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How was the Doctorate/PhD title awarded in Italy in the 1980s and now? when can someone apply for Post-doc?
One of the top Italian research centre for applied physics, the Area Science Park located in Trieste, just elected its new president.
The president's CV can be found here:
https://ginko.unipg.it/ws/sitopersonale/cv.php?humanid=caterina.petrillo&tipo=EV
By reading it, I discovered she got her Physics degree in 1984, starting in 1985 a post-doc bursary at an Italian institution.
Is it still possible to apply for post-doc bursaries&fundings in Italy without having completed a PhD?

I suspect that, worldwide, there are a lot of top research institutions in which the top person is an effective administrator, not a scientist/researcher. And, conversely, lots of top researchers wouldn't want such a position and might not be very effective in the main task: keeping the lights on.

@Wetenschaap in the three of them, since they are not independent one from the other.

Please ask one question per post.

PhD, post-doc etc are just (more or less correct) translation of Anglo titles, which themselves can vary a lot even now even in Anglo-Saxon countries. Most probably she translated a non-tenured research position/fellowship as post-doc equivalent, due to lack of better term.

@AnonymousPhysicist can you refer to a rule about this request?

https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions "Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once."  You have three distinct questions.

I’m voting to close this question because it has more than one question asked.

@AnonymousPhysicist I split the questions and now one of the split question:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/165923/128758
has been closed because it has already been answered here.

EarlGrey, you should first edit this question so that it contains just one question; then post another question (not two), with the second one. If you edit this to contain just one question, I'll then reopen the other.

@EarlGrey "I split the questions"  No you did not.

@AnonymousPhysicist well, let me know how I should procede:

delete this question, so the useful answers are lost and the kind answerers have to answer again to the new questions (why should they? do they have infinite time?);
edit this question, so the answers does not make sense anymore;
?

what-I-did)
I splitted the questions, into 2 new questions, so google searches are more efficent, "one question one answer" as per the rules you pointed. I will wait, let others chip in, then I will copy there the useful parts from the answers given here. Or?

@EarlGrey I explained what you have to do in the above: edit this post so that it contains just one question, possibly aligned with Federico's answer, so that we can salvage one of the answers. Then, edit one of the other posts (just one) so that it contains the other question. At that point, I'll reopen that one.

The doctorate in Italy (dottorato di ricerca) was officially instituted in 1982, and the first courses started in 1983, so it was definitely not a common thing in the 1980s. People even got full professor positions without having one (since it did not exist).
Post-secondary education was not standardized across nations then like it is today; Italian scientists did their first research experiences with other research contracts, 'assistantships' (assistente) and other early-career positions that just weren't formally a PhD and did not end with discussing a thesis.
Regarding that CV, the most likely explanation is that "post-doctoral fellowship" is a liberal translation of the name of the Italian position she held. Note, though, that another non-standard practice of Italian academia is that people can legally be called dottore as soon as they get any university degree, even a 3-year bachelor. (although in the 1980s university degrees came after a single 4- to 6-year course, which was roughly equivalent to a BSc+MSc course with today's standards). So maybe in the eyes of the translator that position was "post-doctoral" because she was already a dottore (although not a dottore di ricerca).
As for your last question, it depends on the exact kind of position, but for instance I think you can still apply for a RTD-A (non-tenure-track assistant professorship) without a PhD [EDIT: not anymore since 2017; thanks @MassimoOrtolano for the correction].

It is somewhat noteworthy that one single special-statute institution, the Scuola Normale Superiore, started their equivalent tertiary course, perfezionamento,  much earlier than that (I don't know exactly when, but surely as early as 1930). This course is now officially equivalent to a dottorato, since 1989.

About your last paragraph: afaik, it is mandatory by law to have the PhD also for RTD-A positions. Probably, the only position where you can apply without a PhD is the assegno di ricerca of type B.

@MassimoOrtolano You are right, I have double-checked, and it seems that the PhD requirement has been added in 2017. It used to be possible, though.

About your last question, let me add something to Federico's answer. Unless you are a lawyer, and I'm not one, in Italy it is frequently difficult to properly navigate and understand the constraints imposed by the law but, as far as I understand, both the RTD-A and RTD-B positions1 require a PhD or equivalent title2. These are the current entry points if you want to aim at a tenured position.
Probably the only position that in Italy does not require a PhD is the assegno di ricerca di tipo B (the tipo A, instead, is a post-doc position), which is the typical way used to hire someone who has finished the standard three-year PhD period but hasn't yet defended the title. But if you don't have a PhD, you cannot go beyond this, and this position cannot be turned into a permanent one. Without a PhD you're also quite at risk of not being selected if someone with a PhD applies too.
1See this answer and this one for a more detailed description of these positions.
2If you open a bando (the application rules), you will likely find that the first 1-2 pages just list the relevant laws, decrees and university regulations on which the bando is based, and it's a daunting task to trace back the origin of a certain constraint.


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Are Harvard-style open access policies lawful under civil law?
Open access policies such as that of Harvard or MIT are implemented by granting the university some non-exclusive rights on the works written by faculty. This is very useful as it circumvents subsequent copyright transfers (to some extent).
There are a few articles explaining why this is compatible with copyright law, so in common law (see below). I wonder whether similar policies could be designed under authors' rights, in civil law (for instance the french "droit d'auteur"), where rights transfers seem to obey to slightly different rules.
Useful links:

Simon Frankel and Shannon Nestor, Opening the Door: How Faculty Authors Can Implement an Open Access Policy at Their Institutions
Eric Priest, Copyright and the Harvard Open Access Mandate, Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property, preprint August 1, 2012

This sounds more suitable for [law.SE] than Academia. This question may be interesting to academics, but an expert answer would come from a law expert, not an academia expert.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it deals with precise legal details which this site is unlikely to be able to provide sufficient expertise to answer well.  I believe it should be migrated to Law.SE.

I have posted it on Law.SE: http://law.stackexchange.com/questions/5486/are-harvard-style-open-access-policies-lawful-under-civil-law

Harvard has very good lawyers who I'm sure they consulted with before making this policy.

FYI: Has the stance on questions pertaining to legal issues changed?

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To what extent is reviewing work beneficial for young researcher's career?
I'm a recently minted postdoc working in an applied computer science field. Occasionally I get requests to review an article, or even to serve as a technical program committee member in various workshops.
Should I basically accept all of these requests as long as the papers to be reviewed are related to my subfield? Or is the opportunity cost too high? Will this community service be positively viewed when I apply for academic positions?
I typically don't learn much from reading the papers under review, as the workshops I'm invited to serve are not that high quality overall, and many submissions are plain bad.

Related: Should I agree to review papers as a postdoc?.

I judge my review opportunities based on the venue: if it is a known good venue, or if it is a little-known venue but there are good people organizing, then it is a good place to give service.  You might end up with all bad papers (after all, in a selective conference most papers are rejected), but you'll still learn things about the process and the way that other people are thinking about the field, and you'll give service that will help a venue or people that you like (and it's not bad on your CV).
Don't waste your time on junk venues: if a venue is not serious, you are only degrading yourself by associating with it.  Note, however, that "junk" is completely different than "low impact" or "high acceptance rate"---in many areas of computer science, a lot of the really interesting new work and research discussion originates in workshops or symposia that have very low impact and high acceptance rates (consider, for example, the AAAI Symposia).  What is important is whether the people and organizations involved are credible and likely to attract interesting work.

In my experience, your "community service" of serving on program committees and providing reviews can reflect positively on your hiring case. This is in part because it demonstrates that you're willing to be a "good citizen" and do the service work that keeps an academic field strong. I'm in CS myself, and we can definitely use more high-quality reviews.
The primary reason, however, to get involved with reviewing and particularly program committee service is to become part of the community in your subfield. This is the "networking" advice that you've probably heard many times, but it's especially applicable here. Keeping in mind @jakebeal's advice above about choosing good investments for your time, these are some of the people who will review your papers and funding proposals. They can be good sources of advice, feedback, and future collaborations and reference letters.
Moreover, hiring committees want to see evidence that you will be successful as a junior faculty member. This kind of participation in your subfield's research community can provide strong evidence for your case (again, modulo the quality of venues and work involved).

Yes, you should accept at least some of these invitations (unless they are from junk journals or junk conferences, but the other answers have already emphasized that).
Basically, it is all about networking:

For well-known journals, conferences and workshops, this definitely becomes a strong point on your CV. It underlines your reputation within the community.
However, even for less prestigious venues, it can be a door opener if the organizer or some other members of the PC are established seniors of your field.  If you do a good job in a couple of Workshop PCs, sooner or later your name will be dropped when someone assembles a PC for a more prestigious conference.
Physical PC meetings are the best possible networking opportunity. Most conferences in CS (at least the better ones) insist on a physical PC meeting – an excellent opportunity to access the "gurus" from your field! On such a meeting, the atmosphere is a lot more personal than on any conference. By good reviews and a coherent line of argument in the discussion you have furthermore the chance to distinguish yourself as a real expert in the field.
Besides that, you learn a lot about how a PC works! You will experience how thin the line could be between "weak accept" and "weak reject". How much it depends on group dynamics and "the one reviewer" that stands up for some paper (or against it). How... Long story short: It helps you to write "better" papers (i.e., papers that have a higher chance to survive this process!)
If allowed (and in many cases it is) this is also a good opportunity to train your students. Let them review a paper as well. Of course, in the end it has to be your review and you have to be confident in it. But reading and discussing a paper from the viewpoint of a reviewer strengthens their (and also yours) writing abilities.

So even if you do not necessarily "learn something new" from the papers, you will definitely learn a lot about the hidden rules of the publication process itself.

While it is good to be selective in what you want to review, it is generally a good idea to be "available" to review papers from a wider range of topics. This means that you will have to occasionally say yes to requests. I think this will only enrich your CV and you will be looked in a better light among your peers. After all someone must have peer reviewed your past work. I see it as a chance to give it back to the community.

There may be a short-term benefit if you list "Reviews for X" on the CV, or the journal publishes a thanking-by-name for the year's reviewers. Otherwise, the outside world would have no idea whether you are a diligent reviewer or otherwise. Another medium-term consequence of diligently reviewing, especially if your reviews are high quality, is that editors may get to know that you are a good reviewer. This can lead to invitations to serve on editorial boards and perhaps the ultimate horror, being invited to take on an editing position. IMO, if your concern is getting a permanent job, the value for that goal of reviewing is pretty low: it's more useful for tenure and promotion, especially promotion to full when service counts more.
Taking a more long-range perspective, reviewing is in your self-interest for two reasons. First, you can influence the shape of your field by imparting your knowledge to other authors via the reviewing process (thus making the world more friendly to your viewpoint). Second, if you encourage and support the existing system of volunteer scholarly reviewers by reviewing, then (by "cultural osmosis") your own submissions stand a greater chance of being reviewed appropriately. That is, if almost everybody says "No way" to review requests, then there will only be a few reviewers and the reviewing system will collapse, which would not be good for your own publishing plans.
But of course, avoid junk journals and don't automatically accept all such invitations, not at this stage of your career.

I am not on a hiring committee, especially in your field, so I can't necessarily speak to how it will effect your job prospects, but some things about reviewing papers that have benefitted me:

Interaction with journal editors. I went back and forth with an editor in a journal I was reviewing for that's important in my field, not to argue but to clarify what I was looking for in a review. That editor now knows me - not well, but certainly more than if I was simply contacting them out of the blue.
A look at "things to come". Reviews let you see a little bit ahead in terms of what the field is doing, and are useful prompts to keep up with things that are probably topic-relevant to you.
The chance to make the literature better. This one is, to me, fairly important.
On more than one occasion, I have been able to point out work by someone I know (and once myself) as possibly relevant to the authors.

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Reliable method to find ISI rated Journal
I searched in internet and all I found was that we have to search the name of journal in "https://mjl.clarivate.com/" and if it indexed as: SCIE or SSCI or ESCI then the journal is indexed as ISI journal.
but I wanted to submit my paper in "https://academic.oup.com/painmedicine" and I serached it in clarivate and it said that it is indexed as SCIE. But when I email to the editor of painmedicine journal he said that their journal is not rated or indexed as ISI. Now I am very confused that which journal is ISI?

Various unneeded comments were removed here (by multiple moderators); let us remember to be nice.

The approach you found - that of looking for the journal in the Master Journal List of Web of Science (WoS) - is the correct one. Pain Medicine is indeed indexed in SCIE and thus in one of WoS' databases.
Note that WoS was originally created by ISI (Institute for Scientific Information), but is now curated by Clarivate Analytics. Thus, the label of an "ISI-rated journal" is not entirely correct, and it is possible that due to this incorrect label, the person with whom you corresponded did not understand what you meant.

Thank you so much. What are the other abbrevation like SCIE means that a paper is belong to WoS database? For example SCI or ESCI and etc

SCI, SCIE, SSCI, ESCI - they all belong to Web of Science. The four abbreviations denote four different databases (or indexes) within the overarching platform WoS. See also https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/127695/is-there-any-relation-between-them-like-esci-is-less-than-scie-and-scie-is-less?rq=1 for some details, if that helps.

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How is a transcript with different scores reviewed?
My transcript contains a score which is listed as a percentage, and it also contains a GPA out of 10. I have mentioned the percentage score in my application for something. How will a graduate school review it for admissions in USA and Canada? By looking at the percentage or the GPA?

US and, I assume, Canadian universities are pretty good about translating scores from different systems. If your transcript is official and you don't come from a tiny country then you probably don't need to do anything other than show what is "official". When in doubt, your university probably has a web page that provides explanations. Failing that, an official's email address might be provided.
In the US, at least, the relationship between grades and percentages can vary quite a bit and GPA is normally used, but it is usually out of 4.0 or possibly 4.5. But nothing is universal in the US, as we have no national educational system.


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Rebuttal in a journal
Recently our paper was rejected in an journal.
Now, after two resubmissions a Reviewer was not satisfied and the editor sent it to an independent reviewer, who was satisfied with our previous revisions.
But now he asked a new set of comments and thereby the editor rejected it.
Our main objection is that the new comments were based on a comment bya  Reviewer and was already answered in the first resubmission.
So is there any chance for rebuttal as the editor already gave 2 chances for resubmission before? and as the independent reviewer has misunderstood the work and is asking the same question?

"...the editor sent it to an independent reviewer, who was satisfied with our previous revisions. But now he asked a new set of comments and thereby the editor rejected it. Our main objection is that the new comments was based on a comment by Reviewer 1 and was already answered in the first resubmission" I don't understand: Why was the independent reviewer looking at a version of the manuscript which didn't address the comment?

It was not a major comment, we addressed via adding few lines in the text. The comment was based on a concept that was similar but not same. Now, this new reviewer thought that the concept was same and completely misunderstood the work.

If the reviewer "though the concept was [the] same," then maybe your text needs to be revised to make sure the readers cannot make such mistakes.

When a paper is rejected by a journal, submit to another journal.  Do not argue with the editor.

I will give the perspective of someone who has been an independent reviewer brought in on a disputed manuscript.
You do not know what the reviewer wrote to the editor. In a recent manuscript where I was asked to review in the situation you are in, I provided constructive and actionable feedback to an author. I discussed where the author had adequately answered the reviewers concerns and had not met those concerns. And then in the private comments to the editor, I expressed my reservation about the manuscript.
Do not take the rejection personally. This is a normal part of academia. I had a paper rejected after three rounds of edits recently! A year in the review process and the editor decided enough was enough and cut our paper loose. We looked at the feedback from reviewers objectively and prepared the manuscript for a different journal.
My advice, there is little chance that you will sway the editor. Accept their decision and move on. Fields are small and memories are long. Take the reviewer feedback that you were given and feel good that you got solid feedback on a manuscript draft from scholars in your field. Then incorporate that feedback and resubmit to a different journal.
A word of warning about resubmission. Address the feedback of the reviewers before you resubmit.

@newstudent, if more than one person has the same misunderstanding, you probably need to reword to communicate more clearly.

Only the editor who rejected the paper can respond to this. But before you send it, be sure that you have somehow addressed all of the objections and improved the paper based on any helpful reviews.
You don't have to actually do what a reviewer would like, as you still have ownership of the work, but you do need to consider them in any revision. But don't just put in "a few lines" out of context or in rebuttal. Weave any updates into the text. I doubt if you have done this, but including a comment in a paper like "In response to a reviewer we would like to add..." is awkward. That stands out both for the editor and later the reader.
You can send the editor your best version and ask for reconsideration, but it is up to him/her. If you don't get a positive response, consider submitting elsewhere.

Move on.  Haven't you wasted enough time with that journal?  (Whether you were in the right or whether the editor was.)
Without a little more detail it's hard to get any inkling of the issues.  Don't know the field, don't know the objections.  But there is at least the possibility that the reviewer comments and editor decision are valid.  They may actually just be valid.  Or they may at least be poor communication.
My advice if you want to get published is to write very classic "datapoint science" papers.  Don't claim big discoveries but just literally report your experiment and the observations.  Be completely candid about any lack of controls, experimental issues, etc.  Nobody has time to do the perfect experiment, especially the first time round.  But if you are just clear what you did, than the paper is the paper.
Note that this does not mean you need to walk away from all interesting intuitions from the work (they are of interest and benefit to the reader), but just take a more caveated approach and make it clear where you are speculating.  For example the report is "varied temperature and the material showed this pattern in conductivity".  Intution/speculation (towards the end of the paper) could be along the lines of "The graph suggests possible onset of weak localization.  Further work (e.g. with more advanced methods such as umptifratz spectroscopy) is needed to confirm this hypothesis and determine the extent of the phenomenon.
The idea is you are not totally hiding your light under a bushel or boring the reader by hiding from showing him some possible interesting insight.  But you're also not going around bragging and hyping with weak evidence (like WAY too many papers in Science/Nature do).
The point I am trying to make is that it is very easy to just publish uncontested work.  I synthesized something, I varied the temperature, I measured the conductivity might be uncontested.  (Actually they could be contested to, but for the sake of argument let's assume that both you and the reviewer agree, here.)  That's good enough.  It's a contribution. Publish it.  Now "we are near a superconductor" is a much more tenuous and arguable claim (absent smoking gun evidence by resistivity and magnetic...AFTER the transition, not "near it").  So you probably want to cut or at least properly caveat such speculation (make it clear it is not the point of the paper).
The same issues would apply for biological or social research (here there are often practical limits of expense and number of data points).  Doesn't mean you can't publish--for instance, if you are going to move on from the work, it's actually in the interest of science for you to write up even incomplete work, so at least someone may benefit from the time spent--but it just means to be honest about the warts.  And not to make strong statements of insight if you haven't done strong work to rebut criticisms.
I am not an expert on theoretical work but I think the same would even apply there.  For example, "we suspect a new property of prime numbers, that every third prime is related to differential equation X by transform Y.  We have checked the first 100,000 such primes and see no deviation.  Our efforts to prove the relation to date have been unsuccessful.  We suspect the phenomenon is related to recent findings/research in boundary flow phenomena because of the similarity of the two differential equations, but have not been able to definitively link the two problems."  [And then publish it in a lower rank journal.]


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Can PhD Thesis be converted into Three IEEE Journal Papers (same as they are in Thesis)?
The students of the laboratory in which I worked for follows the below rule:
1) In four to five years, they publish three-four IEEE papers.
2) Merge all those papers into a single document and publish it as the PhD thesis.

For me, the scenario became a bit different. In first three years of my PhD candidature, I wrote three IEEE papers, publish them, and got all the credit scores required by the university to fulfill my PhD.
Now, for past two years, I am working on a project. I wrote three manuscripts: one is basically on an Electronic Device, and another two are on the Software Modules based on that Electronic Device. Our initial plan is to publish them before my thesis submission. But, later my prof. decided to sell it to a company. So, we didn't submit those manuscripts. Since, we are not getting a good amount of money, my prof. asked me to write my thesis based on those three manuscripts.
So, my thesis basically looks like:
Abstract
PART I: Manuscript One (without Abstract & Conclusion)
PART II: Manuscript Two (without Abstract & Conclusion)
PART III: Manuscript Three (without Abstract & Conclusion)
Conclusions

I submitted my thesis and got my PhD degree. Now, I work in my professor's company (my student life is basically over). But, I don't want to throw away those three manuscripts into garbage can. I want to publish them into some IEEE journals. So, I took a "We Don't Care" certificate from the Dean of my University which basically says: "It is his work. We gave him a degree based on it. But, we don't have any copyright on it. We don't care what he will do with that work."
So, from my university point of view, there is no problem if I publish papers based on my PhD work. Now, when I asked my professors/colleagues about this, they told me: YES, YOU CAN PUBLISH PAPERS OUT OF YOUR PHD THESIS. Then, I asked what does OUT OF means. Different people has different opinions about it. Since they are confused, they made me more confused.
Some of them told me change the figures, some of them told me change some of the texts, some of them told me keep the proposed method same, but change the wordings......... the list goes on and on. Now, as I work as a full-time engineer in a company, I don't have that much time to do all those works. I want to publish those three manuscripts as they are in the thesis (like below).
Manuscript One (PART I of the thesis - only change in Abstract & Conclusion)
Manuscript Two (PART II of the thesis - only change in Abstract & Conclusion)
Manuscript Three (PART III of the thesis - only change in Abstract & Conclusion)

My specific question is that:
This is my OWN WORK. Nobody has any copyright on it. It is published as PhD thesis, but, never distributed online OPENLY. Only the students of my university can access it through their student accounts. I made it private on purpose. However, the university can make it public after two years.
The only problem is if I search in google the exact texts from my manuscripts, it takes me to the university library website (where you have to give user-name and password to view the thesis). That simply means, if I submit those manuscripts to three IEEE journals, all of them will say I HAVE PLAGIARIZED THE WORK (am I correct?). Because, the plagiarism checker of IEEE cannot differentiate between the works which have/don't have any COPYRIGHTS.
Can the learned researchers confirm me:
1) If I submit those three manuscripts into three IEEE journals, is there any chance that they will pass PLAGIARISM CHECKS? Please note that at the time of PhD thesis submission, I have uploaded my manuscripts to turnitin plagiarism checker website to get an "Originality Check" certificate. Is that could be an issue?
2) Should I just submit and tell the editors the above problem (to be legally/ethically correct)?
3) Is there any other solution?
Thank you for your time.

You should check the specific journals you are publishing in to see if they have specific rules for this (many do).  Most allow it so long as the paper is being published with a year or so of the thesis publication.  Some journals even have a special type of article which is basically "thesis published as journal article".

You are mixing up a bunch of things here:
1. Copyright
Since you have the copyright to your text, there is no issue here. (Personal opinion: It is rarely necessary to pay much attention to copyright issues in academia anyway.)
2. Plagiarism Since you wrote that text, there is no plagiarism issue here. Even if the journal should check for coincides in the text, they will see that this text is written by you.
3. "Self-plagiarism" / Double-publication The former is very unfortunately named, since it is no case of plagiarism. The latter points out what the actual issue is. As a rule of thumb, this only applies to the same type of publication - having the same text in journal article and dissertation is fine. In this case, the subsequent publication should clearly mention the preceding one. So the journal articles would say prominently that they are based on Chapter X of your thesis.
4. Writing appropriately for the setting If your dissertation is actually written as a dissertation, then to make good journal articles out of it, probably significant rewriting would be necessary. This is because the style (e.g. level of detail) is different; because chapters of a dissertation can be more tightly coupled than different journal articles, etc.
If you fundamentally wrote three journal articles, did not publish those but stabled them together, this is not an issue. Then updating the references/context description would be enough.

thanks a lot for your answer. Two things. 1) So, 100% "Self-plagiarism" is not even an issue. Right? 2) "So the journal articles would say prominently that they are based on Chapter X of your thesis." - Should I mention this in manuscripts or in cover letter to editor or in both?


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Can you get into a phd program in engineering with a failed semester
I really want to get my PhD in mechanical engineering. I have a good amount of research done but my GPA is only a 3.0. My first semester of my junior year my husband suddenly deployed right after we closed on our first home, I started a new job, and got a dog. I got a D and an F that semester and my GPA dropped to a 2.0. The following semester I retook the classes and got all A's and a B. I made the deans list and brought my GPA up to a 3.0. Did that one semester kill my chances of getting into a PhD program for mechanical engineering?

There is a good amount of ppl here with much lower GPA than yours who are faculty members in top 50 schools! So, yes! You can get into a PhD program.

Look at the similar question and don't hesitate to write a new question if there's something different about your situation.


text:
My supervisor avoiding me -- what to do?
I'm doing a masters. My thesis supervisor made our relationship a bit more personal and friendly: added me on Facebook, invited me for couple of dinners and we used to hangout sometimes and talk on articles at bars. Now he's for some reason avoiding me, answers emails/messages after couple of days (he used to do it in less than a day tops) and very cold and short. A very big problem is that I'm taking a lot of credits with him this semester (individual research work) and not only I have this fear that he might give me bad grades (he can do that simply by calling my work low quality; there's no objective criteria for the kind of individual course that I'm taking), he might end up not writing me a reference letter for my PhD, which is bad because first, a lot of credits under the name of individual work will remain unexplained, and second, I suppose it's awful that the one that I have worked with a my supervisor doesn't write me a letter.
What should I do?
PS: He's not physically accessible until the end of summer, except that for a 2 days conference that we'll be meeting in a week.
=======================
UPDATE:
I messaged him just like @aparente001 had advised me, but shorter (with the question that @cag51 suggested to ask face-to-face). He answered me in a minute a sat up a meeting time for that day's tomorrow (we were supposed to have a meeting before, which didn't happen). Then I realized that he has been only super busy and there's nothing else that plays any role (at least that's what he said). So, asking him worked even before a face-to-face talk. Thank you for your help!

What have you done wrong for him to change? Seems like one day fine , the next ...

I have no clear idea! Maybe because I have been arrogant in a scientific discussion so something, but again, I'm not sure about it.

I think it might be relevant to know if you had any signals he might have seen you as a romantic prospect... if so, he might be trying to make the relationship more professional!

There is a big step from avoiding you to giving unfair grades.

There is also the possibility that someone else has "warned him off" as it were and he is now worried about any contact...

Definitely not a romantic prospect, as I'm we have two different sexual orientations and we both know that about each other.
Also, I don't think that's the issue for my case; we're both new here and my last supervisor had introduced me (very nicely) to the new guy (because the new one is expert in the areas of my interest).

Professors are not always the people who would win a prize at interpersonal relationships.
Professors often have significant stressors in their lives.
So please don't assume this is about you.  For example, perhaps the professor will be up for tenure next year and is trying to crank out as much work as humanly possible, despite feeling almost crippling anxiety, and has decided that it's necessary to minimize non-productive interactions so as to maximize the hours in the day available for research.
If you yourself are feeling anxious, unsure whether you are cutting the mustard, then ask.  If it's difficult to ask this question in person, then you could send a preview of your question via email, a few days prior to your meeting, to give time to prepare.  Here is one way such a question could be broached:

Dear Prof. X,
  I am enjoying working hard on my project!  But I would also like to find out how I am doing, objectively.  Could we check in briefly about this when we meet next week?  I am interested to know: What do you think is going well, what areas do you feel I need to improve in, do you have any suggestions for me, to get the most out of my time working with you, are there things you would rather I handle differently?  This is the sort of feedback I'm hoping to get when we meet.  I think that periodic constructive feedback will help me become an asset to your group.

Be prepared to take notes.  Don't argue or defend yourself.  Thank the professor for the feedback.  Don't get too frustrated if your professor doesn't know how to do this sort of feedback session smoothly.  Remember, the main purpose in asking this is so you won't have to rely entirely on your overactive imagination.

Thanks for the detailed answer. I'll probably do this before I talk to him face-to-face.

@user93503 -  I hope you'll post an update.

You should talk to him face-to-face when possible. I would say something like:

I might be overanalyzing this, but I noticed you've been a little distant lately. Have I done anything wrong?

If he says no, you need to leave it at that. He might just have a personal situation (e.g., parent dying), he might be concerned that he was acting too familiar and is now trying to reestablish boundaries, or it might just be nothing. I seriously doubt he would change your grades or fail to recommend you if he tells you flat-out that everything is fine.

This sounds like a good plan, although I'm unsure whether I should approach him face-to-face without notifying him, or I should send him an email (as the next responder suggests) and let him know that I'll be willing to talk about him.

It feels to me (without any evidence or proof, so I can certainly be wrong) like your supervisor might now regret establishing a relationship that's too personal on the spectrum between personal and professional, and is now trying to establish a relationship in a zone that he feels is more appropriate.
If this is the case, I don't think you have anything to worry about with respect to your grades.


text:
Article Authorship Conflict
I'm an undergrad student and I got together with 2 people to write a research article (lit review) for publication. We divided the project in 3 sections and each did our part. When it was time to submit it, I noticed they completely edited my sections and removed/added new things to it. They said what i wrote wasn't good and my writing had plagiarism, therefore I am not considered a first author (along with them) anymore. They didn't even tell me they were not satisfied with my writing before they edited it.
After days of arguing, the journal we were planning to submit it to emailed us and told us that if we don't come to an agreement soon, they won't even publish our paper. My "teammates" agreed to have me as first author, but without including any of my edits.
My question is, is it unethical for me to accept first authorship now that a lot of my original content is deleted from the paper?

There are so many problems with this whole process; there are reasons why mentors exist in academia and this is definitely one of them. This sounds like a school project, not an academic work, what sort of journal is this that you are submitting something like this to? It's possible you have successfully found the lower bound that a predatory publisher will accept.

To clarify, are the two other people also undergraduates?  I would be wary of journals that are willing to accept literature reviews from authors who don't have a history in the field. Check Beale's List ( http://beallslist.weebly.com/ ) to make sure the journal isn't a predatory one.

"the journal we were planning to submit it to emailed us and told us that if we don't come to an agreement soon, they won't even publish our paper." - this makes no sense at all. How could the journal email you while you were planning to submit? You definitely left out part of the story.

The paper cannot be submitted without the agreement of all authors.  That means you and your coauthors have to come to an agreement—about both content and authorship—before you can actually submit anything.  I think when you write "they won't even publish our paper", you mean "they will not even consider our paper".

Was the plagiarism comment factually true about the OP's initial draft of his/her section?

It's impossible for strangers to de-intricate this situation. I'm voting to close this question as off-topic.

"completely edited my sections" sounds like standard procedure to me. When I collaborate on a writing project, I expect my coworkers to edit also the sections that I've written. Of course, we used revision mode/track changes.

@MHNR how did it turn out?

Letting aside the messy aspect of the question as highlighted in the comments, let me address your main concern.
Since all three of you agreed from the beginning that you are all going to be first authors (not sure how this works in practice), and you gave your best effort and time in good faith during the preparation of the manuscript, there is no ethical issue in you being first author.
In one of my papers, it has happened to me that the section I was mostly involved in writing turned out to be removed in the final version. Nobody, including me, considered removing my name from the paper.
Now, I don't see why you should be so concerned about how your colleagues acted (apart from the issue of removing "first author status", which I understand is not an issue anymore). They did not like what you've written and they decided to rewrite it. This is good proactivity of their part. If you think something important has been left out, you should try to convince them, with sound arguments, why you think this things are important.
Note that the main concern should be the final quality of the paper, not who wrote what and why. In fact, you should also review what they have written and provide feedback (rewrite what you don't like, and so on).
But bear in mind that in the end, all three of you must agree on the final version. Just know when it is relevant to disagree, and when it is best to let it go.

thank you so much for your help. this is the best advice i've heard and i've asked many people for their professional opinion on this matter. I appreciate your help. I'm gonna stay quiet  and be published as co-first author.


text:
What should I do if the author didn't do what I asked them to do when I reviewed their paper?
I had reviewed a manuscript two months ago.
Though the manuscript was interesting and well written there were some minor flaws.
I had pointed to the author the flaws and asked them to correct them.
I had also mentioned three papers, which I co-authored, and which I feel should be cited in the paper.
But today I find that the article has been published by the journal.
Though all my suggestions were incorporated, I find that the articles I co-authored and which I had asked the authors to cite have not been cited.
Should I write to the editor of the journal to take steps against the author for not following what I said?
Will it be ethical to write to the editor to not send me any paper again for peer review since my suggestions were not obeyed?
Also the Editor is a good friend of mine.
I feel let down that though I had asked them to cite some papers, the authors did not say what I said but still got the paper published in the journal.
What steps shall I take now as a reviewer?
Should I do the following:

Ask the Editor to withdraw the paper from the journal as I know the Editor well.
Never ever peer-review for that journal.
Boycott the authors works in  future from any journal i receive.

Closely related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/28640/as-a-reviewer-what-steps-can-i-take-after-paper-is-published-despite-major-scie

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

You seem to misunderstand the review process. The authors are not obliged to follow your suggestions. Typically, when authors submit a revised version of their paper, they also include a 'response to reviews' in which they explain what they have done as a result of reviewer comments. If they wish, they can argue that certain comments or suggestions are misguided/unnecessary/etc. It is then up to the editor to decide whether to accept their paper or send it back for further revision.
You ask what steps you should take: forget it, and move on.

It depends on the severity of the omission. If the works are so closely related that not mentioning them leads to a misrepresentation of the paper's novelty, OP has a point.

OP may have justification for being irritated with the editor for letting things slide. OP may decide not to bother reviewing for this editor/journal in the future, if OP feels their report hasn't been taken seriously. However, I don't think the authors can be blamed for this situation - certainly not without seeing what they wrote in their 'response to reviews' - and in any case the ship has sailed.

I would have sided with OP if they had included in their question a better justification of why the paper should have been cited. "Because I asked them to", alone, is not sufficient.

Even if the paper’s main claim is “apples fall downwards”, the fault lies squarely with the editor and no one else.

i dont think the references are closely related but I felt that those works could be cited

@Math_Freak "Could be cited" means a lot. It can mean "It's my papers and I wish them to be cited." "It's papers that a student in my class should read" "Not citing them shows how ignorant the authors are" "They - meh - could be cited, but then, also not." If the authors do not misrepresent novelty by not citing them, or if citing them does not shorten proofs drastically, and if the authors were otherwise cooperative in incorporating your reviewing suggestions, your anger may be misplaced. Frankly, it's their paper, if not citing these does not make it outright unpublishable, why worry?

@Federico Poloni, what is more, as per the comments, OP co-authored those papers and believes they are not even closely related.

Your enthusiasm and dedication are commendable, but you are misunderstanding the peer review process.
You are not a gatekeeper. You are a participant in a collaborative process to identify publishable papers and improve them. This process involves the authors, the peer reviewers (plural), and is mediated (if necessary) by the journal editor.
Let's talk only about papers which are accepted-with-revisions or minor-revise-and-resubmit. You and at least one other reviewer have made suggestions. The authors receive those and respond. When those suggestions are good ones, and they usually are, they address and/or incorporate them. In other cases, they respond, explaining why they didn't incorporate them, or why they addressed the underlying issue in a different way than a reviewer recommended. The rationale may be anything from the fact that the reviewer misunderstood (the response may then include clarifying some other language so others don't misunderstand), concern about scope creep or length, or just inconsistency between reviewer feedback.
For references in particular, there is a balance to be found from extensive and comprehensive literature review, through pointing to a set of representative articles anchoring the results in the broader field, to merely pointing to specific prior knowledge on whose shoulders the new results were developed. The authors may have just viewed it differently than you, or faced different feedback (e.g. even "this paper should cut down on the references, there are too many of them" from the 2nd reviewer).
If there is significant pushback from the authors, and/or disagreement between reviewers, the editor may send a revised version back to the reviewers. But that is up to them. It seems in this case they felt this was not necessary. Frankly, having briefly been an editor myself, if a reviewer made substantive suggestions, plus recommended a few additional references, and the author addressed the suggestions but pushed back with any reasonable explanation against the additional references, I would consider it a success and publish, as seems to have been the case.
What to do?

Regarding this paper, nothing. That ship has sailed. Unless omission of the papers creates a plagiarism situation, or truly egregiously omits the most important relevant reference in the field, no one is going to retract or print a correction about a potentially missing reference.

In the future, consider adding more explanation in your review why additions (whether literture or others) are important. This is for the benefit of both authors and editor. Shift from gatekeeper to persuader mindset. This might also affect your language more broadly. We don't know the context, of course, but personally I found your phrasing in the question, refering to "minor flaws" and "asked them to correct them" a bit concerning already. Perhaps it is appropriate, but as an erstwhile author, reviewer, and editor I would have preferred to see it positioned instead as "suggested improvements and recommendations", unless they are literally a gaping hole in the logic.

If you continue to find that certain journals and/or editors seem to pay insufficient attention to whether authors incorporate and/or address important reviewer feedback from you, refocus your time and energy on those who do.

Asking to include these references was wrong in the first place. According to your comments to the question(1) and to the accepted answer, the literature you asked to cite :

is co-authored by yourself
is "not closely related" to the paper under review.

As reviewer, you should only suggest to discuss closely related literature. Moreover, before suggesting to cite your own work, you should apply careful judgement for two reasons. First, as reviewer you obviously must not abuse your influence to boost your citation count. Second, even if your reference suggestions are well-intended, your desire to be cited might lead you to overestimate the relevance of your work.
The authors of the paper under review most likely explained in their response letter why they consider your literature suggestions irrelevant. The editor was apparently satisfied with this response. It probably has not escaped his or her attention that the irrelevant literature you asked the authors to cite was co-authored by yourself, shedding a bad light on the objectivity and integrity of your review. Asking to retract the paper after your initially positive review, only because the authors did not cite your work, would just add insult to injury.
(1) I've now edited these comments into your question, because they are highly relevant.

+1 Note that one of the first things that people will do when getting a long list of references is to check them for common authors and then infer something from this. If the papers are not directly relevant, this inference will be the name of the reviewer and the fact that said reviewer is mainly interested in themselves as in good science, so all their other comments should be taken with a grain of salt as well. Even worse, doing so too often might lead to a reputation, as people tend to gossip. And in the end, the right reputation is more important than the right number of citations.

I don't mind the downvote, but I'd be interested to know the reason for it.

Although you don't have any ground for your request to the editor (most probably they will simply not do anything), I do believe your sentiment is correct (at least in many case it is).
I find the problem of not citing papers much more ubiquitous than the problem some academics are used to complain about of "being forced to cite papers".
In my experience, there is a huge problem of stinginess by some authors; they emotionally feel as if they loose something just by citing other work, even justifiably so. It is clear that from the readers' perspective a long full literature review is highly beneficial and academically justified, than a partial incomplete list of references.
Citing unrelated work is wrong. But citing relevant work is a must.

Citing related work is a must, but citing all related work is not. For an average paper in my field, the number of papers that is in some way related would easily go into the thousands.

Possibly. This shows the difference that exists in different fields. In many fields the number of related papers are much fewer and it is evident that some authors are either too lazy or stingy to bother to cite intimately related them.


text:
Is the author of a letter of recommendation notified that their letter has been submitted?
My professor wants to give me a letter of recommendation for a graduate school that I am applying which I will submit via scanning. She didn't give offline recommendation to any One. So she wants to know, when I will submit the recommendation, will there be any email sent from the admission council to the professor informing a letter in her name has been submitted. It will be great if anyone here can inform me if there is any such process like this.

Normally when you submit your grad school application online, you provide the email addresses for your letter writers. Your letter writers then receive an email asking them to upload their letters of recommendation. Once they do so, they receive an email notifying them that their letter has been received.

What country is this?

In recent years, my experience has been that, when I submit letters of recommendation via automated web systems (which is the most common situation), I get an automated confirmation. When I submit letters via individual emails, I sometimes get confirmations but usually not.

You will most likely receive a generic confirmation that your application has been received, which you can forward to the author of your LoR. If you want to be absolutely sure in advance, ask the institution that you are applying to. Practices differ, so we can't make a certain prediction.

In most of the universities that I am seeing there aren't mention of such mail, so I guess there aren't any such mail then considering they have put everything relevant in the reference option

In a perfect world, the admission council will verify the recommendation by calling the professor. So one way or another your professor will know.


text:
What are the consequences if I cut ties with my former PhD supervisor?
Background
I did my Master's and PhD with my former PhD advisor in an Australian university. Coming from the experimental biology background, my advisor switched to the field of bioinformatics around the time when I started my Master's.
For my Master's project, I mainly used Graphic User Interface (GUI)-based programs and platforms such as Galaxy. During my Master's I started learning several computer languages without any support from my advisor. After six month into my PhD program, my advisor decided the whole lab would focus on a newly emerged sub-field which relies heavily on command-line-executed programs for data analysis. I have successfully completed a couple of projects and graduated by a series of publications last year and my degree was conferred in Nov 2018.
My former advisor was not the most knowledgeable person in programming language and statistics.  Likewise, my fellow students in the lab all had the same level of statistical and programming proficiency. As a result, I had to provide support to each single fellow student from data downloading to differential testing and many micro tasks in-between, even after my graduation in Nov last year. I've shared online resources on programming and basic statistics with the lab, however there was little improvement or progress. Six months after my official graduation, I find myself answering emails from fellow students and former advisor on a weekly basis, sometimes ten emails a week; many times I had to rerun their analysis or debug their codes, a good amount of my time went to my former lab. Lately my former advisor even introduced to me via email a new honours (an undergraduate-level research year) student who has just started this year, hoping I could teach the student to generate a specific type of plot for their honours project. Either teaching the student via email or generate the plot by myself will be very time-consuming as the program has a steep learning curve and requires a lot of pre-process of input data, all for a non-essential plot for an undergraduate level thesis.
Reasons that cutting tiers with my former advisor seems inevitable:
I can't see an end to my current situation as a free labour for my former lab. The more support I offered, the more demanding they become. I've decided to stop replying to the students' emails altogether. However, very likely my former advisor will eventually step in since I am the only person they know who could solve their problems, but I am unwilling to do any more work for them. They have no funding currently so hiring a post-doc or a bioinformatician is out of question. That being said, I don't think the burden is on me. Frankly, having been exploited by them (Should I decline unrelated work assigned by PhD advisor?), I am not particularly grateful to my former advisor and just want to stay away from them.
Questions:
1) Am I obligated to teach other students even I have developed the necessary skills by myself without my advisor's support and that I have graduated almost six months ago?
2) What are the consequences if I choose to cut ties entirely with my former advisor?
I plan to work as a freelance bioinformatician therefore their recommendation letters don't really matter right now. If I want to go back to academia later, I figured the price I have to pay (in labour) will be overly high anyway so I will probably try applying jobs without their recommendation letter.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Instead of cutting ties with your former supervisor and colleagues, why don't you just tell them that you cannot help them with every little problem? It is very time consuming and distracts from your current assignments -- which is a reasonable excuse. IMHO you don't need to be that drastic and cut any connections; especially because -- as your question suggests -- you do not have any quarrel with your supervisor. Just be upfront that your time budget is limited and you need to focus other projects.

I find this statement amusing: "The more support I offered, the more demanding they become." You don't say? Seriously though, just drag your feet, take a long time to answer, and all around avoid actually doing work. They'll get the message.

ad 1) Once you have graduated and you are not employed in the lab anymore nobody can force you to do work.
That being said there are a few options for you that might be interesting (but it depends what you actually want):

If you are interested in a publication record then agree with your
former PhD supervisor that you co-author all papers you gave support
for (even if it was only an email or two).
If you are interested in    the financial aspects then write him a
friendly email saying that you    would be happy to further help if
you are being employed an paid by    him (e.g. on an hourly basis using standard market freelancer rates).

ad 2) He will not be happy (but this is not your problem). If you do not plan any further academic career there shouldn't be any real consequence. If you plan an academic career then (1) see the first point above (2) he might be on certain panels about funding/positions etc (3) he might be reviewer (4) he might have friends in points 2 and 3. But if you do not plan to continue in academia then these points do not matter to you.
In any case I would recommend not to just stop answering but write him a clear email with whatever decision you make (and then stop answering if you want).

i feel like this is a perfect opportunity to boost publication record. The advisor certainly can't say no to that or it would be obvious to them that this relationship is going to be lost.

The amount of remote help you supplied sounds rather excessive from your description. It's not unusual to get the occasional email about specific aspects of your previous work from PhD students that continue with related work, but your description goes very far beyond that.
In general, you're not obligated to work for free. If it is of interest for you, collaborating on publications is an option that results in benefits for both sides. But it doesn't sound like this option is appealing to you.
You have to obligation to provide help that requires a significant amount of effort on your side. There is a huge difference between asking a former group member about something that takes them just a few minutes to respond and essentially asking them to debug their work and spend a lot of time on it. The latter is unreasonable to ask unless there is some kind of collaboration.
You're not employed by your previous institution anymore, and you have new responsibilities now. As a courtesy you could still respond and give the students some general pointers on their problem, but they have to figure it out themselves and debug their own issues. I think politely declining to help is a better idea in this case than not responding at all (not responding is valid if they continue to bug you after you declined).
One part that isn't clear to me is how much the supervisor knows about the situation, or whether this is driven by the students themselves. They might be unaware on how much their students are still relying on you. If they're unaware, they might not react badly at all.
Your former supervisor might get angry if you stop helping their students, but that would be a rather irrational response. That doesn't mean it won't happen, but it would not be justified. If your former supervisor retaliates it could cause you significant issues, but far more if you stay in academia than outside. But how likely this is is very hard to judge without knowing them and their personality.

Document the time you spend then send an email to your supervisor and their manager / Dean stating that this is work which needs to be supported ie paid for.
Then see what they do.


text:
In a conference, when will the decision of best paper (or other award) be made?
I am just curious, do they make the decision before the conference?
Or do they watch the presentation of potential candidates first and then make the decision?

It depends.
Some conferences, such as ACM CHI, announce them before the conference even starts. This has the advantage/disadvantage of letting people know which talks they should see. And in my experience, these sessions are packed!
Other conferences announce them at the end of the conference. This has the advantage of keeping everyone at the conference until the very end (people might try to leave after their own presentation...) so they don't miss their own award!

It depends on the conference, though most of them in my experience make the decision after the talks.

My experience generally matches, though it depends on the conference.  Sometimes the pick is made in advance.

In top theoretical computer science conferences these decisions are usually made well in advance, and often special sessions are dedicated to the awarded papers.

Best paper awards are awarding the best paper, not the best presentation. They are common in archival conferences (i.e., conference that publish proceedings and that "count" as publications) like those that form the primary publication venues in computer science.
Because they are geared towards papers, they are almost always decided on well in advance of the conference. Often they are decided at the program committee meetings where the final decisions are made as to which papers will be accepted! When they are announced varies from conference to conference even within fields. Sometimes awards announced at the conference with a ceremony. Often, they are announced well in advance.
Conference that award papers earlier often do so that they can mark best papers on the conference program. In some conferences that list awarded papers in the program, best papers are not even formally announced. One year at Computer Supported Cooperative Work, I found out that one of my papers had received an award when I browsing the public program!
In most non-archival conferences (e.g., social science and humanities conferences) awards for papers are given for any work that was published in the field in the previous year. These papers nominated ahead of time and are not necessarily (or even often) work that is presented at the conference.
I've heard of best presentation awards given at the very end of conferences based on presentations given at the conference but I believe these are exceeding rare and, in my experience, have mostly been in the context of special conferences like doctoral colloquia.

Best paper awards are awarding the best paper, not the best presentation - This is not at all true at a general statement. While in some fields (like CS) conference presentation quality is not usually considered as a criteria for awarding Best Paper, it can be and sometimes is.

Some conferences, for instance, solicit nominations based on the quality of the paper alone, and allow the audience to vote for the best presentation among the nominated finalists.


text:
Could research data fall under the Freedom of Information Act?
When I refer to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) I mean either the federal act or similarly implemented state laws. Clearly the validity of such requests would have to be limited to institutions which have received government aid in at least some way. In addition, there is the argument that such data could be considered a trade secret, as is the case in Mississippi.
However, the case in Mississippi is meant to protect findings themselves rather than raw data. In addition, there are many cases in which the data itself could be considered to have been public information to begin with, as is the case in archaeological excavation.
Some institutions already have an open data policy, such as PLOS, which requires all data relevant to a paper to be published:

PLOS strongly believes that, to best foster scientific progress, the underlying data from an article should be made freely available for researchers to use, wherever this is legal and ethical. Data availability allows validation, replication, reanalysis, new analysis, reinterpretation, or inclusion into meta-analyses, facilitates reproducibility of research and extends the value of the investment made in funding scientific research. Thus, PLOS believes that ensuring access to the underlying data should be an intrinsic part of the scientific publishing process. Furthermore, by getting data into the right place on publication we can reduce the burden on authors in unearthing old data, retaining old hard drives and answering email requests.

This is, at least in part, a purpose of FOIA: verification of claims. So based on the letter of the law, would such a FOIA request be considered valid and assuming the institution simply rejects the request, would there be legal recourse?

Are you worried that your data will be FOIAed, or are you trying to FOIA some data?

I'm not sure that it should matter which, since that doesn't change the law. Actually, my last question which included my person reason for asking was put on hold. Essentially, I think such information should be made available and I'm wondering if there is any legal ground on which I can stand.

If you are worried about being FOIAed, then your institution probably has an attorney whose job is to deal with FOIA requests, and who probably knows the law in your state and at the federal level quite well. If you want to FOIA something, then you will probably want to consult a private attorney who works in this area. Either way, I wouldn't trust some anonymous advice you got about the law on the internet.

Honestly, not helpful. Want to pay for the lawyer to answer the question, which is at least partially academic in and of itself?

@Omen it's perfectly fine to ask a country-specific question; we have many such questions here

@Daniel I believe the appendix of the paper I refer to in this answer will be of interest to you

If you file a FOIA request and the institution denies it, then you face the possibility of having to sue it to vindicate your right to the information (if you have any). It might be faster to consult an attorney first, and they may not even charge you for the consultation. Random people on the internet tend to be bad at giving legal advice. You need the advice of an expert in this area of law. FYI, the USDA has a page on this, and it requires access only for data cited by the agency in support of its official actions.

@ff524 I'll take a look.

The original Freedom of Information Act applied only to information in the possession of government agencies. That means that the release of reports and proposals submitted to the funding agency could be compelled under the FOIA. But it did not apply to data from the research, if in possession of the PI and not the funding agency (as is typically the case).
A later amendment (Shelby amendment) expanded the FOIA to apply to some federally funded research data in the possession of a non-profit institution, as follows:

The release of "research data relating to published research findings produced under an award that were used by the Federal Government in developing an agency action that has the force and effect of law" may be compelled under the FOIA, if
the data is not "trade secrets, commercial information, materials
necessary to be held confidential by a researcher until they are published, or similar information which is protected under law."

Also, the requestor may be charged a "reasonable fee equaling the full
incremental cost of the agency, the recipient, and applicable subrecipients."
So the general answer to your question is that in most cases, the FOIA does not compel the release of data from federally funded research.
Regarding state law, it seems from the appendix to this report mentioned in another answer that at least one state does have an open records statute that may apply to research data produced by employees of the state university system:

"Measuring Reproducibility in Computer Systems Research." Christian Collberg, Todd Proebsting, Gina Moraila, Akash Shankaran, Zuoming Shi, Alex M Warren. March 21, 2014.

Yes, it could.  "Could" is a very broad word.  Keep in mind that FOIA applies only to executive branch government agencies and has nine exemptions.  Additional laws apply in particular states and in other countries.  As other commenters pointed out, this is not legal advice and you should consult a lawyer.
http://www.foia.gov/ also see Wikipedia.

First: If you are seriously concerned about this, you should consult with a lawyer. Period. Only lawyers can give legal advice, and you shouldn't call others unhelpful if they point this out. By the way, academic institutes and universities can really kick your balls if they think you hurt their trade secrets even if you done it with good will. There are examples about people who got jailtime esp if it was something patent related. So err on the safe side if you are not sure what data you should share.
Second: ".. the underlying data from an article should be made freely available for researchers to use, wherever this is legal and ethical. Data availability allows validation, replication, reanalysis, new analysis, reinterpretation, or inclusion into meta-analyses, facilitates reproducibility of research and extends the value of the investment made in funding scientific research."
or from PLOS:
"PLOS defines the “minimal dataset” to consist of the dataset used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript with related metadata and methods, and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety."
It sounds nice and fluffy, but technically speaking all this hold for present publications, too. Off course, no one publishes every single experimental results, but any data that needed for replication, validation etc should be part of your publication. Results without reproducibility are useless in science, even if reality is a little bitter. I guess these policies are coming to push people a little more in the direction.

This doesn't seem to answer the question about the FOIA in any way.


text:
Should you cite somebody's Transfer Report? (Confirmation Report)
Context: At UK universities at least, before progressing from the first year of your PhD  (or transferring from an MPhil to a PhD), it is required to write a fairly substantial report detailing the research done so far and the outline the research direction over the remainder of the PhD. It's usually known as the Transfer/Confirmation/Upgrade Report.
Is it appropriate to reference these kinds of reports when writing: a) Your own Transfer Report, and b) Published research articles? I have never come across one referenced in a paper before, whereas I have seen references to PhD theses, Masters, and undergraduate dissertations.

If it is published somewhere, then you should feel free to cite it. However, if it's not, then you have a challenge. You might cite it as, more or less, "Author. Title. Transfer Report, University, Year. (unpublished personal communication)" Which indicates that you friend or colleague gave you a copy in which you first found the information you are referencing.
I think such an approach gives your colleague credit and gives readers at least some hope of being able to track down a copy if they want to verify your claims about what it says.

I would like to just add to this answer having since discovered a bit more about these reports (at least in the UK context), it seems they are effectively internal documents and so the 'unpublished personal communication' is probably the best description above. (They wouldn't be found in a University Library like a Thesis might be.)


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How to explain to college that religious observance precludes me from living on campus, as required?
I am planning to attend a college that requires students to live on campus, in a coed setting. As an observant Muslim, I cannot do that.
The college asked me to write a letter explaining why I cannot live on campus. I also have to explain why I can't eat the cafeteria food.
I'm asking how I should start the letter, and what I should say in the letter.

This site focuses on academia beyond the undergraduate level, so it is not the right place for your question.  However, generally colleges are extremely sensitive to the religious needs of their students, so as long as you cite religious reasons for wanting to live off campus, etc, I don't think you'll meet any objection.  (I'd suggest that in your letter, you pay more attention to punctuation, grammar, etc than you did in this post.)

@eykanal It's actually not terribly uncommon for a graduate program to require students to live on-campus for the first term, and it's an even more common requirement for grad students on exchange. (examples)

Cleaned up the now-outdated comments.

@CharlesMorisset Presumably this college's policy is that students have to write a letter explaining why they need an exemption. The OP is asking how to phrase this letter.

Out of curiosity, what in islam pcludes you to live campus? I understand why you cannot eat the cafeteria food (though you will probably not be the first muslim in the college and they may provide alternative menus).
Many muslims are living in campus dormitories in France (and in Europe in general) and they don't have much troubles.

@Taladris If the dorms are co-ed by room, it might be very difficult to maintain modesty requirements.

@mkennedy: Such arrangements are quite rare, at least in the US, and typically happen only by request of both students.  I've never heard of a university where students were required to live in potentially co-ed rooms.

@NateEldredge Sorry, I meant that a dormitory floor might be co-educational, not that individual rooms would be. Sorry for the mix-up.

@NateEldredge You are incorrect about the prevalence of universities being solicitous of the religious requirements of their students.  There was an infamous case at Yale a few years ago, in which Yale refused to make an exception in an identical case (actually, Yale's refusal was egregious: they changed their policy to require Freshmen to live on campus after the student applied, and still refused an exemption).

A Rabbi I know (whose congregants have exactly the same issues) keeps a stack of form letters in his drawer, stating that the named person is observant of religious law, which prevents him/her from living in a coed dorm or eating cafeteria food.  He fills in the name and signs it.  I assume there's a reason why he mass-produces these letters.  Chances are, your Imam has a similar stack.  It could not possibly hurt to include such a letter with yours.

BTW, if you mean it, you should probably include something in your closing like: I regret that, without these accommodations, I will be forced to withdraw my application to attend.  That will let them know you really mean it; you'll be surprised how many people in a university setting have never met anyone who makes "serious" decisions from religious imperative.  Without a statement like this they may assume you are just asking to indulge a preference.

This kind of letter should typically be brief and straightforward. Unless they have told you specifically what should be in the letter, you can write:

To whom it may concern:
Please be advised that, as a Muslim, my religious observance precludes me from living on a coeducational campus. As per the advice of [person or office who told you to write the letter], I am writing this letter to request an exemption from the on-campus living policy.
Thanks for your consideration,
Nimbra

If you want, you can also include contact information for a member of the clergy (i.e., a religious leader) who knows you and can vouch that you do, in fact, have such a requirement. (Sometimes this is required as a matter of policy; for example, those who cannot take the SAT on Saturday due to religious observance must provide a letter from clergy attesting to this.)

I think in your sample letter, you want to use the word "dorm" rather than "campus."

Because it is implied that the college you plan to attend doesn't have an existing form or requirements for exemptions, I suggest that you include more information rather than less.
For an exemption from the on-campus housing requirement:

Briefly discuss the religious observations that are in conflict with living in a co-educational dormitory.
Detail where you are going to live (parents, other family member), give the name, address, and contact information. If living by yourself, a letter from your parents or legal guardian about the situation. Do you have the money to do this? How do you plan to travel to the college?

For the exemption from a meal plan:

Again, briefly discuss the religious requirements that preclude
eating in the cafeteria. (The food service may be able to provide halal meals. If that's so, are there other reasons to ask for an exemption?)
Detail what you will do instead (relative will provide food, cook for
self, bring lunch, etc.).

The residential and meal plan requirements are to foster relationships in the incoming class. Having the majority of incoming (at least) students on-campus also helps to ensure that they have safe places to live and food to eat. Give them reasons why they won't need to worry.
I would also either offer to get a letter from a religious leader or just provide it outright.

In my experience, this kind of letter is usually just procedural (i.e., something to stick in the file to show that they followed the policy) and no detail is necessary.

@ff524 when I went did a little searching, I found that some places wanted notarized letters from parents, doctor's notes (if for medical reasons) that included asking for release of medical records, and from one place that almost no exemptions for any reason are made. I think it's better to give the college every reason to grant the exemption rather than have to appeal later with more information.

Ok. Just speaking from personal experience (I myself have some restrictions due to religion, and I have to send a letter similar to the one I wrote practically every semester).

Start with explaining why its so important that you attend that college and not one that would be better suited for your beliefs (I'm assuming you desperately want to go to this college rather than going simply because its close to home.) Briefly and politely express what the issues are and why they are issues. Quote from the Quran if you need to. I would also ask a local Amam if they would write a letter explanation to further support your claims. As far as the cafeteria food, that is on you. An institution can not be expected to fulfill every dietary guideline of its students. Halal and kosher aside, dealing with allergies alone would limit the cuisine to gruel.


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Can I ask a professor (via e-mail) for a citation for a result presented in lecture notes?
A mathematical result is presented in a set of lecture notes by a professor, and I have not been able to locate any journal papers which include the result. Would it be appropriate to ask the professor, via e-mail, for a citation to a journal paper?

Note: I am not a student of the lecturer.

I assume you have thought long and hard about the statement and are reasonably sure that it is not a consequence of the preceding results in the lecture notes, yes? Sometimes such statements are left in textbooks and notes as exercises for the attentive reader, and not always are such exercises marked as such.

@StephanKolassa: Yes, the result isn't derived, though it is stated how to derive it. The lecture notes don't have a bibliography, nor are there any on the course website, or even the prof's personal site. I also checked textbooks which I knew the professor used for the notes, but have not found it.

The answers notwithstanding, an alternative: take your question to the appropriate SE site, probably [physics.SE]?

Sure, it can't hurt to send a brief, polite email. Just make sure that the reference isn't already given somewhere in the notes, or the professor's course website, or his/her list of suggested reading.
Of course, you should prepare for the possibility that your email will go unanswered. Professors tend to be busy. There is little-to-no benefit to them (other than the pleasure of helping out another human being, that is) in tracking down a reference for someone who isn't a colleague, student, or potential collaborator. There's also the possibility that this professor didn't prepare his/her own lecture notes, and the grad student who did is long gone, etc.

E-mail sent! I'll let you know of the outcome :)

He replied within minutes with an answer; thanks!

@user1997744 Put him on your list of prospective supervisors!

@Moriarty: I'm 16 years old, doing self-study, but sure :) The result was a metric tensor which was a solution to the low energy equations of motion of a string theory, and I couldn't find it anywhere else.

@user1997744 That's very impressive!


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Appropriate response(s) to a possibly rude 'off-duty' academic staff
In my university, students doing their Phd or Honours are regularly recruited on a part-time basis to assists with students in lab experiments.
As a student in the Math and Physical science, my strength is tilted towards the more mathematical aspect of my studies. On the other hand, I struggle with elementary experimental work. This requires initiative on my part to spend more time in the lab.
In a particular occasion, while working in the lab, a student claiming to be doing his Phd while on causal work as a lab demonstrator offered to assist me in my work.
Note that during this time he was not on duty as a lab demonstrator.
In my observation, a good lab demonstrator is one who provides logical steps for the student to arrive at a conclusion that they are seeking.
When the time came for me to asked for help, he failed to answer my question while actively pass smart-ass condescending remarks.

Me: "What is the physical significance of xyz? In my lab assignment, I arrived at this equation and solving it should give me what xyz is but I am interested to know what is its physical significance".
Lab demonstrator: "You can't solve that equation? Just do that right? Are you serious? Look, I'm not here to do your work for you".

That event has severely affected my self-esteem. More importantly, he wasn't helpful. Under no circumstance had I any intention of asking him to do my work. His accusation came across as extremely offensive and uncomfortable. However, keeping in mind that he was 'off-duty' and was in the lab as a student and not as a lab demonstrator.
*I stress he is a lab demonstrator only during class hours. At the time of our interaction, he was not functioning as a lab demonstrator. If he is not paid outside his stipulated hours, he is under no obligation to function as a lab demonstrator *
What are appropriate responses under the above event?
Edited to reflect accuracy.

This is not an answer, and you are right sayin that that was rude, but whenver you ask a question to a lab assistant use the same rules you'd use in asking in StackOverflow: make sure you describe the problem properly and that you showed some research/effort into it. Do no let the "helper" mistake your question with a "do my work" question. Note that I am not saying that you did, just leaving this piece of advise here. Also, don't let someones rudeness affect you.

It was not the rudeness that affects me. What affected me was the intellectually demeaning comments he made. @AnderBiguri

Do you know how to solve that equation, or not? If yes, why didn't you tell him right away that he misunderstood your question? If the equation is a really basic one, like a quadratic equation, for which you should have learned the formula long ago, the comment seems a bit blunt but not completely out of line.

Yes it is a very basic one which I could solve by hand or by computer-easier than quadratic equation. He was not answering my question in the OP and constantly going on with smart-ass comments leaving me no time to respond without interrupting. Once he was done, he returned to his seat. I offered a "thank you" from across my seat but he was unresponsive.I didn't felt any further interaction with this person is warranted. @FedericoPoloni

I too had argues with different lab assistants, the best action would be to let it go, don't spend psychic energy on people that are not worth it, t is something that doesn't affect you, trust more on your capabilities.

So some jerk offers to help you and then decides to be a jerk instead. (His job is irrelevant.) Burn him in effigy and move on with your life. If he offers to "help" again, look him square in the eye and say no, possibly prefixed by a four-letter epithet.

What are appropriate responses under the above event?
That depends whether or not he is your direct superior, I must say I didn't quite get that from your question. You state that he is a lab demonstrator, but was not "on duty" at the time of the incident.
In the general case, you will meet many condescending people throughout your life. So my first suggestion is to start developing a thicker skin and just shrugging it off.
You should also keep in mind that he told you a lot about his personality. So, your lesson is to keep the communication with this individual to a minimum. Since he offered you help, but then failed to be constructive and was insulting and disrupting instead, you shouldn't accept (or ask for) help from him anymore. If he "offers his help" again, politely decline "I can manage on my own, thank you.". If he disrupts your work by trying to force his assistance, then that is an issue for the lab supervisor and you should bring the case to them.
If he is, or is assigned in the future to be, your lab demonstrator, i.e. "on duty" as you said, and behaves in a similar manner, this is also something that you should bring to the lab supervisor. Avoid "paying him in kind", i.e. engaging in an open confrontation with him, though. You gain nothing by it, you'll probably just end up demeaning yourself to the same level as he.

I have edited the OP to reflect greater accuracies in my post. He is a causal lab demonstrator on days where he has classes. On days without, he isn't paid and thus not functioning as a lab demonstrator.


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Format multiple affiliations/institutions for medRxiv
I am submitting to medRxiv. In the "author list" part of the submission process, each author has only one line for an institution. There are no obvious ways of adding more lines.
I can see that it is possible to have multiple institutions (example)
I would try with a semicolon, but since there is no way of previewing the generated medRxiv page, and since it stays up forever, I am unwilling to try it out. What is the correct way of entering multiple institutions in the author information?

This is answered in medRxiv's faq.

Why have some details changed in the Abstract or other metadata?
Metadata details (manuscript title, author list, abstract, etc.) are
supplied by the author during the submission process and initially
post with the PDF. These are replaced with final metadata extracted
from each PDF file once the full text HTML is generated. There may be
small differences between the metadata the authors supply and the
corresponding text derived from their PDF files.


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Can I slightly change the title of my conference presentation?
I'm going to a conference in December and I will have a 20 minute talk there. Originally, a colleague of mine was supposed to go, but personal circumstances resulted in my taking part instead. My colleague and I cover the same area, so this is not the problem. But since my colleague handed in the title of the talk we have reevaluated our use of field-specific key words. Therefore, I think the title as it stands is a little misleading. Is it common practice to adapt conference presentation titles? I found one topic covering a similar matter, but it hasn't got much attention.

Is your question whether it's okay to contact the organisers to change the title of your talk, or whether it's okay to have a title for your talk that is different from the one in the programme?

The latter is the case.

Given that, officially at least, the title of your talk will still be the old misleading one, I'm not sure how much there really is to be gained by changing the wording of your first slide, which seems to be effectively what you're thinking of doing. In fact, having a title for your talk that doesn't match what's in the programme could be potentially misleading anyway (for example, if the chair reads your title from the programme, rather than the slide, or if the title on the screen isn't what your audience had expected).
If you feel that your title is misleading then what I think I would do would be to begin the talk by making it clear that the title is potentially misleading, and then clarifying what the talk is actually about. You could even, before the audience's eyes, swap your old title for a new title.
As long as the programme has the old title then to a certain extent the damage is done. I think the best approach to take is simply to make clear from the outset that the title is misleading, and explain what you're really going to talk about.

Thanks for your answer. I don't think it is misleading in a way that would throw off 99% of the audience. But if someone happens to know my topic they might challenge the title. It is really about a rather vague definition nobody will have heard of. Given that changing the title might be more damaging than living with the present title, I think I will just leave it and address questions if needed.

@ian_itor That sounds reasonable. Playing devil's advocate for a moment, you may want to consider the possibility that someone in that 1% challenges your title and a couple of minutes of your question time (presumably only 5-10 mins for a 20min talk) is spent clarifying it, rather than discussing something more productive to you. Additionally, if the only people likely to pick up on it are the experts in your topic, are these the people you want to "mislead." Ultimately, you know the field and the audience better than I, so you're best placed to weigh up the likelihood of these events.

You have raised a good point, but I think saying that our views on the use of terminology have changed since the submission of the abstract might suffice to clear things up.

It is quite normal that in a conference with 40 talks, several speakers change the titles of their talk on the spot. Common reasons are that there was some success after registration, or during the preparation of the talk the speaker found out that he cannot cover everything in the prescribed time. Sometimes it happens that a mistake was found to late, so the content of the talk has to be changed substantially. Usually this is not a problem.
However, people either come to your talk because they are attracted by the title, or because they just want to appear polite. It would be unfair against the former if you change the content of your talk, in particular if there are parallel sessions. So if after submitting your title and abstract you find some much more interesting results on some other topic, you should still stick to your original talk.


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Postdocs (Bioinformatics/NGS data science) from university of Toronto get Salary or stipend
I am bit puzzled, regarding the payment made to postdocs in Canada. I am a PhD and in my first postdoc (Europe). For my next assignment, I am in my final stages of negotiating a position of postdoc at University of Toronto. I looked over some advertisements for the position that said the salary will range from 60k to 80k.
My first question is:

In general the postdocs associated with UHN are awarded salary or stipend?
How much salary can I expect as this is my second postdoc (I need to run a family of 4, in Toronto)?

I know from my past experience that salaries can be negotiated, depending upon the need of hiring PI and your eagerness to join the team.
Could anyone provide me with inputs.
Many thank's in advance.

I guess the votes to close this question are related to your second question, which we cannot answer. We don't know your field, nor your experience that would help negotiating a salary. I think the first questions is interesting and should be kept open.

Hi, I will update my question.

Postdocs at the University of Toronto are employees.  Postdoctoral research fellows are unionised as part of CUPE 3902 Unit 5.  Although some agencies would like to treat postdocs as trainees, they are not.
The salaries at the University of Toronto for postdocs vary enormously, from less than $35k/year (in humanities) to over $70k/year (in computer science).  There is no general salary scale.

Hi, Thank you for your reply. I added the missing information. My field is computational cancer biology (Bioinformatics).

@Angelo Ok!  Although I don't have statistics on the salary range per field, yours sounds like one that should have salaries to the upper part of the range, in line with the ads you saw.  You should be able to support a family of 4 on that in Toronto; I found that cost of living is smaller than in similarly sized cities (certainly compared to places like New York, San Francisco, or London) although I have no clue about costs for things like schooling.  Good luck!


text:
Can I propose a talk in a seminar on a research paper which is under communication in a journal?
I have communicated one research paper of mathematics in a journal. Now I want to talk on that paper in a seminar/conference just for a presentation and getting a presentation certificate (probably), but not for publication.
Is it ethical ?
Any suggestion please.

Perfectly ethical. You are discussing your own ideas. Even in the case that the journal already has copyright to your paper (probably not here), that doesn't mean that they somehow "own" the ideas.
Even if your remarks were published, it would be fine, though some journals object to prepublication of the paper. But that only applies to the paper - the specific expression of the ideas - not the ideas themselves.
The "certificate" is irrelevant to the ethical question here. Good for you if you get it, but the action is ethical in any case.

Thank you very much for your answer. But I am a PhD student and there is a rule in my country, that I should present at least 2 seminars. Second, possibly the certificate (if they provide) will increase my CV.

I mean that the certificate is irrelevant to the ethical question.

ok, thanks. I got it

Presenting your results at a seminar is not a violation of any ethical academic norm. Conferences are slightly different: you should find out whether the conference will have a published proceedings.
If your work will be peer-reviewed and published as part of the conference proceedings this may violate the journal's publication policy. In particular, you won't be able to authorize the journal to publish the work as that privilege has already been given to whatever conference you had given it to by letting your paper be part of a published proceedings (you will need to actually sign this when you publish).
Normally, these are questions you can just ask the conference organizers and they'll be happy to let you know how to proceed. Some conferences allow the publication of an abstract/short paper that just summarizes the results, and thus does not constitute a violation of most journal policies.

Thank you very much for your answer