text:
Discussion turned into argument with the conference keynote speaker, would it be appropriate to email an apology?
I had a chance to visit as an audience to an international conference in computer science. As usual, there were few keynotes before the scheduled paper presentation is carried out for the day.
During the presentation of one keynote speech, where the speaker (quite renowned in the field) made a very strong argument that the equation/method that he is using will solve a lot of problems. However, I could point that there was a mistake in the method (rather the equation) itself. The method did not obey the basic laws to solve any possible problems.
The discussion with the Professor continued for a while and he never agreed to what I was saying and I also never accepted those not-so-possible facts. This whole thing converted into an argument.
I understand that it happens during such process because of adrenaline rush. Now, after few days of wondering about it, I am thinking that I made a mistake. I am feeling bad. Could it hamper my future/present career prospectives? I am presently in my PhD research. I want to mail to the professor and say sorry for the incident. Not sure.

I am not clear about your question. First, you said "I could point that there was a mistake in the method", then you said "I am thinking that I made a mistake". What do you mean by "mistake"? He was right and you were wrong about his method? Or you think you made a mistake because your attitude was bad? Please clarify.

Could it hamper my future/present career prospectives? — Of course it could, but so could a bad haircut or your taste in music.  Or it could help your career prospects, if the right people agree with you, or if the keynote speaker enjoys arguing. If you feel the need to apologize, then apologize—not because you think the apology will help your career, but because you believe your argument was inappropriate or hurtful.

Oh, so YOU'RE the guy who gave me so much trouble a few days ago! (Just kidding!)

I have a suggestion, Coder.  Polemics can more easily become acrimonious, or at least uncomfortable, when communication isn't clear.  It takes time to become good at debating in a non-native language.  How about making a little pact with yourself to postpone engaging in polemical discussions, at least in public, until your English has gotten more comfortable and reliable?  There are at least four spots in your question where I have to do a little mental conversion (this is what he wrote -> this is what I think he means), and I am concerned because usually a non-native's written English...

... shows fewer of these language glitches than his or her spoken English shows.  My suggestion is that you continue diving into polemical discussions in one-on-one or small group situations, but hold off on entering them in large, public gatherings, for now.

Also note that in general, letting a speaker know, during a talk, or in the Q&A portion at the end, is an extremely awkward time to point out a fundamental flaw in the work.  Especially if it's an invited speaker or a keynote talk.  This is akin to shouting, "But the emperor has no clothes on!" in the middle of the pomp and circumstance of the parade.

@aparente001 That's an accurate comparison, but one should point out that the most embarrassing event in that story is not the kid shouting out, but the emperor having no clothes on.

@lighthousekeeper - We don't know whether this emperor really was naked, though, do we?  And anyway, OP will cringe less after the fact if he minimizes the embarrassment, I think.

IMO. which i will not post as an answer, as I continuously find myself in similar situations (hey, it's part of being someone with A.S., we tend to spot errors and address them, and not see the social implications..until later)  Anyway, I would apologize for arguing/addressing the possible errors at the wrong time.  I say possible errors, as that is how they should have been brought up.  So it would be you asking a question, as opposed to you telling/instructing.  No one likes a smart ass, which is something I have to remind myself constantly...seeing as I am accused of being one constantly :P

@NZKshatriya are you saying- it's better to be silent and talk personally later?

@Coder, I am trying to think of how to word this:   Yes, I believe I am.  If you spotted the flaws, it is likely others did as well.  But the place and time you brought them up were inappropriate.

@aparente001 I think the issue is how you point out the emperor is naked. Shouting "The emperor has no clothes on!" may be too brusque, but a "Given the intangibility of the garments you purport to wear, is there any practical difference between wearing them and being naked?" is likely acceptable. As would be "What assurances do you have that the tailor isn't conning you?" An appropriately worded question (vs. argument/polemic) should be sufficient to point out the the audience (and speaker) that there's a fundamental flaw (if one does exist).

Academia is one of a few areas where it is still OK to have a discussion and even an argument. In fact, some research groups are involved in long-standing discussion / heated competition / argument. Academic discussion is considered a way to improve our joint understanding of the world and to further the scientific progress and knowledge.
However, as in any game, there are some rules to understand and follow.

It is OK to disagree with someone's argument, but you should listen and do your best to understand it first. If you don't understand something, ask politely. If you still don't understand, ask someone for a third opinion. If necessary, allow yourself time to think before you continue the discussion.
It is very important to be polite and not to become personal.
Seniority per se does not matter so much: professors do make mistakes sometimes, and they know it. However, it is important to remember that most of professors are called professors for a good reason, and they are indeed experts in their field. Their words are not always infallible, but usually quite well thought through. It is OK to ask a professor to explain his/her statement, but it is good to show that you generally respect and trust them as colleagues and experts.

As long as you followed these rules, I think you are fine and there should be no hard feelings. Otherwise, it could be a good idea to write back with a sort of apology. Professors are people first, and as all people, they have feelings, which should be respected. So if you fill you hurt their personal feelings, an apology would be nice.

Thank you very much for such a wonderful explanation. I had initially followed the pointed out disciplines. However, mistakes happen. I should better take some time before writing back.

While I generally agree, there are many exceptions where disagreement/competition affects scientific work and things turn ugly.

Unless you have convinced yourself that you were wrong or rude, there is not much point for an apology; in the first case, for insisting on a wrong point, in the second, for losing your temper, respectively.
If you are right, you should not apologise for making a point (again, unless you were rude, and then you should apologise for your manners, not for your statement).
In any case, writing an email will remind the prof of who you are, including name and affiliation.
Decide whether this is what you want.

But, let assume that he was wrong and I am right. Writing a mail to him might lead to a surprising new collaboration. I don't know. Just being greedy. I am not sure.

@Coder That would most likely involve continuing the argument via email (unless he's changed his mind since the conference). You should get it clear in your mind whether your main aim is to apologise or to continue the argument on a more polite basis, because it will make a difference to how you write the email, and probably to the advice you get here.

@Coder And what if it is the other way round? Are you sure that there is not a hidden/implicit assumption that he doesn't see as necessary to state, but is hidden behind his ideas? Before embarking on an argument, make absolutely sure that you are right. And even then, be prepared for backlash. A frontal attack on a central tenet of someone's research needs to be prepared to encounter a well-founded fortress of arguments.


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Do most postdoc offers include travel funding?
My mathematics department (a research-oriented department at a non-top school in the United States) has recently made a postdoctoral offer to a strong candidate, and I very much hope the candidate comes.
I have learned that the offer doesn't include any money for travel. Since his eventual success on the job market would presumably depend on how widely his work is known (among other factors), I believe that he (and essentially any other postdoc) should travel extensively to conferences. At least, he should have the opportunity to do so.
Some conferences have funding for attendees, but many don't. Unfortunately, none of us have much grant money we could spare for this purpose, and in any case my feeling is that this should come from my university.
Is it typical that postdoctoral offers are made without any travel funding? And if yes, is it typical that candidates are able to successfully negotiate for some funding?

Which country are you asking about?

@DmitrySavostyanov: Good question, thanks for asking. The US. I just now edited my question to mention this.

No funding is typical.

One thing to try: since postdocs in math often involve teaching, they are often treated as term-limited faculty positions, and the postdoc gets a faculty job title like "visiting assistant professor".  As such, if your institution has a general policy of providing funds for faculty travel, or some sort of (semi-)competitive internal travel grants, it is worth checking if the postdoc could be eligible.

Some prestigious external postdoc fellowships include funding for research-related expenses including traveling. But these are typically given by a funding agency, not by the hosting institute.

None of my postdoctoral positions had travel funding in them, nor have I heard of anyone getting such funding.  There are several factors to mitigate this, not all of which may be available in all situations.

The postdoc can learn how to apply for grants and other things, which can provide the necessary funds for travel or other research needs.
If he is invited to give talks, then the inviting institution/department/professor will often cover travel expenses and offer a per diem.
He is likely coming there to research with specific people.  These people, being experienced, established professors who can attract promising postdocs, likely have grant money of their own, some of which could be allocated to the postdoc's travel costs.  This is often what pays for the previous point: professors can often use grant funds to cover the costs to bring in speakers.
Exceptional postdoc candidates are likely to be offered exceptional postdoc positions, with fancy names like The Harry Smith Postdoctoral Fellowship in Dynamical Systems.  These often come with bigger paychecks, making it easier for the postdoc to afford such outside costs.

I guess I can offer myself as a counterexample: I had a postdoc in math (in the US) that came with travel funding.  But the position was funded by a grant which specifically budgeted for that.

My postdoc in math at a top-ranked U.S. school did not come with any dedicated travel funding. Some amount of funding was still available through the department, but not much - perhaps one domestic trip per year. This was not advertised as part of the job, it was just something that the department chair could arrange.
The postdoc was not funded by a grant, nor was it one of the "premier" postdocs at the school, which was large enough to have several "levels" of research-oriented postdocs.

I did two postdocs (in math), and I had some travel money with both of them.  One was an NSF postdoc at Columbia.  I do not recall if the NSF provided travel money then, though as mentioned in the comments they currently do. In any case, the department provided some travel money to postdocs.  The other was in Japan funded by the JSPS which had explicit travel money attached, though it was barely enough for a single conference.  Most conferences I wanted to attend as a postdoc provided funding so I don't think I used most of my travel money from Columbia.
The department where I am now (a large state research university in the US, but not a "top department") provides some travel money for our postdocs (and faculty and grad students), which we can also supplement from our own grants.  I'm not aware of any conventions that say the department should or should not provide travel money, though I don't think it's typical that travel money is made as a part of an offer.
If your department normally provides some travel money to faculty, it seems reasonable to provide some to postdocs as well (maybe a smaller amount, or under certain conditions).  I think it's a reasonable thing for a candidate to ask about before making a decision, but I wouldn't try to negotiate for it to be put into the formal offer (which is usually made by the university/college rather than the department anyway).

When I had an NSF postdoc it came with 10k (total, not per year) for travel and other expenses.  Checking the current solicitation, there's now a 12k lump sum for expenses.

@NoahSnyder Hmm... maybe I just completely forgot about that.  I'll edit my answer.

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Research on relationship between how an instructor is addressed and students' evaluations of that instructor?
We've had several questions on this site along the lines of "What should students call me" or "What should I call my professor" (e.g How to sign your email to students, so to avoid their immature behavior? and several others). It's not only here; for example, I recently read a comment on another website which asserts

at least in the sciences, it’s probably important that women use the “Prof” title, since there is a tendency for students to view their female professors as people who are “more approachable” and “more friendly” than the male professors– which can cause trouble when evaluation time comes, as students are less forgiving of the “mom figure” than the white male imposing arrogant professor figure. (I was surprised to find out about this effect when told about it several years ago by a couple of female professors, but I’ve heard about it enough now that my impression is that it’s a pretty general effect.)

I've heard this kind of thing in comments on other sites, too (e.g. here). I know many people have opinions, educated guesses, or relevant personal experiences, but I'm specifically asking for research on this subject. (I looked, but couldn't find anything relevant.)
Has there been any formal study on whether there is a relationship (causal or not) between how an instructor prefers to be addressed, and students' evaluations of that instructor?
I'm looking for a research study that answers questions like:

Do instructors that use a formal title like "Professor" or "Doctor" receive measurably different reviews than instructors that use their first name?
What effect (if any) does gender, race, age, academic discipline, or department culture, have on the above relationship?
Is there any evidence of a causal relationship here? Possible intermediate factors?
Does using a formal title have any mitigating effect with respect to the negative effect on student evaluations of being an instructor that is young, gender minority, racial minority, etc.?

There seems to be quite a bit of research about gender bias and teaching evaluations. However, I have always been skeptical of the advice "females should have their students call them professor". To me it seems like a pretty strong claim that being called professor will help remove most of a student's biases towards different genders. So great question, I am interested if there is any research backing up that statement also.

Mmm... maybe it would be better to add a united-states tag, because there are countries where you wouldn't call a professor in any other way than "Professor", irregardless of age, gender etc.

@MassimoOrtolano  I don't think the US is the only place where professors might be addressed by first name, so I don't see any reason to restrict this question to studies about the US.

Have you seen the data visualization of gendered language in teaching reviews?

@Fuhrmanator I have... interesting stuff, though most words I tried don't appear often enough overall to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Titles are also dependent on the an institution's country. In Australia/New Zealand, the title of professor is an earned title through promotion, you are not a professor just by being employed at the university. Rather, professor is the top title with your academic level (levels A-C are Dr, Level D is Associate Professor, and Level E is Professor).

How would you distinguish that from, say, a situation where the worst professors are the most jealous of their titles?

Multiple lines of relevant research suggest, as you said,

recognition of job titles specifically correlates strongly to
compliance, and
knowledge of an authority's gender significantly shapes the
likelihood of compliance in subjects relying on that authority.

The closest fit (to the inquiries you propose in your question) in a single publication was Eagly, Alice H. Gender and social influence: A social psychological analysis. American Psychologist 38.9 (1983): 971. There is too much here to cite. Alice Eagly enters into a rigorous investigation of compliance's relationship to gender in vein of Professor Stanley Milgram's exemplary methods on the psychology of obedience to authority (Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to authority 1978). The report finds (from p. 2 of PDF):

  Other subjects in this experiment were given information about the job
  titles as well as the gender of the communicator and recipient. Both
  high-status (e.g., bank vice-president) and low-status (e.g., bank
  teller) job titles were utilized. In these experimental conditions,
  subjects were expected to base their judgments about social influence
  on the job title information rather than gender because gender would
  not be used to infer hierarchical status in the presence of the highly
  informative job title cues. (2)  As expected (see Table 1), these
  subjects considered the communicator's recommendation more likely to
  induce compliance when the communicator had a high-status rather than
  low-status job title and when the recipient had a low-status rather
  than high-status job title. These subjects did not utilize the gender
  cues to predict compliance

The effects of gender and status cues on perceived influence were
  expected to depend on whether the recipient's response to influence
  was public or private. Because the power of persons who have higher
  status in organizations stems primarily from their control over
  sanctions and access to resources, status differences favoring the
  communicator should increase subordinates' public compliance, and
  private, internalized opinion change should be relatively unaffected
  (Kelman, 1961). Indeed, those few effects that were obtained on
  subjects' beliefs about private opinion change were weak and
  reversed effects obtained on perceived compliance (see Eagly, A. H., &
  Wood, W. Inferred sex differences in status as a determinant of gender
  stereotypes about social influence. Journal of Personality and Social
  Psychology, 1982, 43. 915-928.).

Eagly, Alice H., Mona G. Makhijani, and Bruce G. Klonsky. Gender and the evaluation of leaders: A meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin 111.1 (1992): 3. finds further:

[…] on the evaluation of women and men that occupy leadership roles. While
  holding the characteristics, except for sex, constant and varying the
  sex of the leader, these experiments investigated whether people are
  biased against female leaders and managers. Although this research
  showed only a small overall tendency for Ss to evaluate female leaders
  less favorably than male ones, this tendency was more pronounced under
  certain circumstances. Specifically, women in leadership positions
  were devalued relative to their male counterparts when leadership was
  carried out in stereotypically masculine styles, especially when this
  style was autocratic or directive. Also, the devaluation of women was
  greater when leaders occupied male-dominated roles and when the
  evaluators were men. Findings are interpreted from a perspective that
  emphasizes the influence of gender roles within organizational
  settings.

Eagly, Alice H., and Wendy Wood. Inferred sex differences in status as a determinant of gender stereotypes about social influence. Journal of personality and social psychology 43.5 (1982): 915. is also highly relevant, but it is subsumed in the primary study cited.
Student-disciplinary investigation also corroborates this gendered relationship in students' regard for teachers. Mabeba, M. Z., and E. Prinsloo. Perceptions of discipline and ensuing discipline problems in secondary education. South African Journal of Education 20.1 (2000): 34-41. reports:

The lack of discipline in secondary schools throughout the country has
  long been a matter of great concern for educators in South Africa.
  Numerous attempts have been made to solve the problem and to
  re-establish a culture of effective learning and teaching in the
  schools. Discipline in education, however, is a complex phenomenon
  that may evade the accuracy of one single definition. Discipline in a
  positive sense refers to learning, regulated scholarship, guidance and
  orderliness. Discipline problems, refers to disruptive behaviour that
  affects the fundamental rights to feel safe, to be treated with
  respect and to learn. Rejection of reasoning, noise, physical
  violence, threat, theft, graffiti and vandalism, verbal abuse, lack of
  consideration, boisterousness, and disrespect for authority are some
  of the manifestations of disruptive behaviour that teachers and
  parents have to deal with presently. Reasons for this negative
  attitude lie inter alia in pupils feelings of anger, frustration and
  worthlessness because educators seemingly neglect their interests and
  level of development and often base disciplinary policies on
  autocratic principles and self-interest. The purpose of this
  investigation was to determine the perceptions held of discipline by
  all the stakeholders in the education process and to verify the
  reasons for the defiance of discipline by pupils and students. The
  ultimate aim of such research would be to initiate preventative
  strategies that can solve the problem and support pupils and teachers
  towards a new culture of successful learning and teaching.

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How to confront new office mate regarding personal hygiene?
I am a senior graduate student and share an office with 3 other post-docs and graduate students.  We recently had a first year graduate student join our lab for a rotation and he has been placed in our office.  This new student has intense body odor, to the point where you can smell it in the hallway outside our office when the door is open.  I have asked my other office mates what to do about it and their responses have ranged from "I don't notice it" to "Yeah it's bad but there's nothing we can do about it/I'm not saying anything".
To me, there is no way one can't notice  I have found it distracts me from my work.  I imagine my advisor has noticed, but so far no one has mentioned anything and I have been the only one to bring it up with anyone else.  I've asked friends who work in industry what they'd do, and they say "don't say anything but immediately report it to HR", which doesn't particularly help in my situation.
As the semester is coming to a close, it's only getting hotter outside and the rotating student will be present more often in the lab.  I'm afraid to say anything because

I don't want to make things uncomfortable, especially since we need to train him;
I'm afraid I'm being culturally insensitive as he is a foreign student.
He may have a medical, religious, or other reason that leads to the smell, and I don't want to offend.

Because this is an academic lab, I have no access to an HR department.  Any advice?
A related question (which was not closed) can be found here.  In this question, and those found on The Workplace SE, most answers are "tell him privately and nicely", but I'm worried about being insensitive because he is new, I haven't gotten to know him personally, and he may have cultural, religious, or other reasons for not wearing deodorant.

This might be a good question for The Workplace SE

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it has nothing specific to academia.

Actually, here's two questions about it already :) http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/621/how-should-i-approach-a-co-worker-on-matters-of-personal-hygiene and http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/31975/how-to-deal-with-a-colleague-who-has-very-bad-hygiene/31979#31979

Looking more closely at those workplace threads, the answers aren't particularly insightful;  either the answers imply an employer-employee relationship (tell HR, go home early to shower, no docked time/pay), or the answer is just "tell them nicely".

If you are at a university in the U.S., there is something equivalent to an HR (=Human Resources) department, but maybe less well known...

@paulgarrett Mind elaborating?  I'm not sure that the rotating student is being paid by any source, and therefore he wouldn't be an employee, so would the university's HR department be relevant here?

@catnip Those answers seem entirely helpful to me. I imagine the embarrassment from a polite conversation is less than what he'll get if it's brought up any other way. He's your officemate. You owe it to him (and yourself) to tell him.

A grad student that's not being paid by anyone, but is rotating through a lab? In the U.S., this would be a bit unusual, I think. In any case, offices with names like "Student Services" would be places to contact to ask for their approved action on your part. There is some risk that you would cause trouble for yourself by saying anything at all directly to the student...

@paulgarrett That's precisely what I'm worried about.  I will seek out something like the Student Services department.  By the way, he is an admitted student who starts in the Fall, but has arrived early from his home country.  He has a student ID, etc. but I'm fairly certain he doesn't start getting paid until the Fall.  Didn't think that was particularly relevant for the OP.

The paid-or-not aspect can have some technical ramifications, but whatever your local version of "Student Services" is would be the place to start, to avoid accidentally getting yourself into trouble.

@paulgarrett Thanks for understanding the issue.  I would accept your advice as an answer if it were in that form.

There are those who, due to injury or disability, have lost their sense of smell. I say this only in regards to your statement, and assumption, that "there is no way one can't notice" - people really may not notice.

See https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/a/9646/4366.

After some clarifications via comments above:
There is surely an office with a name something like "Student Services" that would be the front end for many issues involving conflicts/issues between students or conflicts/issues between students and faculty. It is not possible to guess the name of the corresponding office at your university, so some experimentation or asking around is necessary. You should definitely consult with them about what actions on your part would be approved or disapproved.
There surely is an HR office at your university (assuming it's in the U.S.), which has some oversight powers/responsibilities for any paid personnel. Probably most grad students have not had any interactions with that office, but it surely exists, and does some back-end checking of hiring and such.
Many years ago, as director of graduate studies in mathematics at a U.S. "R1" university, I found myself the recipient of complaints from office-mates about the hygiene of a grad student. Having been already sensitized to the volatility of such issues, I wrote a somewhat vague, but pointed, message to all grad students in the math dept about "expectations" for hygiene, given their TA duties. Naturally, most were confused as to why I was writing this at all, but the "broadcast" aspect did avoid confrontation with individuals. Also, there was certainly the aspect that there was a job getting done for pay, and interference, accidental or not, was not ok. If the person had not been paid by our department, I would have been much more inhibited about strongly-recommending hygiene modifications, just given the way things seem to work here.


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Will a publication in one subfield of my discipline help me get into graduate school in a different subfield?
I am a psychology undergrad student. I am currently working on a project that will be submitted for publication later this year. However, the project I am working on is in the sub-field of psychology that is not of my interest (environmental psychology). I am planning to apply for PhD programs in social/personality psych. (Sadly I didn't get a chance to conduct a research project in that field.)
Although my publication could be a strong evidence for my research potential, my concern is that this publication is irrelevant to my research of interest. Thus, how can I convince the grad school that I am a good candidate for the social/personality field?

The obvious answer, that it will help you be demonstrating research potential, seems to be ruled out by your p.s.  Can you please clarify what you are trying to ask?

@jakebeal i just edited my post! "Although my publication could be a strong evidence for my research potential, my concern is that this publication is irrelevant to my research of interest. Thus, how can I convince the grad school that I am a good candidate for the social/personality field?" thanks :)

Thanks for the edit---and I agree with @Corvus: the distinction between fields here is pretty minimal for purposes of judging this as evidence of research potential.  Environmental psych vs. social/personality psych---really not going to matter at an undergrad level.

Even if your publication were in physics or economics or any other field, it would still be a positive component of your application. When I look at graduate applications, a publication record--while not essential--is valuable because it signals the following:

Interest in doing research
Initiative to get into a lab and work on a project
Familiarity with what primary research is actually like
A close enough relationship to a faculty mentor for me to pay particular attention to that mentor's letter of recommendation

All of these hold in your case.

Publications in completely different fields have certainly helped me throughout my career, starting with a totally irrelevant one I did as an undergrad. All decent research utilizes the scientific method. All data analysis utilizes standard approaches. And people judging you always are concerned about you willingness and ability to complete the task; i.e. to publish your results. If you box yourself into one small area, you will not progress as much. Everything changes, and you need to be able to change with it and expand your interests and abilities.


text:
Why should a paper be reviewed by more than ten reviewers?
One of our recent submission has been suggested to be revised by a journal (CS). However, we could not at first believe that we have to address the comments or points raised by 11 reviewers plus the editor's comments. The comments are very diverse and conflicting.
Is it quite difficult to address all the comments and satisfy all the reviewers. Everyone is a human being, even us.
How and why should a paper be reviewed by so many reviewers? Now we are not in a situation to withdraw the paper and probably it is quite difficult to address all the comments because of computational issues.
For the how question, I have this possible answer: Yes, the editor might have sent reviewer invitation to more than required number of reviewers; and to the surprise, all accepted it.

I would read and re-read the editors comments to find a hint on why there have been so many reviews.

I removed the "revision" tag that was newly created for this question because it's ambiguous and highly likely to be misused (for one thing, "revision" has another meaning entirely in UK English). Unnecessary proliferation of highly specific tags, ambiguous tags with multiple meanings, and tags that are very similar to existing tags, make it harder for other users to use tags - so please don't create a tag unless you're 100% sure about it, and ask first on [meta] if you're not.

Is your question really what the title says, or something else? If you want to ask what to do, ask it clearly, and edit your title accordingly. If you really want to know about "how and why" this could happen, please strongly emphasize that this is your question.

If you really want to know why your paper got so many reviews, just ask the editor.

@JeffE I just wanted to know why should any editor possibly do that?

11 reviewers seems excessive to me too, but that is the situation you are in now so you need to find a way to deal with it. My starting point would be that it is the editor that makes the final decision not the reviewers, so it is her or him you need to convince not all 11 reviewers. Sometimes the editor gives hints one what (s)he thinks the main comments are. In that case you know what to focus on.
If that is not the case you just have to make reasonable decisions and justify them. So if there are conflicting comments you need to show that you have taken them seriously and made a reasonable choice on how to handle that. If all the suggestions are too much, i.e. it would result in a book rather than a article, then the editor (and the reviewers) can see that as well. Just mention that and justify the choices you make.

(Answering the question about how papers end up with this many reviewers.)
Take a look at this question. If the answer is correct, then there were 11 reviewers invited of which one has submitted. However, the invitations to the remaining ten reviewers are still outstanding. They haven't been uninvited - it's a hassle to do, not to mention potentially a problem since there are reviewers who finish their reviews before accepting the invitation. There's literally nothing stopping the remaining 10 reviewers from suddenly agreeing to review the paper followed by submitting a review. If that actually happens, then the editor can scarcely tell them that they should stop writing their reviews. Result: 11 reviewers.
Having said that, it's extremely unlikely this happens. I've certainly never seen more than ~5 reviews for a paper. I would guess that the editor handling your paper was new or was dealing with a strict deadline, and was paranoid about the paper not being reviewed on time.


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How will an online MBA be perceived in applications for a faculty position in economics and accounting?
I recently retired and want to get back into pursuing higher education.
I am happily married and live in Los Angeles.  So, I am somewhat geographically constrained concerning my choice of MBA programs to attend.
I have now seriously considered online MBA programs, but I'm worried about the quality and perception and other potential risks of online degrees.
Another obstacle I face is that my employer will likely say that I was not a "team player" or a "good leader" for their organization.  Since MBA programs require so much teamwork and group projects and leadership skills, I don't think I am a good fit for traditional programs, hence the online programs would be better suited for me.
Can anyone provide some general comments about going the online MBA route?
I wish to become an Assistant Professor of Economics and Accounting.  So, I want to know how an online MBA will impact future employment in academia.

Would you please clarify I recently retired and my employer?

It will take you out of consideration for any faculty appointment. MBAs are headed to industry; to teach, you need a relevant Ph.D. This doesn't depend on whether your program is online or not.

@scaahu: I assume OP means their former employer. An MBA application typically has letters by former supervisors, peers, and such (I've written those myself for such applicants). See, e.g., here.

@gnometorule Sounds like an answer. Can you post it as one?

It will take you out of consideration for any faculty appointment. MBAs are headed to industry; to teach (be hired on tenure track), you need a relevant Ph.D. This doesn't depend on whether your program is online or not.
Come to think of it, depending on how interesting and high-level your prior job was, and if teaching (as opposed to research) interests you, you could target an adjunct position instead.


text:
I accidentally submitted a plagiarized essay, and have been called to a meeting about it. What should I expect?
I was writing a draft for an essay for a Political Philosophy course and I was extremely cramped time so I decided to pull quotes from the authors (Machiavelli and Hobbes) off the internet. Along with the quotes I took some of the leading sentences. I submitted the draft and changed up the quotes and the essay but accidentally emailed the wrong copy to the Teachers Assistant and handed in the proper copy.
I heard back from the department that I have an exploratory meeting about the essay.
What should I do/expect and how can I mitigate this, its my first offence and I don't want it on my record or get kicked out but I know I did something that is wrong.

No excuses. You committed a murder and expect to be forgiven?

@Prof.SantaClaus It is not quite that. It is more like he didn't commit a murder (clean paper copy) but confessed to it (plagiarized electronic version).

@StrongBad I've seen this type of excuses too many times -- 'so sorry I emailed you my draft instead of the copy without plagiarised text'.   He/she chose to run the gauntlet, and got caught.  Plain and simple.

@Prof.SantaClaus but he also submitted the correct paper version, which in my mind complicates things.

@StrongBad OK.  If that's the case, then we usually look at past history.  Is this a good or bad student or one with personal issues.  If the student is above par, then I would simply give the student a warning.

How do you "accidentally" submit a plagiarized essay?

@NZKshatriya By accidentally thinking your instructors are daft?  One of the first techniques learned in How to Cheat 101 is to attempt to acquire a de facto extension/advantage on an assignment with some variant of "I accidentally sent you the wrong file, here's the correct one...".  While I'm sure it's technically true that this can be a legitimate accident, the odds are...vanishingly small in my experience.

@NZKshatriya By being a liar as well as a cheat.

When I sat on my department's academic misconduct committee, students would regularly submit different electronic and paper versions of papers. We graded the paper versions and processed the electronic version with TurnItIn. The paper version would generally contain lots of plagiarized material that was absent from the electronic version. As a faculty member it was always difficult to determine what exactly happened. Generally, the students would claim the plagiarism free electronic version was the correct version and they printed the incorrect version.
In your case, it appears the electronically submitted version, presumably the one checked for plagiarism, was the one that had plagiarism and you printed the correct version. This not only seems more feasible (most of us have sent the wrong attachment on an email), there is no obvious benefit for you.
I would suggest you acknowledge that your work practices were sloppy and you should never have produce even a draft with any plagiarism. Your notes need to be very clear when you are taking direct quotes. You also need to acknowledge that you will be more careful when submitting work in the future. Finally, you can explain that there is no benefit for you to have turned in the wrong copy electronically and that you should be assessed on the paper copy after that copy is checked for plagiarism. You should be prepared to hand in the electronic copy of the paper version.

I am going to admit where I went wrong and that is was sloppy I am just worried about what the outcome is going to be for the first offence

Depends on the school. If it is a single sanction school, you will be expelled. Each university has their own regulations, you might want to read the ones relevant to you before the hearing.

You ask for a printed and an electronic copy?  The reason for that is so transparently obvious I feel like you're asking your students to cheat.  Is the department so underfunded you can't afford to print papers?

Before going to the meeting, do your homework.  Find  your school's code of conduct, catalog statements, and/or program handbook and see what is PUBLISHED by the school regarding intentional or unintentional plagiarism.  Did you have to sign something on admission or at the beginning of the semester/class/program that acknowledges your understanding of plagiarism rules?  What does that say the consequences are?
You can ask for leniency, but be sure you have the policy in hand that shows the committee that they are allowed by their OWN RULES to give a more lenient consequence.  Be sure that you admit that you did plagiarize, no excuses.  Let them know what you will do differently next time.
I always encourage my students to AVOID QUOTES.  Learn and synthesize the author's work, and put it in your own words (with appropriate citation).  I have also used TurnItIn as a student and an instructor, and find it to be a useful tool to catch plagiarism.  I am proud to say that as a student, I have had plagiarism values on TurnItIn that are consistently 2% or less...primarily because I avoid quotes and work hard to show what I learned rather than assembling knowledge from someone else.  (OK, that sounds really snotty and stuck-up, sorry about that!)
Good luck to you!


text:
Use of Wikipedia images I created myself
I have created several images for Wikipedia and would like to use them for my own poster/talks as well. However I am concerned that my colleagues will assume that I took them from Wikipedia and will consider it bad practice to use images from Wikipedia instead of my own and secondly to not reference them. How would you clarify that?

Is your Wikipedia/Commons username identfiable with your own name?

it's my first name + year of birth so it is not perfectly clear but maybe good enough

I'd reference it like: Illustration created by Penguin_Knight. This piece of work was contributed to Wikipedia in August, 2016. [url]

Why is it bad practice to use images from Wikipedia? Even if you hadn't created it, so long as it's attributed and not a copyright violation, it seems to me that you're sensibly saving time by not reproducing something that already exists!

There's nothing worse than someone asserting, unsolicited, that such-and-such an image was not taken from Wikipedia but uploaded to it. You might as well introduce yourself as a vegan gemini, currently exploring Buddhism, who likes to travel with their ferret and ukulele. Conversely, if I discovered that someone I know contributed a useful work with a CC-BY licence, they would immediately be my friend.

I'd like to add a comment that if you're using LaTeX, there's a package called "ccicons" that lets you add icons for the creative commons licensed items. Looks nice in a biblio and saves space.

I think the problem here is that you (a) don't feel like you should be citing the source of this, since you made it yourself but (b) think this will be viewed as plagiarism from Wiki (or, at least, laziness). It seems to me the best way to resolve this is to cite your source, and cite it as yourself via Wikipedia. A short note like (Wikipedia, Original Artist Jane Doe) makes it clear that yes, this is the image from the Wiki page but also that you made it.

"Image: Author." or similar.
So long as the license granted to Wikipedia is a nonexclusive one (and I would be very surprised if that isn't the case) there's no need to bring them into it at all.
Just show the image, attributed to yourself.

Good question, but one part is not entirely clear: do you prefer to remain anonymous/pseudonymous on Wikipedia?
If you don't care, the best solution is to log into your account, and update the Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons page to reflect your full name. Here is an example of the best code to do that, at least on Commons.
If you do prefer to remain anonymous, your problem substantially results from your having contradictory wishes: on the one hand, you don't want the general public to link your Wikipedia avatar with your real-world identity, while on the other hand, you do want a loosely-defined subset of the general public to make that link. So, the more broadly you communicate the full story, the more you risk "outing" yourself to the general public. There's no "right answer," as any answer will require a judgment call on your part, of how much risk you're willing to endure.

Interesting.


text:
Can external thesis examiner object to inclusion of so many unwanted co authors in published papers?
My friend is working on material science and he published 3 papers in very good SCI index journals. In all papers he is first author and second is his supervisor and rest are co-authors like incharge of lab where test were conducted, teacher of his supervisor who is working in other university, some other scientist from USA who suggested the problem to his supervisor but was not involved in work in any other way and last co-author is student of his supervisor from same semester working on slightly different problem. In each of three papers the order and number of authors is same.
Now he is afraid of external examiner of his PhD thesis who may according to him might raise objection on inclusion of so many coauthors. All the papers were communicated by his supervisor so there was no chance for him to decide of his own. I told him that, this is a usual practice and nothing to worry about. Am I right ?

How would the examiners know that some of the authors did not really contribute (were "unwanted")?

I'm a bit dubious of friend of a friend question on co-authors ethics. In my experience, (in materials science) it is also quite likely that depending on the advisor, there can be quite of bit of collaboration going on in the background relevant to the project and papers coming out of it (and that a bit naive or blinkered student might not realize). (Who made samples or figured out protocols, who performed some other measurements or characterizations to make sure sample was OK, who was supervisor talking to (conversations trickling down to insight or direction of project).

In my field it is usual practice to describe the phd students individual contribution to each of the papers making up the thesis. Is there no such mechanism in place here?

Now he is afraid of external examiner of his PhD thesis who may according to him might raise objection on inclusion of so many coauthors.

Six authors listed on a scientific paper in a lab-experimental discipline in not a very high number. I don't know what the specific norms are for materials' science, but that's not uncommon.
Also, there could be 100 co-authors - that doesn't matter, as long as they don't argue about the individual contributions each one has made. Your friend has had an opportunity to explain what he personally worked on, in the context of producing these papers and more generally: That opportunity is the thesis, which ties everything together.
If your friend is in a thesis-less track (i.e. submitting articles only to be considered for awarding a Ph.D.) s/he may want to consult his/her advisor regarding how to transmit additional material - e.g. a letter - to the examiners. In fact, consulting the advisor regarding this concern is a good idea regardless of the measure to be taken.

this is a usual practice and nothing to worry about. Am I right ?

Probably - but your friend's advisor will be able to confirm that.


text:
Maintaining a conference advertisement list
For managing submissions and reviewing for scientific conferences, EasyChair is a great solution, free and well-tuned for the needs of volunteer organizers.
Is there any similar sort of site that supports mailing lists for conference advertisements (e.g., calls for papers, calls for participation)?
I ask because this is a problem that a number of interdisciplinary groups that I participate in have been struggling with, for which a number of the obvious solutions do not seem to be workable:

Institutional mailing lists don't transfer well when you have a shifting group of organizers.
Google Groups is problematic for China, won't let you add people without emailing them immediately, and isn't a stable platform since they keep changing how it works.
Most other commercial mailing list services I've found seems to be either spammy, pricey, and/or otherwise tuned for businesses rather than academic conferences.
Setting up a collectively owned and managed server seems pretty heavy-weight.

This feels to me like a good niche for someone to have filled with an EasyChair-like service, but I do not know if such a thing currently exists.

Most hosting providers offer mailing list management facilities as part of the hosting.  For example, Dreamhost, which I use for hosting my personal domain (mekki.ca), provides announcement & discussion lists that can be configured with granular permissions such that multiple people can administer them.  They will be associated with the domain in question.
As such, it's usually attached to the conference website (most hosting providers provide something similar, so contact the hosting provider of your conference's website for details).  Since you are already paying for the domain name and hosting of the conference website, there are usually no additional fees for the list management, and anyone who could access the conference website should be able to receive the list emails as well (i.e., China, etc.).
(Full disclosure: The first Dreamhost link is a referral link.  If you sign up for services, I get a small credit.)


text:
Is there an entrance exam I can take to get admitted directly into a European PhD program in electrical engineering without a masters?
I'm an undergraduate electrical engineer. I have studied up to 80 percent of a masters in electrical engineering program and have two IEEE published papers. Is there such a thing as a PhD entrance exam that I can take to prove my ability to pass advanced electrical courses and get admitted directly into a PhD in a university in Europe?

Admission and funding in European PhD programs depends a lot on the university and the country's regulations. You should search for the programs you are interested in applying to and read their specific requirements.

In Germany, it is possible to start your PhD without a master since 2000 (text only in German). You have to find an advisor and pass a qualifying examination, which differs by university. So, you first have to choose where you want to do your PhD.

i want to do my phd at eth zurich or eindhoven institiute of technology

i wanted to do my phd at eth zurich its great to know you are there

can you provide me with your mail to contact you i really have many question regarding eth zurich and i need your help.

I did my PhD at ETH Zurich but had a diploma, so I don't know anything about their qualifying examinations or if they even offer this opportunity.

thanks for your response but i asked your mail cause i had questions about accomdation in zurich and if igot enrolled in masters

how will i cover my costs ? do i work as a teaching assitant or i have to find a job outside eth

You can find this information online: https://www.ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/working-teaching-and-research/welcome-center/employment-contract-and-salary/salary.html There might have changed a lot since I left ETH but at least I can tell you that you don't need an additional job.

In Spain it is in general necessary to have an "Oficial" Master's degree to enter a PhD program. The "official" qualifier means that some master's programs are formally recognized as conduits to doctoral programs, whereas others are not. In general a foreign degree would have to be recognized as equivalent to a Spanish degree, usually by the administration of the university offering the doctoral degree. Although there are lots of qualifications to this general statement, applicable in special cases, basically you need to have a master's degree already. Here and here is information (in Spanish) about the requirements at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, which is probably typical. For someone who does not have an official Spanish master's degree or a foreign degree recognized ("homologado") as such, there is a process to apply for admission, but the details probably depend on the particularities of the applicant.
Admission and funding are generally separate matters. The summary with respect to funding is that there isn't much, what there is pays poorly by the standards of northern Europe or the US, and it's competitive to get what little there is.

The Dutch (eg. Eindhoven) situation is that a PhD is normally funded (or done as an external PhD with a company). As such anyone will have to go through what amounts to a "job" interview. Within the system a masters is normally expected, but exceptions can be made, especially for candidates from countries where a masters would not be required to start a PhD.
A PhD in The Netherlands will always have a full professor who will function as promotor (under whom's responsibility you would work). You may in addition have a daily supervisor with less experience. You will basically need to convince your interviewers that you can do the research. A common question would be for you to present your Msc thesis (or bsc thesis) as an example of your ability to write, the papers you published could be a good alternative, especially if you were the main (or only author). Be prepared to answer the question why you didn't finish the masters (in this case time can be in your benefit)

In France, they count it in years of study. My Bachelor in Engineering was 5 years, so that was "equivalent" to a MS in France. I had an MS as well, but I didn't even bother ($) translating it, because it wasn't necessary.


text:
How to save my academic career after ending up in a deeply problematic lab for PhD?
I graduated with an excellent master's degree from one of the western European countries. I thought it would be good for my career development to do a PhD in another university but unfortunately I now find myself in a lot of trouble. The lab I am working at has several issues and there are many deeply unethical things going on. I am pretty confident that if I leave the lab without completing a degree, the professors will try to hamper my applications to other places.
Is there anything I can do? Obviously I am no longer a good applicant but someone who (at least seemingly) "failed" first. I wish this was my fault but it is not.
To make the question clear, I am contemplating on leaving due to ethics issues, general unfairness, and repeated mistreatment of employees (not just me).

How can the professors hamper your applications if you don't tell them about your applications?

Deciding to leave one university for another is in my belief, beyond the scope of asking strangers on the internet. However one thing stood out.

The lab I am working at has several issues and there are many deeply unethical things going on.

If things are as egregious as you claim, you are beyond, "should I leave" territory and cross into "what are my country's whistle-blower laws"? Is your lab injecting subjects with unknown substances or diseases without their knowledge? Is it stealing or utilizing funds in an unscrupulous manner such as buying personal items?
If things aren't as serious as claimed, I don't see why you couldn't have a sit-down meeting with your researchers and inform them of your dissatisfaction and hope things turn around. If it comes to applying to another program, you can always inform your potential institution of the shortcoming of your current situation.

I would suggest talking with your university's ombudsperson.  First, have a discussion with the ombudsperson about what behaviors they are required to report. Usually they will bring this up themselves, but it's best to be sure--some institutional ombudspersons are mandated reporters.  Then I would discuss those aspects of the situation that can be kept confidential (hopefully, the entire situation).  They can advise you and point you towards other campus resources that may be of use.
In other words, this sounds like a complex situation that is worth talking about in person, and in more detail than you probably feel comfortable disclosing online.


text:
When a professor commits scientific fraud, are the journal reviewers and editors of the paper also discredited?
If a researcher publishes a paper found to be fraudulent, are the reviewers and editors of the paper also discredited for having approved the fraudulent paper?

A note about the nature of academic fraud: Merely being wrong is not fraud.
In the case where something is indeed fraud, it will depend very much on the paper in question - it would only discredit the reviewers and authors if there is the reasonable expectation that they could catch it.
Consider some examples:
Fraud by Omission: You run a study twenty times, and report the one version that gave you a significant outcome. That study is well-conducted and correctly analyzed - it just also happens to be cherry picked. How could a reviewer know that?
Fraud by Modification: You alter your data in some way to give you a desired answer, and then re-analyze it. This analysis is done correctly, you provide the reviewers with this "raw" data and they reach the same conclusions, etc. There are some mistakes you might make that could alarm a very alert reviewer, but it's also possible, being aware of these mistakes, that you wouldn't make them.
Similarly, if you edit some figures, reviewers might catch egregious versions, but some people are caught out by things like particular artifacts in the image files, which is not something to necessarily expect the reviewers to catch, or even necessarily to have seen (as sometimes we don't get the raw figures, but versions processed by the editorial software).
Fraud by Just Outright Lying, Absurdly Unethical Studies, etc. Most of the vaccine denial literature falls in this category. Deliberately misleading statistics, results not supported by the data, etc. These I do expect reviewers to catch, and do think less of the journals that let them go into print.

There must be "willful intent" for it to be fraud, otherwise it is just poor scholarship.

The general answer is NO.
Academic peer review is not designed to catch fraud. The purpose is to review methodology, check assumptions and reasoning, and verify that the author's conclusions are justified given the data and analysis presented. While it's possible that a peer reviewer might notice some discrepancy and follow up, it's not expected and it's not likely.
Peer reviewers are domain-specific experts, they're not detectives. They do not have the time or the training to fact-check submissions beyond their own expertise and ferret out lies. It may in fact be impossible for a peer reviewer to prove fraudulent activity because most papers do not include their full raw data and many peer review systems are double-blind reviews. Even if you know the authors, a peer reviewer does not have subpoena powers and cannot compel evidence like a court can (the traditional venue for prosecuting fraud).
(As an aside, this is why replication, public datasets, and open-source code is viewed as highly favorable by many academics. Peer review will not catch frauds, but replication studies will fail to reproduce fraudulent findings. Public datasets and open-source code are their own form of proof that a paper's findings are correct.)
There are exceptions to the above. For example, there are rings of editors and reviewers who publish each others' work with little review or oversight as a form of quid-pro-quo and there are pay-for-publish schemes. In such situations where it can be shown that there is group wrongdoing then of course all the members of the group will pay a price.


text:
Are there situations where taking an honorarium for trying a textbook on a class is acceptable behavior?
A publisher for an e-textbook is offering me an honorarium if I try it with a class. My  own ethical take on this is that I would not entertain this regardless of the size of the honorarium (which I don't know).  I certainly wouldn't do this without full disclosure to the students who I'm forcing to buy the book.  I also don't see this as a particularly good text for my course.
While my own position is sort of steadfast, it's something that I haven't seen before in academic publishing, so I'll ask "Are there situations where taking an honorarium for trying a textbook on a class is acceptable behavior?"

Is this simply a bribe to use the textbook or are they asking for your feedback on the book?

Maybe if the honorarium is larger than the total amount the students will spend on the book. Or if part of the deal involves the students getting the book for free. The cynic in me says that those seem unlikely though.

From the message: "Test Marketing Program- To help with budget cuts ***** (publisher name deleted) is offering to you and your department a test marketing program with an honorarium involved."

Related: Do textbook publishers really offer ethically questionable inducements to professors to adopt or retain their book?

While I clearly don't like this concept, I confess it is refreshing to see a publisher courting teachers, when my other publisher just wants to lock me out of teaching resources because our bookstore doesn't sell enough copies to my class (probably because they buy it from cheaper sources!!)

Refuse the honorarium, but (if you think the book is good enough) agree to test the book if the publishers give the students free copies, no strings attached.

@StrongBad Are you implying that if they are asking for feedback then it might be acceptable to view the honorarium as compensation for writing up the feedback? It seems to me that accepting money to use a particular textbook will imply to some (most?) that it was a bribe and the educator puts the needs of his bank account above those of his students.

I think if you'd not seriously consider the text without the honorarium, that clinches a "don't do it". That is, external monetary motivations should not be allowed to color your professional judgement. And, given that the appearance of impropriety is itself a potential problem, even if the text is plausible, better to be able to later claim objectivity by not taking an honorarium/bribe...

Fully agree -- but what if (unlike the present situation) this were the perfect book.  It would still seem wrong.

This doesn't seem to answer the question that was asked - it answers the reverse question.

Sorry, I meant to make it clear that I thought the answer should always be "no, it's not ok to accept an honorarium [sic] from a publisher..."

In this situation "honorarium" seems like a glorified bribe. It would be OK to accept payment for actual work (like, producing a written report on how the book did in a class), but as long as no such work is expected then all the publisher would be asking is for the instructor to sell his students. So my answer would be a plain "no".
One of the reasons that Universities pay their professors handsomely is precisely in order to buy them freedom.
I would add that such a publisher deserves to be made "famous" for such practices.

I completely agree with the last statement.

+1 for the answer, but I'm afraid that "Universities pay their professors handsomely" is not universally true.


text:
If I request a paper through my university library, must they pay a substantial amount of money?
I was asked to referee a mathematics article, submitted for publication in a reputable journal. To evaluate it, I also wanted to look at a cited article which it claims to extend. Upon searching online (through my university's VPN) I hit a paywall: I can read it for "only" $39.95.
My university subscribes to some journals, but apparently not this one. I find this price ridiculous and I will not pay. But I am also reluctant to ask my library to; that money is coming out of our students' tuition. If I ask a librarian to furnish me with a copy of the article, will they be out this same $40?
Related question: will publishers (requesting that I do peer review for them) obtain and provide articles upon request, in situations like this?
(Related but different.)

Update: People gave me the (excellent!) advice to ask my librarians, and they got back to me. Their answer in brief: It depends. Usually, it doesn't cost my library anything; sometimes it can, but the requests go through different channels than the paywall I encountered.

It's a great question for the site - but it would also be a great opportunity to talk to your university librarians.  In my experience they are very interested in keeping faculty informed about their services and how they work.

This is an interesting question - upvoted - but I disagree with your reasoning for asking it: regardless of how much this would cost your library, I see no point for you to second-guess your library's decisions about which services to offer and how much money to spend on them. Presumably the library's administrators understand much better than you how much money they have, where it comes from, and what they'd like to spend it on. In other words, this should not be a factor in your decision. But in any case simple curiosity is already a good enough reason to discuss this.

Of course, I don't use sci-hub, but I want to make sure you have heard of it.  You can read about all the people who do in this science article.

I do not remember how many times I requested authors for their articles, which I couldn't get for free. But I do remember that it was successful all the time. People are very happy when you ask them to provide their papers. I found this solution much better in terms of communication between researchers. Of course, in this case, you do not need to inform them that the purpose is to review another paper. Rather, "I found you paper interesting and I do not have access to its publisher, I would be grateful if you could send me a copy".

If you run firefox or chrome you might like to try the unpaywall extension. This is meant to get you acess to legitimate copies of a paper, e.g. in an author's instituional repository. There's also open access button which is similar but gives you more search options.

School is expensive. Where do you think your tuition money should go, if not to resources like this?

@sgroves: I have no qualms about requesting an article it's for my own scholarship. But if it's for the sake of peer review, for a publisher that is in the business to make money, then my feeling is that they should bear the costs.

It's worth noting that large academic libraries spend millions of dollars on journal subscriptions a year. I understand the sentiment that the publisher should pay, especially as you are already working for them for free, but even if your library does pay the full $40 to get it for you, it's a drop in the ocean from a fund that exists for precisely this purpose. Of course, I attended an institution that seemed to pride itself on acquiring pretty much anything that was requested, including a bunch of Bill Nye videos because my friend thought it would be fun to ask for them.

i always thought they pay a flat rate.

Some have subscriptions @vsz and then it's like a flat rate per year I think, but the easiest would be to just ask the librarian. Maybe the article is in a journal that is subscribed to, and maybe not.

You should not hesitate to ask the library for articles like this. The library most likely will pay a fee, but it will probably be less than the $40 for you to access it directly, and is an expected budget item for academic libraries.
There are costs associated with interlibrary loan (ILL) transactions, but they are minimal for articles that can be handled entirely electronically (for things that need to be physically transmitted, like books, and/or processed in some way, like print articles that must be scanned, the costs can be substantially higher). Since you found this article online, it probably falls in that cheapest category.
Many libraries also have agreements with publishers to "buy on demand" some articles that are requested through ILL. This usually happens entirely behind the scenes, so you probably wouldn't know the difference between such an article and traditional cross-library lending. It may cost the library more than ILL, but the library then "owns" the article so any future requests for that article will be at no additional cost, unlike ILL, which costs the same every time.
As an academic librarian, I can tell you that the library almost certainly has a budget for this kind of thing, and if it were my institution, I would want you to use this basic library service to get the materials you need to do your job (almost as much as I want students to get the materials they need). Nothing in a library is actually free*; making information accessible is the reason libraries—and library budgets—exist.

*Of course there are open access journals, donated books, etc., but someone had to pay for all of those, too, one way or another.

Don't forget (though the writer of this answer might be too modest to have mentioned it!) that the most important resources available in most libraries are the librarians. Get to know them, make sure they get to know you, and a lot of future frustration trying to locate "untraceable and unobtainable" references will vanish away like the morning dew!

At my institution's library, the librarians want us to use interlibrary loan to help justify the costs.

As to publishers: if the article you need was published by the same publisher as the journal you're reviewing for, there is a chance.  Indeed, a few publishers grant temporary online subscriptions to reviewers.  But otherwise, probably not.
Also, if you contact the editor and let them know that you need this other article to be able to review properly, and if the editor happens to have institutional access to the journal in question, and if they are not too busy, they might send you a copy of the article as a professional courtesy.

Definitely ask the editor. It's not your problem but his. (Surprisingly, I once had the editor ask me, the author, for a paper I referenced - more surprisingly is that the reference was from the very same journal I submitted!)

Likely not. Most university libraries have partnerships with other libraries. They will likely contact a library that does have access and request a copy. This usually comes with some limitations (for example they might only give you a paper copy, not a .pdf version) but they shouldn't pay anything extra.
I do not believe publishers will ask provide papers at request however. They likely expect you to do the above process if you don't have access.

In Germany papers ordered through ILL are sent to the requester's library in digital form, but then printed out locally and handled out to the requester, as the copyright laws forbids the libraries to share digital copies. In this way the libraries are freed from paying the fees to the publisher.

If I ask a librarian to furnish me with a copy of the article, will they be out this same $40?

Maybe... but probably not.
First, there are the inter-library agreements mentioned in other answers, which may allow the library to get you a copy at no cost.
Failing that, the library may have existing agreements with the publishers which would allow them to get a copy of the article at a reduced cost.
And then there's the possibility that, yes, access to the article may need to be purchased at full cost.  Even then, that's no big deal.  A substantial portion of your institutional library's budget is set aside specifically for obtaining access to publications for researchers at the institution.  Buying this access is what the money is there for!
Also, if you're specifically concerned about the cost being borne by the library (as opposed to by some other entity), the cost may, in the end, be shared between the library and your department, depending on the specific arrangements in place at your institution.

My library has a fund set aside for requests. It is specifically earmarked for things they don't have that someone might want. So ask; at worst they tell you no.

Please elaborate. This is not an answer, it could be considered a comment.

He asked about where the money for an article may come from if he requests it via a library. Libaries do have discretionary funds, as he didn't specify the library I have no way of seeing if his does.

But what if they tell you "no"?


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Why do we not reinvent the journal system?
I am very surprised that I could not find any similar question here.
It seems to me that researchers from all universities are willing to write papers about their research for free and hand them into a journal to gain reputation. On the other hand, some other researcher do voluntary check the paper in order to examine if the paper is acceptable for the journal. Therefore, the main work is done by researches.
The remaining work for the journal is to offer a platform where researchers can communicate and making sure that the reviewer is selected anonymous and to bundle many articles to a journal.
Now everyone has to pay a huge amounts for the papers, they are not accessible for free to the general public, even though that most researchers are financed by taxes and only the journal is making profit.
Now I wonder, should it not be possible to create a network page for researchers which contains methods to imitate the review process of a paper? So that all papers can be downloaded at the website for free. I guess most researchers would be very happy if everyone could read their work. Also the money that is spend on journals by universities could be spend to this huge network page instead in order to keep it running.

Platforms like arXiv, ResearchGate and others offer some of the features you mention. Also, lets not forget about open access journals which can be free (such as JMLR).

My favourite metaphor of the current system is this joke from Scott Aaronson.

If your problem is access to scientific papers, I would recommend this answer: http://academia.stackexchange.com/a/12339/10643

These are very good ideas. I think that they are already being developed, by PLOS for example.

Please meet the Open Access movement.
In the last twenty years, many scholars and librarians did try to address the problem you pose.
It is, in fact, a huge issue, and things like this don't change overnight.
The OA movement focused on two main strategies:

Publishing in peer reviewed open journals (gold open access): the idea is to create a brand new journal (or to change the model of an old one) which will provide articles free for the readers, without the current subscription model in which libraries (meaning, taxpayers) pay. The crucial factor of Gold OA is the presence of peer review: organize real journals costs a lot of money, and at the moment the major business model is APG (author processing charges), meaning that the author (often, the faculty behind it) pays for being published and cover the journal costs.
We're still in transition, and there are a lot of drawbacks: there are predatory publishers who try to scam authors, and big publishers offer the "open access option" charging huge fees (this is also called double dipping, because a hybrid (both Open and Closed) journal will receive the money from subscriptions and the money from the authors. It is important to remark, also, that big publishers make a lot of money with subscriptions and they are actively challenging the open access model.
PLoS, for example, is one of the new Gold OA publishers.
Self-archiving in repositories (green open access): it is the model of arXiv, Repec, and thousands of other repositories. They can be "institutional" or "disciplinary", and they accept mostly pre-prints, but also post-print articles.

Of course, there are some experiments in the field:

PeerJ has a very interesting business and pricing model.
Epijournals (from my understanding) are journals created selecting papers from arXiv and other repositories.

References

Open Access, by Peter Suber, MIT Press, 2012.
Wikipedia "Open Access" article. Accessed 4 Jan 2015.

Full disclosure:
I've worked as a digital librarian in managing OA journals from University of Bologna. I'm biased towards OA and open knowledge in general. Please keep it mind that my answers reflect these bias.

big publishers make a lot of money with subscriptions so do gold OA journals with APCs. and they are actively challenging the open access model Hardly. Most have gold OA options to their journals for researchers who have 3000$ they're not sure how to spend.

A related read: http://academia.stackexchange.com/a/31621/10643

I tried to address the phenomenon of "double dipping" of Hybrid Journals. Big publishers make tons of money from subscriptions (please, don't ask me to provide references now :-). Many scholars call this model "Red OA", because it "pollutes" the original and ethical drive of OA, and make researchers prefer the old closed system.

Not only hybrid journals. The Nature Publishing Group bought a large share of Frontiers, a luxury gold OA publisher. Gold OA is the next big pathway for tax money to flow into publishers pockets, you really think they'd miss that?

Well, I'm not saying that there will not be cases like this. I just don't think the whole OA movement has to be identified by borderline cases like the one you mention. At least, we are widening the audience of readers, now.

@CapeCode — What is APCs supposed to mean ?

@NicolasBarbulesco 'Article Processing Charges' the fee that OA journals charge authors to publish their papers.

I'm biased towards OA and open knowledge in general. This is a good bias.

The traditional publishing model has in fact been heavily debated over the past decade or so, and there have been several reinventions. Among these are Open-Access journals, repositories like arXiv, academic social networks like ResearchGate and publishing the paper and the data through repositories such as GitHub.
Some of these are also attaining a great deal of success. The biggest reason we're "not there yet" is inertia. There are two reasons for this inertia.

Publishers don't want to lose their revenue stream, and produce propaganda claiming open access or other alternative models don't work, and traditional paywalled journals are the best.
There is a very strong culture of judging the worth of research by the journal it's published in. So in practice, if you have a very good paper, you make a decision: Do you compromise on your pro-OA sentiment and publish in a prestigious journal, or do you risk undermining your future job applications by publishing in an OA journal?

Ultimately, it appears to be the case that applicants who are seriously considered will be evaluated on the merits of the papers themselves, not where they published. However, when there are hundreds of applicants for a position that need to be quickly screened, will the overworked committee have time to read several papers of every single one, or will they start scanning the CVs for journal names?
OA will surely prevail in the end. Recent past has shown that in practice and in theory, there are no major reasons why it shouldn't. Perhaps after that, other more revolutionary changes will follow. However, OA will not "win" until faculties overcome the bias that OA journals are lesser journals and papers published in OA journals are not good enough for traditional ones. When they do overcome this bias, post-docs and graduate students will happily switch to publishing in OA, now that it's not endangering their career.

The issue that seems to get overlooked is that journals are intended to provide permanent archival of published papers. The problem with electronic journals, etc., is that it is not clear that they can do this with the same reliability as printed journals, which really are stored on paper in archival libraries.

@OswaldVeblen Perhaps that was true in the past. Today, many libraries and online repositories are more than capable of archiving electronic copies. I suppose the question is something like, "If PLoS servers explode tomorrow, what happens to all the papers". But Google Scholar already finds several mirrors of a given PDF, and presumably it would find many more if not for copyright restrictions.

@OswaldVeblen and the corollary is: which articles among the exploding number of them do we want to archive, now that curation and editorial rejection have become unfashionable.

@Superbest: I have had conversations with well-known researchers who are not at all confident about electronic archiving. They bring up the example of paper documents from ancient Greece and Rome (and many other historical civilizations) that we can still read, compared to electronic data from even the 1960s and 1970s that has been lost or is unreadable now.

Superbest, @Oswald has a good point. Many organisations may archive electronic copies of papers, but these are only digital copies. When we unearth an ancient greek stone, or even a parchment from the Middle Ages, we can read them. When the archeologists of the future will find a hard disk, will they be able to read the "papers" inside ? Recently, a library has tried to read an archive, and could not read the tape, the equipment did not exist anymore.


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Is Master Program Rank Important for PhD Application
I am looking to go into the neuroscience or stem cell research fields. I was recently offered unconditional acceptance to the University of Edinburgh for Regenerative Medicine and to University College London for Neuroscience. Both are one year masters programs and included a dissertation.
Essentially, I am wondering how rank plays a role in applying to PhD programs. Does rank play a part in doctoral  acceptances? Both are well ranked, but UCL is ten or so spots higher on a world ranking scale.
Most of the research I have done has said that rank can be important for jobs, but I have not found much regarding the transition into a PhD, which I plan on.
I appreciate any input or opinions on the matter. Thank you.

I don't think it's so important for terminal masters degree, although it should not be completely disregarded. What is much more important, in my opinion, is the exact field you are intending to work in and the person you will work with and the references that you will get in the end (and, again, who they come from).
So if Edinburgh would give you the chance to work with a leading scholar in a subfield you are interested in, and UCL is ranked 10 ranks higher generally, but not as compelling for your more specific interest, I would go with Edinburgh.
Also, 10 is really not much of a difference.


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Deferred admission but funding not guaranteed
I received an offer from a top US school for PhD this March and accepted their offer. Due to some family circumstances, I would not be able to join the program this year. I am an international student, and I have to remain in my country due to some personal and family reasons.
I asked the program about possibility of deferring admission. After hearing my reason, they have decided to defer my admission, but I am not guaranteed funding. Basically, I need to compete with the next batch of applicants for funding (fellowship, TA, RA, or none). I agreed to the same, and I would be getting an offer sometime before April of next year along with funding allotment (if any).
In this context, my questions is: Can I apply to more programs to make sure I have a funded PhD offer for next year?
I realize that there is a certain commitment when deferring an offer, however does the same hold true even when funding is not guaranteed. When I asked the program about my chances of funding, they replied that it is "likely" but "not guaranteed". I am not sure if I can take a "likely" and live with that. What if I don't get any funding (which is basically a rejection) and don't have any other offers? That will be a very sad scenario.
I would like some advice, IMO it is shrewd to apply to more programs, but is it ethical? I don't want to explicitly ask the program this question, since there is a likelihood that they may ask me to simply reapply, which I don't want to. I got off a wait-list, hence not very confident of my chances! Also, since funding is not guaranteed, do I even need to ask permission for applying to more programs? I mean, do they honestly expect a student to commit to a program without the program committing to financial support? I think that is asking a bit too much, and gives the program a complete hold over the student.
Also note that there is one other program (call Y) that I was admitted to this year, which I really liked. I had a very hard time choosing between the two offers, and had I not got into the program that I have accepted and deferred (call X), I would have gone to Y. I think I can get into Y again next year if I apply, since they tried hard to recruit me, but in the end I chose X because of better location (both were equally strong in research). So if X doesn't give me funding next year (effectively reject), I would like to go to Y.
Please share your thoughts. Thank you.

In brief, in academic mathematics, if you are "accepted" but without promise of funding, it's a very weak offer. The fact that you got funding this time around is certainly positive, but there's so much volatility involved that I think it would be a dangerous mistake to view the situation as so much promised to you (it's not) so that you have a complete obligation to go there and nowhere else. A promise of funding should be construed as obliging you to either keep your promise or decline in advance, but mere admission, without funding, while not nothing, is barely something, either.

So, would it be OK if I went ahead and applied to my other school? I'll also may be apply to a third school to be absolutely certain of getting a funded offer somewhere. I assumed as much that it shouldn't be a problem to apply to more programs.
The real dilemma I am facing is, should I explicitly seek permission from the school. In such a case, I am very scared that they might just ask me to re-apply, and the probability that I am getting in again is not high (I got in off a wait-list this year). The field under question is applied math or statistics.

Ah, if you already got in "on the second round", the chances are high that you'd simply not get funded at all next year. Given the slim commitment they've made to you, you don't owe them a great deal, I think. At some point next year you could in fact (not too early, but if you're waiting and waiting and not hearing anything) be forthright, eventually, and say that you do have funding elsewhere... But don't try to play that as a "trump".


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How do we prevent a professor from releasing our class project as his own research?
I don't want to release too many details in this inquiry, but I do have a very legitimate question to ask. My senior class (aerospace engineering) has been hard at work for nearly nine months reverse engineering a particular X-Plane. We have done detailed analysis on almost all the aspects of the craft and we have just heard that our supervising professor intends to release this research as his own for future technologies in SSTO vehicle analysis. What options do we have to prevent this blatant plagiarism by an adviser and how soon should we act?

As a side note, how is this publishable research since it isn't new knowledge (people already designed the aircraft)?

Could you tell more about its status. I.e. does he want to publish it without you as an author, or with both him and you? How is his paper related to your results? (It is directly using them?)

You must have documented your reverse engineering efforts in some way (e.g. Student reports). You can publish these online, e.g. On ArXiv.
You might also discuss coauthorship with your professor on future publications.

Publishing on the ArXiv is a very good idea, it prevents any plagiarism. Discussing with the professor to form a collaboration to work together to improve the research/writing and submit it in article form to a journal is also great advice.

@WetLabStudent: This might be a good idea in some fields, but arXiv's coverage is limited to a few specific fields and engineering is not among them.

@NateEldredge that is not entirely true, I have seen several engineering papers on the arXiv published under the category "physics" or  "computational engineering"

@NateEldredge But of course we do not have enough information from the OP to tell whether their project fits these topics. However, there are other preprint services besides arXiv (see http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/84/preprint-services-other-than-arxiv-for-other-fields), so the general principle behind the comment is still valid.

@WetLabStudent: Well, there are also fields in which posting to a preprint server is considered "prior publication" and prevents you from ever getting your work published in a journal; see http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10284/what-are-the-reasons-for-journals-to-have-a-policy-against-publishing-material-a/10404#10404.  So it is perhaps better to be cautious when recommending this approach.

@NateEldredge This is very true, but it is becoming increasingly rare. For example ACS (the organization that runs the journals in the stack exchange question you link to) no longer universally bans preprints! Some of it's journals now welcomes them, and some of them don't. I am aware of over 20 journals in my field alone that have changed their policies within the last 2 years on preprints, and that number is growing. Of course the OP should check the journals he plans to submit to policies about preprints.

Using student work is always a difficult situation and we spend a considerable amount of time thinking about What are the minimum contributions required for co-authorship. In many cases advisors conclude that students have just turned the crank of the well designed project that they have been handed and that they do not warrant authorship. I think that within reason that advisors who have been active in the research process of students (e.g., suggesting the topic, initial readings, experimental design, and analyses) should be at a minimum of offered authorship and in many cases should actually be the sole author.
There are cases where the student wants to publish in a lower ranked journal than the advisor would like. It seems wrong of an advisor to stand in the way of a coauthored lower ranked publication so they can have a single authored higher ranked publication. That said, if the advisor has correctly evaluated that the student contribution is not worthy of authorship, the lower ranked publication will not stop the higher ranked publication.
Making your work publicly available (e.g., through a website or ArXiv) is beneficial to everyone. When your advisor attempts to publish/republish the work, reviewers will have to decide if the work is new and if you should be an author. Assuming your advisor correctly determined that you do not warrant authorship, he/she will still be able to publish the results. In other words, if you class project is your advisor's research, you cannot stop him/her from publishing it as his own. As crazy as it sounds, the only way to stop it is to make sure your class project contains enough of your research that you have some ownership in the project.
It is probably worth noting that, at least in my field, the traditional bar for a MS thesis is a research project that could be published. An undergraduate class project that takes up a 1/4 of a students time for an academic year is generally much less comprehensive than what MS students produce over 1-2 years of fulltime research.

First, something you should consider. How reliable is the source of this "we heard"? And how complete? Sometimes, professors present in meetings the work done in their group, not necessarily by themselves.
If your source is not confidential, you should be clear and talk to him in a non confrontational way. Ask what is the purpose of the meeting, what is he going to present, and maybe if some of you could come along. If after the talk you are still suspicious, you could talk to another professor familiar with your field that could know what is the extent and purpose of this meeting.
If your source is confidential and the contents of this meeting are not public, you can ask him if he thinks your results are publishable and how to proceed. You can also discuss what would the logical continuations be.
Also, I wouldn't post it anywhere without his permission, or clear evidence that he wants to take your work as his. Research is, to some degree, confidential until it is in a publishable form, and you may get shooting yourself in the foot. Specially when working on hearsays, don't do anything that you may regret afterwards.
If you do get solid evidence that he is plagiarising you (and please, confirm this with someone external) you may begin taking bigger actions. Posting your work publicly is a good way of asserting your authorship and getting a timestamp.

This sounds like a common misunderstanding of what research actually is.  Most professors in technology are not doing the day to day research work.  That part is done by students and postdocs.  The professors are setting direction, offering guidance and feedback, securing funding, etc.  They are the "managers" in academia.  This role definitely warrants their name being on any publication they are involved with and is not the professor "stealing" ideas.
The second question is whether your work alone qualifies as publishable.  Published work must have novel content.  If your project is the equivalent of supplying some numbers in a table in a larger study done by your professor, then your work probably does not stand on its own and may not warrant you being listed as an author.  If your work makes up the main body of a paper though or supplies some crucial insight that the whole paper would be based on, then your work would stand on its own.  If so, you should be a coauthor of anything that uses it.


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What can I do in my last semester to improve my chances of admission to physics PhD with a poor GPA?
I am transitioning from EE to Physics in MS program. I am taking courses required for my research. Also, I am taking courses that will help me in finding employment after MS. Due to this act of balance, and doing research, my overall GPA has plummetted to 3.3 ( At the moment my major GPA is also same). I have one more semester to go. What should I do to improve my chance to boost my GPA so that I can apply to top PhD programs in Physics? I am doing MS theses.

Unfortunately, we strangers on the internet are unable to determine which of two reasonable choices is the best fit for your personal circumstances, capabilities, and desires.  If there are questions about the larger system that would give you the information that can help you make your decision, however, those are more likely to be on topic.

Please also note that supplying more information will not change the reason that your questions are being closed: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/82092/22733

Hi, Thanks! Do we have any active faculty on stackexchange? since they have already walked  this path, they may give some advice.

There are lots of active faculty on Academia.SE. They are voting to close your questions because you are not following the guidelines in the help center.  Please particularly read the section on "Can I ask questions about my specific situation?"

Ok! Got it. I will try to generalize this question. Maybe in a sentence or two.

See How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students?, and How do you get a bad transcript past Ph.D. admissions?