text:
If you change your name while doing research, can you list both names on a publication?
If you change your name, can you list both names as authors?
For example, consider a PhD student named John Doe who after finishing his PhD undergoes a sex change and name change to Jane Doe before starting a postdoc. After the sex change Jane continues to work on a project that she started as a PhD student. Assume that the authors on the resulting paper are the PhD advisor, the postdoc advisor and Jane/John Doe. Can both Jane and John be listed? What happens if Jane never worked on the project, can she be the author or does it have to be John?

What do you mean by listing both names?  I see nothing wrong with, say, listing Jane Doe with a footnote saying "previously known as John Doe" (or vice versa), but it would be really weird and confusing to include both John Doe and Jane Doe in the author list as if they were different people.

@AnonymousMathematician I mean listing both in the author list. Something like Doe, Doe, Smith and Jones.

"The song's name is called Haddocks' Eyes; The song's name is The Aged Aged Man; The song is called Ways and Means;
The song is A-sitting on a Gate". Ref: The White Knight, Lewis Carroll, and Charles Dodgson, "Through the Looking-Glass". ;)

This is indeed a weird question, though not an uninteresting one.
Fundamentally a name is a pointer to a person, of a formalized and official sort, but of course for every person there are multiple phrases that point to them.  Any article byline gives a mapping to the set of objects named, and the idea that perhaps this function need not or should not be one-to-one is a very curious one.  I don't know a general principle to invoke from which to deduce the "injectivity of authorial bylines", but multiple names pointing to the same person would be highly nonstandard and powerfully confusing to many.
I'm not sure what to make of the fact that your example of a name change is motivated by a sex change.  Name changes are common occurrences for people of all genders, and the percentage of name changes which are motivated by issues of gender identity and/or sex changes is very small.  The largest percentage is surely when people (not just women, though still more women than men) get married, and then comes people who have moved from one part of the world to another where their name is difficult to pronounce, written in a different alphabet, sounds like something undesirable in the language of their new home, and so forth.  Also papers published in one language are often translated into another, with the effect that e.g. many Russian authors are known by several moderately different names in the anglophone academic community.  Adding a clarifying note that say that multiple spellings point to the same person could be helpful.  In this recent preprint the byline is "Yuri G. Zarhin (Zarkhin)", which is perhaps the closest thing I've seen to the practice you're asking about.
However, there are nuances in your question that suggest the sex change example is not accidental: you actually mean to consider deeper issues of personal identity.  In other words, what if beyond changing their name, someone considers themself to actually be a different person? I get this for instance from

What happens if Jane never worked on the project, can she be the author or does it have to be John?

The obvious answer is "What are you talking about? Jane Doe and John Doe are the same person.  So of course Jane worked on the project.  The fact that the name 'Jane' was not applied to this person while she was working on the project is totally irrelevant."  However, it could be that Jane feels that she is really a different person from John.  Maybe she arranges [illegally, perhaps; I don't know how this works] to get a new social security number and otherwise systematically denies and delinks her new identity from her old one.  In that case it could be meaningful -- even critical -- to her that Jane didn't work on the project, rather John did.  However, though Jane's perspective is a highly interesting one, it is not going to hold up in the practicalities of an academic career, as she presumably wants to regard John's training and credentials as her own.  If she tries to make a CV of Jane Doe's work only, she is going to at best confuse everyone and more likely shoot herself in the foot.
It would be worth hearing from a transgendered academic [I am not one] for more nuances about this.  My understanding is that the above exigencies essentially require them to explain carefully in their CV that they have changed their name from John Doe to Jane Doe and thus cannot professionally behave like they are two different people.  If you are including the identity "John Doe = Jane Doe" anyway, then if it has deep personal significance to you to list yourself as John Doe on a paper that you worked on while you were John Doe even though you now sign all your papers Jane Doe, you can make that choice (and certainly it is your choice: the idea of anyone else telling you what to do here is somewhere between cruel and absurd).  What you cannot do is list both John Doe and Jane Doe as authors.  Well, not unless you wish to be truly transgressive: perhaps there are some areas of academia in which the jarring, confusing nature of such a byline would be viewed positively.

I am not sure if the sex change matters, I just wanted to make it clear that the issue is not as simple as a name change after marriage. I don't know what an editor would do and I don't know what I would think of a person who was the sole author of a Doe and Jones paper.

If Jane didn't work on the project as Jane, I'd think she'd have the choice of either but not both. "I wanted to use my present professional name," or "I felt I was a different person when I worked on the project," are both likely to be well-received. However, "I felt I was a different person but I still wanted credit under my present name," is unlikely to be well-received.
In the first case (work done under both identities) agreed that listing both (as opposed to a footnote) is transgressive and feels dishonest, but in some communities might be acceptable.

@Philip: Yes, I agree with that, as I hope my answer reflects.

The idea of feeling that one is a new person and delinking one's current identity from one's previous identity leads to interesting problems.  What if, for example, John Doe's work on this project had included some plagiarism or falsification of data? I'd want to hold Jane Doe responsible for that, and I suspect most scientists would agree with me. What about non-scientists?

I am not a lawyer but I don't think the courts would accept Jane's argument that she does not need to go to prison for the crimes John has been convicted for.

@gerrit: The case is not quite that easy. From the scientific point of view, the issue is that if any of the coauthors of a paper is or becomes aware that some of the findings presented in the paper are unsound because the underlying data has been falsified, it would somehow be the coauthor's moral duty to do something about the paper. While Jane may be able to deny responsibility for the original act, it will be hard for her to deny knowledge of what happened, which will weigh particularly badly as she must have had that knowledge already while she was working on the paper and still ...

... went through with publication.

This would be a much more common situation if you just asked about name changes after marriage, which is a very common thing for women in the western world (at least). There are lots of strategies here, but some women choose to keep their "academic" name the same even if the name they use in the rest of the world changes. This keeps the continuity of their name for citation counting purposes, professional recognition, and other aspects of an academic career. Others choose not to change their name at all. And others just deal with the change. I don't think anyone puts both their names, and I don't think many journals would accept it.
If you search the internet, there's plenty of articles with advice and stories about what women who married between their first and subsequent publications did and should do.

I agree that name changes after marriage are more common, but to an extent  I wanted to avoid the "don't change your name professionally" issues. I am curious about your statement that no one does it and journals might not accept it.

@StrongBad, my statement was more qualified than that. I have never seen both names on a paper in the post-marriage context, and it is only my supposition based on that and all of the hand-wringing in that context that leads me to believe that no journals allow it. Maybe you should ask a few journal editors.

About "I don't think many journals would accept it". How will they check that 2 names belong to the same person? Will they bother to check?

@SergeyDymchenko, I suppose I mean "I don't they they would accept it if they knew it was the same person." That being said, why risk a conflict with a journal some years down the line? The story will get around.

I believe that we live in a world, where also men might change their name after marriage. Admitted that it is far more seldom, but reducing it to what you have written seems just wrong and an antiquated point of view. I also want to state, that this hardly answers the question that was asked. Someone who chooses to change her/his sex, will most likely never keep her/his name, for academic reasons.

@Martin, I was speaking to likely sources of writing on the subject. E.g., http://www.researchtrends.com/issue21-january-2011/944/, http://scienceblogs.com/sciencewoman/2009/06/12/ask-sciencewomen-what-name-sho/, http://www.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/2dfqho/married_women_in_academia_did_you_change_your/, https://tenureshewrote.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/whats-in-a-name/. This includes some women who kept their ex-husband's names after divorcing. This is a complex issue with a lot of existing writing on it already. I was giving OP some context to search within. ...

... I don't know if @StrongBad is trans, but I don't think this was necessarily a personal question. There are a handful of trans academics out there who have been through this, but I found less info in my searches (though this is interesting). I was hopeful that suggesting that OP go back to the articles on name changes after marriage would lead them to useful information that was helpful regardless of the reason for the name change.

While the articles you linked in the comments might be very interesting to read and contain a lot of information on the subject, I believe that the stackexchange network should have answers that are self-contained. I never implied that StrongBad is trans, but what I do believe is, that it does not matter for the question at all. I was just trying to explain, why I decided to downvote this answer, why I think it does not help, why I think that view is outdated.

@Martin, I don't think you've yet characterized my view accurately at all. What outdated view do you think I hold here? Nothing I said is exclusive to women in the West, just that this is the most common source of information on academics whose names change over the course of their careers. Has that changed? I don't think so. I find the practice old-fashioned, but that's irrelevant to my answer which suggests reasoning by analogy to the more common case.

TL;DR: A transgender woman is unlikely to want her dead name in a publication.  You can safely assume Jane wants to publish under "Jane" and under no other name.  In the unlikely event that this is wrong, she's not going to be upset about her co-author thinking she would like to publish under her real name.

Allow me to offer my perspective (sorry, I didn't see the question earlier).  I no longer consider myself transgender, but I've "been there".
Please accept that there is no "John".  Jane has been falsely imprisoned in a male gender role since birth.  Every time Jane is referred to by her dead name, she will think that she is not welcome, that people don't want her to exist, and she may even contemplate suicide.  (Every time I've asked a transgender person about suicide, they have described detailed plans for how they would kill themselves.)
If you insist on deadnaming her, don't be surprised if she dumps the project, and severs contact with you.  Other possibilities are jumping in front of a train, or filing a complaint of discrimination.  (If people did this to me, I would catch a taxi to the airport, move to a new city/country and start a new life/career outside of academia.  I have organized my life so that I can do this at any moment.  However, I'm fortunate to have found a work environment where this is not an issue, and I'm now a very loyal employee [unwilling to leave even if somewhere else offered me a far higher salary].)
The best analogy I've found to explain how deadnaming feels:  Imagine a husband referring to his wife by his ex-girlfriend's name, and then, when she gets angry, he tells her it's easier for him to refer to her by his ex's name, and that she's overreacting.  His wife was never that person.  Jane was never that person either.
From most transgender peoples' perspective, there is no "sex change" (it's one of many misleading terms non-transgender people use to describe transgender people [other popular ones include "woman trapped in a man's body" (instead of "woman") and "preferred name" (instead of "name")]).  There's possibly a moment of realization ("Huh. I'm a girl.") followed by negotiating a pathway to being accepted in society as one's true gender (or a sufficiently close approximation to make life liveable).  Often this involves adopting a gender-appropriate name, which will help her fit in and be one of the girls.  Irrespective of which forms she's filled in, and irrespective of other people's opinions, Jane's name is Jane (until she says otherwise).
Jane may undergo medical procedures to correct her bodily mismatches (which are very expensive, probably will be the most physically painful experiences in her life, and might make her incapable of having children).  She endures this partly to stop people mistaking her for a man; to live as Jane in every aspect of her life.  Jane suffers greatly for the sake of being called Jane.
Jane will also be aware that if she refers to herself using her dead name, it gives others an excuse to follow suit.  And when others see people deadnaming her, they think it's okay too, and it grows out of control quickly.  (For this reason, I never use my dead name.  Anyone who uses it is doing so against my will---they are backstabbing me.  I have both threatened to sue or file a human rights complaint against those who have used it against my will.)
Being transgender should also be considered in a medical context---it's intimate and confidential, and not something she will want immortalized on permanent documents.  However, one medical aspect is important to be aware of here: the real-life test.  International guidelines for treatment of transgender people require that patients live a life consistent with their stipulated gender (the phrase is "consistent, insistent, and persistent").  As such, it's important for her to publish under the name "Jane" to access medical care, which is probably more important to her than the publication itself.  (As it was for me.  As another example, I deliberately stood at the front of this conference photo so I could later use it for the real-life test.)
With the above in mind, the idea that Jane would want that other word on a publication is preposterous to me.  It would be a huge step backwards in life.
(Caveat: Transgender people are a diverse group, so there is no universal narrative.)

Some comments about Pete L. Clark's answer:

I'm not aware of a transgender person who considers themselves as a different person after transitioning (although they might use something along the lines of "the person I was" metaphorically).  The typical transgender narrative is that they are affirming their gender; something along the lines of "I was always a girl, but was mistaken for a boy at birth".  Some transgender people actually consider themselves as a different gender than prior to transitioning (which might be because of different interpretations of the word "gender"), but not a different person.
The ability to correct one's documents varies from document to document, state to state, country to country, and fluctuates with who's running the country/state you were born in, live in, or are a citizen of.  While messy, it's perfectly legal.  Keep in mind, however:

Transgender people tend to value who someone is, rather than what's written on documents, and
There's also no such thing as e.g. "legally a woman": in a court of law, you are whatever the judge says you are.  Outside of a court of law, it's ordinary for transgender people to have mismatches between their gender, driver's licence, passport, and birth certificate.
[I find it amusing when lawmakers talk about how simple it is to tell who's a man and who's a woman, then proceed to propose laws with definitions of "man" and "woman" inconsistent with the definitions in laws proposed by other lawmakers who also talk about how simple it is to tell who's a man and who's a woman.  (99% of the time it is easy, and these definitions are consistent, but there's some exceptions, and this is what transgender people are---the exceptions.)]

Transgender people often avoid transitioning until the point where they become suicidal, where the choice becomes "transition or kill myself".  They have no choice but to accept the consequences of transitioning, no matter how severe.  They have likely accepted a host of negatives to live an authentic life, including a constant fear of being physically attacked, being arrested arbitrarily (and being raped in a gender-mismatched jail [along with forced prostitution]), being rejected by their families and religious groups, becoming homeless and having to turn to sex work to survive, unwanted sexual advances (trans people are often considered fetish objects, rather than human beings), and so on.  Jane is probably unconcerned other people's momentary confusion about which papers she's authored.
By transitioning, Jane has accepted a lower chance at getting a job, and a lower salary if she does get it, all to live an authentic life.  Her identity (who she is as a person) is more valuable to her than her career.  Some of my stories:

I'm fairly sure I was turned down for a job for no other reason than my gender.  The rejection letter was inaccurate, and I was even told I could not even give a seminar at that institution.  While prior to transitioning, the professor would email me and be happy for me to visit (where I once gave a seminar), they have not returned my emails in about 3 years.
I was accepted for some short-term contract work.  Admin requested my documents, but since they weren't corrected at that stage, I refused to supply them citing privacy reasons.  They said that if I didn't supply the documents, I would be given a "without PhD qualifications" salary, to which I agreed explaining that my privacy was more important to me than money, but they eventually put me on the "with PhD qualifications" salary anyway.
My work under my dead name is listed on separate MathSciNet, Google Scholar, math.SE, etc., pages.
I had two (or maybe three?) papers in the "minor revisions" stage when I transitioned.  It took me something like six months to actually make those changes.  As the corresponding author of one paper, this is what I wrote to the journal editor:

I must apologize about this, as the delay [was] caused largely by myself (not my co-authors) due to personal reasons (which will be apparent from my change of name).
I've attached the relevant documents to this email.  Please let me know if there's anything else required.  Also please forgive me for not using the [submission system] to respond; I do not wish to use that account.

The editor asked me to create a new account, which I did, and the paper was transferred there.  Noone said anything about the name.
I had a grant under my dead name.  After transitioning, I claimed reimbursement for conference travel on that grant, and I was asked for proof of the change of name (a "linking document"), which I refused citing privacy reasons and told them not to worry about the reimbursement.  They apologized for asking, and reimbursed me without the document.

There's workarounds in a lot of instances.  It's not as bad as you might think.  E.g. I've been publishing a lot recently, attempting to bury my dead-name publications; when applying for a job, I first email someone on the panel who I know from conferences; on my CV and website, I list surnames only; and here's a snippet from an email to someone I'll visit next week, who previously didn't know about my transition:

Hi [collaborator],
Hopefully you remember me (and can figure out
  who this is---perhaps ask [another collaborator] if there's any
  confusion).
Anyway, I'm thinking of going to the Design Theory conference in
  Istanbul... [snip]
Many thanks,
Rebecca Stones

Many people have no difficulty with this.  I'm starting to get emails about papers published under my dead name, but addressed to me.  Journal editors are somehow still sending me referee requests.  I've had two professors say they would write me letters of recommendation, which I've actually had to turn down (I guess they perceived me as having difficulty obtaining these).

And in response to some of the comments:

The idea of adding a footnote "previously known as John Doe" is just as preposterous to me as adding a dead name co-author (I would sooner write "I have genital herpes" as a footnote than my equivalent).
"If Jane didn't work on the project as Jane..."  "What if, for example, John Doe's work on this project..."  There is only Jane; there is only Jane's work.  Please try to stop clinging onto the imaginary person, and see the real person.

Rebecca: I learned more from reading this answer than almost any SE answer.  This is not the place for me to ask further questions or attempt to debate difficult questions of the temporal nature of identity, so I will just take in your answer.  I will say though that I tried to write fairly and in an unprejudiced manner on a topic which I have no personal experience.  If the language I used and the ideas I expressed are inappropriate, offensive or painful to you or your community I am very sorry.  Unfortunately I don't know any better...nor do most people, I suspect.

I didn't interpret anything you wrote as offensive; I was more trying to build on it.  In general, it's reasonable to assume one is trying to avoid hurting one's career, but sometimes personal goals are simply more important.

Great, I'm very relieved to hear that.  "In general, it's reasonable to assume one is trying to avoid hurting one's career, but sometimes personal goals are simply more important." Agreed.

Rebecca, I want to echo what Pete said. This is a staggeringly good answer / explanation/opening up. If it wasn't easy or you wondered if there was a point - thank you for your courage as well, so its not assumed easy. I have understood better from this in concrete terms, more of the issues and inward experiences/perspectives, which may be faced by transgendered people, than from almost anything else I have read, here or elsewhere. Thank you.

Name changes are quite common among both sexes for reasons other than sex change or marriage. Apart from the reasons mentioned in the previous answers, I have come across people who have changed their name after a parental divorce, deciding to  use the last name of the mother.
Irrespective of the reason for name change, the process I think would remain the same for all practical purposes. Definitely, there is no question of both names being included as that would establish John and Jane two different individuals, while in fact, they are the same person.
Additionally, while a footnote that explains the name change would suffice in a publication, I feel a copy of a legal document establishing the name change should be submitted to the journal. That would make the disclosure complete and would prove that John and Jane are the same person. In my country, usually an affidavit is done to legalize a name change. I'm not sure how it is is other countries, but I strongly feel some such document should be produced as evidence.


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Why do people in academia tend to write their email address with "(dot)", "(at)", instead of ".", "@"?
This may be a silly question, but why do people in academia tend to write their emails as jhon(dot)doe(at)gmail(dot)com?

I've seen this trend outside of academia too, mostly by technical people (e.g. programmers and software project maintainers). As I understand it, it's a rudimentary trick to defeat programs that look through webpages trying to find email addresses to spam. Don't know if that's the whole story, though.

Let's face it: if I want to farm mail addresses by crawling the web, I'll quickly hack up a regexp that defeats most feeble attempts at disguising them like the one you reference. The level of protection can be estimated to be nearly zero. I suspect that there are far more efficient ways to far (valid) email addresses nowadays.

@Raphael It is sufficient to defeat e-bay.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not specific to academia.  People outside academia do this as much as people inside academia.

It's to prevent robots harvesting the addresses for spamming.  Other things you may see - especially when the . and @ are left in - are addresses like firstnameREMOVEMElastname@example.moc or somenameNOSPAM@example.moc, where you're supposed to remove obvious parts before using the address.

Sure, you can write a filter to find the addresses anyway. But what do you think your response rate is going to be on a mailing list composed of people who have taken explicit steps to avoid spam?

see also this thread on stackexchange that explains the technical details. some of the masking techniques are quite effective, @Raphael

@Raphael Why would you, though? You can harvest a lot of addresses anyway, and doing extra work for the regex doesn't really gain you that much.

@gerrit I agree with the off-topic, but I think it would be better to migrate it rather than close. Also, in Academia these days, an unobfuscated email address will probably be displayed anyway in the University's staff directory, so that's another point distancing the question from Academia per se.

Given that there are two answers addressing why academics specifically tend to use this somewhat outdated method of email address obfuscation, I must conclude that this is specific to academic and am voting to reopen.

Many of us still don't have spam filters as effective as gmail. Most of academia is still on homegrown/managed systems, which don't have the resources Google has. I run my own email server, and though I have pretty updated spam filtering, quite a bit still gets through.

Just some personal experience to add to the various statements that this is now pointless. I have different email addresses from different stages in my career. One is on my webpage and all my papers, in a basic obfuscated form. A second was written briefly in plain text on one webpage before I caught that the wrong one had been put up for me (I prefer to keep my publicised one consistent on my research). Both accounts delivered to gmail, and so they went through the same spam filter. For at least a year I got significantly more spam arriving to the new-and-only-briefly-publicised address than

Fun fact: if you paste the obfuscated address into Gmail's "to" field, it will automatically convert it to the proper address.

This question should migrate somewhere else. Superuser maybe.

Completely unrelated to this exchange.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not specific to academia. It may be on-topic on [su].

The on-topic aspect of this is that most academics have an institute homepage over which they have very limited control (e.g. they don't have the option to use script-based email address hiding), but they are expected to make their email address accessible to humans.

Here is an answer from the SE about Information Security. http://security.stackexchange.com/a/45044/72376

As others have said, it's to prevent email address harvesting.  So why academic users mainly, and why do they use this pathetically ineffective technique?
Academic users were among the first to actually use the web for any purpose.  Universities were the first large-scale source of email addresses, and when the web became available, academic users were the first large-scale group to take advantage of it.  When spam started to become an issue in the early to mid 1990s, address obfuscation was actually an effective way of preventing address harvesting -- at least, for a few months, or a year or two, before spammers were doing the obvious corrections.
Even after spammers were correcting obfuscations, the early web users often continued to obfuscate: They had already done it and didn't bother changing it back, or they figured it might help and wouldn't hurt, or maybe they copied a template from someone else and just followed it.  Again, these early web pages were not really designed as such, they were just some student or early-stage professor hand-coding html. If new web pages are still obfuscating, they're presumably just copying their mentor, or their mentor's mentor, without really thinking much about it.
That's the same reason you see this sort of thing among the other early-adopter classes of web users, like tech folks.  People who put out pages in the early 90s had a more or less legitimate reason for it, and the tradition has just hung around.
(I just looked at my web page, first hand-coded with HTML in 1995, to see if I did this, but I don't even see an email address on my page any more.  I don't think I ever bothered to obfuscate even when I did include contact links.)

Thanks. I think your answer is the only one that goes past the obvious reasons.

It's the same reason why most academics users web pages look like they were last updated in 1995.

+1 from an early adopter (who got about 100 to 120 spams mails per day on my mid 1990 unui mail account).

To avoid email harvesting spam-bots. (As if someone can't write a Perl script to make the appropriate substitutions.)

It's worth noting that this occurs only on webpages (never in papers or non-web CVs).  It's a 90s-era web convention, rather than an academic convention.

Is there any evidence that this is actually necessary? I have had my mail address in the open for years and I don't get any spam.

@Raphael That cannot be -- the average user gets (much) more spam than legit mails. What can be is that your email client or provider filters spam. But such filters are necessarily heuristic and cannot be perfect. There will always be false positives and false negatives. If you indeed get no spam it means that the filter is on the strict side, filtering a lot. Inevitably this must include false positives, i.e. legit mails which you never receive. You should at least regularly read a filter digest, something which many filters offer. They contain a one-liner per filtered-out mail.

@Raphael I see only now that you are a PHD student in the CS area, so all I have written was known to you, possibly better than to me. What is your own best guess then why you don't receive spam? It's very uncommon.

@Raphael When I worked in academia and my email address was on the institute's website, I got a lot of calls for papers from insignificant "journals". This can't be easily classified as spam and therefore defeated the filters.

@PeterSchneider et al.: There is no spam filter outside of my client that I know of (headers don't indicate one, anyway); it may be that our datacenter silently filters (which they should not). Well, I do get occasional mails by Computeroxy, and the odd "journal". But nothing of the Viagra or penis enlargement kind. The only address I get such (in volume) is one I used over at wordpress.org. Other, which have been online for years, get virtually none. I don't think people need to crawl the web for addresses these days.

@NajibIdrissi Thanks for the reference! That's old, though; I'd be interested in a contemporary experiment.

@Raphael You most certainly have at least one and (if in an institution) probably several upstream spam nets catching and silently filtering your mail.  And you are glad you do, even if you think you aren't - you can be certain of that.

While you can write a script, in practice few people do: People who mask their email are such a small fraction of all the emails that it's not worth it, and furthermore they're low value emails since such a spam-savvy person would also be hard to fool with typical spam (simple scams, worthless "products", phishing, Nigerian princes). Remember that spammers don't profit from sending you spam, they profit from you replying to it.

Just because someone can counter with some effort, it still can make sense to do something that is practically zero effort on your side. It is like a padlock: any idiot can break it with a hammer, yet it is much better protection than keeping things totally open.

@TomDworzanski: I'm not saying you can't extract e-mail addresses from PDFs, just that in practice academics don't obfuscate them there.  (I don't recall ever having seen a paper with an obfuscated e-mail address, while I frequently see them on web pages.)  My point is that although the question asks why "people in academia tend to write their emails as ...", it's not a general academic convention that e-mail addresses are always written this way.  Rather, it's specific to web pages (regardless of whether this specificity is actually justified).

i tend to make an image out of the email to avoid that kind of thing in websites i make.

Academics have a vested interest in being very public facing at times - it's easier to be contacted by potential students, collaborators, the media, etc. if your email address is readily available. And there isn't an incentive to hide your particular identity behind a large-scale corporate account (hr@fakecompany.com for example).
Putting your email address out in the world, in plain text, is a recipe for having it harvested by spam-bots. Examples like the one you give are an attempt to make the address (marginally) less machine readable while still making it perfectly human readable.

Is there any evidence that this is actually necessary? I have had my mail address in the open for years and I don't get any spam.

@Raphael I have no idea if anyone's conducted that study. I, frankly, don't bother, as most of the spam I get is the result of publications.

@Raphael Does e-mail obfusction work? @ SuperUser.

@gerrit Sorry if this comment is a bit off-topic, but this answer from the link you posted is hilarious: http://superuser.com/a/236257/310853

@Raphael Many university/corporate email spam filter systems are more primitive and less reliable to say, gmail spam filters.

Because those people (in academia or elsewhere) didn't learn proper ways to protect their e-mail addresses from spam bots.
Edit: I'm not sure how can I expand this without repeating Peter Schneider's comment. It is naive to believe that email collecting script would not be able to do basic regex substitution which defeats the use of (dot) instead of .. People writing their e-mails this way just make them less readable for people, not for bots.

Could you perhaps expand a bit?

Using recaptcha may not be an acceptable alternative. If you care about the privacy of your visitors, you do not want them to have to ping Google if they want to see your address. Also, if you care about their time, you do not want to require them to solve human intelligence tasks for Google to see your address.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Finding high quality copyright free icons for computer diagrams in IEEE or ACM submission
I am a new graduate student in computer science and starting to submit papers to IEEE and ACM. I would like the diagrams to look as professional as possible. For example, if I am showing a digital attack on a computer network, I would  like computer and server node icons etc. I was able to find these common ones easily in many WYSIWYG graphics editors.
However, an icon of a "hacker" or "attacker" is harder to find by default since these are more 'niche' if you will. For these I notice that I can use IconFinder, however many icons have a Creative Commons license -- which generally means that I should attribute the original creator. Since I use many icons in my diagrams, it would be easier if I can find some that do not require attribution.
I noticed that the Creative Commons BY 3.0 license has a clause that says:

You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the
  material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an
  applicable exception or limitation

Now I have two main questions:

Does that clause I quoted mean that I can use it in a paper going to
IEEE or ACM or such publications? Is that considered public domain?¹
How do you find icons that you can use freely in your paper without
the need for attribution?

¹ I realize this borders on "legal question" and someone might be reluctant in answering it. Just making it clear that I would not hold anyone or Stack Exchange liable for any advice given.

Addressing your immediate concern, you may be able to find a skull & crossbones icon, if you and your audience are OK with the implication that hacker = pirate. If you ever need nefarious hacker images (CC but requiring attribution), an excellent collection is here: https://www.flickr.com/groups/hacker-images/pool/

Another option is to create your own using a program like Inkscape. Most icons you'll find online are raster images, that don't hold up well on high resolution monitors or high-DPI printers unless they're very big (inflating your document size too). So creating your diagrams in a program like Inkscape will be a win-win, if you're up for learning how to use such software. You can still base your icons off of existing material you find online, as long as you don't copy it exactly, you shouldn't have copyright issues.

The quoted part means that you don’t have to follow the license if you are allowed to use the icon anyway (without the license).
This could be the case if the icon is in the public domain, if its use would be allowed by something like fair use, the right to quote, or similar.
In other words: the license can’t restrict you from doing something which you are allowed to do according to copyright (and other relevant) laws. Copyright licenses (like CC BY) give additional permissions (under certain conditions), not additional restrictions.
If you don’t know for sure that the icon is in the public domain, or that your use would be legally allowed, better assume that you have to follow the license.

Most licenses require attribution. All of Creative Commons’s licenses do (as they all have the "BY" component).
If you really don’t want to attribute your icons (the attribution doesn’t have to appear next to the diagram, if that’s what you are concerned about), you have three options:

Use icons that are published under a license that doesn’t require attribution. It doesn’t have to be a known copyright license, it could also be stated in the terms of a service of the icon site.
Use icons that are in the public domain. The author would have to state this somehow (e.g., by saying "public domain", or by using the public domain dedication CC0 1.0, or one of the other public domain equivalent licenses), or you would have to know that the intellectual property rights have expired.
Use icons that don’t meet the threshold of originality. Of course it’s not easily possible to know if that’s the case. Better be safe than sorry and assume that all except the most simple icons are eligible for copyright protection.

Thank you, but what about icons that simply say 'Free for commercial use' and 'MIT license'. Can those be used without attribution?

@learnerX: The MIT license requires that the copyright notice (which may contain the author name) and the permission notice have to be included in copies. However, the MIT license is not intended to be used for icons (the license explicitly says that it’s for "Software"), so it’s not necessarily clear how it works in that case.

You forgot option 4: Make your own icons

I think using such material has academic implications as well. You may not have license obligations when using public domain images, but in the academic context you are required to attribute them correctly even with public domain and fair use material. And when you need to add "Image by John Miller" for a public domain image, it is not so different to write "Image by John Miller (CC-BY-3.0)" for a CC licensed image.

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

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


text:
Do people usually pursue a Master's degree in the UK before going to PhD?
I'm a physics-majored undergrad student studying in the U.S. and I'm looking for some graduate programs in the UK. In my university, most graduate students are directly enrolled in the Ph.D. programs after completing their Bachelor's degree, but I'm not sure if this works the same in the UK. If I will eventually pursue a Ph.D. degree, do I need to first apply for the MSc programs? Is it possible to directly get into a doctorate program? Thanks!

Check also the answers to this question as two of them describe the situation in the UK.

It very much depends on the subject. My understanding in physics is that most student study a 4 year undergraduate program where they graduate directly into a masters without have obtained a bachelor's degree first.

@penelope Thanks for the link!

@Ian Sudbery Thank you!

You can certainly start a physics PhD in the UK with just a BSc. Your application would be strengthened if you have a final year dissertation as part of your degree (typically 5000-8000 words) as these are standard in the UK and help students get a bit of research experience.
However, the majority of applicants to UK physics PhDs will have what's called an "integrated Master's", usually designated as MPhys. These are four year degrees where you do not graduate after three years with a BSc but go straight into a fourth year, which will comprise more specialised courses and a longer dissertation project. They're not quite as research heavy as an MRes or MPhil, which are purely research-based Master's. Their closest equivalent is BSc+MSc.
I recommend you apply to PhDs and Master's at the same time -- you may well be successful with your PhD applications but if not, you certainly will with your Master's. However, you will still have to apply for PhDs once you have started your MSc -- you cannot upgrade or convert your enrollment to PhD once you are in (this may be possible with an MRes/MPhil but you would need to check the individual university's regulations).
Note that funding for an MSc must be found by the student -- you will not be able to earn money as a TA as is common in the US. UK students can take out a postgraduate loan from the government but I don't know if this is available to international students. Bear in mind that physics PhDs are competitive and you should apply to ten or more universities to increase your chances of acceptance. Good luck!

Thank you very much for the comprehensive answer! I really appreciate it:)

Most go straight from a Bachelor's degree (and that would be considered quite normal). Some have a Master's degree (which wouldn't be thought of as a negative) and an increasing number enrol in combined MRes/MPhil + PhD programmes (which involve doing a Master's before progressing to a PhD at the same university in the same field).

-1 this does not tally at all with my knowledge and experience. The majority of UK physics PhDs do an integrated Masters (MPhys + PhD). A few start a PhD with a BSc only. I have never seen a combined MPhil + PhD programme offered in the UK.

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


text:
Is it okay for the graduate school if my fall semester GPA drops?
I am an undergraduate student and just submitted the applications to the grad schools in both the US and the UK. This semester has been really tough for me, and I feel like my overall GPA might be dropping by a little (from 3.95 to around 3.91). I am worried about if the grad school admission office will be harsh on my grade, especially in one class I enrolled in this semester, I feel like the grade might be 3.0/4.0. Am I worrying too much about that? Do I need to be prepared to explain anything if there's an interview? Any suggestions is appreciated.

You know that's like a 1% change, right?

'Worries' avoid walking on the rationality street.

Will the schools you've applied to know what your fall semester grades are if you've already submitted the applications? Or are these applications that you will submit only after those grades are determined?

Yes, you are worrying too much. It is actually pretty common for grades to drop somewhat in the final term. Students have a lot on their minds.
In the US, at least, any single data point is unlikely to make much of any difference as the evaluation is broad based. And there is nothing problematic about 3.9x grades in any case. And a single course grade is mostly irrelevant.

Indeed, a drop in the 3rd significant figure is, well, insignificant. Now, a semester of all C's or worse is another thing...


text:
Should I include 'Fixed-term' in writing professor's title?
I am an undergraduate student applying to graduate schools. One of my recommenders is my math professor. On the university's webpage and outlook email, his title is 'Fixed Term Assistant Professor'. So I included the 'Fixed term' when I filled out recommender's information on my application portal. Is this appropriate? Does that matter if I drop 'Fixed term' or not? Thanks!

If that is his official title then, yes, you should write it as the university does. Dropping it would be claiming something that isn't true in this case.
The university probably considers "fixed term" to be an important distinction.

Thanks, that helps!

Similarly if someone’s title is “Ritt Assistant Professor” at Columbia it would be very misleading to say their title was “Assistant Professor.”  A postdoc and a tenure track position are quite different.

Though these things are confusing, my colleague Prof. Plavnik is Charlotte Ann Griffin Assistant Professor, but it would still be accurate to say her title is Assistant Professor because it’s a normal assistant professorship with an endowed research fund.  But unless you understand these distinctions you’re best off just literally copying the full title.  Usually the recommender can edit it.

@Noah Snyder Awesome! Thank you!!

Out of respect for him, I would call him a "Professor". That term is also used generically in many countries, unlike "Full Professor".
I would be embarrassed if he read a form in which I describe him with that title.


text:
Is it appropriate to ask a postdoc from another university about the possible research opportunities?
I'm currently a master's student studying theoretical physics. I've been really interested in a research project done by a postdoc from a different university. I was wondering if it would be appropriate if I ask him about the possible research opportunities. I'm not quite sure how I may want to ask, as I'm from a different institution. Should I also let him know I'm just interested in this project and would be happy to volunteer? Thanks!

You can certainly discuss your interest in his research with him. Just what do you mean by "research opportunities"? Join his group? Apply to his school? I don't understand what "volunteering" might mean.

@Ethan Bolker Thanks for the comment! By that I mean getting involved in his project without formally enrolling at the other university. I'm not quite sure if I would be eligible for funding so I don't know if I should let him know I just would like to have this experience even if it's unpaid.

This is called networking --- it's perfectly fine and appropriate and it is a normal part of building a professional career.  Research collaborations across different universities are perfectly normal in academia and there is usually no requirement to be enrolled at, or affiliated with, another university in order to participate in research with academics there.
Researchers at universities are sometimes interested in having people help on their projects (particularly if they are volunteers) but as a Masters student you may or may not have enough background to contribute in a meaningful way.  For these kinds of requests you should look at the matter from the perspective of the other party --- try to think of things you can contribute (taking account of the fact that you are only a Masters student) that can add value to the project.
In any case, it doesn't hurt to express an interest in the research field of another person and ask if there are opportunities.  Good luck.

If you want to ask about collaboration it is fine and collaboration with peers is not paid. But, you have to have something to add to the "team" to make this proper. If you just want their help, they will probably decline as it might interfere with their own duties.
If you want to ask them about life as a postdoc it is also fine. They might help or not, depending on how much time they have to spare.
If you want to ask them about whether their current institution is a good place to be it is fine, as well, but if it is really bad, they might not want to reveal their pain. That is an outlier, though.
But, if you are really interested in their work, then some sort of contact might be useful to both of you. Would you give them feedback on a paper in progress? That might be of mutual benefit. And a contact now might lead to more substantial things in the future once you get established. A wide circle of contacts and collaborators is a valuable thing.
But first, think about what you have to offer, not just about what you hope to get.


text:
Can you teach in higher education with a master's degree?
I have a Bachelor's degree in journalism, and I'm starting a Master's degree program next year.  I'd like to teach in a university - is it possible to do so with only a Master's?

What country, and what field? Journalism? In the US, many university teaching posts require a doctorate.

In the unedited post, you mentioned portuguese, so I'll take a chance and guess brazilian. It is statistically likely, you don't seem to be from portugal, but that still leaves portuguese speaking african countries...
Considering public universities in/near SP, RJ, MG, the whole south and some capitals, you won't even be able to apply, they require PhDs all around, with high competition. In the federal universities farthest away from these centers (like AP, RO, RR) a masters would be enough in most cases. These openings are probably available even with the recession, not many candidates willing to relocate, and, without PhD, the salary will be kinda low... (~ 4k BRL)
On the other hand, if you go to the private universities, yes, totally. With the exception to some of the most prestigious (like PUC, Mackenzie, etc), that require PhDs.  In the smaller ones, most of the professors do not even have masters. Low pay, no research and tons of courses tho...
If you combine both and consider a small private university farthest away from the economic centers, they might not even consider you, saying that you are overqualified....

Your question is short and missing much information, so I will try to cover a few basics.
In general, in many countries, having a Phd is required.  The requirement is not always a university rule, but mostly an internal department decision, or a factor of previous experience.
There are many fields in which a Phd is not required, such as Business, Art, Architecture, Music, etc.  While many of those fields also have what is referred to as a 'terminal degree', meaning the highest degree in their respective field which may not be a Phd, those departments also will hire non-Phd faculty.
This will also vary depending on what type of school.  Community college typically will be willing to accept a broader range of people.  Universities may be teaching or research focused. In that case, you may have a masters with a high level of research experience, and a research university will welcome it.
Industry is also greatly important in some fields.  In something like Industrial Design, having a bachelors or masters with 7 years of product design at Apple may very well carry you far.
I am not familiar with journalism in particular, but would imagine if you were a journalist at a well known paper, a school focusing on sending students to industry and not academia may look favorably on you.
So how do you become a teacher?  In my opinion, your best chances are either getting a masters degree, then working at a renowned journalism company, build a reputation and a name, and over a few years start looking into Universities.  Otherwise, pursue a Phd.  Having a Phd is not a guarantee for a teaching position either, so you may very well end up spending 6 years on your Phd, not having worked in industry, and find it difficult to get a job.


text:
Courses arming students to become whistle blowers in their future career if needed?
QUESTION:
Are there any universities currently offering courses arming students to become whistle blowers in their future careers (or even while they are still a student at the university), if needed? How are the ethical issues (the course could encourage students to take actions (whistle blowing) resulting in harm to themselves, but not having the course could harm the society in the long term) in deciding to teach such a course solved?
MOTIVATION:
As an instructor in a faculty of engineering, I would like to prepare my students, future engineers, to the difficult decision of "blowing the whistle" (for lack of a better expression) on their employer if they see the need for it. By "preparing them", I mean making sure that they know

Definition :: What is whistle-blowing
History :: Famous and less famous whistle blower cases
Motivation :: Social impacts of past whistle blower cases
Legal :: (lack of) legal protection for whistle blowers
Technical :: Current techniques useful to whistle blowers (which might persist or evolve in time, e.g. Tor, Tails, Signal, etc.)
Conclusion :: The importance of creating a whistle-blowing culture

WORK DONE SO FAR:
A quick search on the internet revealed a small diversity of online courses of various length (which I list below), but curiously enough, no academic course. I am wondering if I am using the wrong key words (maybe whistle blowing takes another name in education, to "go under the radar"), or if there are reasons which make it harder for institutions to teach such a course (e.g. employers might be more reluctant to hire employees more likely to blow the whistle on them?).

The Corporate Finance Institute had the most useful material, but it seems more aimed at convincing high level corporate executives of why a whistle blowing policy is in their interest.
The Australian website sentrient.com.au has an interesting whistle blowing course, but does not seem to cover any of the techniques of anonymization which I would like to arm my students with.
Delta-net has a short (30 minutes) course which aims to "Empower employees to identify and report fraud and other wrongdoing under whistleblowing", including a section about "What anonymous and confidential complaints are".
Becker.com has an overview course of
the role of the whistle-blowing in the workplace; an historic overview of famous cases and their outcomes; the  Laws protecting workers’ rights in whistle-blowing cases; and programs, procedures, and concepts important to whistle-blowing laws.
Coursera does not seem to have such a course, but their course on forensic accounting seems to have a section on whistle blowing.
Glencora Borradaile wrote a book Defend Dissent (also available in Spanish!) based on a course she taught on "Digital Suppression and Cryptographic Defense of Social Movements", which should be relevant.

To clarify, I am not looking for a course which "does it all for me": I am able to do my homework and to create my own course! It's just that when I solve a problem, I like to look at existing solutions, and I was kind of intrigued by the lack of existing academic courses.

Something like https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/esd-932-engineering-ethics-spring-2006/ ?

All the trainings I've seen with regards to research/academic ethics: research with humans, HIPAA, research with animals, conflict of interest training, etc, have a whistleblowing component to them. I would say in broad terms, I'm surprised by the limited instruction in these sorts of ethical areas encountered in other disciplines. In biology, these were all standard whether or not you worked with humans or animals.

Actually, I think a full course in whistleblowing is overkill in an engineering or other technical curriculum. It is too specialized. Maybe in law it would work.
OTOH, a course in professional ethics is certainly warranted in engineering and STEM generally, and the responsibilities and possible actions of witnesses to corruption and malfeasance could be part of that.
I encourage you to find resources on the topic, but also encourage you to think more broadly about ethics in engineering.
Also note that blowing the whistle on the powerful can be life threatening in some places. Even in the US, it doesn't always work out well for those who do it. But that is a societal problem, not a technical one.

I would add a cryptographic component, about the tools that whistle blowers can use to stay anonymous and protect themselves. A whole course could be taught about those, so I do not think it would be overkill?


text:
Why should the scientific community avoid double submissions?
Every journal has strict rules about duplicate submissions, and I do not mean publishing the paper in 2 venues.
My approach is mostly from an economics point of view: Given the fact that most reviews take between 2-3 months, plus any number of months for a resubmission, limiting yourself to only one journal seems not only a waste of time for the individual, but an overall drag for the scientific community. Even if you make a groundbreaking discovery, it won't get published until about a year later.
Multiple submissions dramatically increase the chances of getting your work published, and if you get accepted in both, you can always pull out your paper. From a marketplace point of view, this makes sense, since in this way, journals would be fighting for authors and not the other way around.
Models like Arxiv have proven that this is not such a crazy idea

arXiv is not a peer-reviewed site. Different publishers have very different rules about publishing to eprint servers as well as their journals. For instance, AIP/APS allows an author to put her own version of a manuscript onto arXiv, while ACS doesn't allow this at all.

In case the uninitiated are reading this, one should be aware that if a publisher discovers a case of double submission, they will likely ban you from submitting to any of their journals for up to several years.

I don't see what arXiv has to do with this at all.

I think there are three reasons.

From the publishers' perspective they want to squash competition.
They want to know that if they invest the time and resources to
evaluate the paper that they have a very good chance of publishing
it. I don't particularly like how the publishing industry currently
works and I might argue that this is in fact a reason to double
submit.
The second reason is about the reviewer and editor resources. These
are our colleagues and wasting their time is not fair. As a reviewer
I want to know that if I put time and effort into a review, that my
comments will be considered. Even if my review leads to a rejection,
you will likely think about the feedback before resubmitting.
Having little or no cost associated with multiple submissions reduces
the effectiveness of the peer review process. You increase the
chance of finding a set of reviewers who miss flaws and potentially
ignore reviewers who find flaws.

Adding to point 2: Given the sizes of some communities, it is quite likely that your colleagues would realize at some point that you submit to more than one journal at the same time (e.g., when one referee gets the same manuscript twice). They will not like that you increase the overall refereeing workload and let them partly work in vain. They may immediately refuse to referee any of your papers in the future.

If the point of publication was to get it published as quickly as possible, then there might be some merit to your argument. But the point of peer-reviewed publication is to have the community vet your work and certify its basic soundness (not value/impact necessarily - that's a different story).
In that case, the delay involved in publication is a problem that needs to be fixed, but you shouldn't fix it by allowing multiple instances of peer-review.

Would be interesting to have a "pool" of peer reviewers (attached to something like Arxiv) willing to give their time (like the do now) and give scores in this pool. Then, the Journals can come and bid for high scored papers, or papers that have been accepted as passed by peer reviewers. That way the power would be with the authors, not the journals.

This is similar to what some of the "publish-then-review" proposals are getting at.

One reason could be- if the paper gets accepted at both the venues, then you'll have to decide which venue is better. You could have thought about this before submitting also, so to avoid loss of time of the reviewers, you should do it before.


text:
Why did SoftwareX’ impact factor drop from 4.5 SJR to 0.4 last year?
I planned to submit one of my long-developed software pieces to the prestigious journal SoftwareX. I was preparing for this for a while and making my code ready, and was just about to submit and realized its huge drop of impact factor on SJR.
It steadily built its position as a respected and leading journal, growing its impact factor close to 10 and topping the lists at SJR and Google Scholar for publishing software. And now it dropped a lot, to the level of paid open-access journals of disputable reputation.
Is there a systematic reason why this happened? Too many papers, too many poor papers, bad leadership, bad management, poor peer-review?

I took the liberty to remove the off-topic part of the question from the end. The answers you get hopefully help you in choosing a publication venue, but we can not choose it for you.

Dear @RichardErickson I think the community voted differently and found the question valuable. It is not specific to the journal, but to the ranking brought by SJR, citescore, etc. Looking at the answer we now know better how IF can be pumped by a single paper falling out of window after 3 years. The question "Where to publish?" (or as I stated "Shall I publish there?") is one of the key that you answer at academia and in future you are evaluated based on your decisions. If sth is suspisious with metrics, it's good for all the community to know the reason and be aware of it.

As a point of comparison, SoftwareX currently has a h5-index of 20 and h5-median of 34, while Journal of Open Source Software has a h5-index of 32 and h5-median of 60, as measured by Google Scholar. In my experience these metrics are generally more reliable than so-called impact factors.

I think this is a good example of putting too much faith in an average measure like Impact Factor or SJR when you talk about the 'reputation' of a journal.
In 2015, in its first year, SoftwareX published "Gromacs: High performance molecular simulations through multi-level parallelism from laptops to supercomputers", which was extremely highly cited - Scopus has almost 3,800 citations, more than 40 times more than the next most-cited paper in the journal. The journal is quite small, so in 2017 SoftwareX would have had a “citations per paper” of about 8 from that one paper alone.
SJR uses a three-year window, so this paper stopped contributing to their average in 2019, which is where you see the precipitous drop in rank, as it's now reflecting the 'normal' citation rate for other papers in the journal without this huge outlier.
The question you have to answer for yourself when deciding where to submit is, should you care? You said SoftwareX had built a reputation as a respected and leading journal, so if that was actually true in your field, then nothing seems to have changed apart from this one big outlier dropping out of the citation average. On the other hand, if 'reputation' was just used as shorthand for Impact/SJR, then this has indeed substantially fallen, and you'll need to decide how much that matters to you when you decide where to submit.

thank you for digging in. I was guessing an outlier was driving the moving average.

@Stephen McMahon - that is a very good explanation that I was looking for. And it actually gives a broad perspective. The current reputation of the journal, measured with SJR dropped, yet it's actual potential and quality, knowing the background, did not so much. If that is the only reason for the drop, I am about to keep the faith in the journal. And the faith on th market flooded with seasonal scam journals is the key.


text:
What exactly is "campus security"?
I read this question where a teaching assistant asks how to deal with an aggressive student.
In her answer, the user Nicole Hamilton gives advice to call campus security. Now, in my naive foreign thinking, whenever the word "campus security" came up, I imagined this to be similar to a discotheque's security people: a single strong person (or a team) who would be in the university building during its opening hours, helping de-escalate conflicts and throwing out aggressive people.
However, the user "apparente001" advises the OP to "do not hesitate to call campus security for an escort while leaving your building at night" (in a comment). This suggests that campus security is more: A university employee apparently may call these security people at any time to any (reasonable?) place to escort them (I assume, provided that some incident happened like the one described by OP). From the Wikipedia article, I understand campus police (is this the same as campus security?) to be police officers who only serve in university.
However (at least in my country), I could not simply call the police to escort me at night when something "vague" like the incident described in the question happened. (I do not want to say the the incident is not serious - however, I doubt a police officer would escort me at night if I told them that very incident).
So I take it that campus security/campus police must be something different: an organisation any university employee can call at any time. Can you tell me more about this concept?
In particular, the question which interest me are:

Is campus police/campus security the same concept?
What exactly does campus police/campus security for university employees? When can they be called and for what purpose?
Can university students (if they are not at the university building) also call them? If yes, to what extend do they help them?

While the original question specifies no country, I have the feeling that the OP and the user "apparente001" are talking about US or Canada. (I may be wrong, through.) Therefore, I also would be (mainly) interested in information about these countries.

note:  Campus security will usually only escort you to your car or maybe a near by bus stop.  Depending on how busy they are will determine how long they can wait with you.  We also have mini-vans at night to take students, staff, or etc to their cars if they call and ask for it.

What I've seen in the US: Campus security can escort you at night to prevent problems; they can give you a jump-start if your battery is dead; they can use a tool to open your car if you locked your keys inside; they can frisk someone and take them to their office to hold them for some time; they can issue a traffic ticket on campus or nearby; they can look for a lost child on campus; they can take a report of a crime committed on campus; they can deescalate tensions; they can call other law enforcement agencies for support. That's probably not an exhaustive list but it's what I'm aware of.

There is an article Difference Between Security Guards & Police Officer by LinkedIn. I have a feeling this is a boat programming question because the underline question is the difference between police and security guard. I am going to flag the mods and let them determine whether we should close this question.

@scaaahu: I am sorry, but I don't understand your comment. Was it bad the I included my interest in distinguishing the two words? Should I edit that out? I am sorry if I broke any rules by asking that.

Please don't be sorry. I don't think your question is a bad one. But, I must point out your question #1 is actually the difference between police and security guard. Some universities use police (the reason may be they are public universities). Some use security guards. At least, I don't think private universities can have police officers as employees. Your other questions makes some sense. I can't determine if we should close it. That's why I flag the mods.

@scaaahu's I think there is more to it then just the difference between police and security. There is also when to call them and escorts, etc. This seems pretty fundamental to university life.

@scaaahu: I strongly disagree with the "boat programming" assessment here. As someone from a country like the OP's, where neither "campus security" nor "campus police" exist, getting an idea of whether these two terms denote the same thing is an integral aspect of understanding what "campus security/police" is. It is not as easy as saying "Some universities use police (...). Some use security guards.", as even with that in mind, I would have no idea whether that's the same organization as the usual "public police", a special team or subdivision thereof, or a private police-like entity.

Many universities (both public and private) in the US have campus police.  These are actual police officers who can carry guns and have the power to arrest someone or write a citation.  On a large campus with tens of thousands of students, this can be a quite sizable police force.  The campus police typically have jurisdiction limited to the university campus, but in some cases, they share jurisdiction with local police in the area near campus.
Other universities have campus security.  These are security guards who operate much like the security guards you might find at a sporting event or concert.  They don't have full police powers, but they can certainly remove someone from campus who is misbehaving.  When an incident becomes serious, they'll call in the local police force.
"Security" is often used as a generic name for these forces, whether or not they have actual police powers.  On many campuses, there is a mixture of police (more highly trained and paid more) and security guards (less trained and less expensive) that are assigned to deal with different kinds of situations.
So,

Not exactly.  Campus police have full police powers (to arrest, use
deadly force, etc.)  Campus security typically has less authority.
Campus police or security are typically the first responders for criminal activity (robbery, assault, etc.)  They enforce campus rules that may not carry criminal penalties.  Campus security can call in the local police for more serious incidents.   Anyone on campus (students, faculty, or staff) can call in the campus police or security, although making a frivolous complaint could get you in trouble.
Unless there's some jurisdiction agreement between campus police and the regular local police force, it wouldn't be appropriate to call the campus police to respond to an incident off campus- the campus police would transfer your call to the appropriate police department.  Note that "campus" might include all university-owned buildings, even if they're physically distant from the main campus.  In particular, university-owned housing is typically "on campus."

At another level, most campuses in the US have their own set of rules for student conduct and an administrative process for judging students who are charged with violating the rules.  This is separate from the legal system.  It gives some leeway to university administrators to deal with infractions that might be crimes if they were handled by the regular legal system.  This can be controversial, particularly when it extends to more serious offenses such as sexual assault.
P.S.
Some large campuses in the US also have their own staff to provide firefighting and emergency medical assistance.  When there are science and engineering labs, it's particularly important that firefighters be trained in how to deal with emergencies involving hazardous materials.
Many campuses in urban areas have free escort services- a student (or even a staff or faculty member) calls up security to request an escort to walk with them (or give a ride in a car) from one part of campus to another. You can't expect instant service, but a typical wait time might be 20 minutes.   The escort might be provided by a campus police officer who is already out on patrol, but it's more common for there to be a group of non-police employees and vehicles dedicated to this. These services are mostly used late at night- if you've been working in your lab until 1 am, you might want an escort back to your dormitory or the parking garage.
In the US, the Clery Act requires colleges and universities to prepare an annual report with statistics on crimes and other incidents (such as fires) that occur on and near campus.  Potential students often read these reports to determine whether a campus is "safe."   This has made campus safety an important concern to administrators.

My university's PD's jurisdiction includes some of the student-heavy nearby neighborhoods, even if they aren't university property. So in some cases, it might be appropriate to call.

That’s exactly the situation I mentioned where the campus police have some off campus jurisdiction.

Ah, you're right, you mentioned it above, I was looking at the bullet "Note that 'campus' might include all university-owned buildings," which didn't include nearby non-university buildings.

Might be worth adding to this answer that security personnel can also be medical first-responders. At my institution campus security responds to lab accidents or medical emergencies. They will then coordinate with local emergency response (ambulance/paramedics) to help guide them to the location of the emergency. University/college campuses can be pretty sprawling places with a lot of interconnected buildings. It can sometimes be hard for an outsider to find their way (including emergency personnel). They are also in charge of writing incident reports for university safety records.

If there is an emergency situation do not worry about jurisdiction, call 911.  It is their job to dispatch to the appropriate police agency.

Good answer! You may want to add a note about escorts since that was part of OP's question.

It can be all of the above. For example, UPenn has a legitimate, and accredited, police department, they also use a private security service that monitors the buildings and grounds, a walking escort service as well as a door-to-door shuttle service.
There are security phones all over campus. Basically, US universities take safety very seriously. Whoever you get in touch with, will make sure you get the help you need.

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

1) Is campus police/campus security the same concept?

Slightly different, though they often have the same function. Most campus police have arrest powers and are official police agencies, while campus security doesn't have arrest powers and are just a security group. There are occasionally both on a single campus.

2) What exactly does campus police/campus security for university
  employees? When can they be called and for what purpose?

I mean, once can call them for anything. They can do campus escorts, reporting crimes on campus, questions, etc.

3) Can university students (if they are not at the university
  building) also call them? If yes, to what extend do they help them?

They can, though if they are off-campus, there's often nothing they can do, though they may be able to put you in touch/get in touch with the police in the area who can help. On occasion there are informal agreements where campus police might deal with local complaints from/about students instead of the local police.

You're running into a side effect of a capitalist system.  For the most part, US universities, both public and private, are run as businesses, and the main customers are the parents.  If the parents believe that a particular university is not safe, well there are plenty others to choose from.
Therefore the campus police/campus security will do whatever is needed to make the students feel safe, within reason. As faculty you will benefit from this approach, so yes, if you don't feel safe, don't hesitate to call them.

This may or may not be an answer to 'why'. This is definitely not an answer to 'what', which is asked here.


text:
A reviewer has stolen my idea – what can I do?
I submitted a manuscript for publication in May (it was about DFT analysis of a specific system). The manuscript was rejected in October; one reviewer had made some suggestions, and the other recommended rejection as there is nothing new in the paper. I revised the manuscript according to the first reviewer’s suggestion and submitted the manuscript to another journal.
The second journal rejected my manuscript as one reviewer stated that similar analysis has already been published. I checked the reference introduced by the reviewer, and it is exactly the idea of my work with a slightly different method and different discussions. The manuscript had been submitted for publication in July (two months after my first submission). It is hard to assume it is just a coincidence.
I wrote to the editor of the first journal and asked him if the reviewer who rejected my manuscript is one of the authors of this new paper. He replied that he cannot disclose the name of reviewers under any circumstance due to data-protection laws.
Now my research is useless as I cannot publish it anymore. What can I do?

I don't know about your field, but in my field it takes longer than two months to do the work required for a paper.

@Mark unless is of course stolen.

he cannot disclose the name of reviewers under any circumstance due to data protection laws Do data protection laws really say that? I can imagine other reasons not to disclose a referee's name, but invoking privacy laws sounds like baloney.

Your assumption that the reviewer must be the author seems misguided.  Reviewers may well be experts in your area, and may be up on the latest literature.

It's not clear that you have enough evidence that your idea was stolen. The other author(s) may have come up with the idea independently -- it is quite common. So you should probably just treat it as independent and simultaneous work. If you have not already done so, you should timestamp your work by putting it on arxiv or similar. That is the best way to claim precedence.

Related: How can an author get assurance that his work will not be stolen by journal staff or reviewers?. Preventive: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/88219/43873 . From the POV of the reviewer: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/46076/43873 and https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/98786/43873 .

Perhaps the reviewer did not steal your idea—but took the opportunity to squelch your paper so that the reviewer's paper would get published first. Under the circumstances, the reviewer had a conflict of interest, and should have not accepted the review. (Note: if you want to reframe the question, it might represent a new question!)


text:
Pitfalls of Academic Blogging
I am a junior academic (just finishing a PhD in computer science) and I'm considering starting an academic blog. My reasons for starting a blog are:

Fun.
Improving my visibility.
The benefit of science.

… basically, the same reasons I publish papers. (In a sense, academic blogging, is just a 21st century form of academic communication to supplement journals and conferences.)
However, I also have concerns:

Maintaining an active blog takes a lot of time and effort. (i.e. it may stop being fun.)
Fear of failure - many blogs die. (Does an inactive blog look bad?)
Being a junior researcher, I worry that people will not care about my blog or, worse, disagree with what I say.

So I want to ask for advice from people who have (or had) an academic blog:
Is academic blogging a good idea?
Does it become too much effort?
Is it worthwhile?
How likely is blog-death?
In general, what are pitfalls to watch out for when starting an academic blog?

Related question How to archive an academic blog or website?

This might be a duplicate of http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11832/how-to-effectively-use-blogging-as-a-tool-to-gain-visibility-in-academia?rq=1

In academics there will always someone disagree with you. Don't be afraid of disagreement.

In fact when no one is disagreeing with you, you are either writing something trivial or academically not interesting.

Does the fact that all academics agree with @Mast mean that we are actually disagreeing with the claim?

First of all, I'm not an academic yet, but I'm planning to be. I read a lot of academic blogs in my field daily or should I say, semi-academic. By semi-academic I mean that they have articles of an academic subject but with more in-layman's-terms approach. And I absolutely love all of them. I believe that being able to explain things simply is an art, not mention extremely valuable, and having a similar blog is something that I aim to do in the future.
To address your concerns:

Maintaining an active blog takes a lot of time and effort. (i.e. it may stop being fun.)

Yes it is. I've been blogging about tech (Android and Linux) in the past and after a while it became an extremely cumbersome experience maintaining a steady flow of news, reviews and opinion articles. BUT this is not what an academic blog is all about. You don't need a good article every day. You need a good quality article once or twice a month. This is not so hard.

Fear of failure - many blogs die.

They do. And yours might too. So what? Firstly, you shouldn't fear leaving your blog inactive for a couple of months. This is something you want to do, remember? If you don't have the time or you just don't feel like it for a while just don't do it. If you don't like the view of an abandoned blog after a few months just delete it. It's ok.

Being a junior researcher, I worry that people will not care about my blog...

Producing quality content is the key here. If you produce quality articles from which your readers learn stuff you'll find out that after a while a significant amount of them will care.

...or, worse, disagree with what I say.

That's the best part! Being a junior academic you already know that:

Everything you say must be backed with evidence
No matter the evidence some people will disagree with you

Disagreeing means views and comments. Disagreeing is how you'll make regulars. This is a key concept in blogging. Rarely you will get comments like "I completely agree with your article", not to mention that they don't have a special value. But comments like "I think that you forgot to include the fact that X" sparkle interesting conversations from which both parties learn.
To answer your questions:

Is academic blogging a good idea? Is it worthwhile?

Yes, it's a great idea and it will be worthwhile for you and your readers especially if your articles sparkle interesting conversations. An academic blog indeed increases visibility and creates a more friendly/casual view of the writer which in my opinion most of the times is very much needed.

Does it become too much effort?

Not if you limit yourself to one or two articles per month. Your goal is quality, not quantity. You're not a news site, you're an academic.

How likely is blog-death?

Very. So what? Just do it.

What are pitfalls to watch out for when starting an academic blog?

Do it because you want to do it.
Don't burn yourself out.
Don't get stressed over the quantity. Aim for quality.
Use a simple language.
Be fun.
Have fun.

Is academic blogging a good idea?

Absolutely. Some day, people will be googling you. For instance, someone who read a paper of yours, or who needs to evaluate you for a grant or a scholarship. It's good if the first search result is a blog with quality material.

Does it become too much effort?

That depends on how much time you invest. One or two quality posts a month are quite sufficient, I'd say.

Is it worthwhile?

See above. Yes, it is.

How likely is blog-death?

Quite likely. So what?

In general, what are pitfalls to watch out for when starting an academic blog?

I'd see two potiential pitfalls.

If you post too much, people will wonder whether you are spending time blogging that you should be spending doing "real" research. This is not a good impression to make, especially on more, ahem, traditional researchers that may be evaluating you for tenure.
If you post too little, your blog will die, and few things are as sad as a blog with three entries from two years ago. In that case, consider deleting the entire blog if it's clear that you won't be doing any more of it.

To nip both problems in the bud, I'd recommend that you self-commit to, say, two posts a month, and to spend two to three hours on each - no more, but also no less. Block time in your calendar for this, just like for any other activity, so you'll actually do it when the time rolls around. (Maybe you already did a spontaneous post two days ago, in which case you suddenly have two to three free hours for more research!) In the meantime, keep a list of interesting topics.

Papers you have published
Interesting papers you have read
Cool things that happened during teaching
Conferences you plan on attending, or recently have attended (few people have the time to blog during a conference)
Guest speakers you have in your lectures or seminars
Interesting talks you heard
Later in your career: calls for papers in special journal issues you are editing, and similar things

Just read some academic blogs with an eye to what works well and what doesn't, and then develop your own style.

Two to three hours seems like a remarkably short amount of time to write a quality blog post, unless you're a very fast planner and writer (the kind of person who can take a research paper from concept to completion in two or three weeks).

@DavidZ: quite possibly. (I should have added the disclaimer that I'm not speaking from experience.) I'd simply be wary of investing half a day in a single blog post - this starts getting close to a serious commitment of time. Ideally, you'd post about something you already know a lot about. I'd trust myself to write a decent post about a paper I've written or read in three hours, or about a guest speaker.

Well, yes, I'm not disputing that half a day is a significant amount of time to invest in a single blog post, and that not everyone can spare that much time. But I still think that's not enough time to produce quality output. I've noticed that a good quality post takes me about 6-8 hours to prepare, if I'm writing about something I'm very familiar with (like my own research), and 15-20 hours if I'm writing about something that involves learning some new science.

Let me start with the following disclaimer. Firstly, I'm considering myself also a junior academician (defended my Ph.D. in April 2015; though I have quite a bit of industry experience). Secondly, while I thought about starting professional (in a sense of covering both academia/research and industry, plus various interests) blogging for a while and, even created my own WordPress-powered website with a blog section, I still yet to find time to start and continue blogging regularly. Having said that, everyone's situation and circumstances are different. Also, having some kind of writer's block or, rather, fear, I decided that mostly answering (and sometimes asking) questions on Stack Exchange sites as well as Quora is a gentle way of preparing myself to a more serious :-) blogging exposure.
Now, on to your questions (take my advice with a grain of salt, considering the disclaimer above).

Is academic blogging a good idea?

In my humble opinion, absolutely. I've seen a lot of academic blogs. Most of them are of good to excellent quality. Reading someone's such academic blog immediately adds some virtual respect points to that person's virtual balance in my brain. Sometimes it helps to find answers to my specific questions. Often, it increases my awareness on some topics or subject domains. It also helps me to understand who might be a good potential collaborator for a future research or an advisor for a science-focused venture / startup. All of the above-mentioned points are potential benefits toward a good professional exposure / visibility for an academic blogger.

Does it become too much effort?

As I said, I have no direct experience in blogging, but, based on my experience with answering questions, it depends on your desired involvement. I guess, for blogging it is more about setting a comfortable for the author schedule and sticking to it. Answering questions is a more flexible way.

Is it worthwhile?

See answer to Q1.

How likely is blog-death?

Since one of major, if not the major, benefits of blogging is training one's brain to formulate and express thoughts and arguments, I think that "blog-death" is not only over-rated, but irrelevant. Even if zero people will read your blog now, 1) at some point, some people will start reading it, if it will be worth reading and, more importantly, 2) you will still be self-improving in so many ways.

In general, what are pitfalls to watch out for when starting an
  academic blog?

IMHO potential factors of success are (obviously, potential pitfalls would be the opposite aspects):

finding interesting topics;
expressing yourself via original and quality writing;
creating a visually appealing blog (likely, not critical, but still...);
creating a realistic schedule and sticking to it;
having faith in yourself.

The answers to the first four questions are highly individual (you set the posting frequency, the topics, etc.). Just ensure that you get something out of it, e.g., write down your experiences as a kind of open journal to learn from, or use it to promote your work and the work of people you appreciate. In short, make it useful to you and others.
As for pitfalls, I see one major one in Academia: Given that academia can be stressful at times, it might be tempting to write things you "just want to get out". To publicly bitch about things. This is one instance where a blog might backfire. I think you can say everything as long as you do it with a basic level of respect. If that respect isn't there at the moment (let's face it, sometimes reviewer rejections are hard to stomach and occasionally, people just suck), then don't write about it (at that time).
I'm also not sure about legal issues, e.g., the university might want to prohibit or control what you publish. At least, if they are mentioned by name/affiliation. Personally, I keep my blogs separate from my work, so far without problems, but there are instances in which academics have encountered consequences for their blog postings (usually related to explosive topics and I'm not sure whether administration was just looking for a reason/rationalization).
One last thing regarding the "it might wither and die" concern. Blogs are a great way of thinking about topics and finding one's voice. After all, you write about your thoughts and make those writings public. Many people put in extra effort under these circumstances, and the writing down part might reveal inconsistencies. But it puts an extreme burden on you if you feel you have to carry on the blog until you die. You don't. It's something that seems right at the moment. It can become a success and draw an audience. But it also might be a more private affair. No matter how it turns out (even negatively), you can always look back on it and say: "I used it to think about some topics and it was fun while it lasted, but now I have no further need of it." And that's fine too.

Good answer (+1). I'd say that, in regard to potential legal issues you mentioned, a typical disclaimer, stating that a blog's content doesn't represent opinion of the employer(s) of blog's owner/author (or authors, if blog is a multi-author one) [or, vice versa, does represent only opinion of the blog author(s)], should be enough to prevent worrying about this aspect.

Instead of advising you to avoid a death blog, allow me to say the opposite thing:
You want your blog to be inactive as much as possible
This solves every problem: you will post when you see the fun in it and the idea is ready. If you don't see the fun in it, or how your idea is ready enough to present it, how can people see it fun and worth-reading?
You should identify your priority for blogging is for fun, not for visibility. If you let the urge to be noticed control you, then you can't do it for fun. But if the activity is fun, then visibility will come without your notice. There are blogs out there which have only one or two articles, but with the correct keywords they are still at the top Google.
So do it for fun, and only for fun.