text:
Should I ban electronic devices (smartphones, tablets and laptops) from a course?
TL;DR
In the coming semester,
I will be teaching a "seminar" type course with around 30 students.
I would like to disallow students in the course
to use any electronic devices (smartphones, tablets and laptops)?
Questions:

Is banning electronic devices in my course a good idea?
How do I enforce such a rule?

Background
In the coming semester, I will be teaching a "seminar" type course.
The course is fairly small, with fewer than 30 students.
We will spend most of the time in the course
listening to students presenting their ideas,
and the students critiquing and giving feedback
on other students' presentations.
I have had a few years of experience teaching
large lecture courses with more than 100 students per lecture.
In these courses, many of the students prefer
to type their notes on my Powerpoint slides,
rather than writing on a physical copy of the lecture notes.
Unfortunately, as I walk around the classroom,
I invariably notice that a significant proportion of the students
are distracted during the class by their electronic devices,
e.g., checking their Facebook, Instagram or playing games.
(I would estimate about 20% of students
are distracted at any given point of time.)
I have noticed that I work better without electronic devices
because I am less distracted and can focus better.
Consequently, I would hope to minimize the distractions faced by students
by disallowing students in the course to use any electronic devices.
Why do I want to ban electronic devices from the course?
The main goal of the course is to teach students
how to analyze and present business case studies.
The course is not one that is heavy on facts or memorization.
Instead, students need to use their powers of observation
to follow along presentations by their fellow students,
and to evaluate their presentation style, body language and slide design.
Consequently, for this type of course,
I do not see that electronic devices add any value.
In fact, there are many research studies which suggest that
electronic devices negatively affect students' learning.
For example, an article in Psychology Today writes the following:

Cognitive capacity and overall brain power are significantly reduced when your smartphone is within glancing distance—even if it’s turned off and face down—according to a recent study. This new report from the University of Texas at Austin, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity” was published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.
During this study, the UT Austin researchers found that someone’s ability to hold and process data significantly improved if his or her smartphone was in another room while taking a test to gauge attentional control and cognitive processes. Participants who kept their phones in a pocket or bag also outperformed those who kept their phones on the desk while taking the same test. Again, even if the phone was turned off and face down on the desk, the mere sight of one's own smartphone seemed to induce “brain drain” by depleting finite cognitive resources.

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

(I'm a student)
Why do you want to ban the laptops?
Just because some students get distracted? If this is the only reason, that is almost a question of philosophy: Should you force the students into a situation that you think is best for them or should you assume them to be mature enough to decide what's best for them?
If your students were around the age of 12 years old, I'd agree that you should ban the laptops. But I'm assuming that your students have to be somewhat self-disciplied anyways to study for the courses in their 'free-time'.
I like writing my notes on the laptop. If you or the content of your course requires the students to take notes, please allow electronic devices. If the course is entirely focused on participation and taking notes would actually be useless, it might actually make sense to forbid using the devices because then the students would probably participate more.
In a class with only ~30 students, the following does not apply, but regarding your observation that some students are playing games during your lectures:
You will never be able to give the lecture in a tempo that fits every of the 100+ students perfectly. Some may be constantly bored and it suffices for them to listen with one ear while they are gaming or working on something else. Some are perfectly happy with your speed but get bored once somebody who was a bit slower asks a question.
In my experience, when I try to listen to a (to me) boring lecture, my thoughts just drift after a few minutes and I have not much to take away from the lecture. If I instead find a balance so that I can listen to you while it's interesting and keep myself awake and active by doing something else while it's not, I get more out of it.

Is banning electronic devices in my course a good idea?

In general a big no from me, because students don't like to be told how they should behave. Why would you need to enforce something like that when they are here because they want to learn. However, I encourage you to mention your observations to them and that you think the electronic devices might be detrimental to their learning, so they can make an educated choice.
In your case however, with only 30 students where you expect them to actively participate instead of just listen and understand, it can make sense.
But if only one student is presenting and the rest are supposed to sit and listen (opposed to interactively asking questions and discussing) then I feel like it's a similar situation to my usual lectures.

I have noticed that I work better without electronic devices because I am less distracted and can focus better.

True. On the other hand, I can learn better with electronic devices because it is easy to look something up that I didn't understand without having to interrupt the lecture to ask a question. It's also imo better for note-taking because you can paste parts of the slides and freely rearrange them.

How do I enforce such a rule?

First of all, please provide a good reason to the students along with the statement that it is forbidden. Otherwise you will get a few of them on the wrong side and they will still try to use the devices. Without cooperation, enforcing this would be very hard I imagine.
Secondly, give them a good reason not to get distracted. If they are required to be present anyways, it might be an idea to give out grades for participation. Or ensure that the content of the lecture is really interesting.
Think also about when you want to make exceptions. What if somebody has special needs, e.g. does not see the screen from afar? What if some student has an important deadline incoming and wants to work on that during your class, but still came to not miss completely everything? Etc.
Alternative Solution:

Some of the best instructors I had knew at which point of their lecture they should ask questions and took the time to learn students names. Then you can first ask the questions to people goofing off, and follow up with someone paying attention.

This is a quote of DBB's answer, and it reminded me of a tutor we had who everybody considered to be really great. The thing that set him apart is that he noticed when somebody was getting bored, distracted or lost, and asked that person a question. It might be a really simple one just to get their focus back, or it might be one that tests whether they are bored because they already know the content or rather because they're getting tired. Often, when one student would not know the answer, a different student would know the answer (and could explain it to everybody who lost track) or nobody else knew it either and the tutor knew what he had to explain again.
Such questions make people who are zoning out focus again, even if they are not the ones who were asked. And if it is fine to say "I don't know", nobody is afraid of being asked either, so they can answer honestly and give the tutor information about what they got and what not.

This answer captures a lot of key points on why banning electronic devices is a bad idea.  Most presenters can not come even close to a pace that keeps your attention. If they do - then you can start to focus entirely on the presentation. If not - then what does the OP want here by removing the ability to stay engaged on something? Snoring?

Also if you're grading based on participation then people can be on their laptop the whole time and then receive an F, that's their prerogative.

There's a lot of research that says students learn less when taking notes on a laptop, even though they don't think so.

In my experience "12 years old" misses the cut-off age by at least 2 decades.  (In my opinion, at least 6 decades.)  Even advanced graduate students need some protection from themselves.  Every professor knows several grad students who 1.  will teach extra sections whenever there's an extra buck to be made (and I don't blame them a bit.  I was one myself; married with two kiddos.) or 2.  Take a job teaching at a community college thinking they can finish their dissertation while earning a decent-ish salary.  And grad students are just as bad at texting during lecture as any middle schoolers.

@jaia The conclusions of that research are not universally accepted; see e.g. this critique: http://www.readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore.com/2017/12/a-defense-of-technology-in-classroom.html

It's not just one study. It's a body of different types of studies converging on the same conclusion. See, for example, http://www.danielwillingham.com/daniel-willingham-science-and-education-blog/new-studies-show-the-cost-of-student-laptop-use-in-college-lectures .

@jaia Assume that it's absolutely true that taking notes on a laptop hurts my learning. If some prof forbids me to use my laptop, one of the first reactions it will cause in me is a stronge urge of defiance - it's not much different to when somebody forbids having water bottles on the table. Now, when I don't like the prof, I'll most likely just not attend the lecture and teach myself instead - you guessed it, with the laptop. But, if the prof mentions such studies and makes a good case and actually manages to make note-taking irrelevant and the lecture constantly captivating...

Still one point remains.  A student sitting at my lecture should be there to listen to me. No one is forced to. No one is obliged to feel interested . But respectful of my work. To make my lecture more interesting is obviously my task. This is another point. I would have better sit at the cafeteria,  if checking fb would have been a must.

@Alchimista I don't really agree with that point. Yes, it can be considered disrespectful (and that's a valid point to which I don't really know how to respond). It's convenient to sit in a lecture and listen only when I think it's useful to listen though. I claim it's better than sitting in the cafeteria during the lecture (unless I'm studying the lecture content myself while there), and even if I were completely not paying attention, I at least get to know which topics the prof is more enthusiastic about and which are less important. You're right though that this is a selfish perspective.

@Alchimista would a lecturer feel more respected though, if just nobody would come at all? We had a lecture where we were only 30/300 ppl left and I felt bad for the lecturer. (Maybe related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/7887/68057 )

No. That just means the topic is totally not interesting and no useful. Or I should better join the students at the cafeteria .

"I like writing my notes on the laptop." Very bad idea. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/ (Unless you are affected by dyslexia, then it is actually beneficial to you)

@AndreaLazzarotto Haven't read the article yet, but afaik the two main concerns are usually a) taking notes instead of thinking it through and wording it anew because typing is so easy compared to writing, and b) getting distracted by the internet. b) is a valid concern, but depends on the person. a) only matters if you start writing before you understood it. If you  first think about it, you cannot just write what the lecturer said.
I believe this discussion would not fit into the comments here, but for me personally, I believe the benefits outweigh the problems.

@AndreaLazzarotto Recall our last meeting in the comment section (https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/99382/is-it-unreasonable-to-change-the-rules-of-a-quiz-exam-one-week-in-advance/99394#comment257971_99394) ;) I've provided a few of my reasons why I really like using the laptop for taking notes.

The whole idea of assigning students required homework is about the professor thinking that it would be beneficial for a student to do the homework while students might not be able to motivate themselves to do it otherwise.

@Christian I'm not sure, on what part of my answer are you commenting? Or on a comment? (In general, I am in favour of exercises that are available and can be handed in for correction, but without the 'required' part)

@AndreaLazzarotto The past week, I have now paid more attention to make sure that after (seemingly) understanding something,type it in my own words instead of just copy-pasting the slide content and extending it. I feel like that is actually as important as you implied, so... thank you :)

@lucidbrot that's nice to hear. Actually, just yesterday I started reading the paper I found about this topic. I only read half, though.

Be aware that some students with alternate needs may be prescribed electronic devices as a teaching/learning aid. Depending on your legal jurisdiction their needs may also be confidential and you may not be notified, but  to ban them would create legal or ethical problems for you or the institution.
I cite, for example, the recording of the class for those with handwriting difficulties or vision impairment and so on.
It is a mistake to stereotype students' use of devices in class as always something suspicious as the population is wider than that.

A policy under which "electronic devices are banned unless required to accommodate a disability" may be permissible in such situations.  However, this would have the effect of involuntarily "outing" such students as having these disabilities, when they might not otherwise want to share this information publicly.

This is fairly ridiculous: The special needs for a few -- which should by all means be respected -- should not inform general rules. I assume dogs and vehicles are generally forbidden in the classes -- but certainly not for the blind or the lame. "Alternate needs" (actually, additional needs, a.k.a. disabilities) which require special aids cannot be kept secret anyway, so no privacy issue there. Nobody would mind the one blind student recording.

@PeterA.Schneider not all disabilities are immediately visible.  For example I am dsygraphic and can't write my notes (however i can type them). Not being outed as a person with a disability is something that is beneficial.  People do have prejudices against the disabled and there are people who will mind the one blind person recording.

@PeterA.Schneider The fact that some disabilities can't be concealed is not an argument for requiring people with invisible disabilities to out themselves.

Why the need of electronical aid may be confidential? I know plenty of situations where hiding such may lead to life hazzads! Strong magnetic fields, signal interference,...

@QthePlatypus The one who minds blind one recording shall be taught their behaviour is wrong at the first place. Same for the one who prejudices dysgraphics, etc.

At my place of work (in the US), some students are indeed given the accommodation to use laptops in class.  But they provide me with a letter from the university's disability office.  Are there jurisdictions where students have the right to accommodations, but instructors do not have the right to know it?

It’s difficult to imagine a scenario where the student is entitled to special conditions and the faculty member is not notified about the accommodations allowed. (Otherwise, you set up a catch-22 situation.) Moreover, in many jurisdictions, the student must ask the instructor to be allowed to use the accommodations; they need not be automatically provided.

@aeismail:  To clarify, my comment was mainly concerned about disabled students being "outed" to their classmates, not to the professor.  You're right that it's hard to imagine a system in which the professor remained ignorant that a disability even existed;  usually (in the US) the professors are just told what the required accommodations are but not the precise nature of the disability, and are trusted to keep that information confidential.

Most policies against electronic devices won't disturb recording devices that passively record.

@WebHead yes, exactly this. not all disabled students are necessarily equipped to navigate the sometimes overwhelming gatekeeping processes necessary to access formal accommodations, and often these processes fail students who are deemed "not disabled enough" to require accommodation but nonetheless struggle.

When it came time to make this decision for myself I examined why I might want to establish such a ban and came to the conclusion that I had two plausible reasons:

To prevent one student's electronics from distracting other students
Because research (up to that point) showed that the available options for computerized note-taking (or substitutes for it) led to less learning.

And this being for college I concluded that (2) wasn't my business beyond warning students of the effect, but (1) was a legitimate concern.
The text that went into my syllabus was

You are expected to refrain from disrupting the class or
  interfering with your peers' ability to pay attention. That means
  among other things no texting, no calling, no IMing, no emailing,
  and no social networking. During group-work and interactive
  teaching it may be appropriate to use internet resources to
  obtain facts and figures.
You may use a computing device to take notes, so I'm not banning
  them from the classroom, but it is your responsibility to insure
  that they do not become a distraction. At a minimum this means
  turning off all audible feedback. If you are using a
  device with an upright screen (rather than a pad) you should sit
  in a back row so that the activity on your screen does not
  present a visual distraction to your neighbors.

I've had no complaints either from students who thought the policy was too restrictive or from students who were being distracted and those few students who have used laptops have been happy to move to the back.
I don't know how I would handle the situation where a student with visual trouble that required them to be up front wanted to use a laptop. That's a hard case.

Just let them and trust them to be responsible. It's not note-taking that's distracting; it's the other stuff people do.

Mostly they are. I had a who was student playing Pokémon Go in classes several times this last semester. I don't intervene unless other students are being distracted.

@jaia The trouble with distractors is that one distractor easily spoils the experience of 10 or more well-behaving individuals. In an ideal world, trust would be enough, since there would be no distractors in the first place. In the real world, especially in a group of junior students, you have to deal with distractors.

@jaia, note-taking is distracting itself: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/

How about giving them chocolate and trying to discuss about the lesson  in-class. I mean I had my most learning and nice lecture as a student on teachers that encouraging me to ask and partice in lesson by awarding me with chocolate (seriously). The key it to interact with students and not with just blah blah blah... Keep in mind that learning process is a bidirectional one.

Banning devices is generally poorly received, everyone likes to think they know best about their own study habits. (For some of those 20%, they will be right, for others, you will be right.)
In a mandatory seminar I had to attend where it was very evident that no one wanted to be there (including the presenters), what the organizers eventually settled on was requiring all students to hand in half a page with summary and comments at the end of each talk. This forces note-taking in the immediate and generally makes the students too busy to look at their devices much even if they have them open.

As a professor teaching a class, and - by extension - a former student, I'll give a few reasons why I will never ban electronics/laptops in my class, even if they're classes that don't need them (banning laptops in a class about computational public health is a tall order).
Potentially Singling Out Students with Disabilities: There are students who use laptops as assistive devices. Even with a "ban", you'll likely have to make an accommodation for these students. Which means in the class anyone who does have a laptop will be assumed to have a disability. I'm not interested in making life harder for my students who are already struggling.
Being Able to Bring Laptops to Class Changed my Life: I'm not actually exaggerating with this. For my entire life, I have not been able to stay awake in lectures. Ever. Doesn't matter how interesting the subject is. What fixed that? Being able to take a laptop to class.
Which is more distracting and disrespectful - me occasionally doing something on a screen that's not laser focused on you, or me asleep in the back? Which will result in me missing more content?
They're Adults: They can make their own decisions about how they approach their class work.

I have noticed that I work better without electronic devices because I
  am less distracted and can focus better. Consequently, I would hope to
  minimize the distractions faced by students by disallowing students in
  the course to use any electronic devices.

What works better for you is not what works better for everyone. For example, I retain information better if I don't take notes at all. But I'm not going to ban note taking.

As an undergrad in the 1980s, I didn't get enough sleep, and frequently fell asleep during classes. For the two quarters I was a grad student, I got more sleep and didn't fall asleep in class - but was frequently bored, and did crossword puzzles and the like. For me at least, lectures consisted of about 5-10 minutes of info, and about 35-40 minutes of rehashing that info. The rehashing part was my problem; once you grasp 2 + 2 = 4, 20 minutes of rearranging apples or books or something to demonstrate it isn't necessary.

I am normally in favor of letting students make their own decisions, but the evidence against laptops in the classroom is so strong by now that I decided to ban them in my classes (which are mostly lecture). However, there are three exceptions: disability, very bad handwriting, and the possibility of giving me a write-up about why it's a bad idea to take notes on a laptop. The last one both allows students to make an informed choice if they really love their laptops and, more importantly, provides plausible deniability to those with disabilities that they don't want to publicly disclose. (So far, no one has used any of these options.) I explain the reason for this policy in my syllabus and provide links to popular science articles explaining the research. So far, I have taught two classes with this policy and experienced no pushback and no need for enforcement. If there was, "Please put that away" should do the job.

This is what an ideal lecturer would do in my opinion. +1 for informing them, making it slightly harder to use the electronic devices but still leaving it quite possible. (I'd definitely have handed in a writeup)

"evidence": citation needed! You can refer to https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02940852 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581 or https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.10.003 , for instance.

If you would like to ban devices from your classroom, I think that's your call as an instructor.  It's part of your academic freedom at most institutions to conduct your class the way you'd like.  I imagine you would enforce it by asking any student caught using a device to put it away or, perhaps on repeat offenses, to bring it to the front of the room for retrieval after class.  You would not be first instructor who's done this.
But to me, thirty students is big to be called a seminar.  With thirty students, not everyone gets to talk as much as they might want.  Sometimes they'll be simply waiting their turn to speak or checking out, waiting for the discussion to come back to something they're interested in.  That sounds a lot like the faculty meetings I go to.  We usually get about twenty-five, all there to listen to presentations and participate in discussions of faculty business.  But we all have laptops and smartphones and many are using them.  I don't know why I'd expect students to behave differently than faculty.
On occasion, I find it helpful that students have laptops in my own lectures (in CS) when a question comes up that I can't answer (which happens a lot :).  If I don't want to take the time to do it myself, I might ask, can someone do the experiment or Google the answer?
Also, since I publish my lecture slides just before each lecture, I find that a lot of students are legitimately using their laptops to look at slides, which can sometimes be more readable on their laptops than on the screen from way in the back of the room.
So I think you can ban devices and I think you can enforce it.  You can try it and see what happens.  But I also think you're fighting the tide.  Connectivity is here to stay.  I can't say if you'll see other results you hope for, but the one result I do predict is that the students will be unhappy with you and it will probably show up in your student evals.

I think you will get bogged down in the enforcer role here and it will detract from your teaching. Some of the best instructors I had knew at which point of their lecture they should ask questions and took the time to learn students names. Then you can first ask the questions to people goofing off, and follow up with someone paying attention. The peer pressure to know the answers could help people focus.

I wouldn't recommend banning laptops outright as a global course policy, because:

Many students need electronic devices to accommodate learning disabilities. Laying down a coursewide ban would prevent them from doing so, which is not what you want (and probably against university policy).
Many students who may not need laptops still work better with them due to the affordances they provide, such as digital ink (on Surface devices, tablets, and some Chromebooks) and the ability to store their notes in the cloud.
The research you cited from UT-Austin, indeed almost all the research claiming negative effects of laptops on student classroom performance, is situated in the context of lecture pedagogy. Your seminar is not (I hope!) going to use lecture often or at all, so that research doesn't really apply to your case. In fact you can imagine situations where having laptops available could really help in a seminar class in terms of searching up information and so on.
In fact if you scratch the surface on a lot of these ban-the-laptop articles, there is either no mention of pedagogy whatsoever (so, just immediately ignore the results) or it assumes you are just lecturing. In the latter case, the results of the studies may be true, but you could make an equal case that lectures ought to be banned, not laptops.

Briefly, a better approach to technology would consist of:

Creating a class environment and designing learning activities for students that keep them active, and so either their laptops are used as a tool for learning or else they are working hard enough on something else that screwing around on a laptop isn't a viable option for them. And,
Rather than banning, work with the students (maybe on the first day of class) to come up with some reasonable boundaries for acceptable/unacceptable use. Like anything else, when the students have some ownership on the rules then they are a lot more likely to follow them.

I wrote a bit more about all this at my blog here: http://rtalbert.org/laptop-bans-and-assumptions/
Michelle Miller also has a great article about this here: https://michellemillerphd.com/addiction-accommodation-and-better-solutions-to-the-laptop-problem/

Why do you want to ban electronic devices?
A. You do it for the sake of those (~20%) students that use laptops etc - you believe this will help them concentrate, study better, understand the material, provide fewer distractions etc.
or
B. You do it for the sake of the other (~80%) students, that currently do not use devices - you hope that this will lead to more participation, improve the quality of the lecture etc.
If the answer is A, then just don't. You do not know what's best for them, and I'm assuming they are old enough to make their own decisions (yes, even if they will fail the class).
On the other hand, if the answer is B, I suggest you talk to the students during the first lesson, explaining your reasoning (maybe suggest that it's also polite to listen to other students talking/presenting and not use a device at this time; and/or tell them to sit in the back if they intend to use a laptop). Afterwards, ask the students to minimize electronic devices use and leave it at that. Do not try to enforce anything - this isn't elementary school.

From my experience as a student, I would suggest you don't.
Simply call it out at the very beginning of the seminar, day 1 you introduce yourself in a loud, clear tone, then say that you don't like seeing people distracted by technology.
Mention that this is especially because it distracts those around them as well, and could you all please leave the phone in the pocket, save for those that are actually typing away notes on a laptop just please focus on the seminar.
That has the highest rate of success by far and you still come off as professional and friendly. If you see someone smiling at their phone, just politely call ask them to focus (so whole room can hear that) and after 1-2 such callouts everyone gets the idea that they will be humiliated if they do this, and they will stop unless they're rude morons. At that stage, let it go. Need to treat people like adults, if they want to come in and waste their time that's their loss, just don't let them get in the way of others who are there to learn.

Don't ban the electronic devices, ban the distractions.
Laptops and the like can have useful features (like note taking) which shouldn't be taken foregranted because they can actually help students.
Instead you should look into how viable it would be to block distracting websites like the most common social media websites - facebook, twitter et cetera.
If a student tries to get on social media, only to receive a page from the university saying "This site is blocked, get back to work", it'll hopefully discourage them from distractions.
It won't eliminate distractions but it'll make it marginally harder for students to get distracted, and it'll certainly make them think twice about focusing on the seminar.

Ideally it would be possible to block all internet connections within the room to stop people using the internet during the seminar, but that may not be a viable option.
(And to pre-empt the "what if someone wants to look up a definition or something?" - doing so would also be a distraction. If someone doesn't understand some terminology they should ask the teacher as soon as possible. There may be more than one student that doesn't understand the term, so it could be more beneficial to ask outright anyway, than to have 4 students silently googling a term while the lecture runs on and they start missing bits.)

The course is fairly small, with fewer than 30 students. We will spend most of the time in the course listening to students presenting their ideas, and the students critiquing and giving feedback on other students' presentations.

Banning electronic devices can simulate cases where such devices are forbidden/inaccessible for a real reason. In such cases you cannot easily google the answer up.
As jaia allready noted, explain your reasons in the syllable clearly and leave options for those who must use ellectronic devices.
As I understood your desription, the course is focused on learning how to criticise someone's work and how to respond to a critique. There is no need of using electronic devices at all (except for people with special needs).


text:
Term for someone with a doctorate in nursing
What would you call someone who had a doctoral degree in nursing? I wouldn’t think you’d be able to call them doctor as this would be confusing in the hospital setting. Is there a title used for a nurse with a doctorate degree?

This and another recent question http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/59293/16122 make me think about the distinction between "Doctor" as a job title, in medical settings, and as an honorific, for holders of  doctoral degrees in general. It's a distinction that I believe fluent speakers accomodate without ever thinking about.

They are doctors, but not medical doctors. That's why most people's badges in a hospital include one's credentials so you can distinguish, say, an MD surgeon from a PhD researcher from a DNP from a DPharm. Some US states make it illegal (!) for DNPs to use their  rightfully earned title, though, so this answer will have geographic variation.

I have seen "research nurse" in email signatures. It doesn't imply the PhD degree, but avoids possibility of confusion.

You call him "Doctor Surname" unless you are sufficiently well-acquainted to call him by his given name.  (I worked with someone with a DScN degree and she was called "Doctor Smith" by the physicians in committee meetings, etc.)
If you and this person will be working with patients, ask "How should I address you when there are patients present?" before the need arises.  As guifa states in the comment above, the badge, or embroidered name, will show the degree, not the honorific.
Edited to add: The scope of practice of licensed healthcare professionals is set by state law, and the doctorate in nursing does not widen that scope in any state that I know about.  Guifa's comment that some states, including my home state, restrict the title "doctor" in the context of health care is correct.  You can expect the holder of a doctorate in nursing to know the restrictions, and to have a preference, so the best way to find out what to do when there are patients around is to ask.

Dr.
PhDs in psychology go by Dr.; so can PhDs in nursing.

Please present some evidence that the opinion you give is correct. What you say is plausible but it's also plausible that people would want to avoid confusion between medical doctors and doctors of philosophy in medical contexts.

@DavidRicherby - Evidence that at least some PhDs in psychology use their title: my son sees a PhD in psychology whom everyone calls Dr.  //  If there is some confusion, it can be cleared up; some medical doctors may look down their noses -- but that would be their problem.  Look, in academia some PhDs choose not to go by "Dr" but that's a personal choice.  Once you have your PhD you have every right to go by "Dr" if you wish to, and in a medical context it would make sense to do so, to make a distinction from the RNs.

I've also seen PhDs doing research at NIH who were not MDs, but who went by "Dr."

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text:
What provisions exist to handle scooping when there are multiple reviews of research papers?
Point 1: At my university, it's a practice (not compulsory) to submit our conference/journal paper first to a department where it is checked for plagiarism and quality. Then it's sent to professors in the university to confirm that they don't have any authorship problems with it (ie: that the student didn't copy one of their ideas, unacknowledged). It's only then that the student gets approval to send the paper to a conference (specifically this one) or journal.
Point 2: A journal or conference has it's long procedure of reviews and only some papers get accepted. If rejected or un-published, the author can send it to another conference or journal and there's a similar lapse of time.
During both above situations, isn't it possible for someone else to scoop the idea? Does the academic community have any provisions to prevent a planned scooping? ie: Someone reviewing the paper purposely rejects it and during the time that elapses, publishes the same idea or allows one of his/her other students to publish the idea.
A teacher of mine says that it's because of these fears that she directly submits papers to conferences without going through the university's process. Also, the same reason she submits to conferences instead of journals, because the journal review process is much longer, increasing the scope of the idea being scooped.
So are there any safeguards? If I see my idea scooped somewhere, would it help if I can show proof that I had already submitted the idea at a conference and the paper was rejected? Will the person who supposedly scooped it, get blacklisted?

Here's a case in point. The 2 top-voted answers there have some good suggestions for the situation you describe.

Nice. That led me to this answer about the Dataverse network. Hope it's a viable and valid idea: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/23400/28042. Also some info on simultaneous release: https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/40047/title/Simultaneous-Release/

Good find on both counts. Perfect for a self-answer. :)

After writing to a number of journal and conference organizers, KDD and IEEE responded by saying that putting up a document on arXiv and then submitting the same document to one of their conferences or journals is ok. IEEE officially mentions it here. There's also a nice answer here.
UPDATE:
As of 2019, KDD no longer allows pre-prints on ArXiv due to their double-blind policy.
As of 2020, IEEE started their own archive named TechRxiv, and they still allow pre-prints on ArXiv and TechRxiv.

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

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


text:
What to do on a desk reject of a revised paper?
Since this is a longer story, let me first give some background:
We submitted a publication to a journal in the field of engineering. The article remained on the status “with editor” for more than two months. Our inquiries with the editor-in-chief and through the publisher’s contact form were not answered. When we contacted the assistant editor, things got moving and we got a “major revision” with rather positive, but brief comments from two reviewers. The editor-in-chief handled the manuscript. We addressed all of the comments very carefully and resubmitted.
The next day we received a desk reject from the editor-in-chief as the handling editor. They said our article was out of scope and had a lack of novelty. Both of these issues have not been mentioned by the previous decision letter or the reviewers’ comments. On the contrary, one of the reviewers specifically commented that the paper was on scope in this journal and the results would be useful for researchers and practitioners.
The journal does not have a formal way to appeal, and the author guidelines state that editor decisions are final. The editor-in-chief did not react to our request to clarify how our manuscript could have become worse, i.e. out of scope, after the revision. Due to a number of constraints, it is difficult for us to go to another journal.
If we would have gotten a desk reject on the initial submission in a useful delay, I would have accepted the decision. But I find it unprofessional to reject a revised manuscript on those grounds.
Given these circumstances, how should we proceed?

Same as with other rejected papers: try another journal.

You move on to another journal. Life is too short to worry about such things.

Who is the assistant editor? Is he / she a member of the editorial board?

@Allure Yes he / she is. We contacted them as a "last resort" because we were not able to get a reaction from the managing editor, i.e. the editor-in-chief. They were apologetic and I believe they were able to draw the editor-in-chief's attention to our paper.

Well that's what ResearchGate is for I believe.

Something out of the ordinary clearly happened. It's not professional to reject a paper as being out of scope after it's been revised. My speculative guess is that the editor-in-chief is not very active, and the assistant editor was trying to keep things moving on her own initiative. The letters you received might well be automated emails with automated signatures by the editor-in-chief, i.e. the EiC didn't actually handle your manuscript. However this is pure speculation, and can be completely wrong.
Suggestions on what to do now: if you received a personalized letter from the editor-in-chief saying your paper is out of scope, don't bother appealing the decision and submit it elsewhere. Otherwise, you can write back to the journal to check if there was a mistake, pointing out that one of the reviewers did, after all, say your paper was within scope + useful to the field. I would not be very hopeful, but it's an option.

Just an update, after the paper has been successfully published. Your guess was right, something out of the ordinary happened: The EIC changed between our initial submission and the revision. Given the specialized nature of the work, we did not have many alternatives journals to choose from.

This is a strange situation.
It is possible that the desk rejection was a mistake. I once received an email with two good reviews attached, telling me “Your paper is not accepted.” While my co-authors and I were boggling about this, I received a second email from the editor, profusely apologising for the typo. Since mistakes can happen, you should send a short note to the editor saying that you were surprised that your paper was desk-rejected as out of scope after it had already been peer-reviewed and revised, and ask them to confirm that this decision was correct.
If they really have rejected your paper in this ridiculous way, shake the dust from your feet and send the paper somewhere else. In that situation, I wouldn’t waste my time sending any papers to that journal in future.

Case: There are two persons involved here. The assistant editor thought that your article should be given a chance of peer-review. However, it might have been possible that the Editor in chief was not at all keen on passing the article for peer-review in the first place. Since, you revised the article and submitted again the editor in chief this time thought to stop it as it was probably not suitable for his journal.
Reason: This happens when the editorial assistant (office guys) handle the responsibility of assigning the assistant editor for manuscripts. For example, many journals have area wise editors e.g. Asia, Europe, ... The area of a manuscript is based on the area of the corresponding author.
Suggestion: Submit elsewhere. Since, you have revised the article carefully, it should be accepted somewhere.

You may have a point with your "case". However, it was the editor-in-chief that sent out the first decision.


text:
Ways to spend gap year/semester before applying to mathematics PhD
I was just reading in the answers to some other questions (here and here) that it's not necessarily disadvantageous (and it may even be advantageous) to take a year or semester off after finishing my bachelor's degree before applying to math PhD programs, but I'm not really sure what to do during that year. If the below section is too long, the TL;DR version is: What are my options?
I honestly hadn't looked into any other options since I was planning on going straight to math PhD programs after I earn my Bachelor's degree in May of 2016, but this fall while I was dealing with some personal issues I ended up dropping one of the two graduate math classes I was enrolled in and I missed the September GRE math subject test (as well as the deadline for the October subject test).
While I'm planning this spring to take the GRE math subject test (for real this time) and enroll in another one or two graduate math classes, it's looking like I might have a better chance at PhD program admissions if I wait to apply for admission in the Spring or Fall of 2017, rather than the Fall of 2016. I might apply to a couple of PhD programs for Fall 2016 admission, but I don't want to spend a lot of money on application fees when my application isn't as strong as it could be.
If I do end up taking a semester or a full year off, I want to figure out something productive to do so that the time won't be wasted. I came up with a few options: applying to PhD programs abroad that don't require the GRE (I speak English and Russian, so Canada, England, and Russia), applying to less competitive US PhD programs, or working a full- or part-time job (teaching? computer science?) and using that money to pay for simultaneously taking one or two graduate math classes.
However, I'm not sure if it's kosher to apply for a PhD program if I only plan on staying for a semester or a year. On the other hand, I don't know how feasible it is to both work and take graduate math classes, so I'm pretty uncertain about what to do. Does anyone have advice about the options I have?

How about trying some of the online courses on Coursera? They do have some deeper courses like Functional Analysis.

Perhaps you could substitute "productive" with "stimulating to my brain". Nobody should get a PhD in math to be a productive member of society.

Options I can think of (I bet there are even more than these):

Take some upper level undergrad, or first-year grad, math classes as an unmatriculated student
Audit some classes (this saves you some money -- you don't get credit, but you learn the material)
Apply for a master's, in a program that doesn't require a math GRE (for example, with some quick googling, I found a good program in statistics that doesn't require the math GRE)
Take or audit some non-math classes that you find interesting
Become a K-12 substitute teacher (this only requires a Bachelor's degree)
Be a Vista volunteer
Get a job and build up a bit of savings, to make it easier to get through grad school on a TA stipend
Study abroad for a year but not as part of a PhD program for the reasons you mentioned

Note, if you are working full time, I find that one challenging class at a time is enough.  If you are working 20 hours a week, depending on the type of job, maybe two challenging classes would work comfortably.  I remember taking data structures and linear algebra at the same time while I was working a 40-hour week, and I went a little nuts.  In retrospect, it would have been better to negotiate a reduced number of hours at work.

How does your life look like? Are you able to keep life-work balance? Everyone needs to live, laugh and chase butterflies sometimes. Do you have time for that? Can you have fun with friends every now and then? If yes - great. Keep up with what you do, have a job and either save money or take those math classes.
But if not - relax. Use this months to unwind. Your body will claim its rest sooner or later. It's better to rest on your terms than be recovering from a heart attack at 30.

If you are still dealing with the stress and stuff, just reading math and coming up with ideas, solving small problems, etc. (or going into a book without MAKING yourself finish it) are all good things to do. Then again, these don't show up on a CV. You could search for professors and annoy them with questions. I would advise against getting attached to trivial things in the meantime- this weakens the spirit and creates bad habits.


text:
I believe a publisher is infringing copyright when reproducing a figure I created. What can I do?
A few months ago an Elsevier representative contacted me asking for permission to reproduce one of my thesis figures in one of their books. Since this figure is only in my thesis (introduction section) and is not published elsewhere, I retain full copyright.
Because I am truly concerned about the negative effect of Elsevier policies on science at large, I am boycotting Elsevier. I considered not granting them permission, however I thought that this would mostly affect the authors of the book and have very little effect on Elsevier. I asked my Facebook contacts what I should do, and one of them proposed a very nice solution. Basically, he suggested that I publish the work under some terms so that everyone, and not only Elsevier, can be directed to the specific conditions under which this work can be reused. So I posted my figure on Zenodo (this actually makes sense because I have been asked many times for permission to reproduce this figure - mind you, that's the only reason why my thesis gets cited at all).
I replied to the Elsevier representative referring him to the Zenodo entry, and specifically letting him know that the modified version of the figure that they want to use does not comply with my terms (since it removes the text stating I own the copyright).
Last week, I noticed that a preview of the book is available in Google Books. To my surprise, I noticed that the version of the figure (fig. 11.1) that they ended up using does not comply with the terms I communicated to the Elsevier representative. What can/should I do about this?
Edit
I contacted the Elsevier representative who apologized and corrected the image. The Google Books link above now shows the copyright notice as it should (hopefully this settles the nonsensical debate initiated by @user71659 depicting increasingly weird scenarios in which Elsevier had recompiled the figure from scratch).

The first question would be if your diagram is copyright protected at all in the countries where that book is sold. If some work is protected by copyright in the USA (for example) it does not mean that the work is also protected in Russia. In this case it would be legal to modify the diagram and sell the book in Russia. (I've heard that musicians had this problem some years ago when you could legally download copied music from Russian servers...)

@MartinRosenau Not sure where you read this, but I don't think it works that way. Russia is under the Berne convention, so copyright protection is automatic and does not require a registration.

@Dawn No, see my reply. They probably took it from my website.

@Miguel Then give us the actual link in the question. That's critical information you've failed to give.

@user71659 The way the colors are rendered looks like they extracted it from my thesis (old version of that figure) and then used inkscape or similar to change the fonts. The public version of my thesis is here: https://cora.ucc.ie/handle/10468/1344

@Miguel Page number?

@user71659 27 of PDF or 2 in "printed" version.

@Miguel That's the exact same figure you linked to! You haven't shown anything different. If the data is not copyrightable, there is no problem extracting it from your figure. You can't copyright the fact that 530 nm = green.

@user71659 The Elsevier person sent me an email with the exact same figure that they published in the book (a derivative of mine, not "just the data") asking for permission to reproduce it. I granted conditional permission. They modified the figure, not "extracted the data". I can even forward the email to you if it serves to settle this nonsense.

@Miguel You haven't shown anything. They asked for permission. You put conditions. Assume they didn't agree with them, so they recreated the plot using elements that were uncopyrightable. How did this scenario not happen? Again, you need to get a lawyer to explain to you whether copyright infringement did actually happen, because what you think is copyrightable may not be.

They are also giving you credit in that link that you share. I'm confused as to what the issue is at this point.

@FedericoPoloni It was at the end of the 1990: According to Russian Laws artistic work in other languages than Russian was not seen as "artistic work" - and therefore not copyrighted. There were music download services that provided English rock music for download...

@FedericoPoloni As far as I understand correctly the Berne Convention says that some work created in another country and/or by a foreign person must not be less copyright protected compared to the same work created in the country by a citizen of the country. This would mean that it would not be allowed that Russia only protects books of Russian writers but not of US writers. However it would be allowed that Russia generally does not protect physics books if it does neither protect books written by Russians nor by other people.

@MartinRosenau Maybe it was before 1995, since Russia joined the Berne convention in that year? Also, regarding your second comment: the Berne Convention includes minimum levels of copyright protection.

@FedericoPoloni At least I know two prominent examples of something being seen as "copyright protected work" in one country but as "no intellectual property and therefore not copyrightable" in another country: First is the photo of the monkey "Naruto". (Copyright protected in GB, not protected in the US) The second one are two different photos of a red bus which is colored within a black-and-white picture. (The later photo is seen as "copy of the first photo" in GB but as "work not related to the first photo" in DE.)

@FedericoPoloni The problem here is that the Berne convention definitely includes minimum levels of copyright protection for protected work but obviously it does not exactly specify what exactly "protected work" is.

Can you screenshot the two and put them in your post so we can compare more easily?

@CapeCode great edit, thanks! I didn't like the title either.

You attempted to use a crayon license, that is, modify the terms of an existing well-established license to better suit your needs.
This is frowned upon, because it can cause legal complications. In particular, the license CC-BY-NC 4.0 license that you attached to your work states

The Licensor shall not be bound by any additional or different terms or conditions communicated by You unless expressly agreed.

or, in other words (human-readable version on their website)

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

The CC folks officially forbid you from using that name and logo if you do modify their terms:

Can I change the license terms or conditions?
Yes—but if you change the terms and conditions of any Creative Commons license, you must no longer call, label, or describe the license as a “Creative Commons” or “CC” license, nor can you use the Creative Commons logos, buttons, or other trademarks in connection with the modified license or your materials.

So it is going to be difficult to argue for your additional restrictions in court. They are likely to be void. For legal purposes, we can assume that your work is licensed under an unmodified CC-BY-NC 4.0.
Notice 1 still stands, because the CC license allows you to specify your preferred name and wording for the attribution (and it seems to me that they complied with it in the book). Notice 2 is void. Notice 3 still stands, because the license only covers non-commercial use.
So Elsevier is infringing it because they are using it in a commercial work, right? In principle yes, but you wrote that you had an exchange with them and essentially authorized them to use it in the book under the terms listed in Zenodo. We would have to review your full conversation with Elsevier to see what you really wrote to them.
Disclaimer: IANAL.

Thanks, this is interesting. I explicitly told the guy that they should comply with Notice 2. I should also add I have exactly zero intention to take this to court. I'm just wondering if I can annoy them (Elsevier) a bit without annoying the authors too much.

Exact wording that I used: "At the moment, as I can see from the edited version of the figure which you attached to your email, you do not comply with "copyright notice 2". You are free to use the figure after you fix this."

I fixed "notice 2". Thanks for your insight.

@Miguel If all you want is to "annoy them a bit", then it's completely unprofessional and you're wasting everybody's time here.

@BartoszKP Would you say that strike is unprofessional? Taking (legal) action against corporations with abusive policies has been historically a driving force in gaining rights and changing some of those policies.

@Miguel I'm not talking about actions, but intentions. If people went on a strike just because they want to "annoy someone a bit" it would be unprofessional as well.

@BartoszKP Well, if it wasn't obvious, my "intention" is for them to take notice that they should not ignore authors rights. You must live inside of my head to know my intentions better than I do.

@Miguel I'm not living inside your head. I've quoted your words from the very first comment in this thread directly (please note the quotation marks). Sorry if I misunderstood what you meant, but just wanting to annoy someone (your words - not mine) does sound a little childish.

If you think Elsevier is infringing your copyright, then you are infringing on others (1, 2, 3, 4)
That chart is very standard. The information itself is uncopyrightable. The only thing that stands out is the rainbow spectrum, but even then you weren't the first to draw it like that, see this book published 2006: 5.
I'm sure the people working in the copyright clearance department of Elsevier have far more experience than you, or nearly everybody here, in these matters, who like me, isn't a lawyer.

They did cite Miguel's thesis, however.

Elsevier is infringing my copyright because they modified my creation directly. I generated the graph from scratch. Your answer seems contradictory to me. One thing is the information and another the media created. I think you're mixing things up. As a matter of fact the way that band gap interpolation is done differs from previous work, but that's another thing.

@Miguel not every work is protected by copyright. There's always some hurdle like creative content, originality, etc. Which varies by jurisdiction to some extent. Or in short: Copyright protection might not apply here.

@DonQuiKong We are not talking about ideas here. What Elsevier did was, literally, crop my image file and erase a copyright notice I put there. This is why this answer is missing the point.

@Miguel you're missing the point. Not everything is protected by copyright. Doesn't matter what notice you put on it. In other words, there are images and texts where copyright doesn't apply.

@DonQuiKong No, what this answer says is not that "not everything is protected by copyright"; what is says is that my work cannot possibly be protected by copyright because the original idea belongs to someone else. To me, this seems like a logical fallacy, simply because I'm not claiming I own copyright on the idea, but on the work itself. Your argument is separate from the tenet of the answer.

@Miguel it's not a logical fallacy. Your work is protected by copyright if it's original etc. If the idea is known and it's only a simple representation of data it might not be protected.

@DonQuiKong It's not "a simple representation of data" but something more involved. And you keep saying "may/might" and the answer clearly implies "must".

@Miguel I don't know if copyright applies here. But you were saying it had to so I explained that, no, it doesn't have to, it depends. Your juggling a lot of legal stuff in this story that you clearly have no idea about so I was trying to broaden your horizon. Just take it or leave it.

Looking at the two plots, I would bet that Elsevier have not modified your creation directly - I think they have recreated it from scratch, as you did. Note the different aspect ratio, the broken x-axis, the different font, etc.

@Flyto The data used for this plot requires the code I wrote to generate it (or the author writing their own), so it is very unlikely that they have generated it from scratch. Also, why would they ask for permission and cite my thesis if they had generated their own? They may have used the version in my thesis or my website. Other than that, cropping a figure and adding a couple of lines to break the axes is not precisely rocket science.

@Miguel You say you used a different method to interpolate bandgap. That in itself may not be copyrightable, because it is not a creative expression. Scientific, technical methods and discoveries in the US are excluded from copyright. Your code may be patentable, the code itself falls under copyright, but the output, including equations and figures, are not. I think you're making the assumption that academic plagiarism  is a copyright violation, which is not always true.

@user71659 Plagiarism is out of the question since they properly reference the work. This is just a copyright issue.

@Miguel And again, in the United States, it was found that scientific figures from a model may not have copyright protection. You need to get a copyright lawyer to check this before making accusations, because you very well may be in the wrong and by making invalid claims, trying to take rights away from others. This could subject you, depending on the country and the law, to a lawsuit.

@user71659 In the case you mention, https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/illinois/ilndce/1:2007cv04305/211294/120/0.pdf, it is stated in the summary (footnote 6) that the "reused" figures were not direct copies of the original ones. Again, you're talking about two separate things here, the "model" (which is not copyrightable) and the figures (which are). The "expression" of the data, that is the specific way to plot it, is not copyrightable either, but an actual figure, e.g., JPEG file, is.

@Miguel As was pointed out by Flyto, the font, scale, aspect ratio and markers are different. It is not a direct copy. That is certain.

@Miguel I can't find it. Change your original question to link to the actual figure then.

Maybe they just extracted the values from the image using one of the many tools to do so. Then they generated a new plot using this extracted data. If one looks close enough one might see that the data has changed slightly, but likely not to be noticed.

@Miguel I'm not a typesetter, but I do know that I could just provide them with an image and they'll duplicate it from scratch. I don't know how they do it, but it was certainly not by scanning the original (that leaves easily detectable traces after all). It's amazing, and I don't doubt they can duplicate your data points without the original data as well.

Having created a pretty similar plot myself at aroundn the same time as you (fig 2.4 in my thesis, pdf page 13) I know how easy it is to reproduce.  The style of yours (@Miguel) is fairly conventional and would be easy to reproduce; it may even be a default depending on what software you used

@ChrisH Then, they should have created their own, rather than edit mine (I don't understand this debate, they asked me for permission to reproduce the edited version of my figure). Unrelated: your AlInN band gap bowing parameter is obsolete. Also, my alloy band gaps are chosen from the evolution with composition from different high-symmetry points in the BZ, you can check from the discontinuity of direct-to.indirect character mid way through the curves (e.g., for ZB AlN). So I'd argue my figure is more difficult to create than yours, since it required a piece of (not too complicated) code.

@Miguel I believe they did create their own, just very similar to yours. Mine is a few years old too, and my emphasis was on the (Al)GaN side.  Plugging more complex (published) code than I used doesn't change things appreciably.

Up-front: I am not a lawyer.
This is all complicated somewhat by both the "addon" clauses that you've tried to include, and the conversations with Elsevier in which it sounds as though you may have given them permission.
Every CC license requires users to,

attribute the creator of licensed material, unless the creator has
  waived that requirement, not supplied a name, or asked that her name
  be removed. Additionally, you must retain a copyright notice, a link
  to the license (or to the deed), a license notice, a notice about the
  disclaimer of warranties, and a URI if reasonable.
  (from https://creativecommons.org/faq/)

Elsevier have attributed the creator, but they have not shown any copyright notice, have not shown that the figure is CC-licensed, or provided any link. A casual reader of this book would assume that Elsevier owned the copyright on this figure, which is not correct.
On this basis, then, they are in breach of the license and hence have no right to use it.
However, if this were simply the CC-BY-NC license that you applied to the work, they'd be in breach anyway because they're a commercial organisation.
So the question is whether they are using the figure incorrectly under that CC license, or whether they are using it under another license or permission that you have (deliberately or otherwise) granted them in email. Or whether they are breaching copyright.
That, I fear, may be one for the lawyers.
[1] They've recreated it, not reproduced it, with some differences - but I'm fairly sure that that makes no difference.

I know you wanted to avoid this but you really should consult a lawyer.
Aren't there any free or cheap consultations available where you live?
From the back and forth here with others it is obvious that we can't help you properly.
Copyright law is a giant, complex minefield best dealt with by professionals.
(expecially if you want it resolved legally binding and hopefully to your advantage if possible)

Guess why it is a minefield? Because a lot of people want to find ways and means to do dishonest things, especially due to money. After all, if you can sneak in the fake journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals into a bundle so that you can charge more, infringing copyright is much easier since you know that small researchers don't have the money to fight back.

don't forget the patent trolls. they need to feed families too (;

No don't consult a lawyer. It's a waste of time and money. The image has been redrawn and Elsevier is far better equipped to deal with that issue than virtually anyone else. Just go on with your life.

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


text:
What percentage of registered participants eventually show up at conferences?
I am organizing a small workshop which is over subscribed. We will have to reject a few applications. The worst applicants are easy to spot, but there are a few borderline cases, and I'm afraid that a few unfair decisions will necessarily have to be made.
To minimize the damage, I would like to know how many of the registered participants who we accept will actually show up, so that if I am aiming at X actual participants, could I safely accept X + dX?
I have noticed that several name tags always are left unclaimed at small meetings, because of people not showing up. I would like to know how to estimate how many people I can expect not to show up.
I am looking for answers from people who have organized (preferably small) meetings and have first-hand knowledge about the typical numbers.
--
Edit:
So the week of the workshop came and I can give you attendance numbers. It is good that I didn't overbook since we got 100% attendance (49/49 registered participants). This is despite the event being free of charge (some people suggested the attendance would be lower for free events). Some of the things that we did that may have helped secure such good numbers are thorough screening of applications and asking for confirmation upon acceptance of the applicant. For instance, we weeded out a few applicants who were unlikely to show up unless we paid for their travelling and a couple of accepted applicants told us that they would not be able to attend, a couple of months in advance of the workshop.

You should also explain whether there is another track/workshop/conference in parallel. If people can switch freely between these alternatives, an estimation might be way harder. (I am not an organizer but I have seen this several times, that some events are extremely well-attended while others can become nearly empty)

Is it a free event, or with low cost of application? How wide was spread the ads for this application (only university, twitter, online forums, group and associations... ) ?

@Llopis It is free, but the advertising has been targeted. I have some weird applications but most are from people in the field from reputable institutions.

Is this at a highly reputed institution? Is the workshop tied to a visible publication, such as a special issue? Are the participants well-known and interesting? These variables are important incentives to actually attend.

@Miguel And how far is their institutions to the place your event is hosted? (Also consider that they might be visiting professors that might want to go) Also, how long does it take 2h or 4h of workshop (and all day??)?

I am afraid that, especially for a small meeting, the variation of how many do not show up will be too large to be useful. For example, if I am organizing a 50-person event I would expect that anything from 2 to 10 would be a "normal" number of no-shows. That is, if you really can't have more than, say, 50 participants you can't really safely overbook at all. However, note that oftentimes a few participants more don't really hurt, but of course this depends on your infrastructure and plans for the meeting.
Some further considerations:

Generally, free events have a very large number of no-shows (sometimes in the 50%+ range, from what I have heard) while paid ones do not. This has led to some meetings I know introducing a nominal attendance fee, just to make sure that people think a little before signing up. Some other meetings have also tried to levy a fee only if a registered participant does not show up, but I am not sure how well this works and if it is worth the administrative and inter-personal hassle.
Note that no-shows are often not independent events, statistically speaking. For example, if you have a bunch of participants from the same group / team and they have an unexpected important deadline come up, they all will cancel at the same time.
If you have a very small meeting and you know (some) of your participants well you can attempt to use this to make a stab at estimating no-shows. For instance, I once planned an event for about 30 people, and I knew that some of the senior professors who initially expressed interest where <50% to actually come. I also knew that for some fraction of the industry participants an important client meeting may come up making them cancel last-minute. Based on this information I decided that 35 registrations for a 30-person meeting was fairly safe (we ended up being 28).

An alternative for we-charge-you-if-you-don't-come is to charge a fee and then refund it upon attendance (often called 'motivational deposit' in other contexts). Is this something that can work in the context of a meeting? Or is the fact that it's primarily institutions that are footing the bill make that a non-starter?

How about operating a waiting list, and telling those accepted there is a waiting list? That might mean that those who know they can't come are more likely to let you know in advance.

@JessicaB We do have a waiting list (which I think is a good idea). I will periodically remind attendants that there are people awaiting a chance if they can't make it. I am more concerned about people who will not let me know at all that they're not coming.

Having "no shows" at a scientific conference is common (for a multitude od reasons). I could not find a general statistic of this phenomenon and I guess that the numbers vary a lot depending on the field and also on type of event.
Here is one thing I found: The Australasian Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference, (ATNAC) published a welcome address in IEEE where is says that

The conference paper statistics were: Pending (no manuscript): 3; Withdrawn after review: 0; Rejected: 33; No Show: 4; Published: 40; Total valid: 78; Published Ratio: 51%; Acceptance Ratio: 56%.

(The numbers in the pdf are different, this is a note on the website.)
Hence, there where 78 submissions, 44 got accepted and 4 of them did not show up at the conference.
Note that the above example is about no-shows of accepted presentations. No shows among registered people without contribution is usually much higher.

I think it really depends on:

which academic field
how much the registration costs
how accessible the location is (major city in a country with many scholars of the field vs somewhere more remote)
(other factors?)

and there's no general answer.

Generally if an academic signs for a workshop, they will definitely attend, unless something comes up that stops them. Why would I bother registering if I'm not attending, I have nothing to gain?
Nevertheless, you should expect the number of audience to shrink starting from the first day, especially if they get their proof of attendance. In my experience, if a PhD presents on the third day he will probably have three to four people listening. That is painful but hard to avoid.

This sounds right, but certainly it is not. Every large meeting has a lot of no shows. Believe it or not: people sometimes forget that they registered, sometimes they change plans and forget (or don't care) to let the organizers know, sometimes the travel arrangements do not work or, other people miss a conference due to visa or immigration problems…

This does not really answer the question. Contrary to your suggestions, I do know from experience that many people don't show up, for a variety of reasons, some better justified than others. I'm just interested in an estimate for the numbers. Again, contrary to your statement, by registering for a (free) meeting you have everything to gain and nothing to lose, assuming there are no consequences to a no-show (there usually aren't). If you register you can either attend or not; if you don't register you loose that possibility.

I think you're confusing "assist" and "attend" which are somewhat flipped in languages other than English.

Your reference to proof of attendance suggests that you feel that most academics attend conferences mostly to get an expenses-paid holiday. Maybe that's true among your acquaintances but it isn't the impression that I get. Indeed, although some conferences do give proof of attendance, I don't think I've ever been at an institution that's demanded to see such proof before paying my expenses. British universities, at least, seem to assume that their employees aren't engaging in blatant fraud


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What else can I do if a journal editor ignores my report of plagiarism?
I am now drafting a complaint letter to the editor-in-chief of a technical journal, against an act of plagiarism committed by a famous researcher in my field. This researcher is apparently aware of my original work, written three years prior to his/her work. I've been having trouble with two of my own submissions to the same journal. I suspect this researcher may have intentionally sabotaged my review process by either offering unfair comments or delay the review process, while his/her own submission got revised, accepted and published in a whirlwind. Ironically, this researcher did actually cite my only published work, a conference paper, and at the same time pretended that he/she didn't know that I did it, and helped him/herself to do it all over again.
I am somehow confident about the objectiveness of the editor-in-chief, although it might be that the AE is also involved in this misconduct. But in case my complaint is unfortunately ignored, what can I do to defend myself?
Can I directly contact the superior of this researcher's institution to bring up the complaint again, hoping to have a different result?

Added later: for those who is unclear about what I mean and downvoted my question, please compare the difference between:
Reference [xxx] already did it. The result shown here can be found in [xxx].
and
Reference [xxx] mentioned it. But it is really me that first give the result.

Added much later: someone suggests that this might be an insufficient attribution. If you were in my place, what will you do then?
Suppose I am this famous researcher and I found out a nobody is not giving me sufficient attribution, will the situation be completely different?

Added much much later: Many thanks for all the comments and replies. I have drafted my letter of inquiry very carefully after taking the many suggestions given to me. Nevertheless I am prepared to eat the shxt...fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...
Now I think it is not true that the "game" is rigged for me just because I am a Chinese...if I received my education in one of the top universities in Europe or in the states, I would have a much lower chance of knowing people like this researcher in the first place...now it sounds like it is still because I am a Chinese...damn this life played with hard mode...

i am slightly confused. you write he cited your prior work. to what extent has he plagiarized it, then? / blaming someone publicly via youtube is unprofessional to the extreme and guaranteed to cast a poor light on you, irrespective of whether or not your claim is substantive.

@henning That is the ironical part. My work is cited, but is not given the proper credit. Anyone with a slight sense of what I am doing and this researcher is doing will surely understand it is an act of plagiarism. I agree that youtube is not a good idea. But in the worst case, I just want the researcher to pay.

I'm not sure you understand the limits of what plagiarism actually is - performing experiments triggered by someone's idea is not plagiarism - that is how science works. Plagiarism would be somebody else copying sections of your publication (or your submitted publication). Your suggested actions do not appear to be supportable by your story as written above.

What kind of proper credit do you expect in addition to being cited?

@JonCuster The work is theoretical; no experiment is involved. Its like I did something, and this researcher did exactly the same thing, and based on that did something else. I should be given the credit for the first part, and the second part is not my concern.

@MassimoOrtolano Clearly stating that I did it already. The way of the citation is just so wrong.

Do you not treat the citation as crediting you? What exactly are you expecting? And how is what you have described plagiarism?

@JonCuster Then why is this researcher doing the same thing all over again, without telling the readers that I already did it?

@TroyWoo did the author of the incriminated paper paraphrase or copy in verbatim parts of your prior work without providing a reference to the source? Then this would constitute plagiarism. If not – no plagiarism. He might have built on your prior work (in which case he must acknowledge it) or he might have had the very same idea as you had, but scooped you (then bad luck, but no plagiarism). You also suspect that the researcher  intentionally sabotaged the review of your paper. Do you have any evidence to support this suspicion other than his paper being published before yours?

@henning Im not sure what you mean by scoop. My suspects can only be confirmed by the editor. I am not discussing that here. If you don't like that part. I can delete it. No need to downvote.

@TroyWoo didn't downvote. scoop = he published faster than you (sorry for being unclear).

@henning Not the case. I already published it in a conference paper first.

@henning And thank you for your hint. Now I think I can go matching the words this researcher uses. In fact, even the method this researcher uses to get the result is same as mine, which is clearly well known to this researcher.

Many people have similar ideas at similar times - the field is just ripe for it, or various people all sat in on the same presentation at a meeting, or...  Ideas are a dime a dozen. So far you have not presented a story that supports plagiarism or any intentional action to sabotage you or your work. You are cited. Again, what else are you really expecting? Any of the actions you propose above are completely out of line with what you have stated. Take a deep breath, work hard on your paper, and move on with life.

@JonCuster I didn't make myself clear, because I'm not good at explaining the situation without revealing the details which I'd rather not. Indeed I have already discussed with several researchers and they all think this is at least a misconduct.

@TroyWoo I guess this is really hard to evaluate without seeing the paper. It could be that it was just derivative of your work, i.e. not a new contribution. An informed reviewer should have seen that the paper does not add to existing knowledge and rejected it. However, I would still be very careful with charging plagiarism.

@JonCuster So I will keep you guys posted about the result...if this post is still not closed by then. But I have a bad feeling about this..XD

@henning Thank you very much for your warning. I really appreciate it. I understand this whole thing may backfire if I do not tread lightly. The bright side of this whole thing is that I know who not to trust in the future :-).

Would you have been happier if they didn't mention your work at all? As long as the citation is there, people know you did prior work and anyone who wants to can pull your paper, compare the two, and make up their own minds about whether this author was intellectually honest or not. Unfortunately, unless they misquoted you, all we can say is that they were sloppy and hopefully that will eventually catch up with them.

@keshlam I'd be happier, since in that case it is plagiarism...

Given your addendum, what you are talking about is not plagiarism. It might be a case of insufficient attribution, but without seeing the papers and knowing the field it is impossible to tell.
You are guaranteed to fail in your efforts, and to make yourself look bad in the process, if you accuse this famous researcher of the wrong transgression simply because you don't know the difference between plagiarism and insufficient attribution.
As an aside, the fact that you don't know this difference makes me question whether you are able to objectively judge whether or not the researcher in question has violated the norms of your field. I'd strongly advise seeking advice from a trusted senior mentor before doing anything.

Thank you for your answer. In this case, what will you do if someone is not giving you insufficient attribution? Suppose I am this famous researcher and I found out a nobody is not giving me sufficient attribution, I would probably have no trouble in burying him? So this is like the status is in the play?

I think any published researcher has seen papers that perhaps could have or should have cited one of theirs.  So what? There are lots of papers in the literature that others may believe to be more important and more directly applicable. Our view of our own work is inherently biased. You are ascribing motivation where you should not, since you have no idea of their motivation.

@TroyWoo If you are not being given sufficient attribution by an author, that author risks developing a reputation for not being thorough.  Keep doing good work, and keep publishing, and force your field to give you the recognition you deserve.

@JonCuster Thanks for pointing out the generality of such situation. In fact, I was going to eat the shxt, but another famous researcher, a good friend of mine, after considering the situation, told me I should file the complaint. Now I would leave it to the editor-in-chief to determine legitimacy of my complaint. And now as I recall, this researcher whom I complain about does not really have a good reputation. I thought he/she was unfairly treated, and now I know why. I just wish someone had warned me about him/her in the first place.

@ScottSeidman Thanks for your encouragement. I wouldn't  dream of that though, as I am a Chinese and academia is a westerners' game. The game is rigged for me right from the start. But I am more disturbed by the fact that this researcher I was complaining about, pretended to be a friend of mine for all these years, but later I confirmed that he/she was behind the downplay/rejection of all my previous works (I have all the evidence). He/she was always complaining I was not writing very clearly, bad English blablabla...and now he/she seems to enjoy my research quite a lot.

@TroyWoo What I've always done in the case of insufficient attribution is to simply ignore it and let the scientific record correct itself--or not.

@Corvus Thank you very much for your suggestion. After receiving all the suggestions, I am now drafting a letter of maybe not complaint but inquiry to the editor, and I will only present the facts and let the editor make the judgement.

First, take a deep breath. There are many unknowns here and your may be correct and at it may not. Yes, cases like you describe have happened. Usually persons acting this way will be fairly known for doing so. So try to assess if this person falls into this category. If it is a known trouble maker, you have a tough decision to make. Such personalities are not easy to handle and others may be reluctant do do so as well. If the person does not carry such a reputation, then you may have to question your judgement a little harder. In any case, assess the circumstances and try to gain some understanding of the players.
So what can be done. First of all, you should definitely feel free to approach the editor. But, you should not do it with a preconceived idea of where the problem looms. Instead, try to describe your issue without casting judgement and ask the editor for advise. Remember, the editor, in this case, is very likely completely oblivious to what may or may not have happened and has most likely acted in good faith. You need to have this perspective in mind in your approach since that sets the proper tone in your request(s) or questions.
The information in your question is of course to scarce to make a deeper analysis. What you can do is to visit the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) web site and see if there are any cases described that carry similar contexts. This may give you an idea of how editors may act and likely outcomes of their actions.


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What should be the path to go from an R3 to R2 or R1 school?
I am currently a TT faculty at a R3 (4 year teaching) school and I would like to go to a more research focussed place. After talking to seniors in my field, I understood that I need strong research program to be able to make the transition from R3 to R2 or R1. However, I feel it's very difficult to continue research while I'm in a R3 school because 1)teaching load is high 2) my school doesn't value research that much so there won't be many opportunities like course buy outs etc 3)I need excellent teaching evaluations because I will be applying for jobs. Is there a better way to plan and execute this transition or is it even possible to go from R3 to R1? Am I chasing something that's not achievable? It would be great to hear success stories and some tips as well.
ps: I have other questions about whether or not to disclose to your current department that you are applying for jobs. But I will ask that in a separate post.

I'd suggest two things. First is that you don't risk not getting tenure. So, keep doing the things that your current institution values and do them well.
But to move on into a more research oriented situation, you can get yourself connected to others who do serious research and work with them as a collaborator and eventually a co-author. This can build a reputation for yourself that might be attractive to an R1 or R2 institution.
I suspect, from your "handle" here that you are in mathematics. Fortunately that field is easier than many others for collaboration at a distance. You can attend seminars at some nearby R1, perhaps, and introduce yourself. Conferences are another possibility. Your school library may not be adequate, but interlibrary loan will get you anything you need.
The plan may take a while to reach fruition, but it can be done.

The bad news is that this is very difficult, that many more people attempt such a move than succeed. And the Covid-19 has made a hash out of university budgets, making future faculty hiring more uncertain.
There are two pieces of good news however:

One is that, due to the pandemic, a huge amount of academic activity has moved online. For example, if you are in math, there are huge lists of seminars and conferences, most of which are held online and are open to all. Find some talks to attend, ask questions, and try to chat with the speakers and other participants afterwards. And, if you have research to present, some conferences invite participants to give contributed talks.

The way to succeed at moving is to succeed at what you'd be doing at an R1 anyway: be an active researcher. So, to the extent that you have the time and energy, just start doing the work that you want to do: Learn as much as you can; talk to people; find open questions to work on; and get results.

As far as moving goes, the odds are probably against you. I myself tried to "move up" and wasn't successful. But doing good research is its own reward, and much less dependent on the vagaries of the job market. And who knows, you might get lucky.
Good luck.


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Allowing a student to sit in during class
I'm a grad student who will be teaching a course for the first time over the summer, and I'm not sure what the convention is on allowing a student to "sit in" on the class (that is, attend class without being registered, not getting credits, etc). If a student asks before class for permission to do so, is it to my discretion on whether or not to allow it? I suppose it's always within the instructor's right to deny the request, but it seems like approving the request without the school's permission could be a mistake, since I am an employee of the university. The faculty handbook seems to only consider if the student audits the course, in which case they have to officially register as auditing the class, but nothing about unofficially sitting in. Am I extending past my right as instructor if I let a student sit in?
EDIT: This is at a private university in the US.

This will be some combination of your university policies and unofficial local customs.  You'll have to ask within your institution to find out whether it is acceptable.  If you have a teaching mentor or someone else supervising your teaching, they would be ideal to ask.

@NateEldredge Thanks, that's the straightforward answer that I should have known from the start.

Also be aware that sometimes students are confused or trying to obscure the question and think that they are then registered, re-taking, or will get credit in a different section (e.g., with an instructor they like less). Possibly generating a student grievance later on ("he said it was okay").

@MassimoOrtolano In the US, at a private university.

The special circumstances related to the summer term that I have seen are that some universities do not permit a formal audit over the summer.  In this case, the only options open to the student might be formal enrollment (which could be quite expensive) vs. informal audit (sitting in). If you ask administration for formal permission, they might take the easy way out and give you a  "no."  Therefore I suggest reading your institution's policies and asking a couple of people who have taught this type of summer course whether they're aware of any precedents.

If you want to find out what exactly is within your legal power as an instructor and what is not, check your university regulations. They do vary from place to place. The general rule is that if there is no official policy in the handbook, the choice is yours, but you may also ask the chairman to be on the safe side (this is a good general strategy, by the way: while in doubt and seriously concerned about any legal stuff, just pass the issue up the administrative ladder). As to the rest, I usually allow people to sit in whenever they request it under two conditions
1) The classroom sitting capacity allows it
2) The student behaves in a non-disruptive way
So, unless you have a clear reason to say "No", I would say "Conditional yes" and tell the student any conditions you care about right away with the understanding that if any of them get violated, the sitting-in gets terminated.

University regulations usually aren't a matter of law, so "legal power" isn't the right phrase, here. (But +1, since the rest of your answer is exactly right.)

Assuming that there are no university or departmental policies preventing it, you should consider the reason why the student would like to sit in on the class. I have had many cases where I have allowed non-enrolled students to attend my class. For instance, I have had several students sit-in on my doctoral courses, because they were trying to decide if they should apply to the program or not (one of these cases, the director asked me to allow the person to sit in, if I was okay with it). Some students have indicated that they have friends or colleagues with specific interest in the course topic and have asked if the student can join. I have found that acceptable, too. I have also had one student sit in on an undergraduate course, because he was deciding which school to attend and wanted to and was interested in the major that I taught in.
One case where I did not allow it was when I had a highly disruptive student who disapproved of course content (including content that I was required to teach in the course) and periodically became combative during class meetings (my director was aware of this ongoing situation). I was highly concerned that this visitor would further disrupt the course lecture or discussions and I did not allow it. So, consider how the visiting student could or may inhibit your teaching goals.
If the student is interested in attending an extended number of classes, I may also frown upon that. In my cases, they were one-time occurrences.

I appreciate the advice, though my question was more about whether or not it was within my power as instructor to allow/not allow this. Though you do have a good point about considering the student's motivations for doing so.

Whether it is permissible will largely depend as others have commented on your institution's policies but regardless I would imagine you have the final say.
At my university, any student regardless of their degree, is allowed to sit in on any lecture happening on campus, providing there is sufficient space and that them sitting in does not prevent an enrolled student from attending nor interrupt or interfere with their learning.

Have you spoken to your advisor? I think he may be the best person to give you the most accurate answer as per your university's policy.
I assume that you are a graduate TA under an instructor? In case of such confusion, they might be the best judge on what should be allowed, if it is so.