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Is it a good idea to add an invented middle name on arXiv and other repositories for scientific papers?
As the profile indicates, my name is Max Muller. I've recently started working on a dual PhD on process mining and natural language processing at a university and a governmental institution in the Netherlands.
According to this overview, the surname Muller (or variations thereof, including Müller and Mulder) is the 5th most popular surname in Austria, the (single) most popular one in Germany, the second most common one in Luxembourg, the 10th most common surname in the Netherlands, and the single most popular one in Switzerland.
In other words, there are a lot of Mullers in Northwestern and Central Europe. Moreover, the first name 'Max' is quite popular as well, and the combination 'Max Muller' is pretty widespread too.
Although I don't think there's much wrong with the name itself, I am slightly worried people won't be able to find my (hopefully upcoming) research articles on repositories like the ArXiv, Google Scholar, ResearchGate and similar venues.
Therefore, I currently consider adding a pseudonym to my full name, and use the combination as a profile name on these websites. This could help make me and the papers more easily identifiable. In my case, I'd like to add the name Lonysa, a pseudonym I've thought up years ago. It's also the name of my website. So the full name would become 'Max Lonysa Muller' or 'Max Muller Lonysa'.
My full name is Maximiliaan Alexander Muller, so I could also consider using the name Max A. Muller or something along those lines (as suggested in the answers to this question), but I'm not sure that would help in this case, given there are so many Max Mullers who might have done something similar to their academic names.
I have the following questions:

Is it generally a good idea to add a pseudonym, and the aforementioned one in particular, to your full name on venues for scientific articles in order to make yourself more easily identifiable? Why or why not?
Are there other ways to distinguish yourself from people who bear the same name as you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCID

How many people search by name vs titles or topics?

I have edited your title, because that's not really what a "pseudonym" is, but I left it in the text

Speaking as an anglophone named Bob Brown, I second the referral to ORCID.

Why don’t you simply search for other Max A Mullers?

I don’t understand your distinction between "name" and "full name". Which one is used for  formality, e.g. under which one are you enrolled at your university, which one is used on your contract for the PhD? Why not just use the „full name" instead of inventing a third one?

Why don't you legally change your name to add a middle name? Then it won't even need to be "invented"!

My name is "Jonathan", obviously. When giving my name when ordering food, "Jonathan" has extra syllables that can be inconvenient for the person entering the order. But there are too many Jon/Johns out there. So I picked "Jon Z" as my easy, uniquified name that I give at restaurants ... and, with variations, on web sites. Which is to say that I think this is a great idea.

@Kubahasn'tforgottenMonica not a bad idea but I think it costs quite a bit of money in the NL. It'd also be a bit of a hassle in terms of changing passports and the like

Go for M.A.X Muller and leave an indelible mark on this world!

Consider Korea: About 20% have "Kim" as their family name.

Be sure to do a literature search for another Max Muller with your 'invented' middle name. You might just be surprised...

@MartinBonnersupportsMonica Korea's funny like that.  According to wikipedia, only about 280 family names were in use in Korea in 2000, and the three most common names (Kim, Lee, and Park) cover half the population.

There are two related but separate concerns here: One is to provide a way to figure out which papers are yours, and which papers were written by other Max Mullers. This problem is solved by ORCID, which also handles things like future name changes, etc. In my opinion, every academic ought to get themselves an ORCID.
The second is the question whether you are googelable. For example, if someone reads an older paper of yours and wishes to find out your current affiliation, you really want that searching for your name plus maybe a keyword from your research area leads them straight to you. Here, adding something rather unique to your name as you propose would be very helpful.
Giving yourself a middle name of your own choosing would be completely straight-forward. None of the few potential problems with having a different academic name than legal name would apply here. On the other hand, picking 'Max Muller Lonysa' would probably lead you to become "Dr Lonysa" in short, and then there would be some rare situations where the fact that your passport or degree certificates don't have "Lonysa" on them at all could lead to (surmountable) difficulties.

Note that your ORCID page can contain a link to your current webpage, your current affiliation, etc. This does not contradict this answer since many people will still use google though.

You could do that. It isn't a problem. However, it might not matter much unless there are more people with your name publishing in your field in the same time period.
There is another prominent academician with my exact (real) name publishing concurrently, but we are in such different fields that it doesn't matter.
It is important, however, that a person publish under a single name, whether a true name or a pseudonym in a given field over their career to make things easier on potential readers.
But the modern alternative is to get an ORCID identifier that will, in principle, keep you and your work connected. I suggest that you explore that. I've never felt the need for one, myself, but my name isn't all that popular either.

In addition to ORCID, a Google Scholar profile is very helpful for this problem.

Your university might insist on you getting  an ORCID identity once you start publishing. My UK one certainly does.

Is it generally a good idea to add a pseudonym, and the aforementioned
one in particular, to your full name on venues for scientific articles
in order to make yourself more easily identifiable? Why or why not?

I'll answer from personal experience. My surname was Smith. No-one could ever find me in directories or anywhere else despite the fact that I included my middle initials. Let's face it, who knows or remembers someone else's  middle initials?
After constant complaints from people who needed my services (and for my own personal reasons) I changed it to something much more unusual. In Britain one's legal name can be changed easily by deed poll. I did this at zero cost and I now use it in every aspect of my life. I have never regretted it and people remember me for my unusual surname alone - never mind my achievements.
If you can change your name legally, I would recommend it. My passport, driving licence and everything else are in my new name. It just works.
Max Muller Lonysa would distinguish you from any other author. However, if you want to steal a march and appear first alphabetically in every list of authors, change your name to Max Aardvark or similar and you'll be remembered for all sorts of reasons! (I'm only half joking about this latter idea).

Are there other ways to distinguish yourself from people who bear the
same name as you?

Many - but unless you are a talented and unrelenting self-publicist or an undoubted trail-blazing genius, most of them are undesirable.

A simple solution would be to just use your full name. For every publication, on any institute/personal academic website, when registering at the university,  when entering into collaborations, at conferences, ...
Multiple things will then help you (specifically you, with your name) here:

Your (full) first name, Maximiliaan, is the Dutch version of writing that particular name, a version usually not used in e.g Austria or Germany (Maximilian or just Max), but also not in the UK (usually just Max afaik) or e.g. Italy (Massimiliano, see one of the other answers) or France (Maxime, I think). Unless of course the person has some connection to the dutch speaking part of the world, but this already quite limits the number of people with your first last name combination. Of course, this does not help you much if you get abbreviated to M. Muller.
Having a second name helps you get ahead in the combinatorics game. There are probably fewer M. A. Muller than M. Muller. And M. A. Muller is probably similar to M. L. Muller as far as frequency goes, so I dont think Lonysa would be any better (or worse) than Alexander here, since most people will only see the initial in the shortened form anyway. Now, if you started using a middle name that started with an X, things may be different, I would wager that there are not many people (in Central Europe, in academia) with that middle initial.
Muller is not the same as Müller, Mueller, Möller, Miller, Møller, Mulder, .... People can, and usually do in my experience, use the full range of UTF-8 (well, maybe not the full range, but certainly the parts used to write most people's names, in particular if the characters come from a characterset that looks similar enough to latin characters...) in bibliographies, especially if wherever they copied the citation from (the author field in the paper, another paper's bibliography, ArXiv, the publishers website, some citation managament tool/database...) also did.
There are so many specialisations in science. How many M. A. Mullers that publish in underwater basket weaving (specifically the kind done close to underwater vulcanoes) that got their PhD at Atlantis University are there really going to be?

All of that put together means that you are probably going to be fine, if you just go with your full name (or swap out your actual middle name for the one you came up with).
And if not, that is why you should get an ORCID in any case (among other reasons like your legal name possibly changing at some point in the future due to some reason or another).

All the M[vowel]ller variations are different and will likely appear as such in bibliographies and repositories. But when you Google it, those differences do tend to go out the window. Trying to get Google to only return hits on Muller and not Müller can be an exercise in frustration and futility. It’s gotten better (if you write max muller -müller, it looks like it does mostly filter out the Müllers nowadays), but it’s still far from reliable.

As someone with a standard american keyboard that doesn't have ü or anything like that, if I want to google the name "Müller" I will usually just type in "muller".

@TheGuywithTheHat The correct replacement for "ü" is "ue". Some library systems still use that and even with google, the results should be better that way. Just fyi ;)

I think that some of the arguments in favor of using a pseudonym presented here do not apply in the academic world.
A creative pseudonym added to someone's real name could leave an unintended funny impression (I am thinking of the honorific nicknames of artists or athletes). And one's own taste may change sooner or later. In science, you just want to be identified correctly during your entire life. For that purpose, I consider consistency more helpful than creativity. Not to mention the hassle that may arise from adding another version of your name (e.g. when travelling).
Thus, I second the points in favor of using your full real name, especially considering that it does not seem that common to me, and that there are supplementary tools such as the ORCID identifier.

I have a common, but complicated name (including two diacritics). While still in academia, I made the terrible mistake of not simplifying it (removing all complexities and especially the diacritics that cost me a paper).
Other answers recommend ORCID and, by all means, do it. This is an unambiguous identifier that is much, much better than your name.
At the same time, I would recommend keeping your name as simple as possible. Many countries do not use the middle name or use it sometimes, or use it with a specific order, or use a letter, or a few letters, etc. Names are horribly messy.
Max Muller sounds great.

Since you mention the Netherlands, they have a weird thing about (changing? inventing?) first names a Dutch friend of mine explained to me once, but I forgot what it was. So keep it simple.
EDIT: I called my friend and the story is that parents (used to) choose traditional "Official" first names, but never used them in real life and also (used to) choose at the same time a short version more or less aligned with the "official" name. People would always use the second one in their day-to-day life. The usage of the first one is only on official papers (and especially on papers abroad such as visa applications)

"especially the diacritics that cost me a paper": just curious, how did that happen?

@GoodDeeds one of the letters was ü and it ended up being rendered as uerror (to take OP's name, that would have been "Author: Max Muerrorller". Big journal. Lots of tears. Erratum issued by the publisher but it was too late. A career broken (well, almost :))

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

I know scientists who do not use their real first name on their publications but a nickname that once stuck with them. It is not forbidden.
But there is a question whether it helps to be confused with your nickname's doppelganger instead of the other names's doppelganger...


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Techniques for writing papers when one has dyslexia
What are techniques for writing well/improving your writing/writing faster when you have dyslexia for highly complex and deep material?
For this question I am specifically asking about techniques that work well for dyslexic people rather than general techniques for writing. The reason for this is that things that work well for neurotypicals when writing academic papers can easily be found on the web, and probably in many questions on this site. However for writing with dyslexia, the web is saturated by how to write at a primary/high school level. While I don't believe there is no overlap between good techniques for people with and without dyslexia, standard approaches can be added to any approaches given here.
The other reason is that standard approaches may have a huge barrier to application when you are dyslexic. For example, a common suggestion I have heard is read a paper and take note of what language/phrases you liked in the paper. However, I recently realised I'd never really read an academic paper due to the dyslexia.
To provide insight, I have read many papers (while completing my PhD and post-doc) and comprehended the meaning/seen the big structure of the paper, but don't read the actual sentences. I observed this when asking a friend for an example of a well written paper from my field and read it both as a normal paper and with a modified text supposedly for dyslexic people (opendyslexic). When reading it as a normal paper it seemed standard to me, but with the altered font the text seemed to have been written by a high school student (i.e. it is written using simple words and short sentences). This does lead to an answer whereby you just replace the font in papers, but finding an efficient workflow that allows that (particularly when mathematical formula and figures are in the text). I would consider an answer that makes this efficient within the scope of this question.
I expect there are other issues beyond the one I described above that limits the effectiveness of normal approaches, but these differences aren't obvious to me since it is always hard to see the difference between how you experience the world and how others experience it.

In my specific case I also have auditory processing difficulties, which means answers that say listen to papers instead or use dictation tools probably won't be as helpful for me specifically. Therefore I would prefer techniques that avoid this kind of thing, but would consider them valid answers for this question.

I don't see how this is validly answerable here. It seems to need a professional.

I suspect there are many people that use this site who have dyslexia, suggestions of techniques that work for people who have dyslexia (or know people who have it) make valid answers. The main issue is that people may not feel like disclosing they have dyslexia, though such stigma is decreasing.

Perhaps, but you seem to be describing a very specific variation/combination.

Related: Doing a physical science or maths PhD with dyslexia

At least as far as the writing part of the question is concerned, have you tried dictation software? You won't have to worry about spelling correctly in that case.

@WolfgangBangerth, I suspect that is less useful in math, however.

This is not a dyslexia specific comment, but I find that it really helps to present the paper, which focuses you on key points to communicate. Then gradually convert to written paper with those points as topic sentences etc.

Most universities have writing centers, that is ,groups that help students improve their writing skills. While these are designed for undergraduates, some of them might have experience helping dyslexic students.

A good friend of mine has had luck with the following:

Have paper read out loud by a human or computer. Computers in many cases can slow down the speed of reading, while humans pronounce technical words better and do inflection to indicate the start and end of ideas. If dictating, make sure to use a technical dictation tool that's field-specific, so you can dictate equations etc.
When possible, write electronically with light text on a dark background. Do not use justified text to allow your eyes to better recognize the lengths of words. (I have no idea if this would work, but Word allows you to change the spacing of letters which could help you focus on fewer at a time?)
Establish the sections of the paper first, written as an outline, and have at least the story in your head. "Flow" is universally an indicator of great writing.
Focus on the figures.
Ask someone you trust to improve your phrasing once you get the bones laid out. Or, have them act as a sounding board/interpreter: Tell them what you want to say and have them suggest phrasings until you get what you like. Then one of you types it out.

I was asked to be the human in #5 for my friend recently. Although he doesn't have auditory processing troubles, he did say that going to presentations and debating with others helped him pick up the language of the field without actually reading very much. Then the steps above let him get it onto paper. He's not a great reader, but I would say he is a great writer.
As a non-dyslexic, one of my favorite things to do to practically improve sentences once I have a paper drafted is to highlight common words like "because" or "however" with a Ctrl+F feature then use an online thesaurus to find replacements. Varied language makes your paper more enjoyable to read and can be injected at the end of the writing process. Mixing short and long sentences also helps a lot with readability for you and viewers. I read stuff out loud a lot, and listen for the meter rather than the actual words. This helps me detect when a sentence has become too long to be easily understood. Finally, copy-pasting from published works you respect is quite useful. Just be sure that you are really changing the substance so as to avoid plagiarism. But a phrase here or there, longer stuff with attribution, or just a similar structure, is ok.
For deep or highly technical writing specifically: In my experience the hardest part is getting the "if/ then/ but" or "we hypothesized/ we observed/ we concluded" statements out correctly. When struggling, I will highlight or change the text color of each part of such a statement. Then when I skim the whole manuscript, I make sure each part in red agrees, each part in blue agrees, etc. When it's really bad, I will draw diagrams for myself in a notebook showing the flow of conclusions or processes or grouping samples or measurements together. Then I just cross off each point in the notebook as I make it in the text. If you follow the diagram, you know you hit everything without having to go back and reread as much.

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Should I contact editor to inquire about the revised manuscript?
I submitted a revised manuscript on 19/2/2023. The paper changed to With Editor after few days (2 times) and changed to Under review on 10/3/2023 after I sent an inquiry about the status (this time, EiC told that the previous Editor was retired, and the paper was assigned to a new Editor). The system showed that the re-review invitation was sent to 2 reviewers and one reviewer quickly returned the evaluation on 16/3/2023. However, the second review still do not accept the re-review invitation since 10/3. I tried to contact the journal support, but nothing changed. I understand the review time may be long but for the revision it may not because the reviewer already known the manuscript. But here, it almost 3 weeks, but the review did not respond the re-review invitation. Should I contact Editor to inquire the revised manuscript again?

Just be patient.    Reviewers and editors are usually volunteer.   I for example only look at my assignments once a month.

Thank VitaminE. I know both Editor and reviewers are volunteer and very busy. Here, I concern about that it has been almost three weeks without an acceptance from the reviewer since the invitation was sent. And it looks like he/she will not re-review it forever. Besides, I saw some comments that the typical time for invitation is within 2 weeks. Thus, I wonder if I should contact editor regarding this issue.

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Can a mathematics journal reject a paper because of using an unpublished paper?
I am a postdoc in math. Recently, I wrote a paper in which I used a theorem from a friend's paper. She left academia 6 months ago. Her paper has not been submitted to a journal but it is on arXiv. I read her paper and believe that it is correct.
Can a journal reject my paper because her paper isn't published?

If one journal does then you submit to another journal which isn't so stupid.

If the journal objects, there are several ways to proceed. If your friend's paper is reasonably short, you can ask if it can be added to your paper as an appendix. Another option: if the proof of the specific result from that paper is short you can ask if it can be added as an appendix...

Assuming you give proper citation then it is unlikely that a journal would reject your paper without review. The reviewers might question the validity of the other paper, of course, which would bring the validity of yours into question.
Note that putting a paper on arXiv is publishing, though without the usual review.

Note how much scholarship would be slowed if no journal would look at any paper until all cited papers had actually appeared in formal (reviewed) venues. That process can take up to a year - or even longer. There would be no such thing as a "hot" topic.

Thanks for your answer. I know they review the paper. I meant that they say something like " Since you used a paper that is not published, we reject your paper".

Very unlikely unless, as Alexander Woo suggests, the editor is very stupid. Even completely unpublished "private communications" can be used, though they may draw extra scrutiny from reviewers.

Oh! thanks! your comment make me feel better; thanks!

@Adam You say "something like ..." in your comment. If you [edit] the question to show us the precise wording, and tell us that's the only reason given for rejection, we might be able to say more.

@EthanBolker, I don't read the question as implying that it has happened, but only wondering if it is likely.

There are tons of published papers that cite arXiv papers, so the answer is "no".
Here is one paper I'm aware of that has been on the arXiv for years but has never been submitted to a journal. According to Google Scholar, it has been cited 23 times as of time of writing.

I have to (weakly) disagree with Buffy.
If you're a reviewer, you may assume that a published peer-reviewed result is correct. If you rely on a result that has not gone through peer-review, then you essentially ask the reviewer to find the arxiv paper and (for all intents and purposes) review that paper first. That might not be what they signed up for.
A reviewer may therefore ask you to provide a proof of the result you rely, and thus reject the paper until that's in place.

How is it different if the OP provides a proof as opposed to the original providing it? Review is still needed in such a case. And, replicating the proof in another paper is a copyright violation. The job of the reviewer is only marginally harder.

I think this answer needs some qualification, in particlar the sentence "If you're a reviewer, you may assume that a published peer-reviewed result is correct." How much credibility one gives to a result in a paper depends on various factors, peer review is only one of which. I could (but for obvious reasons won't) name mathematicians, call them A and B, such that I will easily believe most results that A uploads on arXiv, while I wouldn't believe a word in an article of B without checking the details myself, no matter whether peer reviewed or not.

@Buffy I'm not saying to copy-paste the proof without crediting the source, most papers are in any case cc-by (on arxiv).

@JochenGlueck yes, that's why I say that a reviewer might ask you to provide a proof. Anyone can put stuff on arxiv, if you use a bunch of unpublished results by random people, I don't think the reviewer is going to be happy.

@Buffy the difference is that you're reviewing OP's paper, not the paper on arxiv. You can't give feedback and ask for improvements on someone else's arxiv paper.

@PålGD "most papers are in any case cc-by (on arxiv)" Do you have a reference for this claim? It would be an interesting recent development, because the data from 2015-2018 showed that the dominant license was the default arXiv one.

Oh wow, I stand corrected!


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Is it ethical to share with students a book draft that the author no longer makes publicly available?
Several years ago I taught an upper-division Mathematics course at my former institution. In the course of preparing to teach the course, I discovered that a professor at another university had not only written a text that would be useful to my students as supplemental material, but had also posted a pre-publication version of the same text to his personal (department-hosted) website. In the syllabus, I told my students:

[Name of text and author redacted] This text may be purchased online,
e.g. through Amazon.com, but it is somewhat pricey. Fortunately, a
preliminary (and almost complete) version of the text may be
downloaded for free from the author’s website at [website redacted].

Jump forward about a decade, and I am preparing to teach a version of the same course again at my current institution.  It seems that the free, pre-publication version of the text is no longer available on the author's website.
Would it be unethical of me to distribute the copy of the preliminary version of the text that I downloaded (licitly) ten years ago? On the one hand it seems almost certain that the author would prefer students buy the commercially-published version (but since it would be only a supplemental resource in my course, I would not require it in any case). On the other hand the author himself released the text into the wild, and gave permission to people to download it.  How should I think about the ethics (and, I suppose, the legality) of this situation?

I agree with the answer below, but the following may be ok: give them a link to wayback machine, if it is archived. If it's still publicly available, I think there should be no ethical concerns.

What @user2316602 says is the simplest way to resolve the problem in about 50% of such situations, even though (or, rather, because) it completely sidesteps the ethical questions. The bibliography of my last course notes includes 4 wayback machine links. Even when a reference is available and not expected to disappear any time soon, it is recommended to add it to the wayback machine to ensure that the cited version will always remain findable.

What you are actually asking is whether the author has a right to be compensated for their efforts or whether it is OK - somehow - to deny those rights. Saying that using the wayback machine has no ethical implications is not valid. If you don't honor authors you will only wind up in a worse situation. You will also be teaching your students that circumvention of the wishes of a creator is fine, if you can only find a way to do it. I call foul.

Let me give it some scale. If an author makes $5 per copy sold (probably pretty close). Then if a class of 50 students don't pay that royalty, but use the book anyway, they have denied the author funds sufficient to feed a person in the US for about a month.

@buffy I don’t disagree with the principal, and thank you for articulating it so clearly. But with respect to your last comment, in this case the students would not be required to buy the book in any case (as I said, it’s optional supplementary material only), so there is no lost revenue. (Also it’s a small class of fewer than 15 students, so the scale of the hypothetical financial loss is less than in your example anyway — not that I think that changes things.)

Prior to the internet and the pandemic, you would have the library purchase one or more copies and put it on reserve for the duration of the class. And, the scale here isn't just your class, since this is a public place from which people take advice. If you don't get permission from the author, then don't do something like this. Take the advice of henning and Dan Romik.

@Buffy that's a pretty good deal. I just contributed a chapter to a top-notch textbook, and I get nothing but "fame". Guess I'm in the wrong field!

@henning, thank you for your contribution. And I note that you did it with full knowledge (at least I hope you aren't being held in a dungeon, somewhere).

"but had also posted a pre-publication version of the same text to his personal (department-hosted) website." What if it was by error?
What were the license terms on that pre-publication version?

The author took a willful, deliberate action of removing the draft from its publicly available location online. The only thing we can infer from this is that he has revoked any implied approval he may have previously given for anyone to download the draft. By the way, giving the right to people to download something does not automatically imply a right to share it; not legally under copyright law, and certainly not ethically. For example, anyone with a bit of tech savvy can download a YouTube video clip of the latest Taylor Swift hit song, but if they post a copy of the video online, you can be sure that they will get in swift legal trouble.
Conclusion: you should not share the draft. You were within your rights to download it, and having downloaded it, have a right to use it for personal use. But unless you were explicitly given the right to share it with others indefinitely into the future, you should not be assuming such a right.

The key phrase: "giving the right to people to download something does not automatically imply a right to share it". Making something visible doesn't void the copyright. A license needs to be explicit.

they will get in swift legal trouble - Shouldn't that be they will get in Swift legal trouble?

This is exactly what I did with a text I (co)authored. Drafts were free to students and available on my website. When the book was published I took down the links.

@manassehkatz-Moving2Codidact nice, I see you swiftly detected my pun…

"The author took a willful, deliberate action of removing the draft from its publicly available location online." Well, perhaps. A lot of reasons for something to disappear from the Internet in 10 years. But still, +1

Indeed, there are many reasons for things disappearing from the web. In numerous cases of which I know, things disappear from the web as unintended side-effects of IT reorganization, the vast number of historical Australian Government publications being a case in point. So the inference that the book author willfully and deliberately removed the copy seems at best, a possibility.

@user02814: On the plus side, Australian government publications are CC-licenced, so at least people who already have copies can still distribute them, as long as they say where it originally came from.

@Vikki . That is, or ought to be true, given various directions from the the Australian Government Department of Finance. However, the Finance directions did not override the no-license provisions of the earlier regular copyright notices; they merely left things to individual departments to decide. So to copy a document like, for example, "A Fair Chance for All" one is still required to obtain a copyright waiver. In addition, there are still departments that ignore the Finance directives

@DanRomik It was well taylored to be detected

If the author can be contacted, ask them politely whether you may distribute the manuscript that used to be available online, explaining the purpose of your request and the size of your class.
Perhaps you will get a positive reply or even an updated version of the file. Perhaps the author will reject your request. The answer you get is the answer you get.
If your request elicits no response, default to not distributing the file. After all, your question here mentions a few reasons why the author might be unable or unwilling to say yes.

I think that this is a good answer, but i just want to add that the attention for copyright is something of a fad. Some 30 years ago professors would photocopy parts of books for their class, or even photocopy the photocopy (when they had no book.)

@Ivana I did and do so myself. Where I live, we have a public agency that collects a kind of royalty from those who produce and provide xerox machines, which are then distributed to authors and publishers. There's a similar mechanism for paywalled online texts. The case in point is a bit different though. First, the author won't be compensated for the free copy of the file, second the author might have signed away their rights of distributing any preceding manuscripts to the publisher.

To quote Daniel's comment "Did the copy you downloaded ten years ago state its licence terms?" If the pdf says that you can share it, then you can share it, even after the link has been taken down. If it says otherwise (or more likely, says nothing), then you legally aren't allowed to share it.

You ask "ethical", and asked on academia.stackexchange.com, rather than law.stackexchange.com. This makes this question considerably more complex and interesting than it seems at first sight.

Legality
As Daniel and Taw point out, if it's explicitly permitted under licensing terms, then it's almost-definitely legal.
If you are confident that you are definitely violating copyright law, perhaps because you are charging money for copies without permission or something, then it's almost-definitely illegal.
Between the two is the grey-area legal crapshoot called "fair use", which is where you can essentially ignore copyright until the copyright holder comes after you with lawyers, at which point you enter a legal gambling game, where the one with the deepest pockets wins. You either settle out of court and agree to stop, or you go to trial, win or lose, then it gets appealed, you win or lose again, and all the way up to the supreme court or the person with the least money blinks and agrees with the decision. Whether you win or lose is significantly random, but the odds can be pushed to one side or the other depending on your situation.
Firstly, free educational use can be protected under the first fair use consideration of copyright law. You aren't charging for access to the resource when sharing it, so it's arguably nonprofit; and you're sharing it for educational purpose. So far so good.
But sharing a whole work is not usually considered fair use. Sharing any significant parts of the work that were irrelevant to what's being studied would be a copyright violation. However, if every part of the work that you shared was relevant to the course, you might be legally OK even if you shared the whole work.
So, like I say, it's a legal crapshoot. Definitely check with your institution's legal dept to see if they're willing to let you take this gamble, as both you and the institution may be on the hook if you're found to violate the law under their auspices.
So that leaves you in one of three states: legal/illegal/crapshoot.

Ethicality
Establishing legality doesn't answer the question asked.
What you're asking, instead, is whether such behavior would be a violation of ethics, which I interpret to mean professional ethics. That is, the explicit standards of behavior for your profession.
Typically, unless there are powerful conflicts between laws and ethics, professional ethics require one to act within the constraints of the law. Violating copyright to save a few bucks wouldn't typically be considered a powerful conflict: no lives are lost if you do not share that preprint. So, if you're confident it'd be illegal, then it'd be unethical, too.
On the other hand, if the author has explicitly stated, in a license, that they are OK with distribution, then you can be confident that you're complying with their wishes, and your actions would be both legal and ethical.
As always, it's in the grey area that it gets interesting.
To establish whether your ethics support taking the risk, you need to establish what weight your professional ethics place on:

saving money for students;
ensuring students have access to necessary materials;
preventing outdated and incorrect material from being propagated;
ensuring publisher profits;
ensuring author profits;
respecting author wishes;
leading your students by your example;
minimizing potential liability for your institution;
minimizing potential liability for yourself;
minimizing potential liability for your students;
giving access to this specific work rather than similar ones;
not writing your own replacement work;
morality of action and inaction;
doubtless more I'm forgetting.

The weighting you give to these factors, combined with the advice from your institution's legal dept, should point you towards a yea or nay.

Morality
You didn't mention personal morality in your question, but it is arguably an aspect of ethics. Like with legality, professional ethics typically require one to act within the bounds of personal morality.
But like legality, there are areas of conflicts. We might help someone we are not legally permitted to aid, or in a way we are not ethically permitted to, because we feel morally obliged to act.
Consider a case where you know all your students to be too poor to buy the book, are too poor yourself, your institution is not willing to buy copies for its library, and you are unable to find a sponsor to buy copies; and you are unable to change the curriculum; and you know that this is the only book suitable for teaching the curriculum; and the book is so large or your skill so poor or time so short that you are unable to create teaching materials of sufficient volume and quality to replace it.
In such a case, you arguably have a moral imperative to ensure that your students can learn, and that there is at least a route for them to pass your course.
Some professors appear to navigate this maze of morality, legality and ethics by giving their students a warning not to obtain the book illicitly with a wink and a nod, as you see in the comments to the OP here suggesting using the Wayback Machine, or in this widely-spread tweet by a University of Ontario professor recommending that students avoid a list of free textbook sites.
This places the ball in the students' court, giving them the information they need to pass the course illicitly. Some will miss even such an obvious message, but enough would get the point that the message will spread to most of them.
Some may choose to remain within the rules, and fail, learning that strong morals or ethics are punished. This might not be a lesson you wish to teach.
Others will learn that rules are made to be broken, and so will develop a similar attitude towards things like plagiarism. This too might not be a lesson you wish to teach.
Beware of such unintended consequences.
So, as with ethics, morality is a matter where you have to weigh the pros and cons, direct and indirect, and identify a path for yourself that navigates through your own personal maze of conflicts.
My personal feeling is that the various costs of distributing this preprint would be far too high, and I would not do it, if I were in your place. But that is my morality, and my ethics.

This is full of errors, too numerous to list. But the "wink and a nod" is perhaps the worst, showing the way into error. You are, yourself, winking and nodding. Also, illegal doesn't imply unethical in all cases. In Germany in the 1930's it was illegal to "harbor" Jews. But it was anything but unethical or immoral. There are many other errors.

@Buffy: The "wink and nod" contains no error, and is a reference to three comments under the OP, and to the well-known "dear class" meme. The answer already repeatedly and explicitly calls out that law, ethics and morality can conflict; that powerful conflicts exist (such as your Godwinning); and that "Violating copyright to save a few bucks wouldn't typically be considered a powerful conflict". Nobody died to share that preprint. That your two examples of "errors" were in your imagination only, gives me little faith in the existence of the "many other errors" you claim to have seen.

That said: edited "wink and a nod" section to replace explicit list of sites with documented instances; edited "powerful conflict" section to clarify.

Re the list you edited out, OpenStax and LibreTexts host only openly licensed books.

Why would charging money for copies be "definitely violating copyright law"? Doesn't that depend totally on what permissions the original author gives? Compare e.g. with the GNU General Public License, which specifically allows a person to charge a fee for distributing the code to third parties -- and there's nothing in the copyright law that would stop that. As a matter of fact, if there was, I couldn't write a book and then give to anyone to sell, because they'd be charging money for copies of a work to which I hold copyright.

Good call, @ikkachu. Clarified that line a but, to show I mean "if there's a sensible reason that you're confident that you're breaking the law..."

This is just wrong about fair use.   Using something educationally does not automatically qualify for fair use.  Sharing a text in its  entirety probably is not fair use.

@ScottSeidman Isn't that what I wrote? Paragraph 5, sentence 1: "But sharing a whole work is not usually considered fair use." Also the entirety of paragraph 3. But if you got some other message from it, then I should clarify. I've replaced "Firstly, educational use is protected under the first fair use consideration of copyright law." with "...educational use can be protected..." - lemme know if that helps.

The ethical and legal concepts have been covered already. A solution to this is to request for the book, or a few copies of it, to be stocked in your university library. Students are able to photocopy a few pages at a time out of a library book, and even if not, it can be simply marked as a library read-only/un-loanable book, making it accessible to all students to read at any point.

My guess is your professor colleague knew the pros and cons of what he or she was doing, including the downstream implications. The later publisher would have understood the situation too. Dust in the wind.

You don't actually answer the question.

@Buffy I suspect that the implied answer is: don't care and distribute the copy.

Actually, if this was the professor's first experience doing such a thing (combination of download and publish/sell), they might very well not have known the pros & cons, and made a change later when they understood the business better.

@MassimoOrtolano And that implied answer is why I just downvoted it. Advice which says "you can break any law you like, if you think you won't get caught" is never good advice!

Definitely a fun range of comments here. "Don't care" and "break any law": interesting inferences for sure! Now if the OP said the original doc carried the standard notice that "Redistribution of this work is prohibited," well that would change my mind considerably.

@Aruralreader Redistribution is prohibited by default through copyright law. It doesn't need a notice.

A very good point @JoL! In that case it's a legal, not ethical, matter and rightly so. I ought to have added my two cents that the professional  and considerate way to handle the situation in the first place would have been to contact the original author. Or short of that, as you suggest, the copyright holder. I was simply crediting the original author with being an adult with knowledge of how things work on the internet. It would be interesting to see if it got slurped into the Wayback Machine.


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Time/work management resources for leadership role
I recently started a leadership role in a research institute, where I am responsible for supervising PhD students, obtaining funding and doing my own research. I'm struggling with time management/workload balance. Time management has never been my strong point but I've always been able to get by. Now I feel like I will underperform if I don't find ways to be more efficient.
My goal with this post is to know how others have been able to improve in this area and if they could recommend any resources like books or other material online.
Some of my current difficulties are:

Prioritizing work. I'm naturally drawn to doing research by myself as this was my MO for many years. As a  consequence, I postpone working on proposals and catching up with students.
I have a to-do list but it has become so big that now it looks more like a 'to-do-at-some-point-in-the-future' list that is extremely hard to trim down. Everything feels like a priority. Moreover, I cannot function well if I spend a workday working towards ticking items of a list. I need my daily dose of deep thinking about a topic or problem.
I find it very difficult to design a work plan for a given week or day and tend to react instead of preparing things in advance. The problem here is that I feel very comfortable working on open-ended topics where I can explore at will without strict goals or constraints. This has worked wonderfully in my research but I believe this preference is not suitable for a role where I have non-research responsibilities.

Other things might come to mind as I see replies but generally I think my problem is how to manage priorities in a way that I can feel like I have things under control. I think many of my problems are very academia-specific so I hope others can relate.

I don't really have an answer for you, but I just wanted to note that an expectation to be able to reserve multiple hours of "deep thinking about your own research" time every day might simply not be realistic anymore in your current position. In a leadership position you may simply have to accept that your normal work day is more focused on enabling others (writing grant proposals, meeting with students) than pushing forward your personal project(s).

Time management can help with that, but it only helps so much. It can't magically create time if your management tasks already add up to (almost) a full work day.

Does your employer offer any professional development trainings?

That's a good point @PieterNaaijkens, I should check that out. I've attended a few trainings on personnel management, team management, etc but nothing on personal management. There must be something available.

Unfortunately, I don't have links to good books or online references, but I can describe some of the tactics that I (as a tenured faculty and low-ranking university admin) use to deal with these issues. None of them works perfectly, but they work better than what I used to do - and what you also seem to do (have a big list of "stuff" that needs to be handled, pick every day what to work on, and get increasingly more frustrated that the list grows rather than shrinks).
Rigorously use your calendar as a time planning tool
My Outlook calendar is the front and center of my time planning. I have meetings in there (obviously), but I also reserve time blocks for all non-trivial tasks I have to work on. I map these out days, sometimes weeks or even months, ahead of time, so that every day when I get to work I have a clear idea what I will do that work day. I generally strive that all tasks in my TODO list that have some specific deadline also have a reservation in my calendar when I will do them.
Of course this works better for more concrete, short-term work ("do XYZ review") than ongoing research, but even there I try to break it down into meaningful TODOs and I schedule them. Even if I can't break down a research project into specific TODOs yet, I still create a TODO that essentially boils down to "think about project X". Like you, I need significant uninterrupted time to do anything meaningful, and this tactic allows me to schedule things in a way that I have enough consecutive time to make progress.
This also helps my anxiety a lot - I find it easier to fully dedicate my mental energy on work on project X knowing that there is specific time reserved to work on project Y, and it's ok if I don't think about Y at all this week. Further, this way I am able to give more concrete estimates to students or staff when they need something from me, since I will schedule their task in my calendar and have  an idea when I can realistically get to it.
Re-Planning is Normal (but needs to be done consistently)
Of course your initial plan will often not work out. Sometimes short-term tasks that come in need to be prioritized over what you initially wanted to do, and sometimes things just take longer than anticipated (though I usually reserve conservative time blocks to make this not likely). This is fine, even expected, but you should adapt your planning religiously whenever it happens - move all blocks you had to skip today to somewhere else in your time plan, potentially moving other blocks around as required to make all deadlines meet. This sounds tedious, but is really not a big deal most of the time.
The most important thing is to not get into a habit of planning and then just silently doing other stuff instead. Once you get to that point your time plan essentially becomes a waste of time.
Prune Your TODO List (and learn to say no)
Once you start mapping out when you do which tasks, it might turn out that there simply isn't enough time to do everything, at least not yourself, in high quality, and on time. As a manager, part of your job is also to delegate some tasks - and this will include tasks that you yourself could do faster or better than the person you delegate it to. Further, not everything that needs to be done needs to be done well - sometimes it's simply better to do a half-assed job at something unimportant (and get it off your TODO list) than to never do it at all.
Finally, some tasks simply need to be pruned. In addition to my actual TODO list (the tasks I plan to do in the next days or weeks, and have reserved time for) I also have a "backburner" list where I keep all the things I wanted to do eventually but never quite found the time. It feels better to me to say I move a project to the backburner than to delete it entirely, even if quite frankly tasks rarely make it back from the backburner to the "actually do" TODO list. In any case, I try to keep my actual TODO list tidy and only containing things I know I will eventually (have to) do.
Similar to the time planning, I feel it defeats the purpose of a TODO list if it routinely contains stuff that you, deep in your heart, know you are never going to actually do. At that point it stops being a useful tool for time management and just becomes a daily reminder for you telling you how far behind you are and where you have dropped the ball.
Going forward, your schedule based time planning also allows you to assess if you actually have time for a specific task - and to say no if you can already tell that you won't have time to contribute to a project, do a review, or serve in a committee. That's another thing one needs to learn as a manager - you simply won't have time to do everything that sounds interesting or important, sometimes you just have to say no. Your time plan should help you decide when these times are.
Tools
I don't use a lot of high tech for this workflow - my Outlook calendar for time planning and Trello to manage my TODO list. Some people have suggested that a pen-and-paper based solution works better for them, but to me the ease with which you can re-plan and move things around in a digital tool is way too important.
Some parting remarks
That all being said, I believe part of your problem may be that your expectation of having hours and hours of uninterrupted thinking time and loads of time to progress your personal projects may simply not be consistent anymore with your position. Even the best time planning cannot create time out of thin air, and you may find that you simply have to scale back some of your personal projects to make time to adequately handle your management responsibilities and supervise your students.
This may initially feel difficult and unfulfilling, but in my experience this feeling is fleeting - after not too much time, one learns to generate job satisfaction from helping others achieve their goals (even at the expense of not being able to fully focus on research yourself anymore).

Thanks for going to such great lengths to give a helpful answer. Your suggestions are very sound. What you say makes a lot of sense and, indeed, I probably still have some calibration to do when it comes to expectations about the role.

In my organization Outlook shows the calendar slots that one has booked to everyone. I suppose if I use Outlook to apply your suggestions everyone will see me as 'busy' all the time, which is not the case because those 'focused work' slots are flexible. I wonder if there's a trivial solution to this that's not having to use yet another tool.

@kalman-man That's an intended sideeffect. If you want to get any focused work time in in a management position you cannot see research slots as a free-for-all for any disturbances. Establish a process how and when people can raise urgent issues. For me Slack works well - I check it often, but it's easy to turn off / put on the other monitor if I want to focus (and there is a function to remind me of a message in one hour, two hours, or next morning, which is an essential part of my workflow).


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How should I refer to a professor as a undergrad TA?
I just got hired for a TA role as an undergrad. Normally, I would refer to a professor as Professor LastName if I'm talking to them in a "professor" capacity, or as Dr. LastName if talking to them in any other capacity. However, given the closer role I will have this semester, and that many grad students (all the other TAs) generally call professors by their first name, I'm unsure of what proper etiquette should be.
I know generally asking is the best solution, but there are very few times where the professor stands on their ego enough to say "you must call me by my title", even if they prefer the title to their first name. The prof in question is particularly prone to this sort of behavior (based on hearsay), hence the reluctance to email.
To clarify some comments, I normally stick to calling any professor by their title. However, every other TA is calling the professor by first name (although they are all part of his group). The entire situation of an undergrad being a TA is unusual enough. I don't have the familiarity with the prof that the other TAs have, but it also feels awkward to be the only person calling the professor by their title.

You answer your own question when you say (I think rightly): "...there are very few times where the professor stands on his ego enough to say "you must call me by my title" even if they prefer the title to their first name." The most natural course is then to default to calling them by a formal title and waiting for them to correct you to something more informal. If they never do, then just keep using the formal title. Also look for how they sign emails that are sent only to you. If they sign with just their first name, it's a signal that they are OK with you referring to them in that way.

Your country? In mine (and I have a hard time imaginig where this strategy could be wrong), you'd use the formal form until invited otherwise. Or ask the other TAs how they do it...

There are plenty of reasons besides ego for a professor to express the preference that people call them by their title. But even if it were ego that motivated that preference: is it so important to you not to do so that you would want to irritate an egotistical person in charge of your job?

knowing your country is definitely necessary information here because these sorts of cultural questions vary hugely. In fact, what even constitutes a "professor" is very different in the UK & US ("professor" in the UK sense only really refers to the equivalent of tenured professors in the US, with everyone else having a variety of other job titles but generally being "doctor Smith" rather than "professor Smith")

Just to stress how much it varies: I'd actively correct anybody who called me "sir" or "professor" (they're both strictly incorrect), and would be rather weirded out by any coworker (which a TA is, regardless of their other status) calling me "doctor" (or for that matter anything other than my first name) unless they were introducing a talk that I was giving.

At first glance I thought you wrote "underground TA". It sounded like a new low in reality shows.

Anyway I don't see my comment any longer.

This has a cultural element so it varies. Some places tend to be quite formal and others not so. My perspective is the US.
But as an undergrad you probably shouldn't make assumptions and use a title until told otherwise. Of course, you can also ask.
I normally expected my undergrad and even master's students to be fairly formal as I think a certain separation is helpful to them since it is occasionally necessary to be an authority figure. But I accepted things like "doc" or Dr. B" from those who worked closely with me.
When I was in the PhD program I was the only one who called many of the faculty by their first names (not my advisor, though). My fellow students (also TAs) were all more formal, but I was a special case, joining at an older age with a young faculty. I insisted my own doctoral students called me by my given name. But many of them resisted, wanting to be more formal.
But, if you are working closely with a faculty member it is good to just ask.

Was this in a mathematics department? I am quite surprised, when I was doing my math ph.D. in the US I don't think I ever met a ph.D. student that was not on first name terms with their advisor...

@DenisNardin, yes, math. But my advisor was a very reserved and distinguished older European (Czech) man. And quite a while ago, also. Your profile pic suggests a quite different generation.

Thank you for the good advice, Dr. Buffy!

In my environment (Italy, engineering university), I would expect students to refer formally to me as "prof. X". In many cases (PhD students, master thesis students that I supervise, etc.) I will ask them to call me by first name.
So, my suggestion is: start formally, unless the professor tells you otherwise.

I'd recommend simply asking. "Excuse me, I don't want to be rude at any point, but how would you like us TAs/me to refer to you?" I've done this before and it's perfectly fine.

This is an extended "specify the country" comment, but as it expands the perspective of the two answers I see, here we go. The question is country-, discipline-, and also community-specific. Across Europe, there are maths faculties in which "Professor X", or even "sir" will ring too formal, and there are those where omitting the whole "your excellency the archchancellor" just once may rub someone the wrong way. It also sometimes happens that a direct question "how should I address you" may put the person in question in an uncomfortable position, especially if they are socially awkward (and I do know such rare extreme cases among mathematicians, but this is something rather easy to spot), making for a bad first impression.
If that would be the case, or if you feel that in your environment defaulting to the professor's full title is not the way to go, I would advice to observe other people in your position at your faculty, and ask them about it. You note that other TAs are older, but they will have more insight in what's done and what's not than we could: you can't go wrong following the local norm, the keyword being local.
Also, let me say that in my language the professor/doctor lost most of its teacher/scientist distinctions that your question implies, and instead convey seniority -  and thus a misplaced "doctor" may be (mis)construed as an affront. But clearly your environment is different, so I wouldn't worry about that layer of complication.

Are you sure “sir” is used anywhere in European academia? To me this has a ring of either American military superior, or British knighthood.

"Sir" is in common use in schools in the UK to address a male teacher. "Sir [Name]" would imply they're a knight, but just "sir" comes across as a generic respectful address to someone senior to you. It's related to the military-superior use, but it's used in somewhat formal contexts - some schools, staff speaking to customers in some shops, hotels and restaurants, and so on.
I'd be more surprised to see that at the university level than in primary or secondary education, but there may well be countries with more formal norms that use that kind of language for university teaching staff.

'Maybe for once someone will call me "sir" without adding, "You're making a scene."'

This is what I normally do, but the situation of having an undergrad TA is extremely unusual. All other TAs are part of the professor's group. Please see the last paragraph in the question for more details. I think what happened was that the professor's class is too large for only his group to manage, so they reached out to someone else (me). As to why they chose me over any other student, grad or undergrad, I can only speculate (perhaps vainly).

My understanding is that in UK English sir is used where in other languages one uses the respectful pronoun (e.g. Sie in German, lei in Italian, vous in French etc.)

Be careful with "Sir" in the UK. It is sometimes used as an insult to people who neither have a position of authority, nor deserve any respect at all. When I was at Cambridge in the UK, non-academic college and university staff often used it as an insult.

Be formal with Dr or Professor until they tell you to use their first name.

There are some deeply rooted prejudices that may be at play, depending on your discipline, so it's best to just ask what they prefer.
Start from information given by the professor. How do they sign their emails? If they sign them "Firstname", you should ask if it's ok to address them as "Firstname".


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Mailing address for retired people in teaching applications
I am applying to be a lecturer, where most of my references are professional references. I am being asked for a mailing address for references. Professionally, it seems awkward to ask for someone's mailing address. I understand this is easy in academia, as one can put down the department address. Similarly, I can put work addresses for professional references. However, a few references have since retired. What can I do in this situation?

Some universities (mine) leave email in place for retirees.

@Buffy the question asks about "mailing address for references" and seems to be snail mail.

Your references should all have mailing addresses at which they receive professional correspondence. You can ask them for that information without any awkwardness.

A couple have since retired. What would I do there?

@user760900 Ask them what address they'd like you to provide for this purpose. It's normal for people to receive mail.

Many retired academics keep their university email address. Try that. If you can't find an address, ask their old department if they can give you updated contact information. This might include physical mail addresses.
Many retired academics still have a web presence and a web search may turn them up.
But you shouldn't be listing references that you haven't already contacted, so you should have some means of asking them what to do. They will supply an address if they choose to.


text:
Is it even useful to report cheating anymore?
I'm taking my 8th course since the Covid-19 shutdown of universities has forced everyone to come home. When looking up stuff, I have inevitably come across almost all the questions from psets, quizzes, tests, etc posted to Chegg, where I presume other students are cheating. I am 100% sure these are from the current term's class questions, as the questions are usually rewritten every term by the profs in my department and are posted as a picture, so sometimes one can even see the header for the current term (not to mention the picture is directly of the question paper). I think at this point it is a fair assumption to make that there is cheating going on.
In my first 7 courses, I reported this, to varying degrees of success. All the professors tried to address this, but some basically told me even they couldn't do much about it. Even after the "mass cleansing" that happened after each of these reports, almost every question I searched about could be found on Chegg.
My 8th course just started and I'm already seeing questions on Chegg. I understand the professor's predicament of them not being able to do anything and don't want to become the student constantly pointing out flaws in their enforcement of academic misconduct (as doing this would probably cause the prof to grow to resent me through misattribution of arousal). However, it's extremely frustrating to slog out a class and be working 16 hour days when others are cheating their way through a course (not to mention destroying the curve, making it even harder for me).
At this point, does it even make sense to report this to the prof?
I phrased the question title as such because I suspect many others are going through the same problem during Covid-19

You aren't reporting cheating.  You are reporting the opportunity to cheat.  This is very different.

You were right to report it, but after a few reports they probably got the point. Stop comparing to others and keep studying instead of cheating, it will pay off in the long run because you learn something and cheaters don't

@AnonymousPhysicist I mean someone has to post it and I think it's fair to say that that given the post (and the post's intention) and given the opportunity to cheat, the person in question is probably cheating.

@Louic I don't report any more than once per class, but it is still somewhat frustrating

I don't know that the person who intends to cheat is at your university.  You might know that.  In any case, if you can't identify them it's not particularly helpful to report it.

@AnonymousPhysicist To answer your question, the question is directly off the question paper usually (sometimes even with the current semester and teacher name there) and most of my profs write their own questions. But thank you for the advice.

Please edit the question to be clearer.

@AnonymousPhysicist You might be surprised how many naïve professors there are. I think he should definitely report it to raise awareness about how cheating works in 2020

@Louic and you might be surprised at how many of us also sat the student side of the desk. I had a student complain that she had a different mark to her friend who she copied off - her friend had all correct and she was most upset that I had changed the order of the answers on her version. I did not have to say anything - the rest of the class were laughing so hard....

Why are you looking up stuff on Chegg? Isn't that cheating?

@shoover if I look something up that has wording similar to the question, the chegg link will come up (usually high in the Google results). If I click it out of curiosity, I can see the question (as described above)

Presumably you're looking up "questions from psets, quizzes, tests, etc" after the "psets, quizzes, tests, etc" are over.

@shoover of course, unless allowed otherwise. For example, I am allowed to look up help on psets, but I am not allowed to have someone else do my work or copy the work directly off someone. Thus, I may look up a concept that I am having trouble with, but if my phrasing is specific to the class (ex. the class has a slightly different name for a common term), the chegg results come up first.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: When students cheat on exams, it's because our school system values grades more than students value learning.

Some relevant Math Educators posts about Chegg and cheating: 1, 2, 3

In general it is useful to report cheating.  Some institutions require students to report it.
In this case, however, you do not know who cheated and faculty have already made reasonable efforts to make cheating harder.  The information you are providing is not doing anything to reduce cheating, so you can stop reporting it.

Someone who has used Chegg might have more information.


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Returning to academia after long break with new research topics
I am currently out of academia but I would like to return to university and start as a
postdoc.
It is more than 5 years ago when I finished my PhD in mathematics (algebraic geometry)
at a very weak British university. Despite my efforts, I was not able to find a postdoc
position. From the beginning of my PhD, I did not like my research. Furthermore, the area
my PhD thesis belongs to is quite isolated. I made one publication in a journal which
is rather at a medium level.
Now I have a very interesting research topic I can work on together with another
professor, but in a completely different field. It lies in the area of mathematical
physics. I must add that there is no financial support for this project, so
I have to invest a lot of my personal time into it. My questions are:
Does it make sense to start working on my research topic and later at some point
(for example, when I have enough results with one publication) start to apply for a
postdoc position?
Is it reallistic to get a postdoc position a few years after the PhD but with a research
topic different from the PhD thesis?
I am concerned because of the folllowing things: my main concern is my age. I am nearly
40 years old. There are universities which take this issue into consideration although
officially they would never admit it. In particular, German universities do so. Secondly,
my PhD degree from a weak university does not favor an application for postdoc positions
not to mention a permanent position. Thirdly, I expect that universities will reject
postdocs who have such a big gap in their CV.
Here is some background: I did my undergraduate degree in Germany with an excellent grade.
Unfortunately, I could not find a PhD position in Germany, so I applied to some British
universities. At that time, I did not know that the British university system is
completely different from the German one. So it happened, that I arrived at a weak
university. I was not able to leave it because I could not get any recommendation letters
to start new applications. Although my PhD advisor knew that I do not fit into this
university he did not warn me. Moreover, he was telling me a lot of lies to make me stay
there. It was unbearable. I would have left this university if I could.
After my PhD, he did not help me to find a postdoc position. The only thing that he
did was telling me that there are no postdoc positions and that students who graduated
from strong universities like Cambridge have better chances on the academic market.
This was very frustrating.
I applied to many universities, even outside Europe but not a single application was
successful. Even my applications for different kinds of fellowships failed. It was very
difficult (and still is) for me to figure out what are the important things for a
succesfull application for someone who is in my situation.
Any advice is welcome.

The UK might be an exception because there is a plan for a significant increase in research funding for mathematics (though who knows how national research budgets will change in the next few months), but you should assume that there are no academic jobs with a significant research component for mathematicians who do not have multiple papers that are or are likely to be published in good journals (the top specialist journal(s) in your subfield or a reasonably good generalist journal).  (This isn't quite true, but it's close - in particular, some subsubfields of mathematical physics are known for very long and substantial papers, so one very good paper may do.)
In particular, the job market now is more competitive than it was five years ago.
I wouldn't worry about the age factor or the time after PhD, but do consider the chance that the research will actually result in two very good papers.


text:
Extended paper - should I keep someone who virtually had no contribution?
I had a paper accepted at a conference and want to extend it with some new material based on the comments and submit it to a journal.
One of the co-authors was added to the conference paper because he was the head of the group where I was working. His contribution were textual suggestions to the manuscript. We have since split ways and he has no influence whatsoever in the extension. Again, he had little influence in the conference version and I added him mostly to avoid conflict, since these days people expect co-authorship based on their position.
Since he did not contribute neither to the conference version nor to the journal extension (and he has no position of authority over me anymore), I do not want to add him to the list of authors in the extended journal version. How acceptable/unacceptable is this?

Beside him, Do you have other co-authors? Have you talked to them about it? what was their opinion?

Yes, all colleagues at the same level as myself in the hierarchy. They're all against including the PI, they even didn't want me to include him in the conference version (as I said, I did it because of politics and because he was still there when the idea was being cooked -- by me). We all had problems in the past with the PI regarding undeserved authorships.

Probably best to ask your other co-authors and garner their advice. The answer is mainly political rather than set in stone.

In all journals (CS/AI) I’ve worked with you need all authors of the conference paper(s) on which the journal version is based on to agree on the author list in the journal version. Some editors will just not allow a paper to be accepted before explicit consent has been obtained.
It is also unfair to an extent towards this professor. Think about this professor’s perspective: they may believe their contribution was much greater than just some textual edits, and once they realize that you submitted a version without their knowledge or consent, they’ll just email the editor and the paper will not go through to publication before it’s all sorted out.
I suggest you email the professor, tell them your plan, and whether they’d like to still be written as a coauthor. Most people would get the hint. Even if they’d still want to be included then there’s not much you can do about it: you should have established authorship in the conference version.

Publish it under your name and those who provide actual assistance.
If that head has no input to this further paper and you are not part of that team or lab then they do not belong as an author.
This does not prevent you referencing the previous paper.

the extended paper will have about 70% of the content of the original (conference) paper, does this change your view? My dilemma is that this person might claim to have contributed to the conference paper and freak out because of not being in the extension.
And of course I will cite the previous paper along the lines of "this paper extends the preliminary results published in [ref], by..."

If th subsequent paper is 70% of the original then it does not sound like it is sufficiently different... I the original content is 30% then that seems more suitable, but that is my opinion.  A subsequent paper should show marked progress from the original, but the editor may be ok with that.

sorry my bad! I meant that 70% of the extended paper will be almost identical to the conference paper. The remaining 30% will be new material.

@SolarMike 30% new material is standard for extended journal versions of CS conference papers.

@JeffE so is that only CS, is the OP in CS? or another field, will 30% be relevant then?

@SolarMike OP writing about having a paper accepted to a conference and quoting the standard 30% figure both strongly suggest that OP is indeed in CS, or near enough for the 30% standard to apply.  (Of course, I'm happy to be corrected.)

This is an interesting question which has two aspects that I would like to address

You awarded your old PI an authorship when it was not deserved.

While I understand your reasons for doing this, you should avoid doing this in the future.
Instead you should always have a meeting with your coworkers where you discuss who should be first author, second author, etc. and who should contribute what.
Ideally, the ordering of the authors should be settled well before first draft appears. If someone make a smaller or larger contribution than expected, then the ordering can be renegotiated.
This is though to pull off especially when the distribution of power is uneven, but try to take the lead: "I have this idea which I would like to develop into a paper. I think you are ideally suited to complete this important task. Do you have the time to make this contribution to a joint paper during the next two months?"

It appears that you neglected to invite your old PI to contribute to the extended paper.

Again, while I can understand your reasons for doing this, a third party might view things differently.
It is possible to argue that you have tried to deny your old PI credit for your past work.
This is less of an issue if the new paper not only cites the old paper but make a new and very significant contribution.
Moreover, if your old PI has declined to collaborate citing, say, time constraints, then this issue evaporates completely.
Now in your current position I would cite the old paper and ensure that the new paper makes a new and very substantial contribution. I would only award authorship according to the criteria suggested by the ICMJE:
"Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND Final approval of the version to be published; AND Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged."
Visit the ICMJE website for additional information.


text:
Percentage of tenure track positions promoted to full professors
I wonder if there are statistics on the overall percentage of people promoted from tenure track positions (assistant professor) to full professor in fields like mathematics and science (first-rate institution is OK).

Closely related, maybe duplicate: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/34924/what-is-the-promotion-rate-of-professors-in-united-states/43544#43544 and https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/568/what-percent-of-assistant-professors-generally-receive-tenure-and-how-does-this

Both do not tell the exact statistics. Maybe there are not any.

The percentage itself has little value. Say something about why you want such information and you might get more informative answers. The percentage means very little in any individual situation, I think.

Nothing special, just for curiosity. I believe the rate is much low nowadays than that of 20 years ago because the conditions have been much improved in university

Highly variable. Top universities often have a lower percentage who are promoted in place, but those missing out there often are tenured elsewhere.

Of course, top universities have high competition and so lower rate of promotion. Often very top departments find most full professors elsewhere, and rarely promote their own assistant (associate) professors to full level.

See my answer here https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/25949/what-books-biographies-or-survival-guides-are-helpful-for-men-in-education-in/25983#25983 the data for the UK are collected by hesa

it stands to reason that as jobs get harder to get, so do promotions, as schools can just keep raising the bar everywhere.

It depends a lot on university and country as well. In some European countries, many successful academics retire at the level of associate professor. I don't think this can be answered in the abstract.

Do you actually mean "get tenure", or do you actually care specifically about further promotion beyond tenure? In the U.S., as many people here know, but not everyone, most assoc. prof. positions in the U.S. are "with tenure", while few assist. prof. positions are. So the genuine question might be more like "how many people who get a tenure-track position do get tenure?" Or is that not the point?

I'd like to know both, i.e. percentages of assistant profs who get tenure as well as those who get to full profs.

Of course, top universities have high competition and so lower rate of promotion — [citation needed]!

Ivy league school, Stanford, MIT, Yale, U Chicago, Caltech and etc, normally find full professors elsewhere, and rarely promote their own assistant (associate) professors to full level. In other words, you have to be internationally established before being appointed as full professors at these institutions.


text:
Should online notes be cited in reference of paper for publication?
I find that some lecture notes available online as well as some websites (e.g. wiki) provide important sources of information for various scientific fields (e.g. mathematics), and are sometimes better than officially published papers or books in certain senses.
My question is that if I write a paper for official publication, can I cite them in the reference of the paper? If so, what is the format to cite them? For examples, to cite an online lecture note, may I simply write as preprint, or have to add the weblink to the note? For web sources, may I add weblinks of the websites to be cited?
For example, is it valid to cite something like: "P Schlicht. Lecture Note: A Introduction to Model Theory, Online...(or Preprint...), 2018"?
I think there is no need to add the actual link to it because the link can be changed later.
Edit:  This question is different from the suggested question for duplicate because I ask also what is the format to cite online notes and websites.

mostly online notes provide references in the last page. you can cite from there

It's far more important to be precise and clear than to follow a rigid format.  Make a good faith effort; if the copy editor cares, they'll fix whatever they think is wrong. Readers won't care.

@JeffE, do you think the example in the post is valid or not?

You're missing a URL; otherwise it looks fine to me (assuming the actual title of the document begins "Lecture Note:").  But I'm not the person you have to please.

But a URL can be changed later, e.g.if a person is moving to another institution.

There is no precise, universal format. More important is that relevant information can be given, such as where (=url) and when (=date uploaded) you found it. Of course, the author. Do not change the name the author gave it. The fact that the URL may change later is not your direct concern, and is not a reason not to give the location where you found it.

If the notes in question could be added to the Internet Archive, then one could cite that specific version.

From a historical perspective, citations like 'personal communication', 'unpublished manuscript', 'in preparation', 'to appear' (but never do) are not that rare, and much worse for the purposes of readers even being able to check the source!

Since URLs can be changed, it is better to search the lecture note by its name.


text:
Can hiring committee directly contact editors of journals
Normally, a hiring committee gets references from those an applicant provides to them. However, in some cases, I wonder if a hiring committee can directly contact the editor of a journal who is in charge of the paper of the applicant.
I think this can happen if the paper of the applicant is still under review and the editor has yet to reach a decision. In this case, the applicant can not have the editor of his paper as a reference if he does not know him, but the hiring committee can not wait and want to contact the editor directly for the quality of the paper. Maybe the hiring committee needs to find an acquaintance of the editor in order to know his opinion on the paper.
Any thought on the above scenario?

I cannot imagine a hiring committee going to the trouble of contacting an editor for an opinion  on a submitted paper. Nor can I imagine an editor responding.

A hiring committee can find an acquaintance of the editor to know their opinion, right?

Why would a journal editor be a reference for, well, anything in a hiring process?

Suppose a hiring committee wants to know the quality of a paper to decide whether hire the paper's author or not.

I’m voting to close this question because you seem to be arguing in the comments that you are really looking for a way to have a submitted paper (yours?) evaluated by a hiring committee. That's not an answerable question.

@Ethan Bolker, I do not want to have a submitted paper evaluated by a hiring committee. But I run into the problem described above, i.e. what happens to a paper that is important but can not be fully verified at the moment.

My feeling is that if a single paper is sufficiently good (significant, important, etc.) to make a nontrivial difference in the hiring of someone, then this should already be clear from the letters of recommendation, from grapevine word-of-mouth in the field, etc. Trying to explicitly call attention to the paper in such a way as you suggest would be a red flag to me. In general, there are many, many more aspects about the suitability of a candidate than something like this.

What I am talking about could be a (very) rare case and generally nonexistent. Suppose someone has an important (great) paper but can not be fully verified in a short period of time, then few people can understand and so can not state it the letter of recommendation. But if the hiring committee likes it (very much) and can not wait because other institutions may make an offer, then it probably takes chance and makes an offer first. Before doing that, contacting the editor of the paper becomes a real possibility.

Suppose someone has an important (great) paper --- I suspect hiring committees are primarily interested in the likelihood of the candidate continuing to produce important papers after being hired. Having such a paper before being hired helps suggest this, but if nothing else about the candidate also suggests this, then how do they know you didn't just get lucky in some way? Incidentally, this all assumes that the position being hired for is mainly to "write important papers", not to teach courses, advise students, serve on committees, contribute to ongoing departmental research, etc.

I am talking about a (endowment) chair position and so it is mainly on research, not much else.

I have never seen this happen and I can't imagine it happening either, because unless the journal editor is an expert on the exact topic (not likely), they are not especially qualified to comment on the quality of the paper. The most they can say is that the reviewers think [XYZ], and even then, the real review happens after publication.
That said, the contact information of journal editors is usually publicly available, so hiring committees can contact them. It's just that I don't see them doing it.

For "the real review happens after publication", what happens if a paper can not be fully verified for publication (this means the paper can not be published) but its importance is evident?

@hermes I don't understand. What do you mean by "can not be fully verified for publication (this means the paper can not be published)"? If the paper cannot be published because it is incorrect, then its importance is kind of irrelevant.

Sometimes people know a paper is of great importance (or potential) but they can not verify every detail of the paper because it is either too new or too hard so that no referees can be found.

This can happen (often). So a paper that cannot be published does mean it is incorrect or not important, which should be common sense.

@hermes are you referring to math papers? For the fields I'm familiar with the bar for publication is not that high. If you are referring to math papers, then my understanding is the paper is not published until review is done, and in the meantime the preprint is available. Contacting the editor then is still not helpful, because the editor doesn't know if the paper is good either.

@ Allure, yes, I am referring to papers in mathematics and other highly sophisticated fields, not ordinary ones.

Sometimes an editor should know the importance of the paper he is in charge of.

@hermes sounds improbable - a paper could deal with a very important topic, but if one cannot verify that the paper is correct, then the fact that the paper deals with a very important topic is irrelevant. It could be wrong, after all. E.g. there are plenty of wrong papers dealing with whether P = NP. Would you call them important?

@ Allure, that depends on the type of problems. In the proof of a conjecture, everything has to be verified because it can be declared true or important. But if the work is a theory (involving some philosophy), it often can not be verified every step. However, we can know it is important or not by intuition or something else.

@hermes but then the paper would be published wouldn't it? In the same way the papers on General Relativity, MOND, etc were published even though the theory wasn't (still aren't) fully verified. I cannot understand what you are writing; maybe a mathematician can answer.

@ Allure, that answers your claim "but if one cannot verify that the paper is correct, then the fact that the paper deals with a very important topic is irrelevant. ". So a paper can be published and deemed important without all of its detail being verified. You got a good example of relativity.

@hermes then the paper is published, there is still no "if a paper can not be fully verified for publication (this means the paper can not be published)", and the question that you asked in the OP doesn't arise. I still do not understand what you are writing.

@ Allure,  I mean that if some papers can not be fully verified for publication, then they can not be published. It does not hold for all papers. Note that there is "what happens if" before the sentence.


text:
Can I cite a thesis in a paper?
I wonder if I can cite an unpublished thesis (Ph.D or Master) in a research paper. If so, how do I do it? Should I also include a link to the thesis?

Related and maybe duplicate: Can I cite an unpublished Master Thesis?

@Anyon, yes, this solve it.

Assuming it isn't formally published, then the citation would probably include the university instead of the publisher. Otherwise the same.
Links are always a problem since they are subject to disappearance. It is good to also include the date that you last referenced it there with any link(s).
And yes, you need to cite it to avoid various plagiarism issues.

How to cite
browsing the list of bibtex entry types, we find:

masterthesis
A thesis written for the Master’s level degree.
@mastersthesis{CitekeyMastersthesis,
  author  = "Jian Tang",
  title   = "Spin structure of the nucleon in the asymptotic limit",
  school  = "Massachusetts Institute of Technology",
  year    = 1996,
  address = "Cambridge, MA",
  month   = sep
}

Whether to cite
When deciding if to cite something, the most essential question is: Are you borrowing an idea from that work? If yes, then you should usually cite it as to avoid plagiarism. You do not need citations for things that are common knowledge (though what counts as common knowledge may depend on your field and the audience you are publishing for).
Specificly concerning an unpublished thesis, I quote from this answer:

Just because it's not published doesn't preclude being able to cite
it. You can't not cite the thesis if you're taking information from
it!
The degree-granting institution should perpetually retain copies in
its library, and most universities these days store PDF copies as
well. A copy may be harder to track down, but a determined reader
should have no enormous difficulty in getting a copy of the thesis.


text:
What should I do after the acceptance of a paper in supercomputing (Springer journal)?
One week ago, my paper has been accepted and I received the following email:
You will be contacted about proofs and offprints in due course by our Manufacturing Department.

What should I do ? and it take time to publish my paper ?

All you need do is wait to be contacted. Yes it takes time.

Of course it takes time to publish your paper.

Celebrate or get ready to pay the publication fees, or both.

As mentioned in the previous answers. Now that your paper has been accepted, all you have to do is wait. If you are wondering about the time it takes to publish a paper after acceptance, you can get an approximate idea by visiting the journal website and checking the public record of a dozen of published papers. That is, the time between Accepted and Published.


text:
Publish a paper with flaws, improve it, or let it go?
As a PI, I have quite a few projects that have gone nowhere. For some of these projects, I have submitted a manuscript that has been rejected. In others, I have written portions of a manuscript, but feel like the results are rather inconclusive. I could submit these manuscripts as they are, but I find it difficult to write papers with inconclusive results (there's no story to tell). It feels unethical to resubmit papers where I have not addressed the flaws pointed out by the reviewers. I suppose I can just be as upfront as possible about the flaws, but this also takes some time and finesse. It seems like the amount of time I'd have to put into these manuscripts to address the flaws would be better spent on projects that are working and have promising results.
My grad school advisor seemed to be of the mindset that you should just keep revising and resubmitting a manuscript until it gets accepted. I sometimes felt like he was succumbing to a sunk cost fallacy and that the time we put into rescuing these projects wasn't worth it. There's also the argument that you should publish any work you do, even dead ends, because it will avoid duplication and save other people time. But putting anything in a publishable form takes time and effort, which takes away from other projects. What is the opinion of the community on these issues?
Another complication can be the involvement of others in the project (students, technicians), who would like to have a better publication record. However, in many cases, it might be faster to make them part of a better, more promising project than to dump time into a project that isn't working.
I'm trying to be more choosy about the projects I take on in the future to avoid this dilemma, but it's hard to know where a project will go. I'd like some advice on how to handle such projects/unpublished manuscripts. Just submit them to a preprint server and forget about them? Submit them to journals that have a low enough bar? How do you decide whether work is worth salvaging?

My thoughts on

How do you decide whether work is worth salvaging?

I think a better question is how to salvage, not how to decide whether to salvage.
You even suggest some possibilities

If the referees' reports suggest changes that you think make sense
then the review process is working. Make the changes and resubmit,
there or elsewhere.
Clean up some obvious bad places and post as a preprint.
Incorporate the good parts in another project.
Some dead ends should be acknowledged as such - and published. See What to do when you spend several months working on an idea that fails in a masters thesis?
Maybe the referees were right to reject. I have two manuscripts from
years ago that I never reworked or resubmitted.

All papers have flaws, and all papers can be improved.  The minimal criterion for whether to toss it or work on it is whether or not it provides any new information, however minimal.  If it does, then you need only adjust your expectations on the quality of the journal.

In order to decide whether to write up and publish a project as a preprint and/or journal article, you may ask yourself a few questions:

Would it be interesting to give a talk on that material?

Should the results be mentioned in review articles on the subject?

If the article you consider writing had existed before you embarked in the project, would you have read it, and would it have influenced your work?