecture "XYZ 2" the next semester.
Liking or disliking is usually up to the individual professors and students. A student who doesn't like the way professor A teaches will probably welcome the switch of lecturers halfway through the class, while another student, who likes his style of teaching, will probably be disappointed. E.g. with the physics lecture I mentioned, I would have loved to keep professor A for the rest of the lecture, as he was using the blackboard and the lecture notes were less text and more figures. With professor B, we had lots of text (and formulas) and less figures. The latter was much harder to revise before the exams.
And, as most others have already mentioned, make sure that in exams etc., all parts have the same or at least similar complexity. It's annoying to have different classes with different requirements, but within the same class, it's a big no-no.

Something like this can be highly beneficial for some subjects, but probably neutral or even negative for others.  The negative part comes from students needing to adjust to a new lecturer and their teaching / grading style.  For some this might not be a problem, for others it can be highly distracting and disruptive to their learning.
Where you can get a lot of benefit is in the social sciences in classes that highly benefit from disparate perspectives.  For example, I took a course on Judaism where there was a constant stream of guest lecturers.  It worked really well because you got to see interpretations on the subject from highly religious Jews, atheist Jews, Jews highly critical of Israel, ones that were big supporters, etc.
For lower level math courses like LA and calc I would much rather just have one good professor, even if it wasn't their specialty, than to have to adjust to new ones. I would only prefer having a new one come in if the new lecturer was much better at teaching. But the reverse is the worse case scenario. If the new lecturer was much worse than the previous it would be incredibly irritating.
Relatedly to the last point, there's also the issue of dropping.  At the start of the course you have the option (at most places for these level of classes) to drop the course or switch sections if you have reason to think the professor isn't going to work for you (hard to understand, etc).  But you would have no such option if there's a new one in the middle of the semester.

As a student I once had a math course where they switched professor mid-semester. It was the best thing which ever happened to us because the second professor was able to explain things we’d never understood in an intuitive and clear way. The original professor didn’t even understand our question.

I had my second course on General Relativity taught jointly by two professors and I absolutely hated it. One of the lecturers used handwritten notes and the other provided a pdf with infinite typos in it. It is a frustration not having a complete set of lecture notes taught continuously from start to finish.
That being said, student experience of a joint course/module depends only on who teaches it and not on mode of teaching, provided both lecturers are willing to put efforts into communitaing with one another so the course runs smoothly during transition. As you said the course under consideration is a large first-year class, I would imagine it is of no difference whether it is taught by a single lecturer or 2 to 3 jointly.
This brings me to the second point: my GR course was a small one, and having two lecturers literally mean they get to know you less. But this really is not on the student experience side of things but on recommendation letter issues.

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


text:
What happens to equipment purchased using a startup package after an academic leaves the university?
I am on the faculty of a large American university, and I have bought a lot of equipment (laptops, tablets, batteries, etc.) for research purposes using a startup package.  I will be leaving for a new university in September, and I am wondering what, in practice, will happen to this equipment.  Obviously, it is the property of the university and I'm going to leave it all there, but is someone going to come through with a clipboard and make sure it's all there?  Do these kinds of things usually just get sent off to surplus sales?  How about the students of mine who will still be at the old university?

How about the students of mine who will still be at the old university? - what's the relevance of this to the question? (Surely you don't categorize your students as "stuff" :))

@ff524, what I meant is that I'd like for my students to be able to use this equipment, even in my absence, for the remaining time that they are at the old university.

What happens to your stuff depends on how your university classifies it. Inventoried material—more expensive items that a university keeps track of—will almost certainly need to be accounted for. So that probably includes laptops and tablets, unless they're so old they've been removed from inventory (as not having any significant value anymore). Major laboratory equipment and furniture also fall into this category. Such materials will probably be held as "surplus," and made available to other groups or departments.
In contrast, small-ticket items—such as stationery and miscellaneous office supplies—are not normally tracked. You won't be asked to reimburse the university for a missing stapler.

In my alma mater, a public university in Spain, all expensive material is inventoried, and as it belongs to a public entity, cannot be sold when used up. Also, to get rid of an old computer (to get an idea: some are using floppy disks) requires a lot of bureaucracy. You need to prove that it is not useful anymore, and blah blah blah.
So, what they do is just drop the material in a given corridor, and wait for it to be stolen. If anyone -ever- comes asking for it, they will just check the corridor "ah, it got stolen". Lots of trees saved.
For other equipment not suitable for this scheme, well, we have a wide terrace with lots of space.

It's always beautiful when pragmatism beats bureacracy :-)

In my old group, what we did was that every lab member could, when (s)he is leaving the group, "buy" their own hardware for a symbolic price if it was older than 3 years (3 years, because after this time span the hardware was considered without significant worth by the university). So basically, everybody usually kept all their equipment after e.g., graduation. Our lab head considered this as sort of his "graduation gift" to the student / ex-lab member - I am not convinced that the entire process was entirely legal, but apparently (as the equipment is formally without worth to the university) nobody ever actually complained (so far). In the rare cases where this was not possible (e.g., a laptop younger than 3 years), we simply kept the equipment back for emergencies (such as when the laptop of one of the lab members breaks and he needs a replacement while it is being repaired).
In my new group, hardware is simply returned, put onto a big pile, and in most cases, forgotten. Every now and then the big pile of old hardware gets thrown away. I am sort of assuming that this is how most universities handle old hardware, as silly / wasteful as it is.

Some universities do hold a surplus sale every now and then for some of the old stuff rather than just tossing it all away (that's what the engineering department at my alma mater does, at least, though they hold the sales very early in the morning and I was never motivated enough to get myself up early enough to check it out).

I invite the IEEE student branch at my school to come by and take anything they can use for parts before we throw out a pile of old hardware (they've done some really cool projects with our old inkjet printers!) And at an industry R&D lab I've interned in, there were large discard boxes in hallways marked "books" "hardware" "cables" that people could pick through.

@ff524 That needs to happen more often. Unfortunately, there are no stakeholders in this: sorting through stuff, cleaning, even carrying it to the foyer is surplus work. :/ (And in Germany, obviously, you can't just give obviously worthless stuff away as long as it's booked to be there.)

@JAB depending on the circumstances, sometimes those surplus sales cost more than they bring in.


text:
Is it normal for a journal submission to show "awaiting assignment" for more than a month?
I submitted a paper more than one month ago. The status of my submission is still "awaiting assignment". May I ask if this is normal? How long have I to wait before formally asking the editor about the status of my submission? My field is mathematics.

It's a little unusual (but not uncommon). Sometimes it takes time to find a referee.  It also depends on how busy your editor is.  I would wait a few more weeks before enquiring with the journal.

This seems like a duplicate of something. Maybe http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18543/article-awaiting-reviewer-invitation-6-months-after-submission?rq=1 or http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16624/with-editor-status-for-2-months-is-it-normal?rq=1 or http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/24162/is-it-okay-to-inquire-about-the-status-of-a-paper-when-the-online-submission-sys/24171#24171

It really depends on the journal. Have you been contacted by the editor upon receipt of your paper? If not, I would contact them immediately just to check up. A month is a long time to go with no word. My paper submissions (all to the Astrophysical Journal) have all been followed up by the editor within a week of initial submission.

There is an acknowledgement of receipt of my submission. However, I think it is computer generated. I did not received any follow-up email from the the editor.

Then it can't hurt to send them an email inquiring.


text:
Have most journals recently stopped providing off-prints to authors?
I've recently obtained my PhD in mathematics and started a post-doc this year. I have 5 published papers, across a wide spectrum of journals (in terms of quality, from very good to mediocre). However I never received any off-prints from the journals and it seems that to receive those one has to pay. On the other hand all the professors that I know of have always a lot of off-prints for most of their journal publications. I always wanted to have these neat looking off-prints but it seems that the winds have changed and journals are becoming "cheaper" (behavior-wise) than ever.
This leads me to the following question:

Is this a recent change? Is it considered the norm now to not send off-prints free of charge?
Are these professors perhaps ordering the off-prints through some departmental fund?

Is there anything that can be done about this situation? Can I pressure the journal into sending me off-prints free of charge (e.g would trying to refuse signing the publishing agreement, unless they provide the off-prints for free work?). Have people tried boycotting journals not offering off-prints? This kind of cheap behavior really strikes me as pushing the boundary of what is acceptable. Not only we do most of the work for the journal (refereeing, writing, etc.) but on top of that journals are expensive and do not even offer off-prints anymore.

Instead of having a pile of such prints on my desk, I now carry what I want to read on a USB flash drive.  If I need to, I print out something.  I imagine there are applications to render documents into Kindle-like format if you don't want a device throwing photons at you.

My first published paper came with fifty off-prints. I kept one for myself, gave one to my co-author and gave one to a friend in exchange for him offloading one of his off-prints on me. The other forty-seven went in the recycling the next time I moved. If I've been offered off-prints from a journal since then, I've not accepted them.

But if you care for the typesetting (as you write below), can't you just print the electronic version with a good department laserjet printer and staple it together? I'm a PhD student in CS, so I'm barely aware of alternatives. I just wonder whether offprints are better bound, but I wasn't able to Google relevant info.

Off-prints are a remnant from the days when photocopying hadn't been invented and, if you wanted your own copy of a paper, the only reasonable way to get one was to write to the author and ask for an off-print.
Providing off-prints to authors certainly seems to be becoming less common.  Some journals still provide them for free, some only for a fee, and some not at all.  I don't think most people care, and among those that do care, many prefer not to receive the off-prints.  It's been years since I received a request for an off-print, so when I do get them they just end up sitting in piles in my office while I offer them as party favors to anyone who enters the office.  Some decline and probably many of the rest recycle them, since electronic copies are far more convenient.

Can I pressure the journal into sending me off-prints free of charge (e.g would trying to refuse signing the publishing agreement, unless they provide the off-prints for free work?).

I wouldn't try pressuring them, which could come across as both eccentric and rude.  Instead, you could try begging, by explaining that you are a postdoc with strictly limited funds but would really love off-prints and hope they could provide them at a reduced cost.  I have no idea whether this could work, but the worst that can happen is that they'll say no.

Have people tried boycotting journals not offering off-prints?

You are welcome to investigate which journals provide off-prints for free and submit your papers there, but I doubt many people will join you in this.

Thanks for this very nice explanation! As I said in the previous post my affinity to off-prints is purely aesthetic. For example, the type-setting in Crelle's journal is beautiful and I would certainly want to have their off-prints if I published there.

Offprints were a key part of the publication process before the digital era since digital versions did not exist; a smaller number of them commonly included in the page charges. Since journals are now digital and are also moving away from printing as a whole, reprints are things of the past. That your professors get them is most likely because they are used to have it this way but I am sure there will be journals from which they would not be able to get them other than the now standard pdf. I am not sure they get them for free anymore either. A pdf is easy to distribute and carries virtually no cost, to the publisher (journal) or the environment. I am sure the publishers were happy to see them go but the move was not primarily a financial move, it was a lack of demand. Some publishers still provide reprints but since they are no longer part of the standard service, they may charge for them. After all you get a pdf for free to distribute in a similar manner as the reprint. I have been publishing long enough to have a shelf full of useless reprints that in addition exist as pdfs as well. I am also an editor for a journal and for us it is also a question of when, not if, we move away from printing altogether. And in that case the publisher has no part in the decision since we are a society owned journal with no page charges. So I am not sure why you believe the reprint is so important. There is little demand for posting reprints to others when a pdf exists that can be sent over e-mail. I can understand that sending a paper copy can be more personal than e-mailing a pdf but I still think the demand for a printed copies is very low indeed.

Off-prints are not important for me in any practical sense, but I enjoy having a neatly printed copy for myself and to give out to other people... Maybe it's just the younger generation, but I've definitely came across young people (my age) with the same nostalgia for off-prints. Anyway, thanks for this explanation, I think it changed my perception of the matter (I didn't realize there was a lack of demand).


text:
Is providing a slow response to journal reviews a common/good strategy for minimizing the number of review requests?
It is well known that in mathematics the process of reviewing submitted papers is quite long. There are good reasons for that; intrinsically, reviewing a math paper involves checking and understanding thouroughly the proposed proof, which typically requires a significant time investment. Also, a lot of academics are always very busy and reviewing may not be the most urgent thing they have to do, so it tends to be pushed back.
But it seems that there are other, maybe not so commendable reasons. Apparently, the common wisdom around me is that you should be careful not to turn in your reviews too soon, or you will be flooded with requests by editors (who are all too happy to find someone gullible enough to hurry doing their reviews) and reviews will take up all your time. This is an advice I've often heard given to young researchers, including by people who can honestly not be accused of neglecting the community service aspects of their work. A lot of people I have talked to have a policy of never doing the review before the deadline or the k-th reminder from the editor. I even heard of a person who would do the review almost immediately after accepting it (when time allowed), but only send it after the deadline or later.
In an imperfect world where doing your task sooner than anyone else will mark you as candidate for exploitation, I understand the need for such strategies. But I wanted to check:

Is the risk so big?
Is this practice really generalized (also in other fields than mathematics)?
Do you have alternative strategies to avoid having too many review requests (of course, one can always refuse reviews, but since it can be delicate to do so too often, one may try and avoid requests themselves)?

I don't understand what could be delicate about refusing reviews, especially if the requests come in after you have established a pattern of prompt reviewing. Someone who completed five reviews in two weeks each for a particular editor should be able to decline further reviews for a couple of months without a second thought. What am I missing? (I personally try to review as quickly as I can, simply out of fairness to the authors and the editor.)

Five reviews in two weeks seems unreasonable in my field. Moreover, a given editor knows nothing of the work you did for other editors and therefore has no way of appreciating whether you did your share of reviews lately.

Five reviews in two weeks each. And the OP specifically asks about the situation where you review "too quickly" and subsequently get more review invitations - which implies that the deluge of invitations comes from those editors that previously got your "too fast" reviews.

The question I find myself asking in situation X involving other people's papers: how would I like X if it were my paper? In this situation, how would I like it if reviewers were artificially delaying reviews on my paper just because they don't want to say "no" to future review requests.

"I have already written four reviews for you this year.  Please ask someone else."

"Thank you for your interest in my refereeing services. I receive many outstanding referee requests, and can only take on a limited number. I regret to inform you that your request has not been selected for review."

@Kallus, to my ear, your response is so formal it sounds like a joke. "Thank you for your interest in my refereeing services" ... "your request has not been selected for review.". It's just too formal. I agree with JeffE but I would soften it. "Thanks for asking. However I have a full reviewing schedule and I note that I've already done X reviews for your journal this year. Hence I will decline. However, I can recommend asking Y (y@m.com) and Z (z@m.com), who I think will make excellent referees for this paper. Kindest Regards, ___".

@badroit Yes, it was a joke. An archetypical soft rejection letter.

@Kallus, ah okay! I was wondering, lol. :)

I can imagine someone purposefully delaying reviews, but in my experience it's not a widespread or standard part of mathematical practice, and I haven't heard it offered as common advice.  I don't think referees have an obligation to inconvenience themselves to finish a review as quickly as they can, but it seems bizarre to deliberately delay when it would have been convenient to complete the review earlier (or, worse yet, when it was already done but not yet sent).
I don't see a real risk here, or a need to avoid review requests.  There's nothing wrong with turning them down, and you can use a vague excuse like that you are already busy with other refereeing and don't want to cause unnecessary delays for this submission.  In fact, a prompt reply will be appreciated; it already puts you ahead of the people who require reminders to reply to referee requests.  (When a referee declines quickly, there's almost no cost, while it's annoying if I send several e-mails over a period of weeks but never hear back.)  From my perspective as an editor, I'm not looking for people who will complete a review as quickly as possible.  Instead, my ideal referee is someone who is responsive and reliable, who promptly lets me know what they can reasonably do and then does it within the timeframe they estimated.  If they do that, they can turn down as many requests as they like.

+1.  I'd go beyond "bizarre" to "disrespectful": the author is anxiously waiting for a decision on their paper, and if it's a good paper, the community as a whole wants to see it published, the sooner the better.  An intentional delay does a disservice to everyone.  The  math publishing process is glacial enough without your going out of your way to make it slower.

@NateEldredge: if people post their papers on the arXiv or some other widely available source, then the community can read the papers without having to wait a year or more for the journal to finally publish them.  There are also reasons why the community as a whole benefits from a delay in the review process.  The explanation is too long for a comment box, see my answer.

I'm honestly puzzled by this tactics. No one will make you write more reviews than you want to. I write my reviews very promptly (at least the editors of the journals I have reviewed for tend to point that out to me when I submit my reviews), but I have a self-imposed threshold for how many reviews I will do within a given amount of time. If I get requests that exceed that threshold, I politely decline and explain why. I don't understand what's so "delicate" about that. It's surely better to be a diligent reviewer who occasionally declines invitations than to be a notoriously late reviewer (on purpose!).

This is a response to the answer by Anonymous Mathematician and the comment to that answer by Nate Eldredge.  I just want to point out that there are ways in which the community benefits from there being some lag built into the refereeing process.  If there were no such lag then an author would have every incentive to submit every paper to the very best journal in the field, expecting a quick rejection, after which the author can submit to the second-best journal, and so on.  In this way, an author could expect his/her papers to wind up in better journals than they otherwise would, since once there are enough low-probability events then there's a good chance that one of them will occur.  So it is to the author's benefit to do this, but on the flip side this would cause lots of extra work by the editors and referees of various journals.  The main thing I see which discourages authors from doing this is that they don't expect an immediate response from the referees.  So that is one reason why it isn't necessarily a bad thing for a reviewer to wait a couple months (say) before sending in his/her review.

That is true, but it's difficult to call it a reason. If that was the case, journals would've do initial sieving were they'd reject some papers without sending them to referees (as done today by Nature, and PRL, for instance). I can see no (good) reason for purposely delaying the process.

Top math journals do initial sieving, but the process isn't so different from refereeing -- the paper is sent to experts who look at the paper to decide whether it can be rejected without in-depth refereeing.  This again takes time from experts.  Your comment ignores this time.

Does this argument not apply to fields other than math, or are you saying that other fields do suffer from this problem of lots of wasted referee work?

I only know what happens in math.  I can't make any comment about what happens in other fields.

@RanG. you can go even further: if this was a real concern, journals wouldn't do any sieving, they'd simply not contact referees for a month or so. And if this was a real concern, all mathematicians would be playing the same game, so the "better journals" comment is highly suspect. This seems like a pretty bogus rationalization of bad behavior.


text:
What is the explicit meaning of “corresponding author”?
Problem
This question was triggered by the comments on this discussion, but comments and answers on these
questions
confirm the existence of conflicting ideas.
There seem to be two prevalent interpretations of the word corresponding author:

The corresponding author is the one who corresponds the (unpublished) paper to the journal, i.e., who performs the technical process of submitting the paper, is available for requests on the review and publishing processes, and so on.
The corresponding author is the one who corresponds on the (published) paper with anybody who likes to do so, e.g., because they found an error or like some clarification.

What I found out so far
Until today, I was only aware of the first interpretation, which was confirmed by my experience: For all papers I submitted, I automatically became the corresponding author and cannot remember that I could choose one of my co-authors for this role. Some of these journals do not even indicate a corresponding author to the reader. Also, there already is a way to indicate that an author is available for questions on the paper (interpretation 2): stating the e-mail address.
On the other hand, other journals do indicate corresponding authorship, which makes little sense for interpretation 1. Also, the value put into this role by some funding agencies for its implied meaning makes more sense for interpretation 2 (not that I completely agree with it).
Looking for some guidelines from publishers covering multiple fields, I found the following instructions on denoting the corresponding author from Elsevier¹, which kind-of covers both interpretations:

Clearly indicate who will handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication, also post-publication.

While there are other questions on this site touching this issue, they focus on consequences of the interpretation, such as
how to assign corresponding authorship,
the implications of corresponding authorship, or
whom to address with a request.
Actual question
What is the explicit meaning of the word corresponding author? Interpretation 1 or 2 as listed above, both, something else, or is this an extreme example of academia’s inhomogeneity and the answer depends on the field or publisher? Please answer only if you have more to offer than personal experience and individual journal guidelines. In particular, please address the possibility of a varying meaning.

¹ which is separate for each journal, but seems to be identical in content for many journals

For what concerns post-publication correspondence, regardless of the corresponding author, in my experience people writes, in order of frequency, to: i) the author they're most familiar with; ii) the first author; iii) all authors.

This discussion on ResearchGate about the possibility to add 2 corresponding authors has some really interesting answers which are relevant for this question, e.g. the comments of Rachel Y Lei and Helmuth Haslacher.

In general, I've seen it several times that the corresponding author didn't submit the paper. Sometimes the corresponding author is even modified after the paper has been accepted. So, I'd conclude: Your 1. definition is the submitting author and your 2. one ist the corresponding author.

To jump to another level: I've seen papers that have been submitted by someone that was not even one of the authors.

@MassimoOrtolano: I know a similar scheme, which goes i) the author(s) the inquirer has had any kind of direct contact to before, and ii) all authors. Based upon my observations in my field, I agree the indicated corresponding author is ignored - the chance that you'll get any response at all is slim enough, so there's no point in further reducing it by writing to only one of the strangers who have written the paper.

It'd be great if the journals would one day distinguish between "guy who handles all the tedious paperwork and stupid online forms" and "guy who takes official responsibility".

IEEE distinguishes between contact author and corresponding author:

Contact Author: This is the person who is contacted in regards to the submission during the peer-review and production processes.
Corresponding Author: This is the person who is listed as the author to be contacted in the printed publication.

PLoS states two types of corresponding authors:

Please note that the corresponding author for the online submission process can be different from the corresponding author of your published manuscript.

Copernicus uses the terms contact author and corresponding author:

From submission to publication, the authors of a manuscript are formally represented by the registered contact author(s). After publication, the authors of a manuscript are formally represented by the corresponding author(s) specified in the published paper.

Personally, I've seen this differentiation several times. Sometimes the corresponding author is simply a role in the journal system that the submitting author/person can assign to one of the authors during the submission process. The corresponding author might also change during the process.
Conclusion:
Some publishers make a difference between the author corresponding with the journal (submitting/contact author) and the author corresponding with potential readers of the article (corresponding author). Some publishers don't. It's absolutely inhomogeneous and seems also to vary by journal not only by publisher. And it varies over time.

Side note:
And yes, these publishers are indexed in SCOPUS and Web of Science (Science Citation Index, Thomson Reuters Master Journal List).
Search for the publishers in SCOPUS (select checkbox "publisher") or the Thomson Reuters Master Journal List (TRMJL). The latter includes all journals indexed in Web of Science. Unfortunately, the search in TRMJL is only based on journals and not on publishers. Search for "plos" to see PLOS journals, "ieee" for IEEE journals and e.g. "geoscientific" to see two Copernicus journals. See also IEEE indexing agreements, Visibility of PLoS and Copernicus metrics.

Great answer. Unfortunately, all sources of your quotes are offline.

I don't think you're going to find anyone who has the final definition for the term. It is not defined by the law or some government regulation, but instead is a term that is used by speakers in the community who may have different interpretations and nuances on their minds when they use it. As a consequence, I suspect that all you can find is how people interpret the term, but you won't get universal consensus. In the current context, it also seems to me that not very much is lost if there is no universal consensus.
To me, and I suspect to most in the community, the "corresponding author" handles both roles: communication throughout the publishing process, and about possible questions. In the past, the corresponding author may also have been the one who has off-prints of the article sitting in his office that a potential reader could request (by mail), but this is no longer happening in times of the internet. Rather, if you have questions, you may contact any of the authors of a paper.

While maybe not a full answer across the fields, in some journals, the papers have a description about what it means.
For example, in IOP papers (a paper of mine where it does happen) it says:
"Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed."
Which, considering the paper has already been published, means the correspondence about any further questions one may have about the research/science on the paper. Note, I did not submit the paper.

However, to give a counter example, IEEE guidelines describe Corresponding author as (sec 6, page 11):
The corresponding author is responsible for submitting the
manuscript and managing it through the review and revision
process with the publisher. The corresponding author makes
sure that all authors are kept apprised of the current status of
the work.
Which could be considered the "submitting author" as in the question linked there.
I guess that the answer is: The definition is not written in stone and different editors/journals use it differently

IEEE distinguishes between contact author and corresponding author.

@FuzzyLeapfrog Interestingly I copied the text from of my answer from the IEEE document, and that contradicts the one you linked. Which probably makes the point stronger: The difference is vague and undefined

Yes, I agree. Overall, more likely it seems to be a journal freature than a publisher feature. @Ander

Royal chemical society definition

`On submission of the manuscript, the corresponding author attests to
  the fact that those named as co-authors have agreed to its submission
  for publication and accepts the responsibility for having properly
  included all (and only) co-authors. If there are more than 10
  co-authors on the manuscript then the corresponding author should
  provide a statement to specify the contribution of each co-author.
The corresponding author signs a 'licence to publish' on behalf of all
  the authors. Any change in authorship after initial submission must be
  approved by all authors and justified to the editor.

`Duties of corresponding author, described by Willey

The Corresponding author will receive information about proofing directly from the typesetter. Queries should be directed to the Production Editor.
  When the accepted article has been received by Wiley-Blackwell, Author Services will send the corresponding author an e-mail inviting registration in Author Services to track production, and for most journals, for free access to the published article. There may be a short delay from when the editorial office accepts the article and when the alert is sent.Some journals follow a process where all the articles in an issue are sent to the publisher at one time, so the delay for the first few accepted may be several days or weeks. Contact the Production Editor if the delay is more than two weeks.

In page about Defining authorship by Taylor and Francis company

If an article is written by more than one author, you’ll choose one person to be the corresponding author. This person will handle all correspondence about the article and sign the publishing agreement on behalf of all the authors. The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that all the authors’ contact details are correct. You should all agree on the order in which your names are published in the article, and ensure that your affiliations are correct, as explained below.

Springer describes duties of the corresponding author as

The corresponding author collects the conflict of interest disclosure forms from all authors. In author
  collaborations, where formal agreements for representation allow it, it is sufficient for the corresponding
  author to sign the disclosure form on behalf of all authors. The corresponding author will include a
  summary statement in the text of the manuscript, in a separate section before the reference list, which
  reflects what is recorded in the potential conflict of interest disclosure form.
  The corresponding author should be prepared to collect documentation of compliance with ethical
  standards and send if requested during peer review or after publication.

My university interpretation.
First author is the one who carries out the bulk of the experiments, while having an important contribution to experimental design, data analysis, interpretation and writing of the paper. The corresponding author is in most cases the principal investigator. He has major contribution in the design of the work, he will supervise experiments, he will verify or even contribute to data analysis and most importantly he will take over most of data interpretation and writing of the manuscript. Of course variations to the above scheme may occur.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.