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What to do when online instructor not giving meaningful feedback on research project?
I am enrolled in an on-line graduate course (US public university). I do not live near the campus, so I cannot attend office hours (which aren't even offered).
For 3 months, I've been working on a research paper for the course. At regular deadlines, I've submitted my progress electronically, however, the instructor's feedback was sparse in each case:

No feedback on whether my chosen topic was okay.
No replies to my public posts/E-mails about some concerns I had in approaching the topic.
Only minimal markings, e.g. pointed out a few grammar/MLA mistakes, no comments focused on my ideas, organization, etc.

I do not even know if the instructor read my work. The project is worth a significant portion of the course grade, but the instructor has given such little input and I have no idea if the paper is good or terrible. What can I do?

I see three likely paths for you to take, depending on the quality of the program that you are enrolled in.

If you haven't already done so, explicitly ask the professor for more concrete feedback on your work.  You might simply be having a communications problem, where the professor assumes "no news is good news."
If the professor doesn't not respond constructively, escalate to somebody higher up, like a dean.  Approach delicately, as a student concerned and asking for help, rather than making demands.
If you don't get a satisfactory response from the dean, then it may be that the online program you are enrolled in is crap, and you should not bother investing your time and money in it.  Some online programs are quite serious and good, while others are essentially just for-profit scams, and yours might well be one of them.

First of all, I must say that I find it possible that your instructor simply doesn't care enough. The reason for that (or the other way around) might be that the online course isn't serious enough and that the instructor will just give you some passing grade if you hand in virtually anything. While this might not be true for US universities, in Europe online courses and degrees are considered pretty unprofessional, at least in my experience.
Now to your question what you can do in your situation. Based on the information you provided, I would try to publish your paper somewhere (if not in a journal, then on a conference). The peer-review will give you most certainly feedback on your paper. Furthermore, you attend a graduate course in pursuit of a graduate degree, so publishing will become a requirement for your in the near future. Finally, the peer-review will indicate quality to your instructor and give you some certainty that your work will be higher graded.

I can't regard the second paragraph as useful advice.  Papers written as coursework are generally not of publishable quality.  "Research paper" in this context often refers to a work that collects and summarizes results from published sources without adding new results of its own.  That's fine as a learning experience for a class, but it's not something you could publish.  If you submit it to a journal, I wouldn't be surprised if the peer-review "feedback" was a quick rejection with a vague explanation like "no original results" or "not appropriate for this journal".

That doesn't mean the paper is not good as coursework, just that evaluating it as such is not the purpose of academic peer review; submitting it for this purpose would likely just waste everyone's time.  Moreover, who says the OP will soon have publishing as a requirement?  Many people study for, e.g., master's degrees with no intention of proceeding further, and they would not need to publish.  Indeed, online courses are more likely to be part of a master's program than a doctorate.

@NateEldredge I agree with your point of view, the question is vaguely stated. I indeed assumed that the OP is pursuing a PhD. However, at least at my university, many doctorate graduate courses implicitly require that the results are published somewhere (often any international IEEE conference is sufficient). So when talking about a research paper in context of graduate courses, I somewhat naturally assume just that, a potentially publishable paper.

The paper is as Nate describes, summarizing many other works. My only contribution is the manner in which I bring all of the various ideas together...I doubt it is publishable.

I also find it possible that the instructor does not care, but see that as no guarantee of a passing grade.


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Is it ethical for a student to edit the Wikipedia page of his advisor?
I have seen quite a few students editing the Wikipedia page of their advisors. I wonder what the view of the academic community are on this. There might be some conflict of interest since promoting one's advisor can be seen as indirectly promoting oneself, but at the same time it can be argued that a student (especially graduate student) may have a decent amount of knowledge about his advisor.

Wikipedia pages are generally frowned upon by academics as far as citations are concerned.  As long as the info posted is not slanderous, I don't see why this would even be an issue at all...

Just to check, do you accept for the purposes of the question that it is unethical to intentionally disregard Wikipedia's own guidelines? Or are you expecting a potential response along the lines of a reasoned ethical case why Wikipedia's guidelines are evil, bad and wrong?

@SteveJessop I wasn't aware that Wikipedia had a policy for this: I guess intentionally disregarding Wikipedia's own guidelines tends to be more unethical that ethical. But up to the answerer to decide whether his perspective is worth sharing.

I would say that this is not a wikipedia best practice but is not inherently unethical in general terms: you could be biased in favor of (or against!) your thesis advisor, but you are not necessarily incapable of putting up appropriate content.  In practice, if I thought I had some important, appropriate piece of information about my thesis advisor, I would not reject out of hand the idea of adding it to the page.

Answers I've seen seem to portray advisees as enthusiastic ambassadors for their advisor. Without neutralizing COI concerns, I might comment that it's usually an advisor's advisees that first give some of the strongest critiques. I don't see any reason to dismiss that COI editing is frowned upon, but I'd expect editing by advisees not to be a rubber stamp.

It is not ethical, and is, per Wikipedia guidelines, a conflict of interest.

If you have a personal connection to a topic or person, you are advised to refrain from editing those articles directly, from adding related advertising links, links to personal websites and similar, and to provide full disclosure of the connection if you comment about the article on talk pages or in other discussions.

There is an exception. For example, let's say Dr. Potato is listed as a life-long sprout, when he is actually a tuber.

An exception to editing an article about yourself or someone you know is made if the article contains defamation or a serious error that needs to be corrected quickly. If you do make such an edit, follow it up with an email to WP:OTRS, Wikipedia's volunteer response team, or ask for help on WP:BLPN, our noticeboard for articles about living persons.

Other examples of non-controversial edits would be like fixing spelling and grammar errors, or linking to an article on Wikipedia that may be missed.
It is also encouraged that, instead of providing edits and information, you provide:

Those with a potential conflict of interest are encouraged to upload good-quality digital media files that are appropriately licensed for Wikipedia and that improve our coverage of a subject.

Images and media that are non-controversial can then be used by others to be cited, as they wouldn't express an opinion.
Examples of non-controversial stuff would be like a picture of the person, preferably doing nothing controversial.

It's worth reading the linked page - there are rather more non-controversial edits than can be explained here (in particular fixing spelling/grammar can have a major effect on the impression a page gives without changing the contents).

Given what you cite here and what I read on WP, I disagree with your conclusion that it is unethical. It is advised against, but it is neither forbidden nor entails any ethical conflict per se. Also, I would interpret this section differently, because reading the whole paragraph gives quite adifferent picture ("You should not create or edit articles about yourself, your family, or friends."). As an adviser is neither of these, I am not even sure this applies here.

Kind of a tangent, but does this also mean you shouldn't write articles about things you e.g. invented yourself?

@Mehrdad If it's famous, other people will create a page for it. I doubt the Oculus Rift page, for example, was originally authored by a developer of the Rift itself.

I downvoted the answer because I think jakebeal and mako's answers are a bit more accurate: it is not unethical, it is difficult to do it right, not to be self- or promotional, to be neutral. If you have external and authoritative references and sources you can provide for you claims, you are welcome to do that. In Wikipedia (and elsewhere) it is unethical to be unethical.

According to Wikipedia's policies, a living person or their representatives (which would include a student, because the student could reasonably be seen in this way by others), are permitted but discouraged from editing that person's article.  Obvious gaps or errors can be addressed, but since it is difficult to maintain a neutral point of view, the suggested procedure is for the subject of an article to put material into its talk page instead, where others can decide on notability.  I think that this would be the appropriate route for a student as well.

There is a lot of discussion and ambiguous or conflicting advice in Wikipedia about so called conflict of interest (COI) editing. COI editing is any editing by article subjects, or those closely associated with them. The situation you describe sounds like it will usually qualify.
Fundamentally, the ambiguity stems from the fact that COI editing is not necessarily a problem itself but that it very frequently leads to problematic behavior and contributions. The most frequent problems with COI editing are with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy (NPOV). Violations of this would be a breathless or non-encyclopedic tone, inclusion of details that are trivial or unencyclopedic, or in the most problematic case, systematic removal of material that is critical of the subject.
Because these problems are hard to avoid for people without distance to the subject, and because COI editing can call into question the neutrality of the encyclopedia in general, COI editing is not forbidden but is generally discouraged — especially from new editors who are not familiar with Wikipedia's policies and experienced.
There are other problems as well. For example, conflicted editors might create articles for subjects that don't satisfy Wikipedia's notability policy (or Wikipedia's notability policy for academics) because these determinations are inherently subjective and editors close to the subjects are not neutral arbiters.
It's a tricky balance because, on the other hand, Wikipedia does not want to prohibit editing by everybody with the most expertise about the subject. That said, my advice is that if someone is new to Wikipedia editing, they should avoid COI editing and/or try to focus on the types of uncontroversial edits explicitly allowed by the COI policy like typo fixes, references, categorization, etc. If a connected contributor wants to make a potentially controversial improvement, they should always raise it on the talk page of the article first and ask other non-conflicted editors to make the change. Creating new articles about a subject to which you have a connection is also discouraged.
Finally, revealing the presence of a COI is recommended but not required. Moreover, it is against Wikipedia policy to reveal the identity of an editor against their wishes even if it reveals a conflict of interest. Doing so is a violation of Wikipedia's harassment policy.

Besides the obvious issues of conflict of interest, Wikipedia also considers original research improper as it leaves no external source to cite.  If you include a fact about something in a Wikipedia article based on your personal experience, there's no way for other editors to verify it.
So including information about a professor based purely on knowing that professor yourself is a violation of the No Original Research policy.  This isn't an inherent problem as students can certainly be careful to cite sources for the information they add but it is important to keep in mind when writing about a subject you are closely familiar with.

The other answers to date seem to be focussed on what Wikipedia says about the ethics of this action. But you do not owe anything to the biased, rotten edifice that is Wikipedia (in fact, I sometimes add a few bits of deliberately false information to Wikipedia articles, so that I can quickly spot when undergraduates have relied on Wikipedia instead of checking the literature!), so my answer will focus on the ethical issues of publishing information about a colleague/superior on the world wide web.
Privacy
First, it is really important that you do not add confidential information about the subject, unless you are entitled to do so or have permission to make it public -- in particular, do not disclose anything about:

his/her family (some people do splash photographs of their children all over the place, but others prefer to keep even the existence of any children secret -- whatever your views on this, it is not your place to decide on someone else's behalf which course of action is right for him/her);
a "protected characteristic" (exact definition varies by jurisdiction, but this would usually encompass religion, sexuality, marital status, race, disabilities, medical history), unless the information is already published with the consent of the subject on a www page accessible to anyone (again, whilst some people will talk very openly and publicly about "protected characteristics", others do not want anybody to know about them, often for very good reasons -- for example, if you are looking for a job or applying for a big grant, you might not want anybody knowing that you have just recovered from a serious illness or are about to get married).

Accessibility vs discoverability
Secondly, keep in mind the difference between accessibility and discoverability. For example, it may be possible to access someone's address or date of birth on the internet (in the UK, if someone has ever been a company director, such data are likely to be available via the Companies House online register), that does not make it a good idea to publish such data on a highly discoverable website such as Wikipedia.
Not distracting unduly from the public persona the subject wishes to cultivate
Thirdly, you should probably refrain from writing anything that is unrepresentative of the subject's professional life, or likely to cause the subject significant embarrassment/distress, unless there is a strong public interest. You are under no obligation to care how Wikipedia feels about anything, but you should consider the feelings of the subject, since a Wikipedia biography is likely to have a significant bearing on his/her reputation. If a subject is notable for one thing (e.g.: a controversial article; being the victim of a notable crime; campaigning on a social/political issue), you should ensure that any coverage on a highly discoverable site also gives a balanced overview of his/her professional profile overall. A Wikipedia article is likely to be very near the top of a search engine's results, and may well end up higher than an official university profile page. From the subject's perspective, writing an article about the big notable thing will make the professional persona he/she wants to convey less discoverable, and may result in less attention going to the great research/teaching he/she is doing.

And your adding false statements to wikipedia is, of course, unethical. Wikipedia is quite reliable on many topics and would be better but for actions like yours. Go away.

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What motivates researchers in industry to publish their results?
Are there any references which discuss why researchers in industry publish their findings? For example, they might be motivated/required to publish as condition of some grants, to promote some product/firm, or to contribute to public knowledge.
I am mostly interested in the field of computer science > machine learning / NLP / data mining, in English-speaking venues and in the USA.
It would be ideal if there were any studies that looked at those reasons directly, but I am also interested in answers supported by experience. I am especially interested in trying to rank those reasons (e.g. 30% of papers were published due to grant conditions, 50% for lab/researcher's credibility, 40% for the firm's visibility, etc.) or at least have a sense of what the main motivations are, and which potential motivations play only a minor role in the publication intent.

Would you be interested in an explanation from somebody in industry, rather than only a citation?

@jakebeal Research/study/survey is ideal, but I am also interested in personal experiences. The only issue is that it will earn the question to "primarily opinion-based" close votes and more downvotes then, based on my previous questions on this website...

That would be great if downvoters leave comments....

Not a citation, but I would look at a few papers, and check acknowledgements to see if they had specific grants.  Then I would focus on the big players as it may be easy to find, why does microsoft publish research?

You posted many questions where you had to add "Reference on..." to something very broad or opinion based or both. This is finally one where it wouldn't have been necessary.

Given that it seems you didn't strictly want this to be a [tag:reference-request] question, I suggest you remove the tag and edit the question. Otherwise it looks to casual readers like Jake didn't answer the question.

@ff524 Sure, I edited the question. But since I am still interested in references: should I still remove the tag? Does the tag only applies iff answers must contain references?

I think remove the tag. This tag is really for questions where you're looking for a reference, not for questions where you're looking for an answer (that can be supported by a reference)

Simple Answer: Product Marketing.

First of all, it's important to understand that the boundary between "industry" and "academia" is a lot blurrier than may be obvious.  It is certainly this way in the United States, and what I hear from colleagues in Europe leads me to believe it is similar over there as well (though the specific mechanisms may differ from country to country). As somebody who straddles that boundary myself, I see a lot of different people in industry publishing for a lot of different reasons.  At the end of the day, however, it mostly all boils down to the same core reason as in academia: credibility.
Despite all of its flaws, scientific peer review is still the best established means that our society has come up with for judging the credibility of factual claims (side note: legal and political systems are primarily concerned with justice, rather than facts, which has subtle but significant differences).  When a scientist working in industry wants to establish the credibility of their work, peer review is an excellent choice for doing so. The reasons for wanting to do this in industry are very similar to those in academia:

Scientific credibility from publications improves a researcher's ability to secure funding.  This is true both for external funding (e.g., from government agencies), and in competition over priorities for the allocation of internal funding.
Establishing credibility increases the likelihood that others outside of an organization will choose adopt the ideas or products that you are advocating.  For example, published scientific studies are critical to establishing claims of safety and efficacy in the process of drug development.
Publications also establish a researcher (and their organization as a whole) as a contributing member of the community: as they are sharing information and working openly, so will others be more likely to share information with them and work together in return.
No company exists in a vacuum: participating in the scientific discourse can help resolve the problems that a company is facing in its own work.  This is particularly true regarding standards and instrumentation, but extends more broadly.  No matter what organization you work for, most of the smartest people work somewhere else, and demonstrating the scientific value of your problems by means of publication can attract the interest of others to work on those problems for their own reasons.
Scientific credibility also can improve one's standing in an organization, leading to promotions in your personal position.  Some companies even provide a tenure-like status (and I believe in some European countries you can actually get tenure in a company).
Personal pride plays an important role too: industrial researchers are no more immune to ego and vanity than academics.  If you've got a point to make about an idea (or lots of ideas), the scientific literature is one good place to advocate for your view and obtain satisfaction when others respond to it.

Finally, industry/academia collaboration is very common, and even if the industrial partner might not have published on their own, the academic side of the collaboration will want to publish, and the industrial partner will rightfully be included in the author list.
As these apply in general, so to do they apply to machine learning, natural language processing, and data-mining.  Certainly this is a good description of why the researchers in these areas in the company I work at publish quite strongly, and fits what I see from others in the area as well.

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Does any university require students to release their source code in order to graduate?
I wonder whether there is any university that requires students to release their source code (or at least part of it) in order to obtain their PhD.

In thesis defenses I've gone to that involved coding, some important parts of the code were found in the thesis (and briefly mentioned in the defense). It lets others somewhat replicate and understand your methodology.

Student work may or may not be partially owned by the school. Ask your own institution for their policies.

@keshlam I am not asking about my institution.

I would think pseudocode would be sufficient (and necessary). Pseudocode can be "proved" (i.e., like a math theorem) and thus can be implemented in multiple languages. That a university would require the specific coding doesn't really make sense to me.

@daOnlyBG Providing (decent) source code makes it easier to reproduce experiments, help understand results (pseudocode often omits details, implementation bugs, ...), and so on. But let's not start a debate here :) The point of the question is to see whether such requirement exists somewhere, and how it is implemented.

@FranckDernoncourt That's fair, though I could think of a few fields where the issues you bring up are more relevant than in others. I would resort to Brian Borcher's answer anyway- it brings up a lot of really insightful points.

I think a more precise definition of "their source code" would be useful. Surely you don't mean any source code the student has ever written. Then what?

@fkraiem The source code written by the students that was used to obtain the results presented in the PhD thesis.

Note: My answer pertains to schools in the US.

Does any university require students to release their source code in order to graduate?

It depends on what you mean by "university." That is, I think there are fundamentally two different interpretations of your question. Since OP has not yet provided clarification, here goes ...
Interpretation #1
If what you want to know is:

Are there dissertation committees which require students to release their source code in order to obtain approval of their dissertation?

The answer to this variant of the question is yes, this is fairly common in the engineering departments I am familiar with. Typically what is done if source code is required by the dissertation committee is that it is included in the dissertation appendix. Other alternatives include placing the source code online and citing it in the dissertation (e.g., placing the code on GitHub).
Interpretation #2
If, on the other hand, what you want to know is:

Are there universities which adopt a university-wide requirement for students to release their source code in order to obtain approval of their dissertation?

The answer to this variant is (most likely) no.

There's a much broader issue here having to do with copyright and patent rights on student thesis work.  Laws vary from country to country.  Within a single country, different universities may have different policies and even within a university a particular project might be funded by an external contract or grant that has further restrictions.  Thus there's no completely general answer.
To the extent that students make use of university facilities and are paid by the university, and to the extent that the student's work is actually developed jointly by the student and the academic advisor, the university has some basis for claiming ownership of this "intellectual property."
Intellectual property is an all-encompassing term for patents, copyrights, and even trademarks, but the law governing each of these is very different, and using this term can easily lead to confusion.  Administrators who use the term tend to be focused on giving the university as much control over intellectual property as possible and often use the phrase in ways that imply this control even when its not warranted.  Thus it's a good idea to be more specific in talking about the different kinds of intellectual property.
Many universities have policies and explicit agreements about intellectual property that students are required to sign before they can begin work on research projects.   Furthermore, if the student is funded by a research grant or contract they may have to agree to additional conditions.  For grant funded research its not at all unusual for the grant to promise that all software developed will be open source, while for industry funded research it's not at all uncommon to have a requirement that copyright will be held by the funding organization (and the software will be kept proprietary.)
Some examples of policies on intellectual property that effect graduate students:
MIT:  http://web.mit.edu/policies/13/13.1.html
University of Wisconsin-Madison: https://research.wisc.edu/projectagreementsip/intellectualprop/
It's also possible that the academic advisor will set requirements for publication of the software as a condition for agreeing to advise the student on a dissertation or thesis.  For example, my practice is that at the start of an MS thesis or PhD Dissertation, I require the student to agree that software they develop in the project will be made available on an open source basis.  If the student is unwilling to agree to this, then I may be unwilling to supervise the thesis.  It's important that there be agreement on this before the project starts.
Even in the simplest case where the student's dissertation is simply a written document describing the research there can be intellectual property issues.  Dissertations are traditionally "published" by the university in the sense that bound copies are placed in the library and made available to anyone who wants to borrow them.  Many universities now publish dissertations electronically through their own repositories or through services like Proquest.  In order to publish a dissertation in this way, the university has to require the student to give copyright permission (but not necessarily transfer the ownership of the copyright to the university.)  The most common policy in this area is that the student owns the copyright to the dissertation but must license it to the university for publication and that this is a condition for receiving the degree.
To answer the OP's specific question, I'm not aware of any university that has a general policy that all software developed as part of a PhD dissertation or MS thesis must be "released" (as open source software)  However, many universities have policies that say that the university owns the intellectual property and they could demand that the student give the software to the university and then release the software as open source software if they wanted to.  This could also be required under the conditions of a research contract or grant, and it could simply be a requirement of the thesis advisor.

If the FBI or NASA provided funding for the r&d of a tech, the source code would likely be open source.

@Fuhrmanator, no, I don't think that's right.  (To put it another way: Do you have a citation for that? Government grants don't work the way that a lot of people think they work.

@Fuhrmanator: For example, there is a rule that work produced by federal employees as part of their job must be public domain.  But this does not apply to people who are merely funded by federal grants.

@D.W. From http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/ansi_standard.cfm 2007-2008 and 2008-2007 conversion routine. This was developed by West Virginia University under an FBI contract. It is at http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/nigos.cfm (a project which funded a master's student). The contract specified the source had to be open. Perhaps this isn't a general rule for all university-funded projects.

@D.W. My first comment isn't accurate. I meant to say funding through universities.


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Receiving comments on one's article
After publishing an article, assuming that the publisher doesn't prevent you from sharing an article online in a public place, the authors might want to receive additional feedback.
Are there good online methods for attracting and receiving comments on one's article, in addition to collaborators, reviewers, and emails? If possible the comments should be public so that other people could reply to comments.

(originally posted on http://openscience.stackexchange.com/q/123/3)

I'm aware of three general approaches that seem to be currently effective for seeding such discussion.  Listed in order from most direct to least direct:

Comments hosted by the journal itself: a number of journals that are embracing open science principles are embracing commentary directly.  With this, you don't need to take your article anywhere else for people to comment on it: they can do so right there at the article.  Examples of this approach include PLOS ONE and the Frontiers series.
Some sites, most notably PubPeer, are explicitly intended to support discussion of articles.
If you've got a blog or other social media site, you can also host discussion there.  For some people, this can be very effective, but you generally must already have a significant audience in order for this to be an effective strategy.

In all case, however, it still tends to be difficult to get meaningful discussion going of most articles, since academics don't seem very interested in comments sections unless there's a fight going on...

So on PLoS ONE anyone can comment on any article?  That is interesting.  But, the internet being what it is, it is so easy to imagine going wrong …

In addition to @jakebeal's points, I think the more “traditional” ways should be mentioned:

E-mail.  Usually, an author can be marked as “corresponding author” and associated with an e-mail address. Sure, it is not public, but I suspect it is one of the more common ways that comments and discussions actually happen.
Talks.  When you present your work at a conference, discussions may ensue, and this is semi-public.
Formally published comments.  Many journals accept Comments on existing articles as a separate category of paper. Most often, this will be to point out some (real/perceived/alleged) problem in the original paper, and there will be replies and rebuttals, which can continue to several levels of commentary.

You should see if the publisher allows other publications of your work. For example you could publish the same article to a reputable and high traffic blog within the industry. Most blogs allow comments and if it's an industry specific blog then you should only get people within that industry commenting.
If you don't want to republish the same article then you could ask the blog itself to comment on your article and link it to the original publication. This could get comments via email from your publication or comments about the article on the blog that talks about it.


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Can I use the work in my journal/conference publications as chapters in my dissertation?
At my institution, I am required to publish four papers in addition to my PhD thesis.  Of course my planned papers are related to my dissertation project, but I'm not sure if it could be considered academic dishonesty / plagiarism to use these works to form part of my dissertation.  I'm not thinking about copying them word for word, but I was hoping that I can include summarized versions of those works as chapters in my dissertation.  Is this a common practice or would this be considered self-plagiarism?  Should my dissertation work be completely separate from those other publications?

See related What is a “Sandwich thesis”?.

Supplementing the answer from abatkai:
The rules likely vary by field also. In chemistry, converting previously published papers into a Sandwich Thesis is generally accepted and commonplace. My thesis contained a chapter that was prefaced "Portions of this chapter were previously published as (citation), and have been reproduced with permission. Copyright is held by (publisher of the journal)." This was followed by further copyright information and the statement required by the publisher. My institution also required that I submit paperwork in support of my use of published and copyrighted material.
In addition to consulting your adviser and your institution, you should consult the journals in which you publish. Many have policies in place for this. For example, from the American Chemical Society's copyright faq:

The current ACS Journal Publishing Agreement covers several permitted uses by authors... Permitted uses of all versions include:

Use in theses and collections of your own work

If there is a journal that doesn't permit papers to be included in authors' theses, I'll be shocked.

If there is a journal that doesn't permit papers to be included in a thesis, I wouldn't publish in it.

Depends probably on the rules at your institution. At many places actually this is the usual custom. Ask your adviser.
If you write out the correct references so that everybody who reads knows that this part can be found in that paper, then it is never plagiarism. See also the "Sandwich thesis" question mentioned in the comment by Andy W.


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Should I upload a blinded manuscript for the final minor revision in editorialmanager?
I have submitted a paper to a journal from which it got a major revision before. Now, the revised version got a final minor revision suggestion before acceptance.
In the uploading section of the editorial manager, it still asks me to upload a blinded manuscript as a requirement. However, considering that this is the final revision, should I also upload the non-blinded version of the paper which includes the authors' names?

I suggest to do what the journal says it requires, they should know this better than anybody else. After acceptance, there will be a process involving typesetting and proof-reading. You might then be asked to provide a version including the author names, or the journal might add the author names during typesetting from information given during the submission process.

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Acknowledging a coauthor for a particular result
I am writing a (math) paper that uses a result from an older paper that I coauthored with X. I proved some of the other things in the paper, but this particular result was proved entirely by X after I sent them an email asking about it, which ultimately led to the collaboration with X.
In my new paper I would like to somehow show my appreciation for X's contribution, without saying "They did it, not me" (I suppose this would be taboo). What would be a good way of expressing this in the Acknowledgements section?

Presumably you already cite your coauthored paper with X? Is there a reason to do more than that?

Actually, it is simpler than that. You can, as I once did in an AMS journal, mark a proof or the statement of the theorem as "Proof by X".
Normally the Ack section is for acknowledging those who aren't authors.  So, if you mean that X isn't a coauthor on this paper you can add, there, your thanks for past collaborations that influenced this one especially for developing the proof of Theorem A.

This other person already receives acknowledgement for their work through the fact that you will cite the joint paper you did together where the proof is located.  If you would like to do more than that (which sounds quite reasonable to me) then you can specifically note in your new paper that X proved the theorem on their own.  There is nothing taboo about this at all, since it is a standard aspect of research that co-authors may contribute different aspects of a paper.
As far as how to set this out in your new paper, you don't need to agonise over this.  Just make it a short parenthetic remark when you discuss the relevant theorem --- here is an example:

Here we will make use of Theorem 4 in Dmath and X (2015) (actually proved entirely by X).  This theorem shows that...


text:
Should I mention that I can't afford living costs in a scholarship application?
I am applying for a master's degree in supply chain management in Sweden and I can't afford the cost of living in Sweden.  I am filling out an online master's scholarship application form and I was asked to answer how I intend to fund my living cost. Should I mention my lack of resources in the application form?

If you are asked about it, isn’t it then obvious you should answer? Though why would you even want to apply if you know you cannot even afford living there? Are you implying that you suspect something like getting extra funding to cover living costs, or are you implying that you want to trick them into accepting you despite you not being able to make it?

This is likely an immigration requirement; you won't be allowed to travel to the country if you can't afford to live there. If you lie, you may either end up on a permanent "no entry" list or find yourself in Sweden and unable to afford living.

Is the scholarship enough to cover your expenses?


text:
Asked to combine work with competitors, but competitors are under ethical investigation
Got a manuscript accepted and then pulled because of a similar manuscript submitted by another group to the same journal. Per the request of the editor, two groups combined the manuscripts. Now the manuscript was held up for unknown reasons.
I re-read the other group's manuscript and found a number of serious flaws. I don't think any reviewer would pass those up. Now I really regret combining the manuscripts with the other group, but it was the editor's request.
In addition, there were some ethical issues with the other group (gift authorship), which may have been reported to the journal by our research integrity officer.
Should I just ask the editor if they will reconsider publishing our data alone with addition of the new data that the journal wanted without having to take the whole mess with us? I am really frustrated now.

I'll let others answer this because I may be wrong. I have never heard of an editor suggesting two groups to combine their manuscripts before and I can see a lot of potential issues with this. Is this a reputable journal? If you don't know the other research group I think you are better off withdrawing your paper and submitting it somewhere else. This sounds too sketchy to be good in my opinion.

Yes this is a journal with IF > 30, one of the best. I didn't really know the other group until one of our co-authors "betrayed" us and took a small part of our data to offer to the other group. The person has his name on both manuscripts, which the editor considered unprofessional. However the editor wanted us to "rise above" the situation to combine the manuscripts, since the other group has the missing data that the editor wanted. It is a bizarre situation that I have never encountered.

@Hadi: here is an example of a paper in a top mathematical journal that combines the manuscripts of four groups ( as explained by the editor's note on the first page).

@MartinArgerami: that is interesting. Having read the editors notes I can see this happening if all the issues are worked out properly. However, in this case, where Max doesn't approve the other groups work the situation is a bit more difficult. I think I would not want to publish a merged manuscript like this. However, I suspect withdrawing may result in the other groups paper being published instead...

@MartinArgerami: We are trying to figure out what the hold up is at the journal: : bad data from the other group vs. ethical misconduct investigation. The editor was responsive previously but now no longer responds to our inquiries. I mentioned earlier that I reported the coauthor to our research integrity office for dual submission and gift authorship. Our research integrity officer told me he may have to contacted the journal.

If there is any kind of ethical problem with the other group, you need to avoid involvement in unethical behavior as much as possible.  Tell the editor that, owing to ethical concerns, you are no longer willing to work with the other group.  You can ask them to consider publishing your work separately, but you should be clear that you would prefer to take your work to another journal instead of combining the manuscripts.

While I understand your ethical doubts, I see two reasons why going along with the merge may be in your best interest:

If you have access to their manuscript, I assume the other group has access to yours, and is possibly able to correct their flaws. If you pull out, the journal may accept them to publish the result without you.
As the other group is working on the same problem, chances of having them as reviewers in your next submission are probably not small. It is not unthinkable that they would have adversarial behavior and stall your paper while they try to get their own published.

I don't have all the details and I will not make a full judgement, but I hope this can be useful for your evaluation of the situation.

"chances of having them as reviewers in your next submission are probably not small"  Tell the editor about the conflict of interest.

"If you pull out, the journal may accept them to publish the result without you."  A better outcome than getting involved in an authorship scandal.

@AnonymousPhysicist Better for whom? OP will lose their high-profile publication, the cheaters will get the kudos, nothing will happen. If OP can, they should pull out and publish elsewhere, fast, if possible. IF 30 will be hard to top, however, and the other team may end up reviewing the paper, CoI or no CoI. OP may be left with nothing. Been there, witnessed that. Fortunately not in one of my papers. It would have been better to resist the pressure to merge in the first place, but that ship has sailed.

Being left with nothing is unlikely, but still better than being involved in an authorship scandal.

@AnonymousPhysicist Yeah, sure, because years of a scientists life and, who knows, missing out on an influential citation record are not important. If I were OP and think that this research is important enough, I would choose pulling out from the agreement if the shortcomings are not amended, scandal or not. If it's a mediocre result, I would cut my losses, no reason to give the other group too much publicity.


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What would a good written policy for scaling exam grades look like?
I'm not in the habit of scaling exams, although I'm aware that the practice is widespread and highly recommended in some circles (such as grading on a curve). To my recollection, none of my college instructors scaled exams or wrote any policy about such on their syllabi. I'm wondering if one did commit to an official policy of scaling exams, what would a reasonable written policy look like?
The goal here would (hypothetically) be similar to Krantz in How to Teach Mathematics (Sec. 2.10): "My main goal in formulating my grading policies is to make the greatest number of students feel that they have been treated fairly (and, not incidentally, to reduce student complaints)." Secondarily (and again hypothetically), to defend against possible future administrative complaints that the instructor is not matching some recommended grade proportions (same section by Krantz).
Please assume that the individual exams are adequately fair assessments themselves (not broken, vague, or overly-hard questions, cover same topics covered in class and homeworks, sufficient time permitted, significant advance time taken assessing questions and grading rubric, etc.).
Background: I'm at an open-admissions community college where high failure rates are historically common, often half or more of many math or computing courses. Among the things I'm worried about if I started doing that are: Would there be any lower bound to what might wind up being passing work?
For example, I had a colleague at a different university (top-20 in U.S.) who got in trouble a number of years ago in that, when pressed by students on his scaling policy, said that if every single student got a zero on a exam, then the scaling process would turn all of them into 100% marks. Surprisingly, the students successfully organized a total boycott of the final exam, and my friend followed through and gave 100% marks to everyone as per his word. (This turned out to be quite embarrassing for him.)
So I'm wondering what kind of formal, mechanical policy for scaling would prevent no-lower-bound situations similar to this one?

What is your purpose in scaling?

A better policy would be one for writing said exams... and an apropriate marking scheme...

The example you give is stunningly stupid on two levels: one have a calculation to test the spread of marks and deal with it and two: actually opening the mouth and telling the students...

the students successfully organized a total boycott of the final exam --- Going out on a (very short) limb, I'll guess that this person's research expertise was NOT in cooperative game theory!

@PatriciaShanahan: Good question, I'm editing to add that.

Your latest edit "assumption" may be hard to implement in practice. Usually it works pretty much like that, but not exactly, and not always. Plan for the real world, not some imagined, ideal, one.

@Buffy: This seems to be a hard question for people to answer. I'm trying to help people focus on the core, relevant part of the question: What's the best objective way to perform scaling/curving low scores for the indicated goal? I'm hoping that tangential issues don't distract people from that hard kernel question.

It is hard to answer because pre-planned scaling, not as a correction for e.g. an over-hard final, is inherently unfair, especially in an open-admissions environment. One year, you may have a lot of students who are just going through the motions because their parents let them live rent-free while registered as students. Another year, your class may be all serious, capable students. I don't think it is fair to give two individuals with identical performance different grades just because of the luck of the mix of students in their year.

@PatriciaShanahan: That sounds like a pretty good, clear answer, and I'd be prone to select that as best over the currently existing answers, for example. (On the other hand it's effectively done at many large institutions -- see alephzero's comment below -- and if that admittedly less-than-fair policy could be coherently encoded in writing I'd like to see how.)

Scaling or "curving" grades so that a fixed proportion of students get each grade is unethical.  There is extensive evidence that student cooperation helps students learn more.  If you fix the proportion of students that get each grade, then you incentivize students to stop cooperating.  This will reduce how much your students learn.
@PatriciaShanahan is right that this grading approach is also incorrect because your student body does not remain the same across semesters.

I agree and that's been my policy for roughly 2 decades now. But the practice seems to be so widespread, I'm a bit surprised that no one seems willing to defend it or try to make it coherent.

I'm picking this as the accepted answer, because it seems like the clearest expression of an apparently unanimous view here. If someone were to add a coherent defense for grading on a curve (with objective rules for it), then I would be prone to switching to that other answer.

@DanielR.Collins, I think one of the main reasons that (perhaps-lazy) instructors "grade on the curve" is exactly that it does not require them to think much about the sense of their exams, etc, ... because they have formulas that make it all be ok... supposedly.

In general scaling is a mistake as it introduces uncertainty into the student's calculations. But some adjustments are proper and you can publish statements about them.
First, you can agree that no one will "miss" the next grade by a small percentage. This is better done overall, than on a per exam/paper basis. But if it takes 90% (overall) to get an "A", then, at the end of the day give the A to someone with 89. This merely recognizes that your grading scheme isn't perfect and may disadvantage people in small ways occasionally.
Second, agree that your grading rubric is clear that you are allowed to adjust upward when you think it justified. Mine would say something like, "If you get 80% you will get at least a B". This is just a reinforcement of the first point.
Third, permit people to do work over if they have fallen short. Regrade it for "most of" the lost points. My policy was 90%. If you lost 30 points on an assignment you could get 27 points (max) back if you re did the assignment properly. My policy was generous, permitting several attempts. The repetition was good for the students and worked to assure learning.
Fourth, at the end of a course, look at how the students did overall and compare it mentally with what you think they really learned in the course. If you think the learning was actually better than the distribution shows, bump it a bit. This will push a few students up to the next partial grade, say from B to B+.
Finally, avoid marking using only a few high-risk exams, but spread the marks over a large number of tasks. All or nothing final exams eventually leads to trouble, even in less extreme cases than the one you mentioned. This leads to a practice of continuous study and learning rather than "cramming" for the big one. Cramming results in more memorization (short term learning) and less deep learning.
My students all knew everything about the above policies. I seldom got complaints about grading. I could be as demanding a professor as I felt necessary (students viewed me as very demanding). At the end of the course surprises were always happy ones and students felt good about themselves and encouraged to continue.
Finally, let me note that strict scaling, making the course distribution into something like a normal curve is, IMO, always a mistake. It turns the course into a zero-sum game for students who can only win if someone else loses. In theory it should be possible for everyone to do well, even full marks, based only on their own work. Such scaling is also unjustified as it assume that a given sample (your students) perfectly match a population (all students). Statistically that is a serious error to make unless your scale is huge.

The "normal curve" type of grading was used for pre-university exams in the UK for many years but at a national level (and therefore with large cohorts of students). Since exam grades were requirement for university entrance, this was a convenient administrative system to match the number of qualified students to the number of places available. (I'm not defending that system, just pointing out that it can have a "practical" use).

@alephzero, and, of course, lets not confuse "making administrators jobs easier" with "actual learning". Practical can equal pernicious, in some cases, of course.

Personally, I agree with the current last paragraph. But I think that most of this answer is missing the point of the question at hand; it doesn't suggest a "best practice" mechanic of scaling/curving grades, and the fourth point falls into subjective undocumented adjustments that I'm trying to avoid. I suppose I could imagine selecting this as the best answer if it was cut down to the last paragraph (essentially, "it can't be done fairly") and there was consensus for that.

I think my key point is in the first sentence, actually. I.e. "Best Practice" = "Don't". Find a better mechanism.

A system I have used successfully in the past: pick an upper segment or quantile of the class (e.g., top 5% or top 5 students). Compute the average combined mark of these students, and scale everyone else's grade by this value (i.e., if course marks are out of 100 and the average of the top 5 students is 95, multiply everyone's mark by 100/95). Some of the advantages of this system:

it's mechanical, clear and transparent; even though you can't say in advance what the final scaling factor will be, you can tell students as they go along what the current scaling factor is, and they can do their own "if the scaling factor stays the same I need to get xxx on the final to get a grade of yyy" calculations to their hearts' content
in my experience/as far as I can tell the upper-quantile students are generally getting their scores honestly (and are less likely to collude in a grade-gaming effort); in particular, the scores of cheaters are unlikely to have a big impact on the scaling factor (unless there are lots of them and they're extremely good at cheating)
this system automatically handles assessments that were unintentionally made too difficult: if the best students lost a lot of points, then everyone gets a bonus
the top few students automatically get 'perfect' (after rescaling) scores, but averaging by the top quantile (rather than, say, the maximum) is reasonably robust
it doesn't pit the mass of the class against each other; the distribution of the lower 95% of the class has no effect on the scaling

This would obviously break in the "whole class cooperates to break the system" scenario, but that seems extreme to me.  With regard to the "all of the students boycott the exam to get 100% marks" scenario: (1) I do this for large (>150) classes, where the odds of successfully organizing a boycott seem remote (I don't know how many students were involved in the scenario described by the OP); (2) this marking scheme applies to the overall mark for the whole term, not just the final — so students would have to boycott/collude on all of the assignments in order to break the system.

+1, thanks for posting this. Re: The extreme end-case: Understood, but as noted that actually did happen for a friend of mine, so maybe this answer could be improved by indicated what extra clause you'd add to handle that? What if students see this published protocol and one of them asks the same thing?

Each grading policy serves a different purpose, and I think that's the key question you want to answer.
The most common policy I have seen, which happens to also be the most opaque, is actually not about exams but about the grading cutoffs for final grades:

Exams will count for x% of the final grade, homework y%, et cetera. Final grades will be given with cutoffs no less generous than
A: >93% , A- : >90%
B +: >86% et cetera

The benefit of this policy is that you don't have to scale or curve exam grades at all but can still change cutoffs to give a fair distribution of grades, while still giving minimum requirements for making sure you pass or get an A. This policy is meant to fix grade distributions overall in the fairest way possible, but doesn't mess with the weighting or scoring of individual assignments or exams.
For individual exams I have also seen the policy

It will be possible to replace your lowest exam score with the grade of your final exam if it would increase your overall score.

This policy is good to make the exam a less variable and lower pressure affair, since it takes out negative noise in the midterm exams. However, it implicitly makes the final exam higher pressure/stakes. In general this is a good policy if you're trying to make midterms lower stakes but don't want to entirely drop an exam and weight the final higher.
Rarely have I seen a class where there is a written policy about scaling, except to say in the syllabus that the instructor reserves the right to change grading when necessary. In general if you are trying to curve/scale an individual exam it is in response to a poorly written or poorly timed exam. For example, this can happen when the exam turns out to be much more difficult than the instructor intended it to be, or if it turns out to be much longer than expected. When those situations occur the most common things I have seen (in order of frequency):

More generous grade cutoffs at the end of the course.
Making particularly difficult questions a bonus, so as to improve the general average while still rewarding the ones who got the question right
Grading exams out of fewer questions. Typically done more in written exams with partial credit, but for example where an 8 question exam is graded out of your top 6 questions. This again is meant to blunt some of the bottom end of the distribution while still evaluating students
Adding x points to everyone's grade. This is usually at the cost of more generous cutoffs at the end, but many instructors like it because more generous cutoffs usually mean that either homework or exams could be at a lower standard, and this is usually in response to a particularly difficult exam.

In general I think the policies are rarely written down except to assure students that you won't make their grades worse (which I have heard happening in very competitive classes, but have never experienced) or to let them know about dropped grades, and not all scaling/curving answers the same question, so which one you choose depends a lot on what you're trying to accomplish and the culture of the department and school.
In general I would say one of the best policies I have seen was using the first approach with grade cutoffs and then saying "Here is what I look for when I give each grade, roughly":

A: You can apply the material in novel situations and in non-straightforward ways
B: You can apply the material in contexts taught and in complicated multi-step ways
C: You can apply most or all the material in straightforward ways in the contexts taught

Some instructors just routinely drop the lowest score. This usually implies there are more than a few of them, of course. While that may ease the student mind, it doesn't guarantee learning. Redoing the work focuses more on the learning, not the grading.

Thanks for writing this. But, a lot like Buffy's answer, this seems like kind of a verbose way of saying "it can't/shouldn't be done".

@DanielRCollins I think there is a difference between saying you shouldn't curve and that you shouldn't document the exact mathematical transformation that you're using. In general I'm not against curves, I think they're really useful at making courses more about learning and not grades, but I think forcing yourself to a particular curve for every situation doesn't seem right either. Instead treating each test as a case-by-case but never making grades worse seems to be an okay approach.


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How should I respond to a reviewer's complaint about self-citation?
Recently, I submitted an article and got a response from a reviewer that I cited 6 of my own articles out of 44. The reviewer said that it’s a cheap act of self promotion.

If I do not cite my own work, how can I expect others to?
Is it bad practice to cite your own work?

The reviewer didn’t say I cited senselessly, rather he complained about the citation of my own work. How to respond in this given situation?

Someone, either you or the reviewer, is a citation-metric-driven [fill in your negative word of choice]. Decide who it is and act accordingly.

@image  this work is built on my previous work. However, it is possible for 3 references where I can give reference of some other work as well, which I did along with my work. His comment "it is a cheap way of self promotion" made me feel bad, as if I did something wrong. However, after seeing the answers i am glad I am on right side.

“If I do not cite my own work, how can I expect others to?” — Do you cite other work? According to your question, you do. Well, there’s your answer. I find this question a bit concerning: maybe the reviewer was right and some of your citations are gratuitous? The reviewer seems quite blunt in their assessment, maybe it’s because they have a point (rather than lacking any sense of tact and proportion, as implied by the answers).

Note that whether or not the concern is valid, stating it as "cheap act of self promotion" is unprofessional. Reviewers should be respectful of the authors and their work even if they don't like it.

The answers here of Solar Mike and corey979 are correct, but let me point out two additional issues.
First, it might be that without your citations you could validly be accused of self plagiarism. Readers of the current work need to be able to trace back the ideas to earlier work. This is why we cite ourselves rather than just reuse old work.
Second, if you want a mental check on whether a self-citation is proper or not, just ask whether you would still be giving this citation if the other paper were written by someone unknown to you. If the answer is yes, then it is certainly proper - even essential - to cite it. If the answer is no, then you should probably forgo.
As for a response, you could simply ignore it. However, if you think that it is affecting the editor's decision, you could point out the self-plagiarism aspect.

Have to upvote the point about the risk of self-plagiarism...

6 out of 44 is less than 14%... If the cited works are relevant, such as building on previous results or analysis then there should be no problem.
If you are citing works that are by you but not relevant then that is an issue (I don't think you are doing this but just for both sides).
If the only works you are citing were your own then that may be an issue, but could still be relevant ie further work etc as above.
Perhaps you respond by pointing out the relevance of each cited work and, also consider if the links between the works cited and the current paper need to be strengthened.

Thanks for your answer. My work is relevant and this work is built on previous work. However, it is also possible for 3 references where I can give reference of some other work as well, which I did along with my work. His comment "it is a cheap way of self promotion" made me feel bad, as if I did something wrong.

How can you think that he is not doing this without reading his paper?

In all likelihood, I would ignore the comment.  (If you need to respond to editor, just write that the references are all related to the current paper and were left as is.  Make your comment short...no elaborate arguments.)  Obviously take a look at the paper and see if there are any papers that are blatantly on very different topics.  But if they are all in same area of exploration, leave it as is.

Ignoring is a bad idea, you should always response to requests (here accusations) to explain your point of view to the editor.

Could be right.  I have had no bad/good reviewer interaction.  Wrote very direct papers on non groundbreaking things for ACS specialty journals and they got accepted without revision...never saw the reviews.  Still would go with something relatively terse (not turning the thing into an argument).  "Understand the reviewer objection but we have looked at the cited references and they are all closely related.  Think it is better for the reader to be able to follow the story of this research effort.  Leaving cites as is."

@usr1234567 There is no request here for OP to offer any explanation, unless this post has been edited and that's no longer present. But regardless, just being accused of something is not grounds to interject your stance with a response.

Merely counting the number of self-citations is meaningless. The appropriateness of each citation should be judged on its own merit.
If you do decide to respond to the comment (and you may choose to ignore it), you should ask the reviewer if there is any specific citation he or she objects to.

This is similar to the answer I'd write, but it lacks a powerful test of the merit.  The OP could check, for each one of the 6 self-citations, which exact place in the new article is referencing them; if there's at least one very specific reference, the OP needs to fight back for that citation.  If it's hard to locate the connection between the old and new work, perhaps the new work could be modified to make the connection more obvious and easy to locate, but otherwise the reviewer might be having a good point.  (Some journals style guidelines do not even allow citations without references.)

You can reply that citing your other works will be valuable for the reader to be able to follow your train of work.
Just reading a paper without context it can be hard to get a grasp of why to even research what this paper tries to address.
With context, it is much easier to explain to a new reader why this latest paper is relevant to the trail of papers.


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How do I identify predatory and low quality journals? With Beall's List gone, how can I tell if a journal is spam?
Jeffrey Beall removed his list of predatory journals from the internet this past Sunday. While the reasons for his doing this are not yet public, this is a real loss of a valuable service. Does anyone know of similar services available to the general public?
Edit: This other question is definitely relevant, but that approach is more appropriate for finding top journals rather than identifying bottom ones. I.e., following that method would probably exclude lots of valid, lower-tier journals. Are there any approaches to easily identifying a predatory publisher?

The latest update of the list can be found in the Web Archive.

As noted in the question, Beall's list once was a method for identifying predatory publishers. However, the list is no more. A recent Publons blog post addressed how to identify predatory journals.
Summarizing their post, here are some methods of identifying predatory journals. Most of their methods are more positive than Beall (i.e., they point out good journals rather than highlight predatory journals):

Check and see if the journal is part of the Directory of Open Access Journals, an independent body sponsored by many publishers (among them IEEE, ACS, MDPI) and associations, among them the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Check the Open Access Journal Quality Indicators
Use the Think, Check, Submit tools that includes a check list to see if a journal is trusted. For example, the page has a check list for journals.
Follow Butler's Checklist
Examine Publons' list of journals and publishers.

As noted in the comments, some of these lists may have their credibility issues (e.g., Why do open access consortia affiliate themselves with questionable publishers)
Also, you can do your own "smell" test. Note that none of these a perfect. Possible examples include:

Check out a journal's Web page and publishers'. Often predatory journals have bad Web pages or Web pages that seem slightly off or wrong. However, some predatory journals do have well polished Web pages.
Is the journal associated with a professional society? If so, have you heard of the society? Professional societies tend to host legitimate journals (although there are likely exceptions). However, some predatory journals use the names of societies and academics without their permission (or use fake societies that sound close to real societies).
Similarly, is the journal associated with a university?
Lookup the editorial board. Who is on the board? What is their affiliation (e.g., are they grad students and postdocs?)? Also, check the Web pages of the board members. Do they list the journal? Some journals list people without their permission.

In summary, there is no single method for verifying journals. Some predatory journals go to great lengths to seem real.
Edit note: This answer was updated based upon feedback from StrongBad, Coburn, Joce, and Brian.

I am not sure DoOAJ is a good list. See http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/23719/why-do-open-access-consortia-affiliate-themselves-with-questionable-publishers

Don't trust something even if it has a good webpage. It's easy to make something look nice with Bootstrap and other frameworks out there. Also, I liked how Beall included when the names of respected academics were used without authorization/when they weren't affiliated with the predatory journal. There's no easy way to tell without contacting the individual in question.

Looking up the editorial board is also an important step. Of course, some predatory journals list people who may not have agreed to be on the board or may have been trapped, so do not take the list completely for granted. More generally, it is a good idea to publish in journals that have published papers you have used for your research, or where your community usually publishes. If these do not want to consider your paper, then the problem is more likely with the paper than with the journal.

@StrongBad DOAJ, as stated in one of the answer of that question, is reviewing the reapplications of journals accepted before 2014. As an editor, I can tell we are working hard on these issues! And each journal on the list has the date of inclusion in DOAJ.

@Emilie this is off topic, but DOAJ is still sponsored by Frontiers, Hindawi, and MDPI (among others) and that makes me question their judgment and independence. Would love to see you give an answer to my original question.

@StrongBad I would love to, but I don't have the appropriate knowledge! I'm simply assessing applications... Your question is very appropriate and important tough.

@StrongBad DOAJ is sponsored by the royal society of chemistry as well. I have all possible opinions against the royal family, but I would still consider their judgement decent and independent (if I have to apply authority's principle).

I heard about Beall's list several times on this site, but I'm amazed about its significance to some people.
When you start doing research, you need to know which papers are important in your field (your advisor or google scholar will tell you). Then you need to know who is the big shots, and not so big shots in your field. Then you need to know where those guys have published their papers (where your advisor published his/her papers).
Then follow the masters, submit to the conference/journal that they published. If it is a new conference/journal, you need to know some people in the PC members, editors.
If you know none of them, it's not a good idea to submit your paper. In the best case, they are not in your field. Even if you don't know them, you can check if they are from reputable university, if they have well-cited papers to become editors?
Another way is to check 5 papers published by this journal 5 years ago. If none of them has any citations, that journal is spam.
TL;DR: You don't need any list.

I was wondering the same a few days ago in chat. Some suggested that the main result of Beall's list has been that of making some people aware of the existence of predatory publishers.

These aren't bad suggestions, but they need qualifications. "5 years ago" is useless for new journals or for journals that have only recently expanded into a particular subject. Also, it fails to spot journals that went downhill recently (e.g., when editors leave to found their new journal, but publisher continues with a much worse skeleton crew). "Good people on the editorial board" fails when the editorial board is fake (e.g., some vanity presses spam a lot of known professors, then put everyone on the editorial board who doesn't explicitly decline). In case of doubt, talk to people.

Checking the editors isn't foolproof; predatory journals have been known to list people as editors without their consent.

Another way is to check 5 papers published by this journal 5 years ago. If none of them has any citations, that journal is spam. But if they do have citations you at least have to follow up to look for only self/group citations.  That not necessarily quick on badly-designed journal sites (which doesn't exclude good journals), even before you get to buddy citations.

Following the masters and submitting where they submitted is great advice if you're an amazing young researcher, but if you're that amazing you won't be in much danger of predatory journals in the first place. It's the more average researchers who won't always get accepted into a top tier journal that need help to distinguish the lower tier journals from the predatory journals.

In some fields most legitimate papers which are 5 years old don't have any citations. Checking 5 is reasonable but not foolproof.

This advice is basically what http://thinkchecksubmit.org/ says in a slightly more structured way.

A non-exhaustive list of red flags:

They promise an unreasonably fast review cycle, like four weeks or less
between initial submission and acceptance notification. While convenient for the authors, it's impossible to guarantee a decent-quality review process in such a tight timeframe.
They send you unsolicited e-mails. Obviously, sending spam is a
strong indicator for a spam journal.
The articles found in previous editions of the journal seem thematically unrelated or even random.

@DSVA Indeed, a fast review cycle alone (without promises/guarantees to the authors) does not indicate a quality problem by itself. Thanks for pointing that out.

For what it's worth, an archived version of Beall's list close to its deletion can be found at at archive.org. Note that it will necessarily decrease in accuracy and completeness over time.
His other lists are also archived. You can find a collection of links at Debunking Denialism.
Additionally, note that Beall's "criteria" are still publicly available, and some might argue that they are at least as useful as the list, as they teach a man how to fish. While I have seen the objectivity of the list being doubted, I've rarely seen people criticize the objectivity of the criteria.

Exactly that. People should learn that nothing really disappears from the web once it got published.

It's also still available from the Google cache.  Just search "Beall's list" and click the 'cached' link on the first result.  I've saved a copy locally in case it comes down.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170113114519/https://scholarlyoa.com/2016/01/05/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2016/

There are also two web sites that claim to build on and expand the Beall's list:
http://beallslist.weebly.com
http://predatoryjournals.com

Surprisingly Cabell's list hasn't been mentioned yet: see the Wikipedia article and links within. It's subscription-based however, and I have not seen many reviews as to how good the list actually is.
Of course, you can also do-it-yourself with Google and looking through previous issues, verifying vs. the editorial board and whatnot (basically what Beall did, focused on that one journal).

Probably the best way of identifying non-predatory journals is to look at where well-known scholars in your field publish. If the top scholars are publishing in a journal, then at least some papers in that journal are probably worth reading, both to you and others. Then if you publish in that journal, at least other scholars are likely to read it.

Whether a journal is a predatory journal should not be defined based on personal opinions. The quality of a journal should be defined in terms of the quality of the articles published, the review process, the reviewer's suggestions, and the article publication process.

Your answer could be improved if you explain how to define "the quality of the articles published, the review process, the reviewer's suggestions, and the article publication process" without using personal opinions.

The quality of the articles published is something you can quite easily verify (by looking at the published articles). However, the review process and the reviewers suggestions one will likely only see after submission, which is in some sense "too late". Any suggestions?


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Where do I find full citations for articles cited by author(s) and date/year only?
I am reading an advanced physics book which cites articles using only the name of author and the date of publication. Google scholar most often does not find such articles despite using Advanced Search. Where do I find the full citations in the book?

Most of the times books that do this have a bibliography at the end where you can locate the cited papers. Are you sure this is not the case for your book?

@FedericoPoloni I checked that at the end of my book and you are right, there I found all full citations mentioned in all the paragraphs and that section called References.
Sorry for the obvious question.

In this context March et al. 1967 probably refers to the textbook "The Many-Body Problem in Quantum Mechanics" by March, Henry, and Sampanthar.

Indeed. That was the book I found in google https://books.google.dz/books?id=9gs4AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA462&lpg=PA462&dq=The+Many-Body+Problem+in+Quantum+Mechanics+Cambridge+University.+Press,+London&source=bl&ots=y-3xFuaww6&sig=ACfU3U2J46bpzx2hbLmb3uNaoq5t3kSTnQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwijrL_DtLbqAhVG3IUKHekQBgQQ6AEwAnoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=The%20Many-Body%20Problem%20in%20Quantum%20Mechanics%20Cambridge%20University.%20Press%2C%20London&f=false

Sorry for the drastic edit.  I thought this will make it less confusing for future askers who might not have a bibliography.

Question answered by this comment:

Most of the times books that do this have a bibliography at the end where you can locate the cited papers.

Usually the bibliography is at the end of the book.  Sometimes it is at the end of the chapter.


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Future PhD applications and COVID -19
How do you think next year's PhD applications would be affected by the COVID-19? Will we be seeing less numbers or more? Will they be more competitive?
Edit: mainly asking for applicants to the US and UK.

You need to name your country.  Each country has a different process.

It's too early to speculate, considering some plausible worst-case scenarios have people largely confined to their homes for another year.

It is hard to be certain about the future.

There will be more positions because of government stimulus spending.
More students will apply for PhD programs because they cannot find jobs.
As a result of chaos, fewer students will complete the eligibility requirements.

The most likely net effect is more applicants for more positions, but they will be less prepared.

The opposite could equally happen: economy crunches, and money will be scarce. "It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future." was the original quote ;-)

@CaptainEmacs Money is never scarce for central banks.  They create it.  Countries that do not have central banks are often not good places to get a PhD anyway.

The Central Banks may create the paper that we call "money". They do not create the value that we mean by "money".


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Consequences for a tenured person of not getting grants
As far as I heard in (some of) the universities a person having a tenure track position who fails to get grants may not get tenure.

I am wondering what might be consequences of not getting grants for a tenured professor. (Say may he or she get more teaching load? more administrative load? What will happen if he or she will not agree for that?)

In your answers please indicate about what country are you talking about.

It's worth noting that many countries don't have a tenure track system

Here are some related questions that have answers touching on this topic: 1) If tenured staff are virtually unsackable, why is the drive to find funding so strong?, 2) What are the negative consequences of slacking off after attaining tenure?, 3) In practice, how secure is a tenured position in the US?, 4) Will professors get dismissed for not actively doing research?.

please clarify if you mean assistant/associate/Jun.-Prof. persons who are no full professors and on tenure-track, if you want to know what can happen to a tenured full professor not acquiring grants, this answered in the linked former questions and this is likeley a duplicate as @cag51 noted.

Asking this question for a particular country would make the answers comparable.

In the US, once you have tenure it is difficult to get fired other than for misconduct and hard even then. But, you don't need to get annual raises or further advances in rank unless you are seen as a contributor. What constitutes contribution depends on the institution. For some, grants are very important. For a few, they outweigh all else, partly because they fund students. But not all institutions are like that. For some, grants are nice but not essential.
But, whatever the mission of the institution, not contributing will leave you in a bit of a dead end with little chance to choose courses or committees, etc.
While it may be possible to have a 30+ year career without doing more than the minimum, you will likely still be earning at the end about what you were at the start.
Moreover, department heads, have subtle ways to punish you, by assigning you things that you won't really like doing. And who knows where your office will be.

I would also add:  Inability to use the grant funds to reduce teaching load; inability to pay research expenses; lack of summer salary.

In my research university in Sweden, the rules are fairly clear:

There is a default baseline teaching load for tenured faculty. If you do your work "normally" (you win a small grant here and there, but nothing wide out of the ordinary) your teaching load stays at this baseline.
If you win an extraordinary amount of grants (or the grants are very large), you can, at least potentially, negotiate your teaching load down, up to a well-defined minimum teaching load. Some people are able to get a complete teaching relief, but this requires very special circumstances and negotiation directly with the rectorate.
If you don't get funding over an extended period in time, and especially if you show no intention to get funding (that is, you are not even applying), your teaching load may be step-by-step raised above the baseline up to a specific maximum (which is, however, close to 100% of your work time).

There is no (official) angle to "refuse" to do more teaching. "Tenure" in Sweden isn't really tenure in the US sense - it's more akin to being a permanent staff member with certain well-defined freedoms. If you are asked to teach more as per the rules of the department and you refuse, that's a fireable offense (you are not fulfilling your work contract).

There was a case at Northwestern University maybe 20 years ago.  A tenured professor, a medical researcher with no teaching duties, was supposed to get research grants which would cover his salary.  Then one year it happened that he did not get the grant.  So he sued, and argued in court that the university must pay his salary, since he was tenured.  But the court did not agree.  Yes, he was tenured, so he could not be fired; but his contract with the university did not specify that the university must pay his salary.

What? American universities may decide to not pay tenured professors a salary? That's in my eyes one of the worst things ever.

Also happened to a relative--different university (public, R-1), in a medical school.

In Germany, either doing a traditional habilitation (non-tenure track) or going the Junior-Professorship (tenure track) path, not having acquired any grants where you have been a principal investigator is likely to be a big disadvantage versus competitive applicants for a full professor position. Especially for transitioning from Jun.-Prof. to tenured professor an examination of teaching, publication track and acquired funding is standard now.
There are also funding programs like ERC from european union which allow during funding time to take money to different universities/institudes. So "winning" an ERC grant over 2 millon € will increase significantly your likelihood of being approached by universities/institutes. There is a funding likelihood of around 30% at the German Research Foundation (DFG). Both of above paths often last for 4-6 years, so having not been successful at the DFG or many other numerous funding possibilities doesn't really speak for a candidate. Also it is quite common that you start and help writing funding proposal during your PhD work in Germany.
It is important to note that at german universities not much tenured teaching positions exist and not much tenured research positions apart from professors that therefore are expected to do research their whole job lifetime.

The question was about a person who is tenured.  It looks like your answer does not address that.

@AnonymousPhysicist Maybe, I suggested an edit to question and title, because I think OP means assistant/associate professors who are on tenure-track like german Jun.-Prof. tenure applicants (which is always called tenure-track in job descriptions) Otherwise I think this question is a duplicate as already answered by links in comments...

In the U.S., in math, at my R1 university, a tenure-track person who does not have an NSF grant will have a hard time getting tenure, currently. Ironically, it's not that mathematicians truly need money to "do research", since we don't need labs or equipment, really, nor "research assistants" to wash test tubes or do field work. True, funding to go to conferences can be viewed as necessary... "conferences" (=pointless jet-setting around the world...) are an issue in themselves.
The point (in my context) is that somehow the approval, expressed in terms of grant funding, of the NSF, is the purest (!?!) expression of the value of one's research. :)
Ok, perhaps no one really believes this in their heart-of-hearts, but it's an easy sell to other faculty who don't understand the work, to the Dean (most often an engineer, for whom funding is ... forgive me... everything), and to VP's. Within the department, non-grant-funding is an "excellent" excuse to sabotage a tenure vote, freeing up a space for one's own clique.
After tenure, things are not quite so precarious. Still, extra summer salary, and funding for trips to conferences, are things that are useful and attractive. In some places, I'm aware that lack of external grant funding will cause Deans or department heads to assign extra teaching or other punitive things. As though external funding per-se were the ... only? ... goal.
Given all the vagaries of "federal funding", depending on one's frame of mind, one might want to ... at some point... work through/beyond that, and be able to think about one's subject without imagining bureaucrats leaning over one's shoulder, disapproving, etc.
Sadly, it does appear that many idealistic models of "the academy" are ever-less viable.

This is mostly off topic.

@AnonymousPhysicist: ? I did literally tell some consequences of not having external grants, both pre- and post-tenure. Wasn't that the question?

@user847982 Changed the question after my comment.  I have rolled back the changes because they were excessive.  The title now says "tenured."

Is it often the case that deans don't want to tenure someone? I have heard of a mathematician being denied tenure on the grounds that he/she did not get an NSF grant.


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In this time of crisis, would the journals Nature and Science prioritize papers about COVID-19?
Would Nature, Science or other leading academic journals prioritize publishing work on COVID-19, the novel coronavirus that has caused more than 3k deaths so far?  If so, has this happened before in the past, during another crisis?

Journals publish stuff interesting to their readers. This question seems...not well thought out and maybe has some objective that is not spoken.

This is easily answered by checking to see what they have published.  COVID-19 is present in their news articles, but not in the most recent research articles.  Thus far, the answer is no.  Maybe it will be yes soon.

Absolutely. Journals are ways of disseminating scientific information, and they do take into account what is of current interest.
More specifically, however: Both Science and Nature do not just publish scientific articles, but also commentary and news stories. For example, in Science they are in the "News" and "Perspectives" parts of the magazine, and they definitely cover current events. As, if I may add, they should.

I'd add the following, to your terse but imho correct answer: Starting some time ago, a lot of grant money and resources, national, federal and even private - has been funneled into studies regarding covid-19. From the exploratory perspective (genome mapping, etc), from the pathophysiological perspective (treatment efficacies, mortality) and I would be very surprised if not antivirals targeting coronaviruses also gets a boost with FDA clearance and money these days. So, more research is going to be produced, and thus more papers will likely be reported in nature and science going forward...

In short; even if they are not prioritizing per se, then it will appear as if they are

Well, that's true. But they're also working very hard on turn-around times for papers. I mean, a typical publication takes 6-12 months from the time of submission to publication. But there's clearly a need to disseminate new information about COVID-19 more rapidly, and so these publications are prioritized over, say, a study of the extent of boreal forests during the Cretaceous period.

It is, however, a mistake to short circuit good review. It is how bad information can supplant good information.

@Buffy: Sure, but do you have any evidence that that is happening? Reviewers, too, recognize the importance of all of this, and may actually be very interested in reading new papers in a timely manner because it pertains to their work.

When your question bears the underlying motive/question, if it easier to publish in nature and science in the next years by doing research on this topic, then my answer would be no. There will likely be an over-proportional amount of COVID-19 related papers be published in top-tier magazines, but at the same time an enormous amount of additional funding money will flow into biomedical research institutes and create competition to solve this problem in a kind of competition, while many biometdical researchers and drug developers have already stated that the development of a remedy against COVID-19 will take 1-2 years. As Buffy commented above and I conclude, the review likely becomes and should much more rigorous for COVID-19 related papers. Additionally the submission rate and competition to get into review will rise.
I'm aware of several retractions in nature magazine covering biomedical breakthroughs over the past years. Many retractions related to COVID-19 would not be very advertising for a journal within a reproduction crisis within academia.
I also want to mention that really important and technical papers are not only published in top-tier journals like nature and science, often the authors also choose intentionally a journal within the community to fasten the progress and reach the biggest possible dissemination. In case of COVID-19 a journal most of the researchers within a community have access to and which offers a format allowing the authors to transport the content they think is necessary to disseminate in the fastest and most completest way with short review time (which is often much longer among nature and science) to the community is probably a much better choice to save human lives.
It's a delicate question when the research question affects million of lives within a short time period, what ethically the right publishing and reviewing  behaviour should be amoung authors and journals. There are of course preprints for nature and science, but do nature and science really have the best specialists, reviewers and review system for solving a very specific scientific problem within short time or rather journals that cover since decades virus deseases? I'm at least wondering if COVID-19 will also create new ways of publishing/commenting of researchers worldwide within short-time on a very high quality level and with open-source access.
So I'm skeptical about @Wolfgang Bangerth's answer if Nature and Science should prioritize COVID-19 papers without changing their review system/duration and if both magazines are the best place to publish such papers concerning the importance of a fast progress in R&D. This depends really a lot upon how biomedical researchers share information in the fastest way via specific journals with short but rigorous review while retaining a high reproduction rate of the results.

-1 because it assumes the author has an ulterior motive in asking the question. It's something I found quite aggravating when others did it in my question, and I expect OP to feel the same way.

@Allure I replaced ulterior by underlying, I'm no native speaker and ulterior was suggested to me for "behind the concept/question" which in German has no negative meaning. Though I assume like Bryan Krause's comment above the question has some apparent motive, otherwise it's vague and is better closed and phrased another way, as I tried to point out in my answer that there are actually important things to consider to publish in science & nature concerning COVID-19 or not

Same thing unfortunately - answer the question that's asked, not the question that you think is asked. I don't approve of Bryan Krause's comment, either.


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What criteria to use when evaluating an invitation to be an editor from a legitimate publisher?
Some academics receive invitations to join editorial boards or to act as a managing editor for a book or journal special issue frequently. Most of these invitations are spam, and many come from Beall's list publishers. When they come from legitimate publishers, however, what are your criteria for whether to accept? So far, I have:

Is it a journal I'd publish in myself?
Is it a book that I'd buy myself?
Do I have time?
Is it a topic I'm passionate about?
Have they committed to a print run (vs. eBooks only, which to me suggests a lack of commitment on the part of the publisher)?

Is there anything else that you consider?

You forgot "What else could I do instead with the time I'd spend on this, and would I really rather do this?"

I'd be wary of requests to join the editorial board of a journal that you must ask these questions. In many (legit) cases, one is asked to join the editorial board after having established a relationship with the journal. Two of my colleagues, after having been asked, remarked 'well, I'm already reviewing for them 3 times a month so why not make it official?'  If you haven't reviewed for, or published in that journal, it may not be worth your while.

Generally true, but if you have published in or reviewed for that journal, it still might not be worth your while: hence the question.


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About assistant professor job postings with no set deadline
Every once in a while I see assistant professor job postings that don't have set deadlines. Sometimes they would add that applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, or that "until the positions are filled". Usually how long are these review periods? Does it mean that the job is still open as long as they have not taken down the notice? I am aware that one possibility is that someone simply forgot to remove it from their web site.

Which type of jobs are asking about?

I am asking about assistant professorship level positions. Should have made that clear.

If you wonder whether the job is still open, you can always write to the search committee or department head before putting in the time to get your documents together.

One possibility to be aware of is that tenure track hires usually need to made after a national search. Yet some departments like to hire by going after "targets of opportunity". These are individuals already in faculty positions whom the department have identified as exceptionally talented and potentially willing to move. In order to facilitate this process, some departments keep an open search on the books for a protracted period of time.
The point is that some fraction of these rolling searches are probably not intending to hire from the pool of applications that come in unsolicited. That said, I also know of cases where the applications that come that way turn out be so strong that a department ends up hiring from that pool.