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Who should be first author? Theory person or Experiment person?
The situation:
Two PhD students named 'Theory' and 'Experiment' are working on a project. Both are experimentalists by training but, from experiences working on a separate project, Theory comes up with an idea for a new experiment. Positive results from this experiment would have a small but significant impact on their field. However, Theory does not have expertise on the particular instrument required to conduct the experiment so, with the blessing of their adviser, Theory enlists Experiment who is an expert at using the instrument. Theory guides the experiment but the execution is all done by Experiment.
Happily, the results are positive!
The question is, given that Theory and Experiment agree to share first authorship, who should be listed first?
Edit: after writing this I found this thread
Had the idea vs. did the work: Who should be the lead author? which is very similar to this question.
There's also an interesting discussion of the issue in this blog: https://funkdoctorx.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/co-first-author-and-cvs/

As someone working in a field where authors are listed alphabetically, I feel this "first author" thing is getting out of hand. We decided that first authors are more important; then shared first authorship was invented. Now people start suggesting that, among shared first authors, the first one listed is more important. What comes next, shared first first authors?

Since different fields have very different conventions, this question needs more information before it can be answered

The question is, given that Theory and Experiment agree to share first authorship, who should be listed first? -- Varies by field. In my field, I see folks do an alphabetical listing of the two first authors. Sometimes journals allow authors to indicate equal contribution in the paper somewhere. Also, in your CV, you can indicate that the two authors listed first contributed equally.

If the order of shared-first authors matters, you're not really shared-first authors.

"Shared first authorship" means there is a statement at the bottom of the first page, saying "both of these two contributed equally" ?

Possible duplicate of Paper contributions and first authorship

Money guy, for sure.

@FedericoPoloni All first authors are first, but some first authors are more first than others. - Orwell, G. et al

Possible duplicate of Why do people sometimes put authors with equal contribution in non-alphabetical order?

Ooo! Research on how authors should be listed is gonna be my next paper! (Anyone that wants to help, I'll let you be listed too.)

@mickeyf Actually there are various research papers about authorship order, see here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.3391 and the references therein

It is impossible to answer with this information. are you assuming exactly equal amount of time writing the paper and doing all the analysis that went into that?  People asking why it matters who is first is because it makes a big difference how the paper is talked about, how it is cited in practice, and even (barring that) frankly people are petty little bleeps so want to be first.

@RoboKaren The last author spot is reserved for money guy.

Possible duplicate of Had the idea vs. did the work: Who should be the lead author?

Shared first authors are listed alphabethically, at least that's what makes sense, otherwise they are not shared first authors!! I'd go with that no doubt.
From your comments I would say that your are the Experiment person, as you seem to be diminishing the role of the Theory person (he/she simply did so and so...).
From your description, the Theory person came up with the idea and guided the experiments, while the Experiment person simply run the experiments. As a general principle, I would tend to side with the Theory person (Peter's answer here seems to corroborate my view). I believe it also matters who is going to write most of the paper, which you do not mention.
However, as we are all a bunch of strangers on the internet, there's no actual way of knowing which is the case (the idea may be too simple or the experiment may be very complex, and so on...). The best thing to do would be to talk to your supervisor.
Most importantly, don't cling on unimportant details, as you already have a shared first-author status. Move on. This is the kind of meaningless thing that can ruin a scientific collaboration for good.

At least in my field, shared first (co-first) are not listed alphabetically, and additional (but small) weight is given to internal ordering of first authors. I agree it is silly, but the whole ordering method is distorted (in some papers I saw 4 co-first authors).

From the information we have I'd find it hard to lean either side. From the description given, I could also conclude that the Theory person might have had a vague idea, like "wouldn't it make sense to apply that method to that data pool I just discovered?!" and then the Experiment person went and actually did the work. Such an idea might be common enough that a lot of people have it, but don't spend the work to actually cary out any experiments. It might also be that Theory came up with a lot of theoretical frameworks explaining why the experiments could be a good idea, we don't know.

In the end it really depends on how much efforts both authors spent (and how valuable their efforts are to the project), and they seem to agree that it's about the same.

Throw a dice to decide who comes first. Then write a follow-up paper and inverse the order. Sometimes there is no right and wrong all you can aim for is fairness in the long run.

I'd think carefully about how much work has been invested by each student and scientific contribution, and how much each student will guide the writing of the paper. Based on what you've said so far I'd tend toward listing Experiment first. If Theory devoted more effort than I thought, perhaps co-first.
Did Theory say, "It's worth testing X, because if this is true, then Y"? Or did the student develop a quantitative mathematical model that is motivating the paper? Who is making the decisions about experimental details? Is Experiment making all of the decisions, because he/she knows the system being studied? Or is Theory making all of the scientific calls, and Experiment serving as a technician who happens to be expert in a particular tool?
I would have a difficult time arguing, however, that the student who performed all of the experiments - and without whose experience the project wouldn't have worked - could be listed less than co-first, though.
Edited to add: in case anyone's wondering, I'm a theorist.

#AJK thanks for your insight. I agree with your last paragraph. FYI Theory simply realized that an extant quantitative mathematical model predicted something never before tested. So yes, Theory said "It's worth testing X, because if that is true, then Y". The decisions about the experiment are being made equally. Theory knows how the instrument works and has used other commercial versions of the instrument but the version Experiment is using is more specialized and much more delicate so the adviser decided to have only Experiment become proficient on it.

So Theory has an idea, and he wants to enlist somebody to run the experiments. He could chose Experiment, or he could probably chose many other people. No matter who he chooses, he gets a paper from it; but because he decided to chose Experiment, this somehow makes Experiment more important and essential but Theory less important for the paper.

@DVSA - I agree entirely, which is why I suggested asking that set of questions.

@Nick: But maybe no one else has the same idea as Theory and thus, he can find any other minion to do his bidding to bring this knowledge to the rest of us, while Experiment may never give the world this knowledge on his own. Point being, it's hardly clear in such cases and as much as both brought about the same sweat in different forms to the project, I'd see them as equal contributors. Since they already share first author, I'd really be pragmatic with the remaining order.

My guess is the poster is Theory.  Theory believes it's their original idea and feels the credit belongs to them but is worried that asking Experiment to be second author might be offensive.
In my field, usually the person who proposes and "owns" the project is the first author.  However, usually the political setup is that both make clear that we do more than one paper out of this and that Theory is first author for the first paper and Experiment can be first author for a second follow up paper, especially if the second paper is an "experimental" or "methodological" extension of the first paper.

The answer heavily depends on your major and type of research. For example, most of the time in applied chemistry developing an experimental setup and conducting experiment for a very simple idea require a lot of efforts and expertise while in other cases (most of the time
in theoretical computer science) coming up with new idea require a rigorous theoretical (analytical and mathematical) analysis which is much more challenging compare to required experiments to prove the idea.


text:
Paper revision exact deadline
I am revising a paper submitted to IEEE TVT journal. I'm quite tight on time and trying to complete the paper revision by its deadline which is on Sep 10,2018 (Monday).
Does anyone have a paper on TVT and know the exact meaning of deadline for this journal ? Is it on Sunday night or Monday night ?

There was a downvote. I upvoted to make it up. I suspect it's because of the acronym TVT. Did you mean  IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology by IEEE TVT? Please clarify.

Ask the editor.

Since this is already the date in question, let me note that the mail you got on the deadline may be very specific (date, time, place) or not. If not you can probably interpret it liberally in case you can't reach the editor in question. If they say 11:59PM EDT, Sept 9... then they probably mean it literally. But they may otherwise be interpreting it as local time on the 10th. That is most likely the case unless it was very specific.

Relax. Journal deadlines are not strict (unless they are for special issues with a set publication date). They're more intended to help keep the journal organized. Chances are you can go weeks past the deadline and nothing will happen, although if you wait months, your submission might be removed as dormant.
If you're still concerned, ask for a deadline extension. It's likely the journal will grant it.

While this may be completely true in general it may also be unwise to depend on the advice given in the first paragraph here. "Chances are" won't help you if you are rejected even if other journals wouldn't do that. Meet the deadline or ask the editor. Yes, if you request an extension it will likely be granted, but not if you don't ask. Assumptions are less than safe.

While a journal editor is unlikely to completely reject your paper for missing a deadline, there are things you should consider. The first is that you should keep the editor informed if you will miss a deadline, ask for an extension, and provide a realistic estimate for completion.
One reason for providing a deadline is just to keep you working. But note that an editor will typically have several issues in preparation at the same time. There may be restrictions on total length of an issue, both minimum and maximum, and the editor may already have a slot in mind for your paper, provided that you complete in time to fit the production schedule.
If you miss the deadline, then, while the paper may still be accepted, it may be delayed in publication, possibly for quite a while. That might be especially true for a long paper.
Of course, if there is no physical version of the publication and everything is done online, then the length is less of an issue. However, the editor may also have an idea about a theme for each issue and your paper may fit that theme for an upcoming issue. If you miss deadlines then it may take even longer, until that theme comes up again or a more general issue is created.
It is to your advantage, in just about every way, to work with the editor to make his/her life easier. It is a mutual thing. In particular, don't make assumptions that, if incorrect, make life difficult for both you and the editor. It is easy enough in most cases to find out what you need to know.

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Why do graduate engineering schools ask for academic reference letters?
I'm applying to study a master of engineering in Canada from Australia. As part of my application I'm required to provide two reference letters.
Now universities in Australia are very commercialized. Even in my third year courses, there are at least 300+ students in a course. I don't see the professors outside of lectures and consultations and as a result I am not 'close' with any professors. I was volunteering and working a lot during my undergrad degree and have thus provided my work and volunteering supervisors as referees. The enrollment team have responded by rejecting my referees and asking me to provide academic referees instead.
I am really frustrated by this as I fail to comprehend the purpose for academic referees in engineering degrees. If it's my academic performance you want to see, you have my transcript for that. If it's my character and capabilities, my supervisors knows it better than any professor ever could.
The only explanation that I can come up with is that this is an outdated system from a time when there were few students at universities and professors back then had closer relationships with students than they do now.
I know this feels like a rant but I am genuinely interested to hear the story from an enrollments perspective. why would graduate engineering schools ask for reference letters specifically from academics?

The answer is most probably due to the quality of references they have received in the past from non-academic referees, which turned out not to help the choices they made. Most times references are needed, such as for a passport, then the suitable source is usually defined with good reason...

I agree that references do not have to be from academics. That seems like an arbitrary restriction, though I can see how it makes sense to have at least one of your letter writers have a background in academia -- after all, you're applying to a university.
Why do admissions committees require letters to begin with? Because graduate school is different from undergraduate. It requires you to show creativity, initiative, independence. Only having good grades in undergraduate is not enough, so the transcript by itself only provides one piece of the picture. In addition, more students have good grades than can be admitted to graduate school -- so admissions committees have to have additional criteria to select from all candidates.

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How much is the normal salary of a postdoctoral fellow in North America and Western Europe?
I understand that the salary of a postdoctoral fellow depends on the field, project, contract, and so forth, but I am curious how much is the normal range for a fellow. Someone told me that he prefer to continue postdoctoral fellowship, as he gets the same salary of assistant professorship with less official duties.
In my experience, the range of salary for a postdoctoral fellow is much less than an assistant professor, something between $25,000 - $50,000. In Europe, it is in the lower side, but it is usually higher in the US.
I am curious to know what is the actual rate, and is there a norm for estimating the salary of a postdoctoral fellow?
In other words, when looking at postdoctoral openings, how much is an excellent/good/normal deal?

This is going to depend enormously on the country.

...and on the area of research etc.

@TaraB I know, and I just want to get an estimate for North America and Western Europe.

@All Western Europe is hardly a coherent unit, especially when it comes to salaries/benefits :)

@All:  Then it would be a good idea to specify that in the question, but as F'x says, there's a pretty wide variation in salaries in Western Europe.  (Also a wide variation in the cost of living between different countries in Western Europe and also between different cities in the US.)

Two answers mentioned the level of postdoc salaries in France. This is public information, but not always available in English. I have recently discussed this in more detail here.

Norwegian Polar Institute pays some 450,000 NOK (80,000 $) per year, -ish, from a recent job opening.

@gerrit, that is the standard entry salary for a postdoc in Norway. The standard entry salary for a PhD is just $10,000 less.

@adipro I realise.

Let's find some official numbers and statistics. From this article:

As a baseline, in 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Research Service Award (NRSA) postdoctoral stipend for new postdocs was $39,264, increasing to $54,180 for those with seven or more years of experience. Funding levels at universities are broadly similar.

Post-doc salary guidelines depend on individual institutions, and benefits vary widely from place to place. In addition to salary, checking the benefits is important in the US, but less important in more civilized/socialistic (strike out the inapplicable term) countries.
A job site that gathers salary information from US job advertisements has the following for post-doctoral fellowships:

Post-Doctoral Fellow average salary is $39,302, median salary is $38,000 with a salary range from $20,779 to $961,896.

I think it's safe to say that $961,896 is an outlier, but apart from that, the median matches  the NRSA number. It also shows that there is a broad range of salaries, even by browsing the job listings on that site.

For Europe, as I've said the situation is heterogeneous. I know how to find numbers for UK, at least. If you look at jobs postings from jobs.ac.uk for post-doctoral positions, the range appears to be £28,000 – £37,000 (apart from a few outliers). This would be roughly $44,000 – $58,000, but you have to adjust for taxes, health insurance, and then cost of living (which can be quite high in UK).
In France, CNRS is the largest scientific employer, and its post-doc salary is:

The gross monthly salary of a CNRS postdoc is 2,500 €

As an anecdote, when I started as assistant professor, my salary was significantly lower than my post-doc salary. And even some of my post-docs in my group had higher pay than me (as well as some industry-employed PhD students). But money's not everything…

The 2005 Sigma Xi post doc survey reported a median salary of $38,000 a year with a mean experience of 29 months. This is a little bit lower than the 2005 NRSA 2 years of experience salary number. Just another piece of evidence that the salary is approximately $40,000 a year.

@user11852 yes, the scale I gave is the total theoretical range, not restricted to recent graduates…

Can you tell me if postdoc salary is taxable in Ireland?

In many states in the US, you can search publicly available salaries for example California, Washington

A few more: Canadian National Postdoctoral Survey, Assessing the landscape of US postdoctoral salaries, United States National Postdoc Survey results, NSF Median basic salary of U.S. doctorate recipients

@All,
I can only give you some examples. In most areas in physics, in the USA, the postdoc salary ranges from 36000-45000US$ for most universities. Some high-ranked universities pay as much as 60000$ too to their physics postdocs, with an exception of Simons Center which pays 70000$. On the other hand, national labs pay around 70000$ for their physics postdocs - I don't know why the difference between the university payscale and the national lab payscales in the same country for the same field!
In the UK it is fairly uniform for any field, at least in science and engineering. It is usually between £29000 to £33000 per year. Where you lie in this range depends on how many years you have passed after your Ph.D.
In Australia, they usually pay 60000-70000 AUD + 9% (if the contract is for short term - I don't know if the short term means 1 year or less than 3 years though) or 17% (if the contract is for 3 years or more) superannuation, i.e., retirement fund. Again, there are precise rules on where you lie in this range depending on years after the PhD date.
In South Africa, it is somewhere between 180000-240000 Rand per year tax-free.
In New Zealand, you may expect the salary around 50000-60000 NZ$.
In Germany the salary levels seemed complicated to me when I was applying as there are many kinds of taxes and you may avoid some if you are married and have child etc.
In Brazil, you may expect around US$14000 for the national postdoc fellowship (52000BRL). With month life cost of US$1073 (3966BRL )
If you ask me, the postdoc life is miserable if you are in most universities in the USA and have even a small family to support. In my experience, Australia or the UK where the salaries are uniform and above the national averages for the fresh engineers (or other professionals), your life can be much more pleasant -  well unless you are in the expensive area in Sydney or London!
Brazil seems excellent too but I can't speak Portuguese !
Edit: Forgot about Ireland. The salaries are around €35000 per year. I used to get paid around €43000 per year (each every expenses like insurance, taxes, 'levy' which was another kind of tax, etc. were on me though) in 2009-2010, however I would think the salary levels have gone lower after the credit crunch in which Ireland has been affected the most.
I should also mention that most postdocs in Math departments in the USA are paid 48000-55000 US$ per year but they have to teach 2 courses a year or so whereas the physics postdocs don't teach at all (if they teach then they get more money than their salary).
Also in Japan and South Korea the salaries are around US$40000 (converting. their local currencies)

very informative answer!

@SimonArnold great answer, would you have sources for these figures?

@SimonArnold: London salaries are higher to compensate for the higher living costs.  I find it a bit unfair actually that it's the only place in the country where salaries and PhD scholarships are higher, because I work in a town which is too expensive for me to live in (St Andrews, Scotland).

Also I think NZ salaries have gone up (along with living costs).  A friend there is getting $70,000 for his postdoc there and he only just finished his PhD.  And in Australia the top of the range is more like $80,000 these days.

@TaraB how come St Andrews is expensive? it's in the middle of… well, I won't say “nowhere”, but it's a rather little place in the middle of the countryside

@F'x:  Indeed, but it's very nice, and there are more people who want to live there than fit, therefore accommodation is in high demand.  It has a lot of golf courses and so rich people come on holiday there and retire there.  It's also close enough to Edinburgh for a day-trip, so not completely out of civilisation.
But this is getting rather off-topic!

By the way, other postdocs without anyone else to support can afford to live in St Andrews just fine.  It isn't as expensive as London.

In Norway, postdoc salaries in biology are often in the range 75000-90000$ per year before tax.

@F'x, I should indeed put references for each of the figures I mentioned but it may take a bit of dig to get all these figures. However, I have applied to all these countries during the past 4 years and have got a job in each of these countries. So these figures are practical ones, i.e., quoted on my offer letters!

@Tara B, I don't know about St Andrew's but usually most other towns (except of course some big cities like Manchester) in the UK are fairly reasonable compared to their postdoc salaries which is as Simon Arnold said is  even better than a fresh engineer (which is not the case in the USA where on an average a fresh engineer would get starting from around $50000 per year whereas a postdoc can except 36000-45000$). Taxes are slightly higher in the UK but then you have to consider free health services, great public transportation, etc. issues.

In the USA, health insurance can eat up the tax difference. And then you must buy a car unless you are in New York City! To have a fair comparison, then while talking about being a postdoc in London must be compared with being a postdoc in NYC which are equally expensive. I should add here that I am neither from the USA nor UK. I have worked as a postdoc in both the countries though. And the life as a postdoc in the UK is far more respectable than in the USA with the respective postdoc salaries.

In particle physics lab jobs are both highly competitive and prestigious, and often attract some of the next generation of stand-out scientists.

In math in the US postdocs generally pay between 40K and 70K with the bulk between 45K and 60K.  The AMS has survey data and graphs.

The median for 2018 is $56K from a more recent survey result https://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/2018Survey-NewDoctorates-Report.pdf

Some anecdotal data from (theoretical) computer science:

A Simons funded postdoc gets ~ $70,000
A "normal" postdoc funded by a faculty member from an NSF grant seems to get between $50,000 and $60,000 around these parts.
A postdoc at an industry lab (say, Microsoft Research which I think is the highest paying lab, but numbers at other labs like IBM are not so different) gets upwards of $130,000.

Of course, part of the reason that these comparatively high is that the outside industry options all pay more.

Just adding information for some countries omitted above. For useful links find my answer to this question. For Germany, you are interested in the E13 scale (grade depending on you experience = the number of years from your PhD. start/defense - depends on the position), which boils down to somewhere around 40-50k EUR brutto. For Netherlands, you are interested in a salary scale 10, or 11 again depending on your experience, generally the grade corresponds to the number of years from your PhD. defense. The end result again lies somewhere between 40-50k EUR brutto. There are however significant tax reductions for "knowledge workers", which could significantly increase your net salary.

Later edit: adding few sources
Information about the "30% ruling":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_Netherlands#The_30_Percent_Rule
http://www.iamsterdam.com/en-GB/living/official-matters/thirty-percent-ruling
most universities also provide information about this, for instance TU Delft here:
http://www.tudelft.nl/en/theme/international-staff-and-students/staff-guests/procedures-prior-to-arrival/immigration-procedures/30-rule/

Do you have a link to more information about those tax reductions for knowledge workers?

@underdark: sure. See the edited answer

To give a lower-end answer, the worst position in France is "demi-ATER": it is a half position in the sense that you have half as much teaching duty than professors (about 4 hours a week on average, for about 24 weeks), but you are usually expected to work full time, research included.
It is paid less than 1200 Euros per month, net before taxes.
The full ATER position is as much teaching as professors, with a month salary of approximately 1600 Euros.

Wow, I've never heard of this. My PhD stipend in France is greater than that, even without a teaching post. Not I know what to look out for...

The answer to this very broad question depends on many factors such as (but not limited to):

field: I can't really say if the same position in one field makes more than another but it's very possible.
country: see other answers; North America or Western Europe are waaay to broad to be clumped into a single bucket. (see below for approx figures from Sweden)
university/city: bigger and more expensive cities usually call for larger figures, but in practice you don't get richer on that due to higher cost of living (particularly rent)
financing: postdoc but where? ... at a company/university/independent research institute? In certain systems it's also possible to apply for postdoc grants (ref in Swedish), I know some people who have gotten grants that include their own salaries. Getting such a grant means your financial burden on the employer is much less.
tax: some countries have special, time-bound tax classes for "visiting scientists" or something like that, I have heard that Denmark has a such a policy

That being said, I have got a figure of approx 32500 SEK/mon (ref in Swedish) which corresponds to roughly €45000 per annum (The source is a labor union for university employees).
Hope that helps

Denmark's reduced tax for foreign researchers is 26%, which in addition to labor market contributions raises to 32%. As an example, a postdoc with reduced tax and pension exemption (that means that the university pays you the pension that is supposed to pay to the state as you are a foreigner), the net salary is around 40k EUR.

In Ecology in North America, $45K is generally considered a good salary.  $55K is possible via a competitive NSF post-doc.  The lowest I've seen was I think $38K.  Many post docs are funded via NSF grants and I believe there is an automatic cost of living adjustment implemented by the NSF.  The lowest post-doc salaries I've seen are generally at universities in more rural areas.

I am not going to research this in detail for you, as you can find almost all of this online, and there are many western European countries.
For western Europe it really depends on the country, you can expect to earn roughly 2.5x more in Switzerland (86k CHF) compared to Portugal or Spain (€33k), with most of the other countries in between (Germany €50k). The cost of living also changes, but still you end up with more $$ in some countries.
In most countries there is a collective agreement, meaning that you get payed according to a table. For example in Germany all postdocs earn E13, with the exact amount depending on the years of documented experience, and you only get to E14 if are directly managing 3 persons that are in E13. So for a lot of places you don't have to worry about getting a bad deal on your salary.

Do you have a source for the hard requirement for E14? I know that such positions require some additional responsibilities beyond standard research and teaching, but I've never heard of such a hard-and-fast rule (and would be interested to see it). Usually, there has to be some vague argument about the tasks given being "particularly difficult and/or important".

You are right, that's also there and I missed it before. But it does start with managing 3 E13 employees and only mentions the difficult / important after. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarifvertrag_f%C3%BCr_den_%C3%B6ffentlichen_Dienst_der_L%C3%A4nder

Well, Wikipedia is hardly legal precedent... The actual law only mentions "Beschäftigte [...], deren Tätigkeit sich durch besondere Schwierigkeit und Bedeutung aus der Entgeltgruppe 13 heraushebt." Based on this text, you have to argue for each position independently that it has to be announced as E14 instead of E13; one possible blanket argument that seems to have frequently been successful is that the position involves managing 3+ E13 positions.

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text:
How is US law on equal opportunity enforced in academic recruitment?
Almost every US university states on its job advertisements that the university is an equal opportunity employer. Based on federal law, this means that applicants not be judged by their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
What is the guarantee for this fair strategy in action? If the committee is influenced by negative personal views to underestimate the qualifications of an applicant, how can s/he prove/appeal/claim/complain?
For example, certain criteria are given for an academic position. If an applicant believes that the winner of this competition (the one who is finally appointed) is less qualified than her/him, how can s/he claim that the selection was not equal opportunity in practice?
How can one detect/prove this violation?
How does one proceed in case of a possible violation?

Welcome to AC.sx. I think this is an excellent question that is well worded. I also do not think it is really specific to academia and therefore off-topic.

@DanielE.Shub I somehow agree with you and had doubt to post it here, as it is more related to job topic. However, emphasis on equal opportunity employment is mainly within academia (for academic position). I have not seen such emphasis in other job advertisements. However, if this is out of interests of the AC audience, I will delete it.

What about migrating the question to http://workplace.stackexchange.com/?

@ChrisGregg That's OK to me, seems to be a good idea to attract more attention.

@All all government jobs are also equal opportunity.

@Zenon yes but the diversity (thus, the need for EE) of applicants for faculty positions is much higher than government jobs.

I think the question can be salvaged (i.e. made more on-topic) if one added the perspective of how equal opportunity principle is enforced in academic recruitment. Does the OP agree with this?

Despite my answering the question, as it stands it does belong on workplace.SE. If it is retooled as @posdef suggests, then it can stay. Particularly for example, "How does EEO impact the search process for academic positions?"

@posdef I followed your useful suggestion.

I think even after the recent edit, this question is better suited for Workplace.  I interpreted posdef's suggestion not as "How to detect and punish violations?" (the current question) but rather "How do universities adjust their hiring practices to conform to EOE law?" (which I think would be on-topic here).

Being an equal opportunity employer means that the institution abides by the US federal law on Equal Opportunity - basically that the employer cannot consider race, color, religion, sex, or national origin when making personnel decisions. Additional protected classes, such as age, have been added to Equal Opportunity over the years. Equal Opportunity does not force an institution to hire someone they would rather not hire on the basis of being a member of a protected class, but it means they cannot artificially exclude that candidate. Equal opportunity means that all applications must be evaluated fairly. It does not mean that the best candidate on paper always gets the job.
This is in contrast to Affirmative Action, which in the US is "positive discrimination". In other words, the institution is forced to artificially maintain diversity in its staffing if it does not happen naturally. Affirmative action can mean that you would have to hire your second (or third) choice over your first choice to maintain diversity.
Edit - to address some comments.
From the perspective of an applicant, EO violations can difficult to prove, and the burden of proof is usually on the applicant. Most of the information collected during a hiring process is not (and never will become) public. It is shredded/deleted once the position is filled. An applicant's on paper qualifications are nearly impossible to know, unless you are a close acquaintance of the person. The CV that person posts on their website might be abbreviated, incomplete, or out-of-date.
Additionally, most hiring committees often consider important intangibles that are assessed during the interview. Academic positions are different from positions elsewhere. Most academic committees are assuming that they are hiring a person who will stay at that institution, get tenure, etc. They need to assess if the candidate is likely to do so, if the candidate is likely to thrive in the current culture of the department, if the candidate will get along with the faculty personalities, if the candidate is likely to start looking for something bigger and better five-ten years later, if the candidate is likely to survive the tenure process, if the candidate's specialty/expertise fill a current void in the department, if the candidate is likely to meet service expectations with enthusiasm, if the candidate is amenable to the crappy teaching load he or she will get the first semester, if the candidate's research plans are feasible given other expectations and institutional resources, etc.
You may have more awards, publications, conference presentations, fellowships, grants, letters after you name, or whatever on-paper metric you are using, but you may not have met the needs of the department or institution as well as the other candidate. You may feel more qualified, but someone else was a better fit overall for the position. This question and the answers to this question suggest that applications that look too good may not be considered seriously because hiring committees are afraid of a bad fit.
Alternatively, as may happen, the department you applied to may have always intended to hire the person they hired, but to meet legal and institutional requirements they conducted a search. They interviewed several other strong candidates from diverse backgrounds to satisfy EEO requirements, and then they hired the person they wanted to hire. I won't pretend that such behavior isn't shady, but it can be common, especially for administrative positions, and it is legal. The best way for a hiring committee to prove they are following EEO guidelines is to interview a diverse array of qualified candidates.
To allege that your application was artificially rejected because of your membership in a protected class, start by getting a lawyer. Don't risk jeopardizing your case by inadvertently proceeding without one. Then, do whatever your legal counsel advises. That is what they are for. The only real proof that the hiring committee discriminated against you is if no members of your protected class were interviewed. If you were interviewed, that means they either 1) considered you a strong candidate or 2) went out of their way not to exclude you. Either way, you have almost no case. It may make you angry if the second thing happened, but there is little you can do except to warn people you know away from applying at that institution. If they discriminate against you because you are not the one person they really want for the job, it is not illegal, it just sucks.

Even though it's good information I am not sure if your answer (as it stands) addresses the principal question by the OP: "What is the guarantee for this fair strategy in action? If the committee is influenced by negative personal views to underestimate the qualifications of an applicant, how s/he can prove/appeal/claim/complaint?"

Your description is correct, but as @posdef stated, I am curious what is the guarantee that this law is followed in action. I think this is more like a manual for search committees rather than obligation. I do not say they do not follow this strategy, but how to prosecute any possible violation ?

@posdef - I agree. I have updated my answer.

@BenNorris Thanks for the update. It contained many subtle points and I learned a lot.

The only real proof that the hiring committee discriminated against you is if no members of your protected class were interviewed. — I am not a lawyer, but I believe even that is not proof.  For the hiring committee I'm on currently, we have to carefully document the criteria we use to decide who to interview.  But there is no expectation that we must interview someone in every protected class.

Also: +1 for Hire a lawyer.

@JeffE - Having been on hiring committees, I agree. You can only be expected to interview qualified candidates. The law does not provide equal opportunity for unqualified individuals. However, I have been instructed to consider a diverse array of candidates, and definitely to carefully document the criteria and decision-making process.

To clarify, is national origin different than citizenship? Specifically, is it acceptable to consider visa status, which can affect start date and cost?

@David - Instead of asking about visas and citizenship, I have been instructed to ask if the candidate is legally permitted to work in the United States. Then, after the interviewing is over, Human Resources can seek for each candidate the proper verification.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
"Soft" ways to contribute to the research community in a new and growing field
I am doing my PhD research in a new multidisciplinary field within Computer Science. It is new in the sense that there are still no tools/implementations publicly available and several workshops co-located with different conferences. Many papers targeting this new area, have been published in different conferences and journals.  As a PhD student and besides the scientific contributions, I would wonder what other soft things I can do for the field?
So far I have developed a tool for one of the main models in the field. I am documenting it to make it public. I thought about maintaining a bibliography. but not sure how beneficial it is.

You should remember that as a Ph.D student, the instruments at your disposal are limited. Having said that, maintaining a bibliography is a useful way to collect all relevant information in one place, especially given the multidisciplinary nature of the area. If you do this though, be careful to

make sure things are always kept up-to-date. There's nothing more annoying than a half-baked reference page
Be very liberal in what you include in the bibliography. It shouldn't be perceived that you're being a gatekeeper for the area.
If possible, provide some structure to the bibliography: sections, maybe some annotation, etc. Depending on how web-savvy you are, you might be able to create a form for people to enter information in themselves.

The primary benefit for you will be access to the entire body of work in the area, and some credit for maintaining the page. There will undoubtedly be name recognition benefits if you are perceived not only as the librarian, but as an expert on the topic.

Disclaimer: I am also currently a PhD student.
My research lies at the intersection(s) of HCI, privacy, location based social networks, mobility theory and spatial statistics. This means that the work in this area gets published from computer science-y journals like ACM CACM, IEEE Privacy & Security to communication-y journals like New Media and Society to conferences like CHI, SOUPS and MobileHCI.
I adopt 3 strategies to organize my own work. If I do not do this then the existing literature and new critical thinking about my area will spiral out of control for me.

I maintain an annotated bibliography for any relevant work in this area. As Suresh pointed out, its generally up-to-date and quite liberal in nature. This is not public but I always email it to folks who ask for it. I find that maintaining a bibliography in Mendeley, exporting as a BibTeX file and writing a couple of sentences about each article works for me. I make sure that each article is filed under some loose sub-heading. For instance, one such general sub-heading in my area could be "Location Privacy and Surveillance."
I write scripts in order to extract, manipulate and analyze data and I always publish them on github. This is public. Usually, I write scripts in php, python or R. Its great to see other folks forking my projects or following them and making them better than I could. :)
I write short blog posts about my impressions on certain topics and also post some simplistic visualizations and analyses of my work there. I take special care in making sure that these are short but to the point. Nobody likes to read long, rambling blog posts. :P

One very valuable thing you can do is to try to form or contribute to an online community of researchers in your subfield.  In my area, these communities tend to form lately on Google+ and/or Twitter.  You can start by following/adding to your circles people you know who use these social networks.  Then when you read (or write) an interesting paper, post your commentary for others to read.
On G+, if you add the #spnetwork tag to your posts, they will also appear on https://selectedpapers.net/, giving them wider exposure.

A community I know of even has a reddit subpage all for themselves... :shocked:


text:
Reminder email about acceptance letter
A professor at a university replied to my PhD application email with a yes. I asked him further about his current research projects but haven't heard from him for nearly 2 weeks now; should I write him a reminder email? if so, how can it be in the politest way possible?

I would recommend sending out that reminder email.  As a prof, I get about about 20-30 emails per day (of course, many people get plenty more than that).  After a week if I haven't responded to an email it is usually not because I am ignoring it. Rather, it has been drowned out by hundreds of more recent notes and messages.  Reminders are welcomed -- in fact they tell me that a potential PhD student is both organized and values knowing about my research.
Perhaps a simple response like  'I am following up on my email from May xx, 2016. I assume you are very busy but have you had an opportunity to consider my request?' with your previous email included within the email as a reply.


text:
If I upload a draft of my paper to arXiv, will I still be able to publish in an IEEE or ACM publication?
Since IEEE/ACM will eventually own the copyright of the papers they publish, and since they charge for access to papers, if I have a paper on arXiv is that a problem for them?

You can already post your ACM paper on your page free of charge using the Author-Izer service (http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service), so it doesn't look like they prohibit all free-of-charge access (although of course this is under their control).

Read the relevant copyright transfer agreement. For example: http://www.acm.org/publications/ACM-PubLicenseAgreement.pdf and http://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecopyrightform.pdf — in brief, yes, submitting to ArXiv is perfectly fine, just follow the details of the relevant copyright transfer agreement.

Only if you tell them.

As @Jukka Suomela has indicated in the comments, yes, you will.
The relevant policy for IEEE (from http://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecopyrightform.pdf) is:

8 . Electronic Preprints. Before submitting an article to an IEEE publication, authors frequently post their manuscripts to their own web site, their
  employer’s site, or to another server that invites constructive comment from colleagues. Upon submission of an article to IEEE, an author is required to
  transfer copyright in the article to IEEE, and the author must update any previously posted version of the article with a prominently displayed IEEE
  copyright notice. Upon publication of an article by the IEEE, the author must replace any previously posted electronic versions of the article with either
  (1) the full citation to the IEEE work with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or link to the article abstract in IEEE Xplore, or (2) the accepted version
  only (not the IEEE-published version), including the IEEE copyright notice and full citation, with a link to the final, published article in IEEE Xplore.

For ACM, from http://www.acm.org/publications/ACM-PubLicenseAgreement.pdf:

(b) Furthermore, notwithstanding the exclusive
  rights the Owner has granted to ACM pursuant to Paragraph 2 (a),
  Owner shall have the right to do the following: [...] (v) Prior to commencement of the ACM
  peer review process, post the version of the Work as submitted to
  ACM (“Submitted Version”) to non-peer reviewed servers...

This answer is current as of August, 2014.

Just note that the IEEE copyright requirements quoted here are pretty much BS. From a moral/ethical standpoint they have no business telling you what to do with previous drafts; and legally, once you've granted non-revocable rights to, well, everyone, even if you "transfer" your copyrights to the IEEE you can just "have them back" by the terms under which it was published.  (Caveat: I am not a lawyer.)


text:
Recommendation letter after 1 month?
I am applying for a US PhD program. One of my recommendation letters arrived 1 month late.
Should I
1) contact the department
or
2) contact potential supervisors to kindly ask them to consider it, given that the delay was out of my control?
or
3) do nothing?

Contact the department immediately and provide evidence that the letter itself was delayed. Then cc your referee on the correspondence.


text:
Emailing two professors who've co-authored papers I'm interested on working on
I'm interested in a graduate program, and I've identified a topic and idea that I have in mind for research. However, the related papers have been co-authored by two professors in the same department, who also head the related research labs together, as well. I want to contact them about research opportunities.
How would I go about emailing them? What's the right etiquette?

Email both of them individually
CC both of them in one intro email
Choose one of them and email only them

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

From what you've said, it sounds like they're of equal status and you've given no indication that the work you may want to do is likely to be of more obvious relevance to one than the other.
As long as this is the case I would suggest contacting them both in an initial email. If you're looking to arrange a meeting with them then you could mention that you're happy to meet with them individually or as a pair.
Contacting them both at once gives you the benefit of increasing the chance that you'll get a response, while it provides them the opportunity to decide for themselves which of them (if not both) maintains contact with you. Furthermore, even if you only get into a dialogue with one of them, because you've copied in both from the beginning the other should  be able to track what's been discussed.
If my initial assumption is incorrect and it's obvious that one of them may be more relevant to your interests (e.g., if one is the "theory-person" and the other is the "methodology-person") then you may want to consider contacting that one individually, but even still I would suggest there are advantages to approaching both at once.

It's hard to decide which one of them is the (theory/methodology)-person, since both of them have co-authored numerous papers in that field. They even co-head two research labs. My initial hunch was that it might be beneficial to contact them both together, but I wasn't sure if that was would be ok. Thanks for your ideas and suggestions!

Also, should I address why I've emailed them together, in the email? Maybe explain it's because they've co-authored the papers?

@shadow Yeah, I would say that I was contacting them because of my interest in the work they've both been involved in.


text:
How many arXiv papers are uploaded in their final (refereed) versions?
In a recent meta.physics.se discussion on the use of permanent links form physics.stackexchange, I proposed as policy that

when linking to the arXiv, link to the abstract page (arxiv.org/abs/...) and not directly to the pdf, as a courtesy to users on lower bandwidths. If the paper has been published (which will be noted on the arXiv abstract), include a link to the journal version, even if it's paywalled, if only as a courtesy to the referees' hard work.

One comment on the italicized part was

Doesn't pretty much everybody post the final version on arxiv?

and I would like to know (if that is even possible) to what extent this is true. My gut feeling is that this is field-dependent, but I do not know what evidence may be available to explore this, other than anecdotal evidence.
Thus: Is there a clear trend for authors to upload post-referee-process versions after publication? Does this depend on the specific field? What evidence is available for this?

Until recently, I thought that posting to arXiv the post-refereed version was considered bad form, especially if the author has already transferred copyright to the journal.  However, I recently discovered that this is allowed by many publishers, including Elsevier.  You can check on what is allowed by specific publishers.

@DanC Thank you for the link. I know that publisher policies on what is allowed vary, but for now I'm mostly interested in whether people actually take advantage of those rights or not, or in which fields they do.

In math (specifically math.CO), I rarely (maybe 1 out of 20 or rarer) see comments stating that the paper is post-refereed.  I think the Elsevier policy on posting post-refereed versions is probably fairly new, in light of the Elsevier boycott.  As a result, I think more people may take advantage of it as they become aware.  For the time being, I believe it is uncommon.

@DanC: I believe also Springer recently changed their policy in that direction. See also http://academia.stackexchange.com/a/11226/725 about increasing rights for authors.

@DanC: What do you mean by comments stating that the paper is post-refereed?  Do you mean something explicit like "This is the final, published version"?  It has never occurred to me to add a comment like that, although I always update papers post-refereeing.  I'd guess that a lot of people do this without explicit comment.

@AnonymousMathematician The arXiv submission process has  a Comments field.  When I submit a revision, I use that field to describe the changes from the previous version.  I suspected that was standard, but perhaps it is not.

@AnonymousMathematician: moreover, it has a "journal-ref" field, where you can give the final citation. I'm frequently wondering whether arXiv (or other author archived manuscripts) are the final version, and of what paper exactly, so I find that possibility an important help and try not to forget updating it.

It is a lot of work to find out which paper in arXiv has actually the same content as a published paper. However, taking arXiv's journal-ref field as a surrogate indicating which paper has a journal version out, I arrive at these fraction of papers:

So it looks as if the gut feeling that this is field-dependent is true: high energy and nuclear physics have consistently high fractions of papers with journal-ref field set. On the other hand, this seems far less common for maths papers.  Note that a certain drop at the end is to be expected as the preprints may be uploaded to arXiv considerably before the paper is accepted, printed and the journal-ref is updated in arXiv.
Here's the marginal plot over all fields:

So overall, about 45% of the papers have a journal-ref. However, it is set for almost 60% of the 2001 - 2007 papers. Whether this is a real decline or just the lag between preprint and paper publishing remains to be seen (in a few years).
Also, neither the overall nor the subject-dependent trends seem to have a convincing increasing trend, even if the decline due to "not yet published and updated" is assumed to be the sole cause of the decreases.
For the complete picture, here's the development of total number of papers:

and number of papers with journal-ref set:

Thanks for making the effort to process the data and generate these graphs.

I guess the drop at the end is in fact mostly the publication delay. This is also field dependent - math journals are known for extraordinary publication delays, and that is very apparent in your plots.

@silvado: yes I agree. However, I wasn't aware that a delay of 6 years sounds reasonable e.g. for maths. In my field (chemistry/chemometrics) the delay is much shorter, also because we have to be careful whether pre-prints are considered previous publication, so I put my preprints to arXiv only after submission or even after acceptance/end of the embargo time. That makes much shorter to no delay.

@silvado: It certainly seems update delay, rather than publication delay.

By cutting off the 6 years, there is a clear downtrend for math/math-ph/astro-ph, and stay the same and up for others. It should be due to the difficult of publishing in those journal. To get the better comparison, we must also parse for real published paper and compare the date, which is very hard to do.

@cbeleites The tendency in maths to publish preprints very early certainly adds to the observed delay time in your data.

I post my papers on astro-ph after acceptance. None of my papers have journal-ref set, as far as I can see.

@xioxox: May I ask whether you have a particular reason for not setting journal-ref? I use it because I prefer "proper" citations and do not want to put any obstacles to people who wonder whether and to what extent the paper on arXiv and the journal version are the same. In fact, I put a box into the arXiv version stating that they are equivalent.

@cbeleites: I don't have the reference when I put it on after acceptance. No one in astronomy/astrophysics bothers adding it later. I think this likely because we all search for papers with ADS (http://adswww.harvard.edu/), which automatically associates the journal and astro-ph articles, giving the journal article by default.

@cbeleites you should also put a box in the published version stating they are the same!

@DavidRoberts: nice idea, but in my field not feasible: we often have an embargo of a year before we're allowed to make the author's accepted manuscript publicly available.

Only after you sign a legal document ;-). You can always point to the arXiv as being a preprint version, then update that later to the final version.


text:
How tightly enforced are open-access embargoes?
Many academic journals have copyright policies which forbid authors (possibly for a finite embargo time) to make their papers (either preprints, accepted manuscripts, or camera-ready versions) freely available (either on their personal websites or on repositories such as the arXiv). How tightly enforced are these policies? Are there known cases of publishers pursuing legal action against an author for posting copyrighted academic papers? Or would such cases normally be dealt with private requests to cease-and-desist?
This answer seems to indicate such cases are rare, but there could be privately-dealt with cases that are not visible. Or is there a large body of public-repository-published papers that possibly / probably / demonstrably have been publicly posted in breach of a copyright policy?

I am having a hard time thinking of reasons to ask this question that don't involve violating the signed agreement with the journal to respect their embargo. Since questions asking about breaking the law are probably frowned on in the Stack Exchange network, could you please clarify the rationale for your question?

I'm sorry it came across like that - my motivation is far from that. I have not and would not breach a signed copyright agreement, and would advise my friends to refrain from that - I choose the journal carefully beforehand. That said, the publishing business has been shown to be extremely predatory, from big-journal bundling to predatory OA journals, and the imposition of copyright restrictions is one of the stone walls authors hit most often. (cont.)

Publishers have already gone after librarians, and I would like to know how predatory the publishing business is as regards legal action towards authors. Are the 'OA-unfriendly' publishers actively defending their positions?

Most computer science researchers violate copyright/publishing agreements all the time, usually with the tacit acceptance (if not covert permission) of the publishers.  It's not a moral failing.

@eykanal: wrt. reasons to ask this question that don't involve violating the signed agreement with the journal, please see my answer. At least for German authors after an embargo year, any signed agreement that forbids the author to make the preprint publicly available will soon be void. So maybe we can turn this question into a collection of scenarios when preprint publishing is legal even though the publisher tries to tell you it is not.

On a related note, and for the sake of completeness, SHERPA/RoMEO is a very good reference database for publisher policies regarding embargos and copyright. It is good practice for a researcher to know well the contract he may have to sign with a publisher before actually signing it.

This answer mentions a couple of instances of press releases breaking embargo (different kind)

One data point:
I am a mathematician, and I have never heard of this happening to anyone.
Many mathematicians post preprints on their website and to the arXiv, and it is somewhat common for mathematicians to also post scanned copies of the published journal versions of their older papers.
Ethical judgements may vary, but I am unaware of any authors who have suffered negative practical consequences for this, or even who have been asked to remove their papers.

But we also don't have the embargo system in mathematics; at least, not yet.

Nate is right, most publishing houses (including Springer and Elsevier) we use in math have quite decent copyright agreement when it comes to green OA.

I think it is really depending by the community: different academic communities do have different "openness" regarding open access, sharing of documents and collaboration. This reflects/is reflected by the related publishing segment.

This doesn't answer the question.

Update: Here's the new text of the German UrhG §38 Abs (4):

Der Urheber eines wissenschaftlichen Beitrags, der im Rahmen einer mindestens zur Hälfte mit öffentlichen Mitteln geförderten Forschungstätigkeit entstanden und in einer periodisch mindestens zweimal jährlich erscheinenden Sammlung erschienen ist, hat auch dann, wenn er dem Verleger oder Herausgeber ein ausschließliches Nutzungsrecht eingeräumt hat, das Recht, den Beitrag nach Ablauf von zwölf Monaten seit der Erstveröffentlichung in der akzeptierten Manuskriptversion öffentlich zugänglich zu machen, soweit dies keinem gewerblichen Zweck dient. Die Quelle der Erstveröffentlichung ist anzugeben. Eine zum Nachteil des Urhebers abweichende Vereinbarung ist unwirksam.

rough translation:
The author of a scientific work

which was produced during scientific reseach that funded at least half by public money and
which was published in a periodical that is issued at least twice per year

retains the right to make the accpted manuscript publicly available

after an embargo period of 12 months from the date of the first publication
as long as this is not for commercial purposes.

The source of the first publication must be given.
This right is retained also in case of a complete copyright transfer to the publisher of editor.
Agreements on this topic to the disadvantage of the author are void.
I guess the non-commercial clause will raise some questions and difficulties.

old answer:
Here in Germany, the parliament (Bundestag) actually voted to change §38 UrhG
to (among other changes):

Einführung eines unabdingbaren Zweitverwertungsrechtes für Autoren von mit überwiegend aus öffentlichen Mitteln geförderten Beiträgen in Periodika 12 Monate nach Erstveröffentlichung;

rough translation: introduction of an unalienable right of secondary use* for authors of contributions to journals which are mainly supported mainly by public grants  12 months after the primary publication.
* I'm not quite sure how to translate "Zweitverwertungsrecht" - it is the right for secondary use/exploitation(?) of a work. Meaning that agreements that the publisher get the exclusive rights to the work will be valid in Germany only for 12 months, thereafter the authors have the right to make these papers publicly available.
The new text does not yet show up (the voting took place only 2 weeks ago) in the law texts in internet, it will become §38 (4) UrhG.
While this still means that only papers with public funding are covered, and the embargo period may be annoying, I see this as an important step into the right direction. And it definitively means that there won't be any possibility for publishers to enforce anything after a year if a German author made the work publicly available.
In any case, our version of the "fair use" rights mean that  I'm always allowed to send single copies of scientific papers which are needed for collaboration to my colleagues. So within the first year after publication, you'll still have to email me for the paper, but thereafter, you can blame me for not making the manuscript available e.g. via arXiv.

You should make clear that this pertains to the "accepted manuscript version", not the version formatted by the publisher.

@silvado: good point. I emphasised it in the text.

This seems to be changing. A recent article in the Washington Post, How one publisher is stopping academics from sharing their research (2013-12-19), describes a recent 'spree' of takedown notices sent by Elsevier to Academia.edu, the University of Calgary, the University of California-Irvine, and Harvard University. This seems to be a new development:

The letter to Harvard identified 23 articles that it requested be taken down from University-hosted pages in mid November. "We had not received takedown notices for scholarly articles before this, as far as we know," says Peter Suber, the Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and the Harvard Open Access Project.

Academia.edu, which is a for-profit company, and also a competitor of Elsevier-owned Mendeley, got about 2,800 requests.
This story is also covered by Wired and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here is one event that can qualify as such. In 2011, Russell O'Connor submitted a paper to the ACM Workshop for Generic Programming 2011 after having submitted it to the arXiv under a Public Domain licence. At press time, the printer asked O'Connor for a letter of permission from the ACM in lieu of an exclusive copyright transfer which he could not grant. Although he had informed the conference chairs of the arXiv upload when he submitted, and they were OK with it, ACM legal refused to publish the paper as it was "already published." The paper is only mentioned briefly in the proceedings in  a note:

We note that one of the papers presented in the workshop is not included in the proceedings. This paper, ‘Functor is to Lens as Applicative is to Biplate: Introducing Multiplate’ by Russell O’Connor, is accessible as arXiv:1103.2841v2 [cs.PL].

This is explained in more detail in O'Connor's blog post The ACM and Me.

Fully agreeing with eykanal's comment, I can provide the following thought on reasons: as with all copyrighted materials originating from commercial sources, it becomes a business decision on when and how to hunt down those who break the rules. If some authors put their manuscripts out on their own web sites it is probably not worth the expenses to prevent it. If everyone did it systematically, I am sure things would look different. If publishers see a decline in subscription rates from libraries due to the fact that authors make stuff available, then I think we will see something akin to what happened with downloadable music. For a publisher, an author is also what makes the business go around, so hunting authors may not be a good business practice. But, with more and more published work being made available in formally  illegal ways, I am sure it is only a matter of time before clamps are tightened. So it is a bit like teasing a sleeping bear, fine until it wakes up (and I do not mean "fine" as in agreeing with posting material illegally).
In addition to putting the published paper online, it might be worth noting that in many if not most cases, it is perfectly legal to post the original manuscript (before review and typesetting) on the web since this is not the copyrighted material that is in the publications. Unless you have signed off on immaterial rights you still have the rights to that original work.
The bottom line is it is illegal and many probably do not really understand what they have signed when they published their papers.

If everyone did it systematically, I am sure things would look different. — In some fields (like mine), everyone does do it systematically, and things don't look different.


text:
How should I interpret an almost-but-not-quite-alphabetical author list?
I just noticed a weird aspect about this paper (which was of interest here and recently came up again here). If you look at the author list, it reads

L. P. Gaffney, P. A. Butler, M. Scheck, A. B. Hayes, F. Wenander, M. Albers, B. Bastin, C. Bauer, A. Blazhev, S. Bönig, N. Bree, J. Cederkäll, T. Chupp, D. Cline, T. E. Cocolios, T. Davinson, H. De Witte, J. Diriken, T. Grahn, A. Herzan, M. Huyse, D. G. Jenkins, D. T. Joss, N. Kesteloot, J. Konki, M. Kowalczyk, Th. Kröll, E. Kwan, R. Lutter, K. Moschner, P. Napiorkowski, J. Pakarinen, M. Pfeiffer, D. Radeck, P. Reiter, K. Reynders, S. V. Rigby, L. M. Robledo, M. Rudigier, S. Sambi, M. Seidlitz, B. Siebeck, T. Stora, P. Thoele, P. Van Duppen, M. J. Vermeulen, M. von Schmid, D. Voulot, N. Warr, K. Wimmer, K. Wrzosek-Lipska, C. Y. Wu and M. Zielinska

In particular, it splits into an initial, non-alphabetic component,

L. P. Gaffney, P. A. Butler, M. Scheck, A. B. Hayes, F. Wenander

and then an alphabetic list from M. Albers through M. Zielinska.
How should I interpret this authorship convention? What fields is it used in, and to what purpose? My initial reaction would be to assign to the initial component a ranking down in 'importance' more akin to the "first author did most of the work, middle authors supported, and last author sponsored and oversaw the work" convention used in fields with smaller collaborations (at least in physics), but that leaves the alphabetic component in an awkward position, so I'm not sure my interpretation is right.

I think it depends on why you need to interpret the list.

@StrongBad In this particular example, it's mostly curiosity. (In particular, I'd like to get a feel for the role of one team member of this and a later paper, whose statements on a press release seem to me to be misaligned with what's actually in the paper.) On the other hand, I imagine this question would also be useful for people evaluating publications like this one on other (e.g. hiring) grounds to get an initial feel for the role of a given author in a collaboration.

Notice anyway that at the end of the paper there is a statement about the individual contributions.

@Massimo d'oh, of course. The question still retains much of its interest, though, I think. And the second paper has no such statement.

By chance M.Wenander was not M. Aenander.It would have been difficult to know in what list he were supposed to be ...

How should I interpret this authorship convention?
The first (non-alphabetic) authors are likely the main contributors in order of contribution significance as you guessed. Starting from the alphabetic ordering the authors would be those with lesser contributions (but equal to each other).
What fields is it used in, and to what purpose?
I do not know what fields this is specific to, but I would not be surprised if this is a common strategy for papers with many authors irrespective of the field. Ordering a long list of authors with equivalent contributions in some manner simply seems sensible and alphabetic ordering is a simple and common ordering scheme. Unless the publisher has a policy on how this should be handled, alphabetic ordering seems to be a simple go-to strategy.

This is precisely the convention we've used on papers I've been on with this type of structure.

@jakebeal And what field did you work in?

This has been my experience in both computer science and synthetic biology.

I would make an ideological suggestion: Don't interpret it at all.
I believe that the custom of choosing author list positions to express degrees of contribution, seniority, who-is-whose-daddy etc. is unbecoming and should be discouraged in favor of alphabetical author lists. To this end I would suggest applying a sort of "color-blindness" to the order of listing.

This doesn't answer the question. If the authors intended to communicate something by the ordering (and they clearly did) it is worth understanding what and why before you choose whether or not to ignore it.

For a small number of authors the order does not matter much. In this case however it is a good indicator of which of the many authors may be most useful to get in contact with for questions. An indicator of a corresponding author is another solution, but this is not always present for example it is not in the paper linked by the OP.

I agree with @Richard - and in fact I don't think I could have stated my position more cleanly.

@RichardRast: You're just stating the opposite claim rather than arguing it. It is worth it to not understand what and why, and choosing to ignore it.

@einplokum How can you know whether something is worth understanding, if you don't understand what it is? You argue it's unbecoming, which is indicative only of etiquette, but clearly other fields don't have the same social conventions as yours. If you choose to misunderstand or fail to understand based on applying irrelevant social conventions, how can that have value?

@RichardRast: I weight the positive effect of not understanding it with the potential positive and negative effects of understanding it, and reach that conclusion. For a (remote!) analogy, think of why it's better that police doesn't make unlawful searches. How can we know if it's worth it or not before they make the search? Well, the potential benefits are just important enough, whatever they may be, to justify the means.

Or in one sentence: The ends don't justify the means here.

@Benjamin I stand corrected! I overlooked it since I'm used to this information being on the front page.


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Should formatting affect grades of student essays?
I helped my friend, who never used LaTeX before, to convert her PG Diploma essay from a Word document into this system (for a molecular biology class). I convinced her that, with some learning, she could later produce better essays with LaTeX in shorter time, focusing on the content without worrying about the layout.
But she started to worry from the beginning.
She commented on the placement of large figures and tables which didn't fit immediately at the positions and pages where they called out. She was particularly concerned that these floating figures (placed professionally, I think, by LaTeX at the top of the following pages) "appeared in the wrong places in the middle of the next sections".
I explained to her that these automatic placements by LaTeX seemed "perfect" and  "optimal" to avoid large white spaces left at the bottom of the pages; and that this approach is what we see in most professorially typeset materials (e.g., journal articles, and my thesis ;)).
However, the professor who later marked the essay commented that these positionings "look odd" and "broke the logical flow", and he seemed to prefer the "inline placement" of figures and tables. My friend now thinks that some points were lost because of this.
--
Should (such) layout and formatting issues in general affect the grading of student essays?
If yes, I assume this professor might not be familiar enough with professional typesetting practices, or he simply didn't like what he saw in the essay. Is he free not to accept the common professional typesetting practices in his course?

Is there really a fight over word processors?  I have only run into the old "I expect it to be in MLA vs APA format" instances.  I guess one could always ask the professor which processor they use/prefer.

I suggest your friend ask the professor for a breakdown of the grade.  This can be helpful in many ways, as one strives to improve as a researcher and a writer.  Your friend could mention that in the email, to prevent the professor from feeling uncomfortable with the request.

Is LaTeX better than Word? This is a holy-war kind of a question. I personally agree that LaTeX documents often, but not always, allow to produce a better typeset document in less time (as soon as you know enough of it to write the document, and do not spend time googling for "how do I do X in LaTeX").
Are LaTeX's floating objects perfect? Some things are less than perfect even with LaTeX, and handling of floating objects is one of them. You can suggest using [p] instead of [t]/[b]/[h] options --- this can still generate under-filled pages, but at least it looks like it is done on purpose.
Should you Professor comment on the layout? The way how the document looks definitely affects how it is perceived by the reader, so if something looks weird / unusual, it is all right for your Professor to comment on it.
Should the layout affect the grade? There is no general answer to that. Some Universities even have a very rigid guidelines on layout for theses submission, which sometimes, sadly, prescribe the use of Word, and sometimes, conveniently, the use of LaTeX (particularly if LaTeX is taught as a part of the Program). In this case, of course, students can be penalised for not following the guidelines. Sometimes points for "presentation" are included in the task specification --- and you can lose them if your Professor decides that bad typography affects the presentation of the document (I don't think LaTeX can be that bad, though). However, Professor should not simply reduce the grade if they feel that the layout is unusual.

I'll skip the software issue, which is irrelevant to the question

Should layout and formatting issues in general affect the grading of student essays?

In short yes. Any document which is handed in has to be formatted to make it as easy as possible to follow the train of thought and digest the reasoning. No matter if the document is a pdf, printed out, handwritten or ASCII text. If the document is not structured well it may not get full credits. Also note that one can only structure a document well, if one has well organized thoughts on the matter. As an example, it is usually fairly easy to see if somebody copied a solution for some exercises without thought even if there is not typo but only from the mere look of the result. Spacings are odd, linebreaks are often at the wrong point or the organization on the sheet seems to emphasize the wrong thing.
That said, anything more concrete will be on thin ice. Some people prefer strong structuring elements (e.g. having many lists and subheadings), others are distracted by that (prefer more plain text, less dominant subheadings, e.g. at the beginning of the paragraph rather than in a separate line). Some people prefer figures within the text, some prefer then on the top of the pages, some even like them in the margin or collected at the end of the document. I think one should remark that "common professional typesetting practices" do not really exist - there a lot of practices, man contradict each others and professionals did not agree on standards as is fact a lot of "taste" and "habits" are involved.
Don't ignore rules, also use common sense and intuition but stick to guidelines and requirements.

"Should" etc. is a philosophical question. Pragmatically, the questions are: Did this particular professor have specific expectations about the formatting? and In this field particularly, is there a clearly defined standard?
Most professors will provide or point to a style guide if asked. If there is a question about something that LaTeX is doing, then the student whose grade could be affected needs to get the professor's eyes on the questionable formatting before the paper is due (or at the very least, consult a grad student, writing tutor, etc., in the field).
Professors are often weirdly specific in their expectations - treating some style rules as law, and disregarding others that many people observe, often for reasons relating to the goals of that particular class - and so it's as well to ask: what standard are YOU grading on in this class? May I bring my work to you for a brief review beforehand?

Yes/no
Student essays are the best time to learn the formatting. You can comment the format, even if it does not affect the grading. Then you need to explicitly say that formatting does not affect the grading, possibly many times. At some point you may want to demand the proper formatting. The grading is a way to enforce that, instead of suggesting.
Academia is different from the industry. In industry the pictures must be in the proper places. In academia it is only a good thing. The professor has the right to decide in the end, what is the focus of the teaching.
Latex will make the overall formatting easier and saves a lot of time. Word is the best for what I call "shotgun reporting" where things are only added to the bottom of the document and once ready it's polished and then published. There is no revision and the document seldom is returned for editing.
I like to think that the students are adults that make the decisions. In few first tasks you may provide them with latex templates to learn latex, and give them the time to learn. But after many years I think that you should just ask for a proper document that will fit the purpose. If it's thesis and they know latex, then by all means they should use it (my opinion), but if it's about reporting the results, then they are free to choose (I still prefer latex, but Word almost just as fine).


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How do I appropriately use inline citations for multiple quoted paragraphs?
I'm writing a paper where I have a number of sentences across a few paragraphs, all from the same source. How should I use inline citations in this situation? Should I put them after each listed fact in the sentence at the end of each paragraph, or at the end of all of the paragraphs? The paragraphs are all topically related, but each one is different enough to be a sub-topic. In case it's relevant, the topic being discussed is technology, the paragraphs detail how companies using that technology.

Your original question was migrated here; check there for other answers. As this is also relevant on our site, it's welcome here as well.

From what I've seen, the only situation in which you would use a single citation following multiple sentences is if it's obvious that you're quoting that source verbatim AND the quote is uninterrupted. If you're using your own terminology OR the quote is interrupted, you should cite each sentence separately.
This becomes obvious when considering the purpose of a citation. Citations are there to answer the question, "who said this?" If you're quoting someone verbatim, and it's obvious you're doing so, then you only need a single citation, as the reader will infer that it applies to the entire preceding quote.
On the other hand, if you have multiple claims throughout a paragraph, after each claim the reader will wonder, "what's his source for this?" In most cases, you will be using multiple sources, and you will have a mixture of references. However, even if you have a single source for lots of claims, the reader will still wonder after each claim what the source is. You should tell them the source of each and every claim separately.
The exception I've seen—and that my advisor requested I use in my writing—is in the instance of a single logical thought pattern being followed throughout a paragraph or set of paragraphs. If you're describing someone else's work, it can be justifiable to state, "the following is an overview of Bob (2007)", or something to that effect. From my experience, though, that usually only happens in review articles.

Okay so it is acceptable to have the same citation listed several sentences in a row?

@DonRigatone - I would say "yes, that's fine". You can also just read through some of the articles in whatever journal you hope to publish in to see whether that's a common occurrence in that journal.

While not really an answer, this is often an indication of a lack of understanding. The original question used of language like paraphrasing, another indication of a lack of understanding. You should probably show a draft to a colleague asking for specific help.

If you really have only one reference which you take one paragraph to sum up, I'd really advise eykanal’s last item (the “exception”):

Tying one’s shoelaces with only one hand is notoriously difficult [1]. Although it seemed like an unsurmountable issue a few years back, the recent breakthrough of Smith et al. [2] relied on a few topological considerations which have been clearly delineated by Brown [3], and are summarized in the rest of this paragraph. [Here your description, with claims from Brown, without repeating the reference number]
However, little is known about the influence of the number of fingers used [4] in the tying process. Here, we present a research on tying shoelaces with even-fingered hands.

This is better than having a lot of claims [3] with the same reference [3] written all over one paragraph [3]. However, you need to make it crystal-clear what part is covered by the reference: using the paragraph boundary (and explicitly stating this) is a good way of doing that.


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What does this mean, "We recommend that you consider submission to an alternative venue"?
Recently, after submitting a manuscript for publication, I received the following response:

Your manuscript, referenced below, has been considered for publication in XXX: "Article Title"
  Unfortunately, this manuscript on a fundamental topic does not fall under the range of topics that are covered by XXX, which focuses on the applied physical sciences. We recommend that you consider submission to an alternative venue.

My question is, what is the meaning of the sentence "We recommend that you consider submission to an alternative venue". To me, it sounds like a terse "good luck with that!" sign-off. However, that's an odd sentence, as they usually just write "no" in those cases. Does this imply anything particular about my submission?

"It's not you, it's me" :)

Would you please edit this question to give it a more descriptive title?

I think @eykanal made usefully explicit what was too implicit previously... Good. And this does resonate with the potential problem that (not only) a novice may inadvertently misrepresent themselves by failing to be explicit about what seemed obvious to them, but was not obvious to others, etc. Not an easy error to overcome, but awareness of its possibility is very useful.

It appears your paper is off-topic for the journal. An example would be submitting a paper on moduli spaces in Yang-Mills theory to an experimental physics journal. The former is dealing with the fundamental or underlying theory, whilst the journal is looking for experimental physics.

From what you've said by itself, it's ambiguous. That is, if your paper really is on a topic not usually covered by that journal, then their remark is completely bland, just meaning what it says. If, at the other extreme, you are pretty sure that your paper's topic is exactly what is covered in the journal, then, yes, their "recommendation" is just a polite form of rejection.
If you are a beginner at this, it is possible that your understanding of what your own paper is about may have some quirks or limitations, or you've presented it in a way that dis-served you, or you've presented it in a way that confused or mis-directed the editors/referee, etc.
For example, giving inappropriate/inaccurate keywords can get a paper sent to an inappropriate referee, who may think the paper is misguided, while if you'd given different keywords, a different referee might think it was mainstream and wonderful.
Similarly, unfortunate choices in title, abstract, and introduction can set things off down the wrong path. Getting an opinion from an experienced person about the actual appropriateness of your paper for that venue is necessary before it's possible to understand the situation.

The journal is telling you that the paper you wrote does not fit the type of topics that they aim for. The recommendation at the end is to resubmit your paper to a journal which does fit the topic of your article. Looking at the comments, they are more an applied journal, while the paper you wrote deals with more fundamental issues.

The sentence "We recommend that you consider submission to an alternative venue" clearly means that your paper does not match the scope of the journal and should be submitted elsewhere. This indicates that your choice of journal was probably not right. There is a possibility that the editor was trying to suggest that you choose a journal that does not cater exclusively to the applied physical sciences.


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Life as a math professor
I am currently an undergraduate math major in my 3rd year (in America). I have taken lots of pure math courses, and anything I put in my resume tells potential employers I'm probably going to be an academic.
However, I still would like to know from current researchers what is it like to be a math professor. More specifically, I have already guessed at basically what they do (research approachable problems, teach zero or one or two classes at a time, go to conferences and seminars to get ideas, life is probably easier after tenure and more stressful before, pay is sufficient but probably less than industry). When I look up career-related questions on this site, I generally get questions dealing with the items mentioned above.
But what is the job satisfaction like (people probably get impressions from colleagues)? What sorts of things should one consider before committing to an academic career (as it's a long road)? What is the work environment like (what sorts of people with which one has to interact)? Which types of people generally like an academic environment?

In my opinion, it really depends on the type of academic job that you want/are able to land. Professional life in (1) a top tier research university, is different than in (2) a medium tier Ph.D. granting department, is different than in (3) a Master's granting department with a more modest research agenda, is different than in (4) a predominantly teaching oriented, four year college.
The teaching load/research expectation continuum certainly varies across the four. On one end of the spectrum, say at (1)-(2), the teaching load will be light (as you describe) but with research expectations in terms of papers in top tier journals and landing external funding that is very high. However, even if the actual course load is less, you will spend a chunk of time working with graduate students in reading courses, research seminars, their thesis, etc. As you move from (2) to (3), the research expectations decrease as teaching loads increase. In (4), you very well may have no requirement to produce original mathematical research in the form of journal articles, but instead be expected to demonstrate "continued scholarly activity" which can take a variety of forms. On the other hand, you may be teaching 4 classes a semester.
Pay, generally---but not always and certainly not uniformly---decreases from (1) to (4). The autonomy of academic life is usually very attractive and serves to counterbalance a salary that is less than what people in some mathematical specialties could garner in industry.
In my opinion, the type of job one shoots for (and will eventually find success/satisfaction in) is a combination of one's passions (research vs. teaching vs both), innate talents (again, in both research and teaching), aspirations, competitiveness, willingness to deal with pressure, and geography, to name a few.
As a nod to pragmatism, one thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of jobs are in (4) and (3). Jobs in (1) and (2) are highly competitive to land. I have many friends in all four categories who are happy and very few (none?) who are unhappy, although admittedly the latter category probably self-selected out of academia.
Finally, since you are a third year undergrad, you will get a MUCH better sense of how much you really like mathematics in graduate school. During that time all of this should crystallize greatly. You will also get to see the profession much more up close than you do as an undergrad. It is great that you are thinking of these things now; keep your eyes and ears open in the coming years.
This is all just my two cents. Certainly others may have very different opinions, experiences, and perspectives...

+1 for "you will get a MUCH better sense of how much you really like mathematics in graduate school".  Research is very different from taking classes.

I agree with most of what JohnD wrote, but let me mention some additional points.
Many people that leave academia do so less because they're  not "smart enough" and more because it doesn't suit their personality.  Research often involves long stretches of work with no clear signs of progress.  To quote Hans Bethe: "Two things are required.  One is a brain.  And second is a willingness to spend long times in thinking, with a definite possibility that you come out with nothing."  You may enjoy reading Paul Seymour's article: "How the proof of the strong perfect graph theorem was found." (This is an account of the backstory of solving one of the biggest open problems in discrete math in the last 20 years.)
Particularly early in your career, this can be scary.  Pre-tenure you have to balance a desire to hold yourself to a very high standard versus your desire to get tenure, which requires publishing papers, even if they don't always meet your ideal.
To succeed in research, you need to learn how to chart your own agenda.  No one tells you what topics to work on, who to work with, how long to spend on a question, where to submit your papers, or which speaking invitations to accept.  Personally, I enjoy making all of these decisions.  But for some people, this lack of structure is very difficult to handle.  It's essential that you develop a clear vision, perseverance, self-confidence, and the ability to solve odd miscellaneous problems that arise.

I heartily agree with all of that, Dan. And that Bethe quote is spot on.


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Post doctoral while working on self employed job
I am in need to know if there is a provision wherein I could do a post-doctorate in the USA for a year or two, while I am owning my own Biotechnology firm back in my home country?

This is a complex issue with a lot of variables. If your post-doc is for work completely unrelated to the work of the company then there is probably no serious issue as long as you faithfully complete the required work.
However, you will also face several issues if there is some relationship. For example, will you have conflicts of interest between the two aspects? That would make it hard-to-impossible to carry on. Likewise, are there intellectual property issues? In other words, is it possible that you will learn something in the post-doc that is, for contractual or other reasons, off-limits to your company. There may be other issues as well if there is any overlap.
For issues such as these, both the post-doc project PI and a lawyer should be consulted.

No My firm has nothing to do with the academic project and there is no common interest, one is on plants and other on animal and food or agriculture products and research. My firm is not self-owned but a partnership of recent origin. As I wasn't finding opportunities in academic, I had to decide to be self-employed. However, after two year struggle, I received some notable reputation in terms of publications from my PhD work that i think would help me in the academic expeirence.

We have no issues in the firm documentation that prevent the partners from going for a post-doc. but I was concerned if the financial aid for post-doc is government aided, do they have any restrictions that prevent the candidate from having alternate income unless he is fails to fulfill the work requirements of post doc?

@AvinashKumar, I doubt there are any financial restrictions for a post-doc, unlike for some scholarships. It is a job like many others.

Thank you very much Dr. Buffy. It sounds like a good news to me. I am glad I could discuss this matter here at academia with you.