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Does the GDPR cover reviewer blacklists, and if so, how?
I've served as an area chair for several conferences.  Following the review period, the program chairs asked the area chairs to submit to them an annotated list of problematic reviewers. Mostly these were reviewers who failed to submit a review at all, despite repeated reminders, but we were also asked to identify reviewers who submitted exceptionally low-quality reviews, such as reviews that were so short/vague as to be useless, and reviews whose factual errors were so glaring that it was obvious that the reviewer either lacked even the bare minimum subject-matter knowledge, or else didn't bother reading the paper at all.  The purpose of collecting these lists was to construct or to supplement a blacklist for use with future program committee invitations.  That is, people on these blacklists would not be invited to review for future conferences operated by the same scholarly society.
I am wondering whether the coming into force of the EU/EEA General Data Protection Regulation has any implications for these blacklists.  In particular, is the blacklist itself considered "personal information", and is it even lawful to compile such a list?  Can the reviewers mentioned on this list use the provisions of the GDPR to force its maintainers to disclose their presence on the list or even to remove them from the list?  How about the area chair comments used to construct the list—are these something that blacklisted reviewers can force the conference organizers to turn over to them?
I realize that this is a question about legal principles and practice, and so might be also (or maybe even better) appropriate for the Law Stack Exchange or a lawyer.  But since the question treats a uniquely academic scenario, I'm hoping that someone here might belong to a scholarly society that has already looked into the matter, and can therefore provide a brief summary for the present academic audience.

You are right, this is a law question.

And yet we have a dedicated tag here for legal issues, so I figured I'd try posting here first.  I'm not in urgent need of professional legal advice; I'm asking more out of curiosity and long-term planning (in case I ever decide to organize a conference myself).

A question being about law does not make it more or less on topic.

I think the question is on topic, but I think it's weird to post it here.

I think this is an awesome question. Let's hope we get good answers for it.

Is making a blacklist even legal to begin with? I know that there are a number of US states that flat-up ban employer blacklists.

@nick012000 There is no employment contract here. Reviewers are volunteers.

I have voted to close as off-topic in the hope that the question will be moved to law.sx where I expect that the probability to obtain good answers by someone who knows the legal intricacies is higher. In that case, we'd still have the link to that question here, so anyone searching for answers on academia will find it.

The GDPR of course doesn't cover all possible scenarios. However, it's fairly logical. You're not allowed to have and use personal information, unless you meet at least 1 of 6 specific reasons. "Consent" is the best-known, because we've all been asked hundreds of times in the last year. But obviously that's not going to fly for a blacklist.
No, the reason which can justify a blacklist is (6e) processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller. Academic publishing is probably not done "in the exercise of official authority", but it definitely is "a task carried out in the public interest".
Having established that there's a reason, most of the other GDPR requirements become technical. There's a right to ask for factual corrections, but if the facts are in dispute you only need to record the objection. You are not forced to decide.
Now the biggy is of course the "right to be forgotten"/right to erasure. This is not an unconditional right. The person invoking this right must state a reason, and this must hold. "Withdrawing consent" is a reason, but it only applies when consent was originally necessary, which is not the case for the blacklist. "No longer necessary" might make sense if someone retires entirely, but we know that in academia retirement is often not a black&white matter.
The good thing here is that you can reason about actual removal requests if and when they arrive. There is not much preparation required other than the general GDPR rules for good recordkeeping.

My guess would be that irrespective of whether their might be a case that could be argued in court, whoever carries the (financial) liability for a finding against the conference organizers, or just the cost of defending such a claim, would not want to even see the case be brought.

Am I right in assuming that GDPR also means that keeping such a list would mean having to inform people who are on the list?

@TobiasKildetoft AIUI, not proactively. But if a person on the list asked about the list, the organisation would have to tell them.

@Flyto Ok. That is not my understanding of it, but I never did go into much detail. I know we send out letters with details of how we treat data to everyone who gets added to the system I work on (since I just had the task of automating that process). But I don't know if we are required to send out those or just do.

@TobiasKildetoft my understanding is that you're not required to send it out, but that information it must be available. But I'm not a lawyer or an expert on GDPR, so I may be wrong.

@IanSudbery: What sort of financial liability are you considering? There's no profit in reviewing, so it's pretty hard to claim damages. As for the theoretical risk of being sued, you can also be sued now on the mere allegation that you have a blacklist. That's a general principle in law; there's little that you can do that can prevent lawsuits from being filed. The best you can achieve is to make it hard for your opponent to find a lawyer.

My understanding (and perhaps you know better than me) is that breach of GDPR carry fines independent of damages. Certainly if you were sued over having a blacklist you'd surely be in a better position if you didn't have one, even if you might argue that having one is justified if you did.  I certainly know that at our institution they are taking it very seriously and very much taking a precautionary approach (prohibiting anything that might in any way smell slightly like something someone might complain about).

While I see how one could argue for public interest (though I'm not sure even for that) I don't see the necessity: organizing reviews without blacklist is possible even though somewhat more tedious if some of the non-answers/useless reports can be avoided by using the blacklist.

I also disagree that consent wouldn't work here: consent may be asked in a more neutral fashion to keep a file of reviewers together with performance data (would probably need to be described in a more specific fashion) on the reviews delivered (and e.g. areas of expertise) for the purpose of easing the task of finding reviewers for future editions of the conference. Such a list would be even better than a blacklist for the organizers and at the same time more transparent to the reviewers (who'd then also know whom to address their GDPR questions & requests to).

You cannot force editors to use de facto bad reviewers if they know about them.
However, the actual problem with today's ease of data collection is that you can easily accumulate lots of (possibly low-quality and unvetted) data; a blacklist being sent around can constitute slander (or whatever you call it in your jurisdiction), even independently of GDPR. IANAL, but in my understanding, GDPR might be used by a person suspecting blacklisting to force the organisers to reveal its existence and one's presence on it, even if its transfer from one years' organiser to next years' organiser could be justified under its rules. With a cascade of further legal consequences in its wake which are not just limited to removal from the list.
I do not know if they can have a look at the blacklisting comments, but if the comments are sent around with the blacklist between year committees, I estimate that they fall under GDPR.
Having some basic rules of data hygiene (and I consider GDPR as such) is not an entirely bad thing. Best is, leave yourself extra time to get additional reviews if reviews are not up to scratch and don't send blacklists around.
TL;DR GDPR, as I understand it (IANAL), permits people to ask their presence on a blacklist to be revealed, especially if it is institutional (i.e. sent around between organisation committees, not just for individual use of the particular editor).

But a major additional question is whether keeping such a list is even allowed by GDPR, since it will (by necessity) contain information that can identify people. It might be allowed, since there is a reason for it, but that would still probably involve some serious thought to data security and who has access to the list.

@TobiasKildetoft Absolutely. If the list is leaked, the organisers could end up in very serious trouble (not because something is leaked that shouldn't be there, but because the list becomes visible to people who shouldn't be privy to it).

@TobiasKildetoft organisations can retain personal information so long as they have a "legitimate interest" in having it. One could argue that there is legitimate interest in having lists of bad reviewers when organising a conference. But it does have to be treated with the same care and thought as other personal data.


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Is it safe to send official GREs almost on deadline (e.g., the day before)?
I know I should send emails to the specific institutions rather than ask here. But the problem is it's faster here and I have not much time left, and it's a weekend now.
My GREs and TOEFL are already reported to me. Specifically, I'm asking about Cornell and Yale (physics) departments. They both have a deadline on 15 December. They require the scores by the deadline, but even if I order a score report to them now, ETS needs few business days to send them. So they'll arrive after 15 December, most likely.
Do you think my application will be automatically considered incomplete and dismissed?

MIT accepts that the scores will be sent by January, albeit its deadline is 15 Dec also

I am in the same predicament. I asked Princeton Admissions about this and they said:
We continue to match scores to applications as we receive them, even after the deadline.  If we already have your scores on file when you submit your application, it can take up to seven business days for the scores to match.  If you recently took an exam or recently made a request to the test administrator to send the scores to Princeton, it can take up to three weeks from the test date for us to receive your official score report and electronically match your scores to your submitted application. You will be able to monitor your submitted application checklist and will see the test date once the scores have matched.  You will not see the test scores.

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How to establish collaborations with academics who you do not know where you contribute to their research projects?
Lately it feels like I haven't been doing enough both personally and professionally. I am very productive at both my place of employment and my graduate studies (i.e. PhD in Soil and Water Science) however I want to be more active. I am perfectly content with crunching numbers, developing models, researching the literature, writing up results, etc...I know I am kinda...well nerdy and weird that way.
Recently I have begun reaching out to scientists in my field asking if they would like to collaborate in an effort to gain more experience with different kinds of data and ecosystems, make more connections, etc. When I offer to collaborate most don't respond...which I completely understand being an overworked scientists in the publish or perish game who needs another person to slow you down? Meanwhile some respond with a "sure love too" then when I follow up with questions or brainstorming ideas no one responds.
Is it proper to email say a professor with an email indicating that I am interested in their work and would like to collaborate on any projects? If they respond with a "Yes, love to work with you" type email with subsequent emails falling on deaf ears, is it them nicely trying to say bugger off?

Thank you all for your responses...I am by no means being naive and completely understand the demands placed on researchers and professors. I am very research oriented...so @paul garrett I understand where your coming from. I realize that a random email to someone I don't personally know could be somewhat off putting. However several instances have been of me applying for positions in their lab and not able to go/accept position due to funding restrictions (labs are out of the country). After an exchange of emails I offered a collaboration and things go silent. Just wanted some feedback.

If you're asking someone to collaborate out of the blue, they're probably expecting that you already have a project in mind and are contacting them because their area of expertise would fill a required role in that project.  If you follow up on their take with "great, let's get brainstorming" then they're probably rolling their eyes and feeling a bit misled - they expressed interest in collaborating on the unspoken assumption that you had a project in mind.  Usually you come up with the idea first - then contact collaborators because they do something you need to complete the project.

edited title to try to capture essence of your question; you may wish to edit further to get your preferred focus.

Collaborations almost never start with a cold email in my experience. All of my collaborations have involved people from my former lab, people I met at conference, or an obvious opportunity where I had the data and they had the analysis tool. Anecdote aside, I think you have to have something the other side will obviously want: a dataset, a method, a tool; access to a site or species or specimen; something besides an idea. Lots of people have ideas. Lots of people even have the same idea. But in order to start a research relationship with someone you don't know, you've probably got to have something they want and vice-versa.

A comment I overheard once when someone came offering "I've got many good ideas, you could use them" was "don't worry, I have my own  ideas enough to last for a lifetime, I just sorely lack hands to check them all out".

An answer that will probably not be optimally useful to you, but may be explanatory:
I'm in mathematics, at a relatively good univ, relatively senior, generally very interested in "research" in a substantive (rather than "traditional publication") sense, but have done much of the traditional status-enhancing tenure-getting thing, too. And am enthusiastic about mentoring, especially of PhD students.
Short answer: serious people are almost universally already fully booked-up. They're not waiting for a lucky cold-call from out-of-the-blue, in any case. Thus, they're fully committed already. Bang, done.
To second-order: they may consider broadening their interaction base... but to avoid risk, it'd be to people they already know well, trust, etc. Cold-callers would have to offer something semi-amazing to make it worthwhile... oops, but then that simultaneously wrecks the cold-caller's credibility. Ouch. Catch-22.
One could go on in a similar vein, but I'd wager that's the dynamic that's stymi-ing you in these attempts. So the recommendation is to attempt meeting people in more "personal" ways, to establish your non-crank/seriousness, your tractability as a person, and... work up to it more gradually.
(If something I've said is opaque, I can certainly expand a bit. I do realize that you feel, reasonably-if-naively, that you're doing something positive, with baffling results...)

+1 Interesting answer. Would your analysis be different if the "cold-caller" were on the faculty at the same university, but in a different department, i.e., does working at the same place make the outcome more preferable for the one doing the initiating?

@MadJack, well, maybe, yes, it'd be easier for a person I didn't know to establish a "trustworthy" connection if I could look them in the eye over coffee... but that's not strictly necessary. The "problem" is perhaps that of sufficiently establishing one's "persona" ... on the internet?... or somehow in broader circles, so that people can gauge one's reliability, seriousness, and so on. The traditional ways of doing this are well known... and we don't seem to have transparent new-precedents. Very-well-established people can trust each other in a way, that they have reputations to lose...

And, yes, to be clear: "trust". In the end, also noticing (hey!) by accident a long human tradition of tribal and other bases for relationships... "trust", often based on "obligation" (not the worst reason to trust), is the final and decisive thing, I do think. Based on observation, I think "young" people have a flimsy notion of "trust", which would not suffice for me... but/and I am commensurately widely disappointed in the apparent failure of "trust-worthiness" ... mileage varies, and all that.

@paulgarrett - While I am no young buck...I too think people these days have a flimsy notion of trust and reliability. Hence why I have very few people to ask and have to turn to these community based Q and A boards.

@PaulJulian, ... sigh. Well, yes, indeed. But, anyway, to reiterate, I do think that a decisive version of "trust-ability" is most easily established in person, looking people in the eye, etc., if only because of the human animal condition... So it's hard, long-distance. Not impossible, as I could testify, but very difficult without much prior established reputation and such. The animalistic thing is not entirely unreasonable, after all. I'd say, "go visit people", be patient, ...

@paulgarrett - I agree. Thanks for the advice.

I am currently writing a blurb for my promotion packet to "full professor".  It contains (for now anyway...) the following bullet point as an attempt to provide evidence of my stature in the community:

Mathematicians often send me their manuscripts.  Collaborations have resulted from ``cold emails'' by W.C. Jagy, J.R. Schmitt, and A. Bishnoi.  More people have been turned down.

I think there is some useful information for you here.  The most important word is manuscripts.  I did not say that people write to me asking to work for me: they do that all the time, often in a way that makes me think they must be sending very similar emails to hundreds of other people.  If I think your goal is for me to give you a position of some sort, then the best response you might get is an explanation of how you can apply for that position; it is more likely that I won't respond at all.  If the main question of the email is "Will you collaborate with me?" then if I am favorably disposed to the writer I will write back pointing out that they have not really asked the right question.
You shouldn't ask whether you may collaborate with me: even if I say yes, what have we accomplished?  You should actually try to start up a collaboration in an intellectually meaningful way in the email.  A great way to do this is to show me some actual work, describe it in the email -- briefly, but in enough detail so that I can see that it is of interest -- and make a connection with some prior work or interest of mine.  Something like "Because of your work X, I think you might be interested in the enclosed paper Y.  I feel like more work could be done on question Z.  Do you know if...?" would be ideal.
I am starting to wonder whether the above quotation may not demonstrate my "stature" within the academic community to a general audience but rather some different (positive, I think) quality: yes, I have a position of some power and influence, enough to recommend you or introduce you to Dr. A or (if the circumstances are right) hire you.  However I am not too busy to collaborate with people who are unknown to me.  Yes, I am very busy.  People send me stuff all the time. (Another bullet point: "I get more than a dozen referee requests a year.")  But I usually do reply to what people send me if the conditions are right.  Does someone truly eminent stop reading cold emails altogether?  I think the answer is probably no, they just become increasingly picky and selective.
My own preoccupations may have made me take the long way around on this one.  What I am trying to say is: reverse your approach.  Don't send the "Do you like me? yes/no" email first.  First send the email in which you explain your ideas and work in a way which will be attractive and quickly perspicuous to the right person.  What you are shooting for is to first convince them that you have expertise / technique / work of interest and use to them and second that they have the same which can be useful for you.  (Sometimes I get emails sending me interesting stuff and asking me to join in, and my reaction is unfortunately, "Gosh, I wonder why they thought that I could help them with any of that. I have no ideas whatsoever, in fact surely less so than the people who contacted me." At this point I'm busy enough not to want to sign on to a new project with the expectation that I'll have something to contribute in the future.  I need to have something insightful to say right now.)
One final thought: I have often thought that a more than ordinary compulsion to answer a question, any question, is characteristic of those who work in mathematics (and probably also in academia generally).  Private citizens routinely completely ignore questions.  To me that is quite a feat, and the only safe way for me to not answer a question is not to respond at all.  I think that to a large degree "You get one question" when you are interacting with an academic.  (If you don't get a response from a cold email, the most likely reason is that the question is one that they have been asked too many times before -- just not by you.)  Choose your "one question" wisely.  Make it something that inherently draws the other person in intellectually.

Donald E. Knuth stopped answering all mail quite some time back. He only accepts bug reports for his books.

@vonbrand: Around the time of his retirement, perhaps?

This answer is both realistic and optimistic! Very helpful

Your implied question is

How can I initiate distance collaborations with carefully chosen people I'm not personally acquainted with?

Here are some ideas.  (I apologize if you've already tried everything I describe here.)
Send an email to a potential collaborator you've targeted, talking specifically about some ideas or results in a paper of his that you have read.  Pose some "I wonder what would result from such-and-so approach to this data" or "Would the results be more useful if such-and-so additional data were collected" types of questions.  Describe how you have used that approach to good effect.  Or tell them you need some more data sets to test your analytical tool on.  Introduce yourself briefly and mention some fruitful collaboration you've had with someone else.
Alternatively, call the person up for the initial contact.  Start out with "This is So-and-So.  I read your paper about such-and-so and have some questions about it.  I hope I'm not calling at a bad time.  [Short pause for answer.]  I have done some similar work (describe briefly), and was particularly interested in etc. etc.
"We" might go over better than "I".  The rest of the "we" could be your advisor.  You want this stranger to think of you as a reliable character, not someone who's isolated and a little nutty.  (You can actually be as nutty as you like, but we just want to make sure you don't give an initial impression that way.)
If you get an initial positive response, ask if it would be possible to have a phone appointment to follow up.  Mention what some good times of day are for you.  Email is good for that initial contact, but phone will give you better give and take of ideas, and the person is more likely to get excited about a possible collaboration through a phone call.
If you need to re-start some stalled communication, you can respond to last month's thread with either some new thoughts, if you've had some, or with a friendly note saying that you wanted to check in about etc. etc.
Granted, you don't want to be pushy... but it is okay to be persistent, as long as you're not a pest about it.
Better than all of the above, however, would be if your advisor could get the ball rolling for you.
Attending conferences, as mentioned already by Bill, can be quite helpful.

I gave this a +1, in particular because you made some of the key points of my answer with less fuss and personal angst.  The one thing I would say is that: academics can be delicately anti-social social creatures.  Being called by someone you don't know is a real escalation.  Often it is worth it, but it is not to be done too lightly: I have had several email exchanges with people and then called their office phone and detected a note of mild surprise/anxiety in their voice when we talked.  Not to mention that maybe the person you're communicating with is N time zones away...

@PeteL.Clark - Just to reassure you about my proposal to follow up by phone -- "If you get an initial positive response, ask if it would be possible to have a phone appointment to follow up."

It's been my observation that mathematicians are the most uncomfortable with phones.  I think the soil scientists will be cool.

I was referring to the part "Alternatively, call the person up for the initial contact." I actually think that email would be better for this, because the initial overture should be contentful, but calling me up and asking me a contentful question is rather different from letting me ponder it at my own convenience.

"I have had several email exchanges with people and then called their office phone" -- if it was not by prior arrangement, I can see why they might have been surprised and uncomfortable.  But a phone call to initiate contact can work well.

I don't normally phone people about research who aren't collaborators, but I have set up Skype meetings after some emailing back and forth (usually with someone I've met, but not always).  However, what I think is better is to invite a person to visit or tell them you'd like to go visit them to discuss such and such.  Obviously you should have significant interest already in their work for the latter.

BTW, I don't understand this statement: mention some fruitful collaboration you've had with someone else Just telling someone you've been able to collaborate with someone else in the past would seem strange unless it the project has direct relation to the topic you're discussing.

@Kimball - My idea was kind of like when you do a tiny bit of name dropping to impress someone.  You have to work it in so it fits -- but it might help if you could come across as someone who has already collaborated with others in this way.

In that case, I don't think it's a good idea.  I'm always put off when someone comes across as trying to sell themself.

I think some of the existing answers are very good. Approaches that sometimes work are:

"Please find attached a draft paper. Given your expertise in X, I'd very much value your comments and would like to invite you to be a co-author, if you are interested in contributing."
"I have funding of $X and need expertise in your area. Would you be interested in sharing this funding?"
"I have an excellent potential PhD student and wonder if you would be interested in co-supervising this student, given that their proposed topic of Y overlaps our two areas."
"I have skills in Z and my time is fully funded. I am interested in working with you: is there anything I can do to assist your current work?"
"I am preparing a funding bid on X [where I have a reasonable chance of success] and I would like to involve you in the project proposal. Are you interested in working together?"
"I have an [extremely interesting, attention-grabbing] idea for a collaboration. Would you be interested in contributing?"

Try crowdsourcing sites for collaboration opportunities. See http://www.crowdsourcing.org/ which has links to places like https://www.zooniverse.org for projects that could use your brainpower and passion.

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How to cite multiple papers published in different years by the same authors in APA style?
http://www.easybib.com/guides/citation-guides/apa-format/how-to-cite-a-parenthetical-citations-apa/
In APA style, we have to use ampersand(&) instead of 'and' when we cite multiple authors in the parenthesis.
Ex) This is the sentence (Smith & Williams, 1989).
When I cite two papers by the same author, should I use comma, or 'and' or ampersand?
(1) This is the sentence (Smith, 1989 & 1991).
(2) This is the sentence (Smith, 1989 and 1991).
(3) This is the sentence (Smith, 1989, 1991).
What if there are three or more papers?
(1) This is the sentence (Smith, 1989, 1991, & 1993).
(2) This is the sentence (Smith, 1989, 1991, and 1993).
(3) This is the sentence (Smith, 1989, 1991, 1993).

These are the examples given in the sixth edition of the APA manual. They are separated only by a comma.

Training materials are available (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2001, 2003)
Past research (Gogel, 1990, 2006, in press)

Thank you. It solved one part of my question. Do you know what should I do if there are three or more papers? Separate only by comma or use 'and?'

Only a comma. The second example above already illustrates this. The term 'in press' refers to a forthcoming (e.g. accepted but not yet published) paper.


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Do people say why they decline a paper review request?
I am curious to know what actions are generally thought to be acceptable when one sends a request for a paper review, especially a journal one.
When academics are asked to review a manuscript and they have the relevant expertise, is it common for them to decline the review without giving any reason?

Established scientists receive a large number of review requests. A few years back I decided to tally the review requests I received, and the number I accepted. In the end I received 112 and accepted 28 over the course of a year.  Add to that the editorial work I did for three journals and you get an awful lot of uncompensated, unrewarded time invested for the good of the field. (I typically spend about eight hours a week on reviews and editorial work.) So yes, I declined a large number of review requests every year, many of which I would have been well qualified to handle. When the editorial system allows, I try to at least leave a note explaining that I'm too busy, but as jakebeal notes, this is not always an option.
So yes, qualified reviewers can and do turn down many review requests, often without providing an explanation. As an editor, I know that if I ask well known researchers this will happen as often as not, and I don't mind that one bit. What I do dislike is when people don't bother to click the "decline" link on the review request, and force me to wait for a week before giving up and trying to find a new reviewer. This slows down the review process and ultimately slows down science for everyone.

Yes, not even clicking the "decline" button is soo aggravating. It holds up the entire process :-(

Speaking as an editor: generally if somebody declines they do not give a reason.
The biggest reason for this is that the automated "please say yes or no" forms generally don't force people to explain why they are saying no.  So they don't say.
I think this is a good thing.  If somebody doesn't feel they are willing/able to put in the effort to give a thorough and professional review, I would much rather they be able to simply and easily say "no" rather than either being pressured into saying yes or having to come up with excuses.
The people who I really love though, are the ones who point me at somebody else who wants to do the review.  I don't care why they aren't reviewing; I do care about finding competent and professional peer reviewers.

When they suggest someone else I'm using it's often a postdoc in their group, or a new PhD who's just left the group (or an experienced postgrad in the group).  It's good experience.

I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I know someone else who would want to review a paper I get.  I would love to know these people though.

Can you comment on the relationship between the people turning down the reviews and the new reviewers they refer you to? In your experience, is it generally to other established scientists, or to postdocs / students they know?

@E.P. Usually it is other established scientists. If they want to have a postdoc or student review, they just accept and use that person as a sub-reviewer.

In my area of theoretical computer science, it's very common for review requests to explicitly ask the reviewer to suggest a couple of other people, if they decline to review. Of course, it's only a request so people can decline without suggesting anyone. (Indeed, trying to make it obligatory would just result in people ignoring the review request, rather than declining it.)


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Is it crazy for a PhD student to pay open access fees out of pocket?
I was preparing to submit a manuscript to a journal when I made a fatal realization: the journal publishes everything as open access and the author(s)/institution/funding agency must cover the cost ($500). This was a solo side project that I undertook on my own time with no co-authors nor outside funding. I was not expecting to publish this as open access as I was unaware of this policy. In fact, when I initially targeted this journal I thought that some articles were open access and others were not. Upon further inspection this is not the case. I'm clearly at fault for not being diligent enough about the journal's policies.
Now this situation would not be such a big deal except that

I'm a third year doctoral student and will be on the job market soon (I need pubs ASAP!);
I was planning on submitting this article and subsequently switching my focus to the dissertation;
It would take a significant re-work to tailor this paper to another journal as it is somewhat niche: the journal focuses on software publications across a range of disciplines, requires a fairly specific format, and limits articles to 3,000 words or fewer (note: I am not in a traditional STEM field, so I feel that my options for target journals are quite limited).

Am I crazy for wanting to just submit the paper and pay the open access fee out of pocket? $500 does not seem exorbitant compared to other journals' fees. Unrelated to my current situation, a few weeks ago I spoke with my advisor about creative ways to fund open access, but he stated that our university does not have options for funding - this must come through grants. It doesn't seem right asking him to cover the fees as he was not involved in the project and is not a co-author.
In this question, @ff524 suggests seeking funding through PLOS or a fee waiver through the journal/publisher. Other questions on Academia SE result in answers suggesting that authors request funds through the university, library, etc. When is it appropriate to ask for a waiver and/or seek funding from an outside source? Prior to submission, during submission, or after a paper is accepted? It seems like a massive waste of time to seek funding from multiple sources only to have a paper be rejected outright. At the same time, it would seem like withholding relevant information to wait until after a paper is accepted to ask for a fee waiver.

I have zero experience with open access fees, but if it's a student-only paper you could ask the publisher if they have student discounts. If there are multiple authors then bring it up with all of them and see if you can split the cost N-ways. At $500 nobody is going to want to rework and resubmit someplace else. Also, look at the contract or call the publisher and make sure the fee is actually mandatory. Some journals have a quirky system where they have an expected but not mandatory fee.

Assuming it is a good quality publisher, $500 is a good deal.  You can ask for a fee waver before submission, it might work.  I have seen fee wavers happen sometimes.

@ShakeBaby If I am to submit to this journal, I don't have a choice: all publications  in this journal must be published as open access and hence incur the fee (see the first paragraph).

@haff Would you mind sharing the name of the journal?

@JayFromA It's called SoftwareX.

If one of my students performed research by themselves and submitted a sole-author to a journal, I would still (probably) pay for it out of my lab budget; so it may be worth asking your supervisor if you have a good relationship.  If the paper was wildly off-theme, like a history paper from a biology lab, I probably wouldn't, but even a history-of-science paper I'd give it thought. My role as supervisor is to help the student succeed, and paying $500 to help my student succeed is part of the job.

$500 doesn't seem like much for an open access article, check maybe that the journal is not predatory.  The SCRIP journals typically charge something around this.

I don't think you're crazy at all. From a purely economic point of view, although $500 sounds like a lot of money, it is quite insignificant (in a US context) compared both to your future earnings once you graduate, and to the present potential earnings you are foregoing by attending graduate school in the first place instead of working at a "real job". Thus, if you truly think that paying the fee will help you get on with your other research projects and graduate faster and/or with a more impressive publication record, then, assuming you can afford to pay the fee without sacrificing other important or crucial things at least, it seems to me that paying the fee is a reasonable decision.
With that said, I think a note of caution is also in order. My main concern is that a good proportion of the journals that charge open access publication fees are predatory journals, and given that you are a graduate student and new to publishing, there is a risk that the journal you are considering publishing in could be one of those. I would therefore suggest not paying any fee until you have made absolutely certain, by consulting your advisor or other experienced researchers, that the journal in question is a reputable one and that publishing in it will actually further your career and goals. Good luck!

I really appreciate this advice. If I land an academic job then $500 would certainly be worth it. And this price seems very low compared to other OA fees. I hadn't thought about "predatory journals." I found out about this journal through a very well-respected figure in the field - I heard him speak a conference and he recommended this journal for software type publications (he is also on the editorial board). I don't know this figure personally, however, and the journal is pretty new (2ish years). Any thoughts? Does it smell fishy? I'll consult profs. in my dept. per your recommendation

It doesn't smell anything. Could be fishy or not fishy, I have no way of telling, beyond the general fact that to me all open access publication fees (or any other kind of publication fees) seem fishy and I have never seriously considered paying them. But that's a luxury I can afford, being in an area with many options for publication. Anyway, do try to get reliable information about this journal before you commit.

@hsff Open access fees that we have paid for reputable journals are in the range 2000-3000 USD. If its business model allows this journal to charge only 500 USD it does smell to me like they could be sloppy somewhere along the publication path. I'm not saying this is a predatory journal, but there sure are signs to be suspicious and have a close look.

@DanRomik So is Trans. LMS. fishy?

I would concur that $500 is worth paying from the job point of view. I paid more to go to an interview.
You should definitely investigate whether the journal is reputable. But the specific nature of it you describe makes me think it may well be legitimate. A colleague had a subject-specific journal in their area that did open access with no fees (until recently).

@JessicaB a lot of reputable journals charge open access and other publication fees. That practice is a bit fishy in my opinion, if that's what you're asking. The journal itself is a very good one, so even though it engages in a practice I consider a bit fishy I wouldn't go as far as to call the journal itself fishy.

@DanRomik The practice doesn't itself feel fishy from the UK, because it was briefly (government?) policy that this was the preferred model. As I understand it, the decision to back-track on that was (only?) a result of them realising quite how expensive such a rapid transition would be.

Many of them are in fact waiving fees for a period of time, presumable as @Roland says they're trying to build Impact Factor.


text:
Should I send email expressing my gratitude to professors who provided me with letters of recommendation?
I have asked for LORs from two professors that I haven't cooperated in the past and they were happy to provide them. Now, I've been admitted in the MSc program I was interested in. Should I write an email to them, in order to express my gratitude because of their help in earning this admission?

Politeness is always appreciated.

As someone here states time and again, most questions come up from overthinking the issue. The answer by DMlash is good, worst case scenario is if your email ends up in the spam. Otherwise expect the profs to be happy that their efforts turned out to be fruitful.

I think a short, cordial email informing the letter writers of your admittance and thanking them for their help and contribution to such an outcome is absolutely appropriate.


text:
Will not collaborating hurt the career of a math postdoc?
I am a math postdoc, and about to start applying for tenure-track (research oriented) jobs soon. Besides writing 2 papers with my Phd advisor while I was in graduate school, all the papers I wrote since then (about 10 papers) were single authored papers. As I start to think about applications for tenure-track position, I started wondering if this solo career I had so far will hurt my chances.
What do people with experience in search committees think about such a situation? should I make a serious effort in the near future to collaborate with others?

In every field, collaboration is a good thing. Because you can't find everything alone, and you need at least one other person to give you his point-of-view about what you are thinking. I think you should, just because in this world, it is the key for great project and great research ^^

I think this is a very field-specific question. In my field (electrical engineering), it would be a career killer. In faculty positions they expect you to bring funding and to have good (any) chances of getting funding, you need good collaborators. A couple of single-authored papers are good (shows you can pull ahead on your own) , but having 10/12 papers like that is not. I don't know how it works in math though.

I'm not even in academia but I can tell you that collaboration (when done properly) is an easy boost to anyone's career. You don't have to always be learning better ways to do things, just... different ones... it's really the different ways that make you better at what you do. That's a fact I learned, well, collaborating!

Do you interact with your colleagues in other ways? Do you go to conferences, correspond, review papers, etc.?

I think you know collaboration is important, and you're only asking because you don't want it to be. I share what I assume are your frustrations with collaboration, but teams can just get more done. Being able to work on a team is important in every area of life.

@Dan this might be true in general, but mathematics is not typical among the sciences, in my experience

I don't have time right now to write a proper and considered answer, but in light of some of the comments wanted to share this: I am a pure mathematician; and  when I got my first tenure-track position, in 2010, I had approximately 12 papers accepted/published, 8 of which were single-authored. Moreover, when I applied for (and got) a grant later that year, a positive point in one referee report was the large number of solo papers

Related (not math specific): http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/38717/19607

It's not at all unusual in mathematics to have single-author papers. (It is in most other fields.) It might be useful to have one or two collaborations just to show that you can, but there's no inherent drawback to solo papers.

Is collaboration really important? or is having multiple authors on your published papers important.  If the latter then give your pets some credit.  I am sure they helped you.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.D.C._Willard

I added the words "of a math postdoc" to the end of the title of the question. I think this is consistent with how most people have answered the question and it addresses the point that this is field dependent and that if anything mathematics is somewhat distinct in this regard. If others disagree, feel free to roll back.

While it may not hurt your chances, what you may be lacking is the 'skills' that would normally be acquired from working with other researchers. It is in your best interest to possibly work on an open source project or a similar volunteer venture to practice your communication and collaborative skills.

I am a math professor at a research-oriented university, and I have been on multiple hiring committees for tenure-track positions. If I were reading your file, your situation would raise two questions:

Are you doing research that is of broad interest?
Do you work well with others? Are you the kind of person that has ideas to share, that I would want to chat math with in the hallway, that would get graduate students interested in your subject?

Your application should offer evidence that the answer to both of these questions is yes. The first point will hopefully be addressed by your letter writers. It will also look good if your CV lists many invited conference or seminar talks.
The second point will again hopefully be addressed by your letter writers. If possible, I would suggest that at least one of them should be written by someone with whom you have talked math a great deal, and not just by your advisor and senior scientists who have read your papers. If you have engaged in any leadership activities (i.e., started a seminar, organized a conference, informally helped to mentor graduate students, etc.) I would make sure that your letter writers include someone who will attest to this.
And finally, like the other commenters, I would definitely recommend striking up some collaborations, although there is certainly nothing wrong with also doing work on your own.

Re the first question: presumably a big factor here will also be the reputation of the venues (journals/conferences) where you papers are published.  If they’re mostly in high-quality journals/conferences, then that is strong evidence that your work is judged interesting by experts in your field; if in journals/conferences with low acceptance standards, then not so much.

I am a mathematician at a research university.  On all the hiring committees I've been on, I've never heard complaints about someone collaborating too little.  On the other hand, I have heard people shoot down job candidates whose best work was in collaboration with more senior people (the assumption being, of course, that the senior person was the "leader" in the collaboration).
As long as you are publishing in strong journals, I would not stress out about this.  Just work in the way that is most natural to you.  On a personal note, most of my work when I was younger consisted of single-authored papers.  When I was on the tenure track market, I had 15 papers of which only 4 were co-authored.  It didn't appear to hurt me at all.  I write more joint papers these days largely because my joint papers seem to get written up more efficiently than my single-authored ones, but in many ways I miss my old way of working...

It seems like most of the feedback so far is suggesting the OP to collaborate.  In pure math, historically most papers have been solo authored, though there has been a trend toward more collaboration over at least the past 50 years or so.  See Grossman's 2002 paper and in a bit of a different direction this more recent paper (coincidentally with many co-authors).  At least as of 15 years ago, 2/3 of papers were still single authored.
Things are not at a stage where it looks strange for all or almost all of a job applicant's papers to be solo.  Personally, when I look at a job candidate's research the main things I look at are the letters of recommendation and the publication list.  If you are publishing in a good number of good journals, there's no disadvantage from my point of view if all of these papers are solo.  In fact, to me it looks better.  If you have papers in good journals, but they're all or mostly collaborations, that takes some of the credit away from you and makes it unclear how independent you are.  In fact it can be hard to evaluate the candidate if all of their work is joint with strong people.
Yes, collaboration has some benefits, but don't collaborate just to collaborate.  Also, getting an extra small paper or two out now won't make much of a difference.  What's much more important is that you're doing good work and people know about your work.  So you should be active in conferences, seminars, etc.  If you need to, visit people who will ask for letters to explain your work to them.

Yes, I'd strongly second the point that, in math, lots of joint papers with strong people at the very least leaves an easy target for criticism from people who might (for whatever reason) be opposed to one's hiring or tenure. E.g., 4 papers with 4 authors is not clearly better than one solo paper (in a good journal, it-goes-without-saying?), especially if the other authors are more senior. In math, perhaps unlike lab-oriented fields, one's mentor/supervisor usually has their name on the paper only if they've done a good bit of the actual work, maybe a majority (!), not just "supervise".

I second Kimball's excellent answer. In my opinion, collaboration is neither bad nor good in and of itself, it is simply a means to the end of producing good research. If you can produce good research by yourself, that's all that matters, and the fact (that many commenters here don't seem to appreciate) is that mathematics in one area where it is a lot more possible to produce good research by oneself relative to other sciences. In fact, some of the best research that can be done in math, the kind of groundbreaking research that is the product of very deep and intense thinking over long periods of time, has been done by people working by themselves (I'm looking at you, Perelman, Wiles, Yitang Zhang, Louis De Branges and many others). Indeed, I suspect that this may very well be the only way to produce certain kinds of breakthroughs.
With that said, setting aside the extreme examples I mentioned, for normal people in normal situations (and certainly for people at the pre-tenure-track job stage), there are some good reasons to think that collaborating with others can give a modest (or in some cases not so modest) boost to your productivity, and also increase the exposure of your work once it's finished:

In pure math research, the combined brainpower, talents and skills of two people is often more than the sum of its parts. No one person can be an expert on everything, and often research breakthroughs require putting together different ideas that few individuals could come up with all by themselves.
Working with others can give you new ideas and teach you new points of view and techniques. It has benefits that will stay with you long after the collaboration is over and can inform your work on the next project and make you a better mathematician.
Collaborating with others offers a very good way for others to learn about your abilities. If you leave a good impression, that can well help you down the road and also make many other people want to collaborate with you. This can seed a virtuous cycle (a.k.a. "the rich get richer") where people might approach you with exciting ideas for research projects that you would never have thought of yourself, amplifying and multiplying the effect of your initial successes.
Perhaps my favorite feature of collaborating, which seemed almost too good to be true when I realized it exists, is that when you finish a coauthored paper, you now have a person or persons who will spend the next few months or years traveling around the world giving talks about your result. Imagine that, someone working for you for free to go around telling others how great your result is and how great you are! (And keep in mind that they can, and sometimes will, praise you in ways that you could not politely praise yourself...). Of course, I assume you will do the same for them, but again, the result is that your paper can get double or triple the impact with the same amount of effort that you would have to put in for a solely authored paper. (You can also share with them the work of writing the paper, share slides and other "marketing" materials, etc. - the possibilities are endless.)

Finally, I should add that I personally enjoy working by myself slightly more than with others (I've done both about equally - around half my papers are solely authored), so you should not feel that there's anything wrong with you if that's your preferred mode of working. As long as you're doing good work, things should be fine. But as I explained above, you might want to give working with others a try and maybe discover some of the unexpected advantages it can give you.

Thanks, your answer's excellent too!  (I debated about whether to point out some benefits of collaborating, particularly the last bullet point.)

Let me give my own view on this important question. First, note that this is a "probabilistic" question. We don't know precisely how things would work for individual cases, but we do have our own impressions of the statistics and trends in our fields.
So in short, my answer is:

Not cooperating at all is certainly correlated with work which is not of high enough impact; and with a non-cooperative personality.
BUT (and this is where I might raise some disagreement): not being able to work with yourself alone (i.e., doing research only in groups) is also correlated with researchers that are devoid of their own research identity, researchers that are not leaders in their field, and researchers whose main mode of work is following others trends.

These are all mere (statistical) correlations, and I'm sure there are many exceptions.

Cooperate = collaborate?

Perhaps I meant collaboration. Excuse my English.

Yes, you should make an effort to collaborate, although it is not necessary to get a tenure(track)  position.
You should make an effort because collaboration can be a lot more fun and a lot more efficient than doing everything alone (it can also be the opposite when done wrong). It also shows that you can collaorate which is something that search committees like.

By cooperate do you mean collaborate?  It's possible you could interact with a lot of people without having collaborations.

@kimball Sorry, but I don't know what's the difference between the two (my dictionary translates both to the same words in German).

I was wondering why both your answer and @Dilworth's use cooperate.  Cooperate can indeed mean "work together" in a general sense (it can also mean something something less positive like "behave in the desired way" or "not go against"), but at least in the US I have not heard it used to mean "write a paper together."

@Kimball, I'd suspect that the most accurate U.S. English for Dirk's "cooperate" would indeed be "collaborate", as in "work together aiming to write a joint paper"... (As Kimball says, in U.S. English "cooperate" can mean a vague, general "not being an obstacle", without really helping or writing papers together...) Dirk?

I agree with @Kimball: there is (in English, of course) a difference between advising someone to cooperate and advising them to collaborate.  E.g. to me the statement "Most of the time I do not collaborate with my colleagues" sounds very different from "Most of the time I do not cooperate with my colleagues." I was taught as a child that cooperating is good and not cooperating is bad.  No one said anything to me about collaboration until I got to graduate school.

I disagree with this answer. OP didn't ask whether collaborating is more fun or not, and you don't know that it would be more fun for him. Some people actually prefer working by themselves.

In my experience , it is worthwhile to collaborate because
1) if you write an n-authored paper, you get more than 1/n times the credit.
2) if you can find a collaborator with complementary skills then you may write much better papers than either of you would have alone
3) if you have more ideas than time to work out, you can get collaborators to do the less interesting parts and be very productive.
Point 3 is the problem with collaboration, hiring committees may think you are the junior partner and give less weight to your contribution.
Now to answer the original question, will the absence of collaboration harm you directly? No. In fact, because you are not prone to the perception of point 3, it may well help.


text:
Where should figure captions be placed if the journal asks you to place each of them on a separate page at the end of the article?
I want to submit my article to a journal that states

Tables and figures should have captions and legends. Each of them should appear on a separate page at the end of the article.

Does this mean that every figure (I have 15) should be in jpg with captions below deleted?

Your best bet is to email the editor (or ask someone else who has submitted).

The ultimate reason for this may be historical inertia. Before computer publishing, the pages of a book or journal that contained figures would usually be prepared by a different process from the pages that contained only text. For "pictures" as compared with line diagrams, these pages may even have been printed by a different process from the text-only pages, and the sheets of paper were then assembled in the correct order by hand, to make the complete document. Inserting a small picture into a full page of text was the most complicated and expensive option, and therefore discouraged.

I have seen some journals that ask that you put figure captions all together on a single page separate from the figures themselves (an extremely annoying requirement both for reviewers and authors). But I doubt that is what your journal is asking you to do.
More common is just that you put each table and figure on a separate page. So the caption would appear below (or possibly above) the figure. Both the caption and figure would be on the same page. And that page would be at the end of the manuscript. This is standard in, for example, APA style. See this annotated sample manuscript.
So to answer your specific question the image file is commonly embedded in the document, and the image file would not include the caption. The caption would be  standard text from latex, MS Word, etc. and only the figure component would be an image file.


text:
Is it okay to send a letter of intent to attend a grad school, but withdraw if a scholarship is not provided?
Is it okay for a potential student to send a letter of intent to attend a university's grad school program, but withdraw if it becomes clear that a scholarship is not available. What are there any repercussions to this?

Could you clarify what you mean by a letter of intent? Did you send an informal acceptance by email stating that you are very interested in the program? Or do you send a formal acceptance letter stating that "Yes, I will be joining your university"?

I do not think that this should be a problem. Even if you get accepted for admission, and they send an official offer letter. You can always accept or decline it. If you choose to decline it, that is totally fine.

Let me add that accepting a scholarship and later declining it in favor of a scholarship from another university is the type of behavior that is frowned upon; however, it rarely results in any serious action taken by the institution granting the original offer.


text:
What to do when university has not yet reimbursed travel costs for a job interview?
A few months ago, I visited a university for a tenure-track interview in computer science. Before my visit, I received an interview policy sheet from HR stating all the usual things (economy flight fare, etc). After the interview, I was told by HR that I need to mail them my original receipts, which I did instantly upon my return home.
After a few weeks, I inquired regarding the reimbursement and was told that my receipts hadn't been received yet. However, the tracking service (I had used registered mail) did indicate that they had been delivered and, after a second inquiry, HR confirmed that they should have been received at their university but aren't to be found anywhere and reiterated that they need the original receipts to reimburse me.
This was 3 weeks ago and my subsequent enquiries have been met with silence. I did receive a job offer but, also having received another offer, accepted a position elsewhere and informed the university about my decision.

Is there anything I can/should do about this?

To be frank, the university is overseas and taking the probably very expensive legal route is not an option for me. That said, the interview expenses are in the range of 1.2k USD and thus non-negligible for me.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not about an issue specific to academia but about a legal issue.

Have you tried contacting anyone in the department about it?

Do HR actually need your boarding pass for the flight? Is there another way to prove you actually took the flight (perhaps the airline or airports can attest that you passed through, or you might have stamps in your passport)?. I would try phoning the HR department. It's a lot easier to ignore an email than it is to hang up the phone during a conversation...

Did you scan the receipts before sending them? That is, do u at least have some proof of the charges?

What is an "original receipt" for an electronically booked flight?  Just print another copy.

+1 to @Dirk's VTC. This question would be much better at Workplace.SE.

@Moriarty since he attended the interview, I think it is safe to assume he boarded the plane. Plus, nowadays you can just print the boarding pass at home, so it proofs nothing.

@Davidmh Indeed, but it seems that HR are saying "if you cannot prove that you took this flight, we won't reimburse you". An airport-printed boarding pass, baggage claim tag, or passport stamp would provide hard evidence. The fact that the OP actually made it to the interview in another country, along with either a copy of an electronic boarding pass or the booking confirmation, would of course be sufficient proof for any reasonable person. But this is the HR department, they often don't do logic.

@StephanKolassa I think in a traditional workplace this would all be handled by HR, while in academia, it may take the departmental administrator, search chair, or departmental chair to step in.

I can't believe you paid cash for all that? I know if someting happens like that in my company, we simply need to proof it with bank or credit card statements.

I strongly disagree with Dirk's comment.  Not getting reimbursed and what to do about it is an academia-specific issue.  It is almost certainly a bad idea to view it as a legal issue in all but the most extreme cases.

@Pete: How is not being reimbursed specific to academia?? It happens all the time out in the real world, too. This question is just about how to deal with people, and the answer is fairly obvious: phone them up, offer to send new copies of the receipts. Indicate dismay. Done

In general, don't attribute inaction to malice or fraud when it almost certainly is just due to laziness, disorganization, or incompetence. University bureaucracies, especially in some countries, can be unbelievably slow. Sadly, three weeks is often not a particularly long period to go unreimbursed. Be patient and persistent and this will almost certainly work out eventually.

Yes, reimbursement times in Germany typically measure in the range of 3-6 months.

@WolfgangBangerth The worst is when the state has to reimburse something (e.g. taxes). In Italy this takes on the order of years, and even tens of years aren't unheard of.

"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."  (Grey's law)

@Bakuriu: that's not the case everywhere. In Canada, where I live, both the government and the university where I work reimburse in about  10 days, and often less than that.

University HR offices, probably like many HR offices, can de difficult to deal with. I would email the HR person you have been in contact with, along with the department admin/search chair electronic copies of the receipts explaining what happened. I tend to scan the originals, prior to mailing them. If you have copies that is even better. There is no reason to try the legal route yet.

I would ALSO email the CS department chair or the chair of the faculty search committee.

This was 3 weeks ago and my subsequent enquiries have been met with silence.

This is unacceptable. Aren't you glad you won't be working there?
At this point, if it were me, I would no longer bother wasting my time with HR. To echo JeffE's comment, I would forward your complaints to the CS department's chair, say that you are very disappointed with the way this has been handled by HR, and politely but firmly request of the chair that the CS department handle these matters on your behalf.

University HR and reimbursement departments are often very slow, particularly at public universities.  I attribute that to the fact that their primary purpose is to avoid reimbursing people for invalid expenses.  In my experience, 3 weeks would be fast.
That said, it would not be rational to expect them to move faster (or, indeed, at all) without prodding on your part.  It would also not be rational to express disappointment or anger with people higher up the food chain - as they will, in practice, probably be stuck with those employees and the framework of rules and incentives leading to extreme tardiness.  Complaints will only make them less willing to help.  Requests for help will provide an opportunity to feel good about helping someone with a frustrating problem.
It would be best to call the search chair and ask for help.  After the call, I'd send a well-organized email outlining that:
(a) You sent the originals by registered mail.
(b) HR received them and presumably lost them.
(c) HR is now requesting the originals, which you already sent.
Ideally, that email should have the electronic copies attached.
Hopefully, that'll solve the issue.  If you don't get movement within 2 weeks, I'd escalate to:
(a) head of HR
(b) departmental admin
(c) department chair

HR offices at universities are often a total wreck with papers all over the place. One time I sent something to them and they insisted I never did. So I sent it again. Again they said they didn't have it. So I got mad at them and told them to look around for it. While I was still on the phone with them, they located it. I'm guessing it was under a pile of papers. My advice would be to tell them you already mailed the originals and show them the mail confirmation status. Then send them copies of the originals. If they are fair at all, they should honor that since they clearly lost the originals. If not, perhaps contact the president of the university and explain the situation. When things don't work out, go over the head of whoever is not cooperating.

You are by and large right, except that it rarely pays off to get angry because this is incompetence, not bad will. And for sure do not contact the university president over travel expense reimbursement. Faculty you spoke to, good idea, maybe department chair, but sending it up the latter to someone in charge of a tens of millions to a billions endowment would not be helpful, instead rather comical.

If they promised it to you, then the university certainly has a moral obligation to reimburse you. They may also have a legal obligation.
On the other hand, the way I thought about it when I was in a similar position before was that it was an opportunity cost (think: pay to play). Sure, I paid for it out of my own pocket, but I did it because if it worked out it would have landed me a nice job. Sometimes you have to invest a little money for the potential to make a whole lot more. That didn't make it less awkward that I didn't get reimbursed, but at least I could justify to myself that it wasn't a waste of money.

This doesn't seem to answer the question, especially the second paragraph.

That's not what an opportunity cost is.


text:
What is the timeline for academic job postings in the humanities in Australia?
What is the timeline for the humanities (specifically literature) job search in Australia? In the US, jobs begin to be posted in September. Any advice for a US candidate looking for a level B (lecturer, equivalent of US assistant professor) position?

I noticed that for Engineering positions, many Australian universities started posting faculty position about a month ago! I usually check academickeys, higheredjobs and similar sites.

I don't understand the close votes for "not about academia."  Hiring timelines are certainly about the profession.  (I would say the "any advice" part is too broad, though it seems not to be the primary question.)

Universities in Australia take a slightly different approach from those in the US. Rather than recruiting serious academic positions almost exclusively at the assistant professor/level B level and recruiting in cohorts, they tend to advertise positions when they get new funding or when someone leaves, rather than on any particular timeline, and may hire (or cut positions) at any level of seniority.
If you look at the websites of universities, most of them currently have some academic positions open, with deadlines ranging from tomorrow to the end of July. You just need to be on the lookout for suitable positions in your field.
That said, the academic semesters in Australia run from about February to June and from about August to November, so it is likely that there are more positions being advertised in May-June and November-December, looking for people who will be ready to teach at the start of the coming semester.
ETA: Here's one for you to look at: http://www.jobs-monash.jxt.net.au/academic-jobs/lecturer-senior-lecturer-in-literary-studies/642748


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What is a "normal" teaching load for a Lecturer in a UK pre-'92 University?
What is a normal teaching load for a Lecturer on a teaching and research contract (equal split) in a physical science field in a UK pre-'92 University? Is there such a thing as "normal", or is the variation huge? In this case, what is the range in "normal"?

Is “pre ‘92” to mean opened prior to ‘92 or just still using techniques from before ‘92 ?

@SolarMike the former. This is a common term in the UK, because universities created after 1992 have some different characteristics.

Flyto, are you speaking about someone on a teaching contract, or a research and teaching contract. Both are "Lecturers" at many pre 92s, and they will have much different teaching loads. Further, I can tell you what is normal for my subject on my university but it probably doesn''t relate to your university or subject.

@SolarMike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_university

@GrotesqueSI I know as I was at a polytechnic at the time that was a big fish in a small pond prior to the change... I wanted the OP to improve / edit the question to make it less parochial...

@GrotesqueSI thanks, wasn't aware that the lecturer title was used for teaching-only in the UK. In this case it's teaching and research; I've updated the question to include this. I appreciate that there's variation, but I'm hoping to get an idea of thr range. It's physical science, in case that makes a difference.

@SolarMike i'm not sure what you mean. I'm not insinuating anything about different university types (though in your initial comment it felt like you were). But since there's already likely to be a wide range in the answer, I wanted to make it as specific as possible in relevant respects.

@Flyto It is at my Russell Group uni at least, it was a change a few years back. I'm afraid I can't offer you insight into physical science, however, so I'll leave the responding to others.

Please check https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/135906/42952

@electrique thanks. That's leading me to flag my own question as a dupe ;-)

I can only answer for biological sciences:
Universities will have something along the lines of a "Workload Allocation Model" system for dividing up work. Under our departments accounting you get 3 hours prep time for every formal teaching session you give, plus 20 minutes for every exam script you mark. Tutorials don't count as "formal teaching sessions" and so get no prep time.
For for example a 10 credit module, with 18 lectures,  and 2x 3 hour practicals for 50 students would get you an allocation of 100.5 hours.
A full time contract is ~1600 hours, so a 50% teaching load would be 800 allocated hours. However:

50% teaching load would be unusual - the normal split is 40:40:20 teaching:research:admin
There is generally an (informal) recognition that prep takes longer for new hires than for old hands.

A common load for a lecturer would be very little in the first year, perhaps one module in the second, rising to around 30-40 contact hours a year once you pass probation (about 4 times the above, if you had the same mix of lectures, practicals and tutorials), and then rising again to a "full" load of around 120 contact hours as you become more senior/part of the furniture.
There is obviously a massive variation in this. If your research goes really well you might never rise above the ~40 hour category, while some of us can teach things the department desperately needs, but no one else can teach, and so have to do more.
For example, I was on a full load of 120 hours within three years of arriving (which was unusually large). My experience of this sort of load is that if you do the teaching well, then you are basically a full time teacher during term time. This makes securing the grant you'll need to pass probation difficult to say the least. While semester is in full swing I only really have time to meet each of my mentees once a week (note that supervising postgrad students counts as research not teaching) and run my lab meeting and journal club on top of my teaching and admin duty. I then concentrate on pushing my various research projects along properly during the vacations.

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


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Should I submit research/teaching statements if a job ad doesn't ask for them?
The vast majority of faculty applications I've made explicitly require the candidate to submit both a research statement and a teaching statement, and the institution usually describes the expected length and topics to be covered.  However, a few institutions don't ask for any such statements, even though the position is described as one that involves both research and teaching.  That is, neither the job posting itself, nor the application instructions accompanying the online form, make any mention whatsoever of a research or teaching statement, even though they may specifically enumerate other documents to be submitted (cover letter, CV, list of references, writing samples, etc.).  In such cases, the application form usually does allow one to submit one or more arbitrary attachments, so it would certainly be possible to submit research and teaching statements.  My question is, should I use this functionality to submit research and teaching statements?  Or does the conspicuous absence of a research/teaching statement requirement in the application instructions mean that the search committee doesn't want them at this stage in the application process?  (For all I know, they prefer to get a brief overview of the candidate's research and teaching qualifications from the cover letter and CV, and then ask for further details if the candidate makes it to an interview.)
I usually spend a lot of time customizing my statements (by mentioning how I'd fit or expand the institution's research profile, opportunities for collaboration with local colleagues, which existing courses I could teach, how I could further develop the curriculum, etc.) but I don't want to do all this if the statements are going to be ignored.  Conversely, if any statements I submit are going to be read, then I don't want to submit generic ones for fear that I'd come across as lazy, uninformed, or taking a shotgun approach to applications.
For further context, all of the positions I've had this dilemma with have been at UK universities (and relatively highly ranked ones at that).
Also, I understand that the best course of action for any given case may be to write to the contact person listed on the job ad, though I'm still interested in hearing from the Academia SE community whether these sorts of postings really don't want research/teaching statements, and what happens to any statements that get submitted anyway.

I don't have too much experience with the UK personally, but in general I presume that job ads ask for what they want.  The one exception, at least in the US in math, is that we normally we say we require "N letters of recommendation" where we mean N to be the minimum, but we may expect N+1 or N+2 letters.

I think it is farily common to not ask for specific teaching or research statements in a job application in the UK. However, it may well be that the panel expects the key points of what would be in teaching and research statements to be found in the cover letter. In a cover letter for a UK job application, I would look at the person specification and write in the cover letter a concise description of how I meet that criteria. So if the person spec said "Lead an internationally competetitve research program", I would explain in the cover letter how my research program would be internaltionally competitve. If the person specification said "Provide high quality teaching in X, Y and Z", I would write in the cover letter what I understood "high quality teaching" to look like, and provide, or point to evidence in my CV, that I could provide it.

I have applied for multiple lectureships/assistant professorships in the UK and have never submitted a research or teaching statement. It's not common in the UK, and while I don't think you'll be penalised if you do submit them, I'm not convinced they'll be read at all. My experience in the UK is that it's a fairly rigid process: committees might literally put your cover letter next to person specification, and assess how well you've addressed each essential/desirable criteria.
I much prefer the UK process: I got a permanent position here based on a CV, covering letter & 60-minute interview. No job talk, no extended campus visit, no sample syllabi, teaching/research/diversity statements or 437 other documents.

At least in math, job talks are common in the UK, but they are shorter and a bit different than the US.

When the committee comes to decide, however, the will be expected to use that job talk as evidence for or against specific criteria on the job spec.

You're right that the UK job ads I refer to in my OP (not to mention several others I've seen) do include a separate requirements document that enumerates various "Essential" and "Desirable" criteria. Your advice to address each of these criteria in the cover letter is very helpful.

As others have pointed out, statements on research and teaching are sometimes required and sometimes not.  Setting that aside, as a general rule, you can give additional material in any job application if you think it will help your application.  If you think your teaching and research statements are particularly strong, or exhibit some strength in your fit for the position, you should feel free to add them to your application.  Use your cover letter to explain anything unusual about your application, such as why you have chosen to include additional material.


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How much non-salary income do computer science professors make in the United States?
I have seen several questions pertaining to the salaries of professors in the United States. Is there any research/study/survey/... that looked at the non-salary income computer science academics (professors, research scientists, …)  make in the United States?
By non-salary income I mean any income that doesn't come from the salary. Examples of income source: teaching outside the university, cash from awards, running a side start-up/business, consulting, sitting on boards of directors, giving talks, book royalties, patent royalties. Ideally, the non-salary income should be broken down by the income source.

I can't imagine how this information could be useful, because individual variation is very high and non-salary income has little relationship with being a computer science professor.  Surely the most common kind of non-salary income is from investments unrelated to computer science.

Maybe try the workplace site.  Also, why do you want to know?

@AnonymousPhysicist I'm mostly interested in non-salary income related to the academic's expertise.

I've never heard of anyone doing such a survey, but if anyone has, it would probably be one of AAUP, ACM, IEEE.  I would look at them.

Should this be closed? Doesn't seem to be any immediate and reasonable way to find an answer to this.

@G-E surveys can be done.

@FranckDernoncourt yes indeed, but that's beyond a question and answer on here, isn't it?

@G-E maybe there already exists a survey on it

@G-E - Based on the upvotes, it seems that the community interpreted this as Frank stated... this is a request for someone to call out any existing research on this topic. This is not a request for someone to go and do any new research.

@AnonymousPhysicist: Would you argue the same for a law professor, or a professor in medicine? If not, then it may not be immediately obvious, at least to OP, whether ("on average") a computer scientist professor could also have sources of income other than his position at university, completely unrelated things like being invested in the stock market aside.

In mathematics the median is probably 0, and the mean below 100$ per year. One professor got his book royalties in form of a cheque over 26 pounds, and wondered whether caching a pound denominated cheque in Germany would cost less than 26 pounds in fees. Another professor got several thousand Euros for a highly successful textbook, but this amount has to be spread out over ~10 years. More substantial is non-monetary income. The average professor gets several hundreds in form of free meals, complimentary books and the like. This implies that meaningful research is intrinsically difficult.

@Jan-ChristophSchlage-Puchta: Thanks for the feedback. FYI If an author does not intend to make much revenue from a book, why not make it open-access?

The publisher adds value to a book, at least in the form of marketing and distribution, and ideally in counseling and proof reading. Even if your contract with the publisher allows putting your book on your website, this could feel like cheating the publisher. If you do not involve a major publisher, you have to rely on word of mouth marketing and are not present in any library.


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Dress code in Japanese academia
I've been invited to a workshop in Japan, and I haven't been to an academic event there before. In my field in the UK, it would be normal to attend an event in "smart casual" wear, eg a polo top or open necked shirt. Should I expect this convention to be different in Japan?

I think this should be on topic. Apologies if not!

Good question - I think this falls under the etiquette umbrella, which I believe is on-topic.

Yes, you should expect that it might be different. I think the real questions you are asking are "how will it probably be different" and, perhaps, "what should I do to find out."

Not a good answer because it's out of date... but, when I visited c. 1984, everyone wore suits-and-ties all the time, and I had brought a few different suits and ties to do the same. On the subway in Tokyo, everyone wore suits-and-ties. Maybe not very good suits, nor ties, but, still, it was the  uniform. Sorta like the U.S. in the 1950s or so. Maybe, similarly, things have changed, but I suspect less so than here...

Consider asking this on the Japan sub-reddit site (https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/). Many users on there are foreigners living in Japan, who may be able to give you a better idea.

@SimonW "smart casual" is ok, I ve been last year, Kyoto university, some workshop about atmospheric pollution.

@SimonW - is that in the Earth Sciences? You should go with dirty boots and a one week old beard.

@Michael not all earth sciences are geology :-P

If this is a recurring event, maybe you can find some pictures of previous years online for orientation.

@Dubu that's a good idea! But sadly not.

In lab, it's not suits and ties. I see a lot of sweaters, but the buildings don't have central heating. More formal than I saw in the US for sure, but not as bad as I was afraid. The women wear a lot of skirts and everyone tends to use sandals in the lab, which both goes against what I was trained to do, pants and real shoes to protect myself from spills. They don't say anything about my American clothing.

From going to Japan for math, engineering, and Earth sciences conferences a number of times, expect that every Japanese participant is wearing a dark suit and a more or less colorless tie. (There are very few women in science in Japan, so I don't have a lot of experience in this regard.) This includes student workers -- also in suits. You -- and all of the other foreigners who didn't get this memo :-) -- will stick out of the crowd if you wear anything that has color, or just a light blazer. Depending on how many other foreigners are there, you will be ok, though, with an open neck button down shirt, dark pants, and a blazer.
You will find that you can really stick out of the crowd on the streets if you wear an outfit that is colorful. This may just be a pair of light  bluejeans and a dark jacket (nobody seems to be wearing light blue pants). You will really really stick out of the crowd if you walk from the train station to the hotel after a long flight with an orange or blue wind jacket and a reddish suitcase. I speak from experience :-)
I cannot hide there anyway, being tall and with medium brown hair. But whenever I go out there, I now usually wear gray or black slacks (or black jeans), and a black jacket. I can't get myself to wear a white shirt and dark tie, so I might have an off white or light blue button down.
Whatever you do, though, you will always be treated nicely. It's just a question of how "different" you want to be.

Strange. I was only at one conference in Japan ever, but everybody was just in the same clothing you'd expect. The only exception was one senior academic who was in dress trousers with a 'casual' t-shirt, similar to the visiting senior academics from the US. The Japanese PhD students visiting were all in jeans and such. This is in astrophysics, so maybe mileage varies by field or maybe I simply don't have enough data!

The dress code in western culture is very field-dependent, so, even without any experience, I would expect the same to hold in Japan, too.

Would sticking out (e.g. by wearing bright clothing) be an undesirable thing? It may be desirable to do so in "Western" academia, as if done appropriately it's a good way to get people to remember you. However I can imagine that it might be a cultural faux pas to do so in Japan, even as a visiting academic...

@Moriarty -- whether sticking out is desirable or not may just be a question of your own comfort level. I don't feel like I've been looked down on when not wearing a tie (and won't do it when just being in the audience). But if given the choice, I'm also not going to select the bright orange wind jacket over the black one again when going to Japan :-)

Sorry, I'm giving you a -1.  In all the math conferences (international and less so) I've been to in Japan, wearing a suit would be strange.  Note: I come from pure math--maybe applied math is different?

Quite possibly so. The mathy conferences I go to typically have a fair share of mathematically oriented engineering folks. It's not strictly disciplinary.

Same as Kimball, -1 from me too.

I did my PhD in Japan, in Sociology, and my experience at Japanese national conferences and workshops was just like the other answers described: black suits and white shirts everywhere. The only ones who deviated from the norm were senior scholars.
However, after moving out of Japan, I was back for an international conference there and was surprised to see the same scholars who wore the dark suit uniform for national events wearing much more casual attire. My point is that, besides variations by field, Japanese scholars are aware that things are more casual in the West and are willing to accommodate these differences.

Something that hasn't really been highlighted is that Japanese will be very accommodating regarding different outfits (worn by foreigners). You might feel out-of-place, but looking different (you're not going to wear ripped low-hanging jeans, right?) from the standard isn't necessarily perceived as being under-dressed. Social rules usually apply only in Japan and only for Japanese, or rather for inter-Japanese relationships.
I don't know how "international" this conference will be. Often researchers with a lot of international experience (that is, papers with foreign collaborators, frequent visits to international conferences outside of Japan, etc.) will dress more like foreigners, i.e. a more leisurely outfit. They might wear a suit, though, if their head of school is going to attend.
Conferences in fields (or sub-fields) that address a national crowd will likely follow the mentioned Japanese standard (black suit, white shirt) very closely, but maybe only because it is a social event in Japan, for Japanese and should thus follow the Japanese norm.
Disclaimer: my field is Pure Mathematics.

I was going to mention the exact same thing. You will stick out, but it will not be held against you. If anything, you'll be easier to find. I would simply avoid anything that would make you stick out in the west as well.

I live in Japan and work in academia there, and I always wear the same respectable casual attire that I would wear to work in the UK, as do all of my foreign colleagues and most of my Japanese ones. Some Japanese people dress more smartly, but nobody seems to mind the mix. It's been pretty much the same at the international conferences I've been to in Japan as well. My field is "pure science" if that makes a difference.

I was at a major (for my field) academic conference in Japan last summer and I can't say I noticed the people at the conference wearing anything different to what they wear at the conferences I've been to in Europe and North America. If the majority of participants at the event you're going to are not Japanese, I would imagine you'd find exactly the same thing.

This depends on which field you're in.  According to my own experience, typically, in engineering workshops people tend to dress semiformally, where as in pure science people usually dress casually.  The idea is, I suppose, is that in the former you need to look like a businessperson.  You might be able to extrapolate this to your own situation.  Good luck!