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Is hastily writing down the professor's lecture a good way of learning?
I am writing this from the perspective of a mathematician. I am wondering whether there is any research on the standard mode of instruction.
Mathematics lectures, at least in my home country, typically work as follows: the prof starts writing on the blackboard (or whiteboard) while telling about the notes, and students copy down the notes from the board.
90% of the lecturer's speech is reading out the notes aloud while facing the blackboard. Depending on the level interaction, there may of course be questions to the audience, but mainly it is reading out the lecture notes.
Most students aren't really listening because they are busy copying down the notes from the board. You typically see them turning their back and forth between the board and their own notes. Students may find themselves in "unintelligent copy" mode, just copying symbols from the blackboard without any comprehension of meaning.
Irrespective of your style of instruction, I think this is a terribly ineffective concept of teaching right from the start. Individuals have told me that they believe in some sort of "subconscious diffusion" of the lecture material into their students' minds, even if their students are just in "unintelligent copy" mode. I don't believe in this and find this rather counter-intuitive.
All in all, much of the typical way of lecturing looks like a giant waste of time to me. I can only imagine that the most gifted students may benefit from this, and perhaps that is the reason such a mode of instruction is pursued.
Has there been any research on this mode of instruction and its educational benefits? Has there been any research on that "diffusion" hypothesis?

It should be emphasized that the question here is Has there been any research on.... Answers that contain merely someone's opinion are insufficient, in my view, and should be downvoted. Please stop giving this kind of answers.

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Prior to electronic media generally and after the start of mass, rather than individual instruction, this was the primary way of teaching a lot of things. It can be a good start to learning, actually. However, it isn't enough, and never was. Learning is an active sport, not a spectator sport.
We learn by actively engaging the brain. Copying down notes is somewhat active. Certainly more active than taking a phone picture of the board once it is full, or downloading a lecture. It is even more engaging than (just) reading a lecture.
However, if you really want to learn, or teach someone how to learn, I suggest a few additional steps.
One is to review the notes after a day or so.
A more extreme version is to take the notes by hand (pencil and paper) and then transcribe them and add annotations that are needed, perhaps preparing questions for the instructor or yourself to answer.
One is to extract and write down the most important message in a lecture. Or maybe a couple of them. This can be done at the immediate end of the lecture.
One is to ask questions during the lecture if a step in a proof isn't clear to you. (Yes, instructors make mistakes).
One is to review the most important points of the previous lecture just before the next one.
But the most important aspect is to do some kind of exercises based on the lecture. Perhaps these will be assigned. Perhaps they are available in a text book. Try to get some sort of feedback on your solutions.
Another is to start a discussion group with a few students to review the lecture material and update the notes.
But the real key to this is that you learn by actually rewiring the synapses in your brain and that takes repetition and reinforcement. To assure that you are reinforcing the correct ideas, you need feedback.
Note that watching lectures (say on the internet) without active participation is almost completely ineffective for most people. Especially for long term retention and the ability to put the knowledge to use.

For some of the biology behind learning that suggests reinforcement and feedback see: The Art of Changing the Brain by James E Zull

Note also that, as a professor, I've had to explicitly teach this to students and force some of the activities. For those that learn easily they may not seem to be needed, but eventually things will get hard and having good practice can save you.
For example, I'd end a lecture a couple of minutes early and ask for "the most important lesson of the day", expecting that the students would have note cards with a few ideas.

I think this is a good take for most lectures. In particular, I think trying to work out what the key points or, or important parts is at least partially an active activity. Things are turned from words to meaning, and then back into words on the way back to the page. However, does this transfer to math? Presumably it is important to get down all details of all parts of a proof, and in the processes, little processing goes on - I know that when I do this it goes straight from symbols on the board to symbols on the page without passing through meaning.

We learn by actively engaging the brain. Great that somebody is saying that. In my student days, we all learned the old-fashioned way and the lectures were slow enough for me to simultaneously a) listen, b) write down and c) comprehend and reprocess the material (so I was anticipating what's coming next except for a few really surprising twists in the proofs). That mode required some effort on both my and professor's side and I asked questions immediately when I felt somewhat lost, but otherwise I didn't need either an eye contact, or any of modern flashy props; the flow was perfect.

Note-taking engages three sight, sound and feeling which is surely no less useful than the more modern method of teachers using hand-outs. What's in between?

For me, the act of physically writing the notes was key when I was younger. That was what it took to get the content into my brain. I then could remember it, visualizing the page it was written on. I then never actually went back over the notes to review - my time was better spent (to me) looking at other problems, particularly how other authors than our textbook approached things, to compare and contrast. There is research showing that actively writing notes results in better learning that having handouts given to you.

Does not work for some of us. I could either listen to and reflect on the lecture or write it down: getting both was not happening. In math it had to be thorough since a missing step could later leave me lost.  I had poor handwriting so it was extra effort just to make it intelligible even to myself. Nothing left over for learning.  I would instead listen/reflect/ (sometimes ask questions) and then as far as the notes .. hope for the best ..  Translation?  Read the text - which rarely covered all of the lecture material - and/or hope I could cheat in a sense by copying a friend's notes.

Sorry, but this requires some massive citations, especially parts like "Note that watching lectures (say on the internet) without active participation is almost completely ineffective for most people". To me this answer reads just as defending shitty outdated practices.

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. that phrasing was directed at the student. The act of writing out the lecture is a start at learning, provided you capitalize on it. I studied (long ago) under this regime and don't recall a professor ever reading from notes while copying to the blackboard. Yes, their back was toward the students unless they were interrupted, but because they were both writing and speaking. But the after class activities are also needed.

For what it's worth, as an undergrad I made a point of copying down the notes from the board along with margin notes whenever the professor said something that sounded wise. These margin notes often turned out to be extremely helpful. For example, scanning through the notes I made from Probabilistic Combinatorics:

Important ideas which for the sake of speed weren't written down. "Idea: induct on the number of blocks", "this bit is by Lipschitz continuity"
Structural facts about the material. "This is the same as Theorem 4 but with a different proof"
Relative importance of the material. "This lemma is silly", "The Hoeffding-Azuma inequality is the bread and butter of every combinatorialist", "we could have 48 or 72 lectures on this"
Asides to help us get more intuition. "very strong concentration of measure", "This is the only possible definition"
Notes about my own confidence. "should we interchange $p$ and $q$ here?"
Notes about the course. "Examiner's Favourite"

The lecturer tells you a lot more than they write down, and a lecture is an extremely useful and highly scalable opportunity to obtain not just knowledge about what is in the course, but a bit more of the culture of what you're learning. (I do strongly believe that students should be taught how to take lecture notes, and that if they do not know how, the experience can be much as you describe.)
See Prof Körner for an entertaining paper on the subject, which I think should be required reading: https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~twk/Lecture.pdf

It is reassuring that Körner addresses exactly the same concerns about lecturing.

(+1) Although this doesn't answer the question asked, I think it gives very good advice for what should have been asked. I often had the textbook in front of me during lectures, and if there was a useful observation made (e.g. the theorem continues to hold if the T_1 topology hypothesis is weakened to T_0, this proof that open connected subsets of of the complex plane are pathwise connected actually shows they are polygonally connected, etc.), then I often wrote it in the margins of my textbook. I learned the phrase "an epsilon/3 proof" in lectures, which I don't think I've seen in a book.

Has there been any research on this mode of instruction and its educational benefits? Has there been any research on that "diffusion" hypothesis?

As you start with the request for academic research in your text and finish on that same note (not in your question title, BTW, hence plenty opportunity for opinionated empirical personal evidence reports :-)) ) here's what a run around the research net delivered:
Math specific stuff? ... Not so much
There is some published material around college level math ed, but that nicely clusters with the 'effective teaching & effective learning scholar search query' mentioned further below.
And then... on to "note taking" and the "subconscious diffusion" hypothesis
There's plenty on note taking in various general or non-math scenarios, but most is about doing it most effectively, e.g.

The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking
Pam A. Mueller, Daniel M. Oppenheimer (2014) https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581

Then on to the "subconscious diffusion" hypothesis: despite my personal objection to note taking effectiveness per se (I personally found it had negative impact, so I came up with a system where I didn't take notes at all when I was moving around in higher ed -- this was before the advent of mobile phones with great cameras, BTW, so no other recording mechanism was used) there is apparent evidence of its relative effectiveness in learning, based on EEG scans, etc.:

Only Three Fingers Write, but the Whole Brain Works†: A High-Density EEG Study Showing Advantages of Drawing Over Typing for Learning - van der Weel & van der Meer (2017) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00706/full

but then I could NOT find papers on the comparison of note taking vs. no note taking at all. (Only some peeps mentioning note taking is considered more "active" than listening attentively -- I disagree, but this is very different for different people, so my position is not applicable to the general student public.)
A counter-search for research results which might conclude that listening is more effective than note taking, or rather that note taking is detrimental to listening, has not been found yet.

I say yet because the plethora of publications focus on improving your note taking skills -- some universities even publish handbooks about effective note taking! -- and I do not expect much research into that specific subject as "note taking" seems to be the agreed upon (undisputable?) common denominator in higher ed.
An evening of meta-research like this might lead one to the cynical conclusion that the world has already lost its youthful "ungrounded idealism" and collectively gone through the 5 levels of trauma processing, arriving at the very mindful accepting stage where mediocre and inferior teachers are to be expected to be present in bulk, this majority due to the huge demand for and meager supply of teachers everywhere, hence obviating the strategy where the resultant problems are better carted off onto the backs of the students ("here's some life's experience for ya, can't receive it too early") and consequently research tracks the hurd, focusing on how to get that bunch of homo sapiens through the ordeal as optimally as possible. Which leads us to...

[Edit:] ha! found some mention at least of research including not taking notes:

How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) Kayla Morehead & John Dunlosky & Katherine A. Rawson (2019) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09468-2 (and no need to pay Springer 38 European Pesos if you use your brain ;-) )

There's also this (and more, once you've hit these in Scholar):

An integrative review of the cognitive costs and benefits of note-taking, R.S. Jansen, D. Lakens, W.A. Ijsselsteijn (2017) https://research.tue.nl/nl/publications/an-integrative-review-of-the-cognitive-costs-and-benefits-of-note

Another bit of research that may be of interest here and could possibly assist in adapting your studying environment/strategy (I assume the teacher is not malleable in his behaviour):

Revising lecture notes: how revision, pauses, and partners affect note taking and achievement, Linlin Luo, Kenneth A. Kiewra, Lydia Samuelson (2016) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11251-016-9370-4

Should I take notes? master thesis, R.S. Jansen (2015) https://pure.tue.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/47027940/796280-1.pdf

because let's get real: ultimate this is not about note taking good or bad or whatever, but achievement in education, i.e. making it out of there, with a degree if possible, and then on to the real stuff. (and more interesting people -- for you, at least)
Teaching effectiveness research
Ho boy! Drop those first two words in Google Scholar or Bing Academic and you'll be treated to a lot of research being done on improving the teaching effectiveness. (And there's also "Learning Effectiveness" results, though you might want to filter out the AI/Deep Learning noise there)
Little attention to math specifically, but the research spans the entire gamut from preschool to higher ed and adult ed, generally ending up with the conclusion that "classical education" isn't exactly bad but can be improved in various ways, improving: Attention, Variation, Interaction.
Regrettably nobody I checked made the effort to get really nasty and select for horrible teachers as a baseline, though there are some blogs about "inefficient teaching methods". I would like to mention this paper:

Factors contributing to ineffective teaching [...] Mupa, Chinooneka (2015) https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1079543.pdf

and I'm withholding the rest of the title ;-) , because from your description of the class experience there's plenty overlap, despite this being a report about a zero(0!) percent pass rate in schools in Zimbabwe and what possibly went wrong over there. Perceived low morale from the teacher's side being a major common factor with Zimbabwe here, for his teaching methods as you describe them seem not so much "classic" as more "curmudgeon" (facing blackboard, questions to the audience instead of from the audience, etc.)
if I was feeling more compassionate tonight, I'd say the man is tired and probably does not like being in front of a class either. It happens. A lot. Who knows...

Enough fun now, it's a large field of research and a lot is happening. However, as with all endeavours that are very personal, the overall take-away of a lot of the results is "it depends" (on the student, the teacher, the environment, and so on).
Oh-kay, but did anyone compare this prof's modus operandi with anything else in edu land?
You wrote:

All in all, much of the typical way of lecturing looks like a giant waste of time to me. I can only imagine that the most gifted students may benefit from this, and perhaps that is the reason such a mode of instruction is pursued.

Before I attempt an answer:
A note about the "most gifted students may benefit": wrong.
When you are gifted, even a little, you do not benefit from regurgitation like that, because you already picked up where this was going from the books and syllabus that go with the course. All you need is a couple of hints along the way when you get stuck somewhere, the rest is just pedal to the metal at your own pace.
Fundamentally, "gifted" you has three options:

Either you make sure you get some extra intel during class that's useful and interesting to you (extroversion helps here ;-) ),
or you do as I did and skip class entirely, going elsewhere for your education: meanwhile, read (nay, grok!) the books, grab/trade the notes off the others where you deem this necessary afterwards (to make sure you don't miss any additional info that inadvertently happens to be disseminated during class by the sub-top teacher and might otherwise hit you in the neck at the exams),
or you become severely depressed, because you don't receive the necessary amount of input to keep your brain engaged. (I've seen those and generally this tends to spiral towards heavy alcohol abuse. Total drop-out, ending up doing something completely different, is your option when you're lucky.)

(yes, those three options are logical-OR-ed together. There's no exclusivity requirement there. ;-) )
So, please, rethink what it might mean to be gifted in a setting like you describe. If it's already "wasted time" to you, how can it be fruitful to you at all when you are gifted?
Unless your prof took off like a moon rocket at the start of the semester and you are still sitting there flabbergasted only able to hurry your notes, then, okay, maybe he's running at a speed that a gifted person might appreciate. Still, the way you're telling it his interaction with the class leaves things left to be desired and you didn't sound like you're out of your depth yet re the material discussed in class either, so...nah, doesn't sound like he's in it for the smarties only. Sounds more like he's counting down to retirement or meeting with his buddies instead of having to gab with all the collected bloody youth in there to claim the paycheck. That's being depressed at an older age.
Now about an answer to the "waste of time" from research:
If we can agree that the basic strategy of your prof is using the transmission instructional model of teaching (he disseminates his knowledge to you folks, instead of leading you on a path of discovery), then there's plenty researchers have to say, and, again, ignoring his specific qualities as an educator here, but merely focusing on the various strategies, then I 'read' the research as, once more, "it depends". But that's me and an evening of very interesting publications. You can research this and come to your own conclusions.
Let me approach this one from a different angle, where I come back to your own stated desire to have a mathematics focused answer: I serve and aim to please. :-)
This one is about your future competition in the world and very interesting on various levels, with lots of references to material that's much closer to home geographically:

Effects of Constructivist and Transmission Instructional Models on Mathematics Achievement in Mainland China: A Meta-Analysis, Chen Xie, Mingshuai Wang and Huimin Hu (2018) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01923/full

Aftermath
I wrote this while doing the research and it was fun. While I did not really address this from the perspective of a mathematician (after all, where's the hard logic and the math in here?), I wrote this more from the perspective of an educator interesting in education research, as at least there we might have some rapport as you wanted to hear about scientific research regarding your issues. (The professionals in the edu field have a yearly conference (ICED); this is serious business. If you are interested in this area of research, you might want to check them out.)
While you (OP) may be bothered about the note taking, etc., in my opinion, you (OP) have an over-arching problem causing all this, which might be stated as this question:
How do I spend my student days more optimally? How do I get more out of this endeavour?
[Because right now, I feel like I'm wasting my time and having to adhere to bosses (professors) that do not enthuse me at all.]
Asking that question (and trying to answer it) might lead you to more useful conclusions and strategic and tactical choices.
Without going into it further, here's a few questions for you:

if note taking is such a stressful operation, why not distribute the task?
Have a few people take "official" notes, while others can copy them. Thus they are free to pay more attention to the verbal/interactive part of the lecture, entice the professor into interaction instead of droning on, etc. and make only notes about those few bits they feel very strongly about. Then get together and merge notes or study together. (What researchers mention as more effective note taking by not acting like a photocopier all the time, but digesting the material and only noting those bits that were surprising or otherwise noticeable hints to drive your thought processes. Haven't seen mention of any "team effort" in those papers to game the system like that though. A pity.)

Of course, this requires teamwork and a working team is a long term mutual contract, for mutual benefits: the "note takers" are not to be "used up"! -- personal experience is that some people are good at note taking (seek out the ones who score B/C and are happy with an A once in while; the rare summa cum laude folks write notes only Bletchley Park could decode in their heyday so they're effin' useless for a scheme like this) while others are not good at it, so don't step into the simplistic "equality" trap by rotating the note taking. You'll fail horribly, all around.
I got things done by teaching other students stuff they had a hard time with and they provided me with their notes in exchange. Worked like a charm for years. The "note takers" in the group can gain from the discussion afterwards, when you can explain stuff they might have missed or glossed over while making the notes. Leverage your individual skillsets. Experiment. You'll be surprised. (I discovered that teaching was bloody hard (and cool!), as it goes way beyond verbalizing your own comprehension. Taught me a lot extra about the material, people, communicating information and myself. Never would have discovered that if I'd stayed in my box.)

have you asked the prof for lecture notes? If those exist, that can save a bundle on note taking effort too.

why not be better than my old self and take the prof aside and ask him how he feels? No critique, but are you interested in maybe trying something different next time, sir? Like maybe try a Q&A? Let's try something different, shall we? Not permanently, but once in a while, you know, to keep things interesting? Seek the joy and wonder, try to find it. (That'll be a tough job and needs someone emphatic with the prof to help kick it off, but things can happen. Positively.)

I Know I Can, but Do I Have the Time? The Role of Teachers’ Self-Efficacy and Perceived Time Constraints in Implementing Cognitive-Activation Strategies in Science,
Nani Teig, Ronny Scherer and Trude Nilsen (2019) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01697/full

Of course, I can remain cynical and pop in with

College adults are not good at self-regulation: A study on the relationship of self-regulation, note taking, and test taking. Peverly, Brobst, Graham, Shaw, Ray

but may I be idealistic for a mo' and suggest you try to counter that one by showing some surprising collective initiative? I hope you do!

Another option is to actually do your homework/self-study while sitting in class and keeping an ear open for any actually interesting parts of the lecture. If you can get one lecture ahead then it's not too hard and as a nice bonus you look very diligent, sitting there writing away.

I think this learning style is a fundamental misunderstanding of what "taking notes" mean.
I am one of those people that has a lot of problems paying attention without taking copious notes. This was true when I was a student, and it is even more true now that I am a researcher attending seminars and work meetings. The trick is that I never (or almost never) just copy down what's on the blackboard or what it is said out loud. I summarize and reinterpret, often trying to anticipate what the speaker is saying. What I write is not what the speaker says, but the understanding I get. Essentially I am retelling in real time the presentation to a third party (the piece of paper). I am so used to do it that I find very hard to concentrate on something without pen and paper to do this process.
Now this is very tiring and even now, with many years of practice, I cannot do it for more than 1h30 without a pause. Moreover it is a skill, and one that's non trivial to acquire (it took me many years in middle and high school to become proficient in it).
The problem, the way I see it, is that many students that could benefit from this learning technique simply never learned it, and use as a fallback mode being the "dumb transcriber" of what the professor says (which is frustrating and pretty much useless). I am not sure what could be done to fix this or what the root cause of the problem is.

As a student, I'd say the root cause of the problem is when I can't keep up with the speed of the lecture while thinking and taking notes. And a simple way to counteract that is to provide the slides/notes before the lectures, so I can simply screenshot and paste the relevant parts to my notes and add my own notes. Typing formulas takes way longer than that, for example, leaving less time for thinking along.

@lucidbrot That's also why I strongly dislike slide lectures -- blackboard forever. Writing stuff on a blackboard forces the lecturer to move at a reasonable speed. Slides pushes you to go through them super fast.

I guess that depends on the lecturer. My analysis prof usually filled at least four full-room-width blackboards per two-hour lecture. But you make me realize that it's not so much about the medium than about the time the students have to think (and maybe discuss with the neighbour. I always found that very helpful, at least if my friend understood it)

How does ones "reinterpret" a mathematical proof that is just a string of algebra?

@IanSudbery I've never met such a proof in my life as a mathematician. Usually proofs have ideas behind it (even those that can be summarized as a string of computations), and writing the ideas is a lot more important than writing the computations. If the proof is trivial I just write "trivial".

Most of the deeper learning happens after class when working on homework, rereading the notes, asking yourself questions, etc. But that doesn't mean that lectures are useless.
In a setting where you have 50 minute classes and a lot of content to cover, what other options are available? I think the best scenario is if students come into class already acquainted with the new content.
If lecture notes are made available before class and students read them,  a lecture could be oriented to helping the students understand the notes more thoroughly, and that would be a better use of time. This way students are actually paying attention to the content, not paying attention to "getting everything down." But it requires that the students actually prepare for class, which they might not do, and that lecture notes be prepared well before class, which the professor might not do.

This is just my take on this as a student. For me copying what the teacher writes is a way for me to force myself to think about the material. When I'm not actively writing my mind goes like 'yeah I understand this' but when I write along I have to actually understand what I'm writing down. I don't even use my notes for studying afterwards it's just one way to process the information.
This method that the teacher uses can be a good method but only under certain circumstances. If you have a bad teacher at some point you will lose track of what the teacher is saying and the remaining time of the lecture will be a torturous stream of seemingly unrelated facts.
If you prepare for your lecture you have seen most of the material already and since you're on your own you can spend more time on the things that are harder for you. The lecture becomes a repetition and since you have seen the material at least once this gives you a chance to process it a second time. You need less effort to understand everything so you have more mental capacity to really think about what you're doing. To be honest I haven't been doing this too much myself but I hope to do more of this in the future.
So my conclusion is that if you pair a good teacher with preparation before the lecture this method can be really effective. It might not be optimal but it's more than good enough. If you have a bad teacher and you're not prepared these kinds of lectures are almost a waste of time.

Yes, of course there is research on taking notes when the lecture method is used, etc.  See, for example (found with Google):
https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-taking/

That's a very nice site. May I suggest you enlarge your answer by elaborating a bit on what the page says - you don't need (shouldn't) just copy it verbatim, but maybe you can give a short summary.  Else, that site might go away in the future and thus the answer may become useless.

Is hastily writing down the professor's lecture a good way of learning

Ans: No,your life and time will be waste you will not gain deep knowlegde and understanding ,
From Prof Terence Tao statement regarding learning mathematics
It’s also good to remember that professional mathematics is not a sport (in sharp contrast to mathematics competitions). The objective in mathematics is not to obtain the highest ranking, the highest “score”, or the highest number of prizes and awards; instead, it is to increase understanding of mathematics (both for yourself, and for your colleagues and students), and to contribute to its development and applications. For these tasks, mathematics needs all the good people it can get.-
We learn 10 percent of what we read, 20 percent of what we hear, 30 percent of what          we see, 50 percent of what we see and hear, 70 percent of what we discuss, 80    percent of what we experience, and 95 percent of what we teach others

Hi Jasmine- I read your answer and did not really see how it tied back to the question.

@StephenBoesch im  saying that  one of the best ways to know whether you really understand something is to try to explain it to someone else...

OK - not disagreeing on that but it's still not tied back to the question.

Reasons for downvote - The answer does not mention the actual question of OP ("has there been research"), nor does it offer sources for its own relatively crass statement, nor does it match my personal experience (maybe irrelevant, but there's that)...


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Why do I need to update my contact details before Arxiv submissions
Question as in the title. What are the practical or legal reasons Arxiv asks to check a box before each submission, affirming that my affiliation and contact details are still up to date?
Having to check a box makes it look like much more than just keeping up the record. In fact, why do they even need my affiliation in the first place?

When someone finds your paper on arXiv, they are presented with several options. They can "View PDF" or can click for the "TeX source" or "other formats." There is also a button that says "view email" which they can use to contact you, as the person who uploaded the paper. This will be the email address on file for you, and that's why arXiv wants to be sure that email address is up to date.
Not all authors put their email address into the actual text of the paper, and even if they did, it's easier for arXiv to just get your email address when you submit the paper, rather than running scripts to try to find your email address inside the text of the paper.
The author affiliation doesn't seem to be displayed anywhere on the arXiv page for the paper. Of course, many authors put it in the PDF. I suspect arXiv asks for your affiliation mostly as an attempt to prevent junk submissions. For sure arXiv does accept submissions from unaffiliated researchers. They might just need to jump through an extra hoop, like getting "endorsed" by someone who arXiv already trusts.

Yay for unexplained downvotes! I assume the person didn't like that arXiv has barriers set up to make things harder for unaffiliated researchers? Hard to know without a comment explaining the downvote. It's like the old adage goes: "always shoot the messenger"

I don't really understand the point about the junk filtering. Are you saying that a previously endorsed profile may need re-endorsement after leaving academia because people cannot be trusted despite a track record of quality submissions? I thought endorsement was a one-time deal (per category), in which case I don't see why checking the affiliation every single replacement should be necessary. Or is it just that they want to catch if you move to some inherently untrustworthy institution?

@Anyon No, I don't think you need re-endorsement after leaving academia. The check box for affiliation not having changed is the same check box saying email hasn't changed, right?

Yes. The check box is labeled "I certify that the above information is correct.". But that doesn't resolve the question of how does asking whether my affiliation is still correct (on every new submission and every replacement, mind you) help prevent junk submissions? Seems more likely to be motivated by having up-to-date backup contact information in case the email fails to work after all, but maybe I'm wrong.

(Re: downvote) Your answer seems fine to me even though I've had difficulty with endorsement -- see this MSE answer and my comment to this answer. It would be nice if some combination of Ph.D., x number of years of full-time university positions, and y number of published papers could substitute for not having an institutional affiliation. Regarding @Anyon's question, see Is there something I need to do on arxiv if I lose academic affiliation.

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"The file is not eligible for Reference Checking and was not processed"
While submitting a paper to a journal of a famous publisher, the submission system added the following link in the top of my PDF file: "Click here to view linked References". When I clicked the link, I got to a page that says  "The file '[my-file].pdf' is not eligible for Reference Checking and was not processed."
How can I make my PDF file eligible for reference checking?

@matinking ah, I see. So this feature only works for Microsoft-Word files.

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Is a journal based on extending Wikipedia articles feasible?
A large part of the work in writing a paper in my field (theoretical CS and economics) is writing the introduction, the problem description, the motivation, and the related work. A large part of this writeup repeats in different articles studying a similar problem; thus there is a waste of effort. I thought of initiating a journal in which the authors will be instructed to base this part of their papers on relevant Wikipedia pages. Each article would start with a paragraph such as the following:

"This paper extends the Wikipedia article ABC (version from date of submission). Our contributions are as follows: (a) we prove that the ABC theorem is valid not only for $n=2$ but also for $n=3$. (b) We refute the ABC conjecture for $n=4$. (c) We present an efficient algorithm for solving the ABC problem for the case $n=2$.

The authors are responsible for ensuring that the Wikipedia article at the date of submission is uptodate, contains a complete problem statement, and all relevant related work.
The referees will have to verify this. Then, the rest of the paper will be verified as usual.
If the paper is published, then the new contributions will be added to the ABC page.
Advantages:

The literature survey will be done only once, and it will be kept uptodate.
The notation will be uniform (based on the Wikipedia article).

Current journals will probably not agree to this scheme. But can it work with a new journal? Is this scheme reasonable?

I don't think most of today's research is relevant for Wikipedia (today) and should be added there (imo against Wikipedia guidelines)

Would Wikipedia agree to this scheme?  Could you really have a journal (which will not be super-prestigious) where all the statements of the problems are notable enough to be mentioned in Wikipedia?

I think it would make more sense if the journal itself had its own wiki with the common contents on it. Wikipedia itself has its own policies, you can't enforce that the authors will take care of editing the Wikipedia pages to comply with your journal requirements if they don't have control over the wiki's contents (e.g., anyone can roll back their edits).

@Alexander Woo: I don't know about theoretical CS and economics, but in math it is not difficult to think of topics on which many papers have been written (sometimes even one or more books) that presently have NO details in any Wikipedia article, at least as far as I can determine. The very first thing I tried is an example --- lineability in a vector space. The 4th topic I tried is another: uniform rectifiability (only mentioned in a few mathematician's bios).

So what are you supposed to do if you do not like the Wikipedia page for that topic? For instance, because it uses a notation that you find ineffective, it contains statements you disagree with, or cites a lot of content that you do not consider relevant (and if such a journal becomes relevant, it seems likely that everyone and their cat will add shameless advertising to Wikipedia pages).

@FedericoPoloni, see my post. re "that you find ineffective"; just use that "ineffective" notation or edit it to an effective one. re "contains statements you disagree"; if you disagree with the falsehoods on Wikipedia, kindly edit it, at a minimum, delete it. if you disagree with the truths on Wikipedia, welp, a fake news site is what does that, not a journal. re "cites a lot of content that you do not consider relevant". Same thing, edit over.

@Miguel, re "policy"; The policies are usually reasonable and thus compatible. re "control"; I think you meant anyone can rollback rollbacks and all logs are kept with all versions being individually referenceable.

@Pacerier You are assuming that different editors agree on what's effective and relevant here. That's a strong assumption, especially if you move into the specifics of people's research. People haven't agreed on a single preferred notation even for relatively basic concepts.

@Trunk, this is likely a new topic, thus going back a few steps.. and you are at root. References vary but all come from the same set (common global). Instead of having a private wiki, putting it global merges all researchers. (A separate benefit is that it is an interesting use case / metaresearch; what Erel wanted?) ¶ re "..burden.."; That's a common myth and 180degree wrong perception (hence I take pains to write the contrary answer below). Wikipedia wants the content. Putting it there helps the global world instead of benefitting just the ivyed group, that's the whole point.

FedericoPoloni, re "agree"; you read wrongly. Having no preferred nothing is the common case (grep "costs" in clay shirky's article, in my post) and raison detre of Wikipedia. @FedericoPoloni

There are already three journals very similar to this idea:

WikiJournal of Medicine
WikiJournal of Science
WikiJournal of Humanities

There is even a UserGroup in which these are operated.

The links provided show this answer is wrong.  Why did people upvote this?

Because the Wikijournals are close enough to the OP's suggestion, while respecting Wikipedia's rules and using the same format as Wikipedia.

very similar to this idea -- not really

While it is not exactly what I had in mind, it is a very interesting step in that direction. The fact that it is open-access and uses the Wikipedia format makes it easy - both legally and technically - to copy & paste content to and from Wikipedia.

@ErelSegal-Halevi I'm not so sure this format supports copy and pasting from Wikipedia articles... why is that so core to your idea?

No, this will not work.  You claim

A large part of this writeup repeats in different articles studying a similar problem; thus there is a waste of effort

but the effort wasted is actually not so big compared to the extra effort required to coordinate publishing with a wiki.
Furthermore, Wikipedia users will be editing the wiki with different goals in mind than the goals of your journal's authors.  Wikipedia is not meant for containing problem statements.

Yes, this will work. (If you do it, you will see that this is true.)
Contrary to what the answer above wrote, it's  simple and not costly to make it work because anyone can edit Wikipedia. So whatever content you want to put on Wikipedia you are allowed to put it there. Generally, and by design. You are in fact very welcome for Wikipedia is meant to be edited by anyone under any personal/selfish goals except those contrary to what is explicitly banned.
Also, notability is a completely gray concept in Wikipedia and is usually enforced this way: if you have budget for a   journal you can expect your budget to pass WP:N's muster. (since the threshold has been found to be entirely subjective) One might guess that the enforcement follows the rules, but longtime users know it's the other way round. Just today I came across yet another article ("Phrasal template") that is up (notable) and has been up for over 15 years.
One small disadvantage is that  someone will come alone and remove/edit your content (because anyone can edit). This is [by design] feature-not-bug as far as  Wikipedia is concerned; whether there are trolls  camping at your particular topic/subject is irrelevant.
It's a small con because typically every single log is kept. So all you have to do when there is a (slightest bit of) fork is to incorporate it (aka edit over) which is in fact what a wiki is all about, that is, collaboration with the world. I understand sometimes one simply does not have the time budget to bother incorporating foreign changes and deadlines are yesterday in which case you can  simply revert it to your wanted version with your new patch on that thus passing the buck to the other side to do "that incorporation work" from the new outstanding version, accepting that they might also be in the same situation which means that new outstanding version may also be reverted tomorrow unincorporated.
Note that one faux pas is to revert a fork while adding no new content (and without prevailing in talkpage discussion that can get incredibly lengthy; you don't have to prevail/bother with discussion btw if you have new content to add, and in fact there are many users/accounts who have a policy of zero-discussion (which you might find helpful, depending on your goals) which is completely accepted, and Wikipedia is really huge when contrasted to SE and other forums where user types can be rounded up into 3 or 4 types at most and people/culture is only allowed to think either Left or Right, and contains probably  30 or 40 different cultures of users and more, of which only the metapedian is the most visible). Note that if you habitually do this you can actually get banned. But this is also not a con since you don't have to do that as every single log is kept so if your journal is that infrequent that between your edits there is already a fork trying to survive, you can actually just ignore the fork simply by referencing specifically the version you want (thus from the default POV, it is you trying to survive; until your next  article update, which will come till your journal is dead)  and articles are  never complete).
Finally, re "If the paper is published, then the new contributions will be added [to the page]"; Win-win !

What do you mean by "fork" here? As far as I understand there are no branches on Wikipiedia: the history is linear with only one most recent version at each time.

You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_warring ?

I didn't italize  as I think it has a pretty standard meaning pastebin.com/CJf8NHcW ¶ In the page linked, ""use common sense, and do not participate in edit wars"" is what I meant and failing to do so can actually get you banned. as I've already mentioned.

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Pre-submission peer review services
There are many websites offering pre-submission review services for a fee of several hunderd dollars, e.g., editage, editeon, enago and others.
In general this seems like a useful service - instead of waiting several months to get feedback from the journal referees (and probably a rejection), the author receives feedback after a week, and can then improve the paper and submit to the journal.
However, just like there are predatory journals, it is reasonable to fear that there are "predatory review services", that take your money and produce a worthless review.
So, my question is: what is a way to detect a good pre-submission peer-review service, and distinguish it from a predatory one?

If you need one of these services, then what have y6ou and your supervisor been doing...

@SolarMike I do not have a supervisor now... I graduated a year ago. You reminded me to update my profile...

The pre-submission peer review seems to cost about $250 USD for a one week turn around. That is not enough money to find an expert in the field to do the review. It is enough money to get someone familiar with the publishing process in a general field (e.g., biomedical research, engineering, humanities) who knows the core components of a paper (i.e., do you need to include statistics, do the methods seem reasonable, is there an introduction that at least pretends to make sense) and can follow a logical argument. Lots of papers get rejected for these reasons so such a review can be valuable. This is especially true if you do not have any colleagues you can pass the paper by. That said, you would be much better served developing a network of colleagues who you can pass a manuscript by prior to submission then to use one of these services.
Prior to using the service, I would ask to see a previous sample of their work. Unlike a predatory journal, which makes publishing somewhere else difficult, using one of these services only costs you money.

Re your last sentence: If that's really a rogue scam service, actually, the worst thing that could happen is "they take your paper, put a different name on it, and publish it on a predatory journal".

@FedericoPoloni I would hope that reputable publishers would be willing to forgive such a nightmare scenerio and publish the work anyways.

I think you mean proof-reading. This is totally different thing from peer-reviewing. The peer-reviewing process refers to academics and experts in your fields giving you scientific feedback. This is usually offered through conferences, symposiums, and journals. Anything else is suspicious and you should not go for. While proof-reading is editorial feedback (grammar, spelling, etc.). It is up to your institutions rule whether to allow third-party proof-reading or not. You should look into your institution's rules. There are some who define what a proof-reader can/can not do, while some institutions prohibit this specially for students.
UPDATE:
After some comments, it is clear to me now that you mean peer-reviews. As I said, this is suspicious. Respectful academics who can give useful review provide this service through known channels: conferences, journals, symposiums, etc.
Also, these channels ask these reviewers to confirm they will not disclose your work and they treat it confidentially. Other channels can disclose your work especially if you do not know the committee and if they do not have reputation to care about.
My advise: about my self, I will stay away from such shady channels. I only submit to legitimate known channels with clearly defined committee and rules. If something went wrong, there is a chair I can talk to. Otherwise you may find yourself in troubles.

If you read the linked pages, these services really claim that they do technical reviewing "like a true peer review".

This sounds suspicious. Respectful experts in the fields do not go for these services. The channels to get peer-reviews in academia are known since ages. I listed examples like conferences, journals, symposiums.

Yeah, clearly those reviewers are not going to be experts in my field --- at least, no one I've met in a conference ever mentioned having a side job for edit-something-dot-com. The question is whether they can really provide feedback of comparable quality: an experienced researcher may be able to make useful comments on my paper even if they work only in a neighboring field. I'm skeptical, but it's very difficult to tell in advance without having tested them.

I met someone who told as they were bi-lingual they could deal with any translation... They failed with an article about stresses and fractures in a loaded shaft...

@FedericoPoloni think about really bad manuscripts you have reviewed. I would guess that even someone halfway competent in a related field could likely improve them by a lot since in most fields introductions and discussion sections need to be comprehendable to more than just experts.

You may want to go to a forum that researchers in your field frequently visit, and advertise that you want to hire a reviewer. This would cut down the cost for middle services, yet increase the likelihood that the reviewers are from your field. If there are many applications you can choose the best offers.

This could be a good idea, however, it is not very common for academics to offer their services for hire. This might make the negotiation on the salary quite awkward. The advantages in the websites I mentioned is that there is a fixed cost and no need to negotiate.

There are people who put up service as consultant for autodidacts, so I think there is a market for this. I think when people get used to this idea there will be no awkward. Of course this can't replace the standard process, where blind review is necessary.


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How to save my presentation if the audience does not reply?
Some time ago, I gave a 60 minutes Zoom presentation in a department seminar.
I usually ask simple questions during my talks, in order to keep the audience awake.
This time, about 15 minutes into the talk, I asked some simple questions and no one replied (I waited for about 30 seconds). I guess they were just not listening; in Zoom it is hard to tell.
Is there anything I can do in this situation in order to "rescue" my presentation?
Or should I just keep talking to "no one" and learn the lesson for the next presentation?

Can you just answer the questions yourself and move on? The other option is to wait longer for an answer, but this depends on your tolerance for awkward silences.

@astronat Sure, I can answer and move on, but the lack of answer indicates the no one is listening. Is there anything I can do about it?

Have you considered whether your talk is either too dense/technical for the audience or, less likely, too simple?

@astronat How can I evaluate my talk, if the audience does not give me any clue?

@ErelSegal-Halevi The lack of answer doesn't indicate that no one is listening.  I understand that there's a popular school of thought today that says presentations should be "interactive" so that students can "be active participants in their learning" but this is absolutely not what I want from a presentation.  If I'm not answering your questions, it isn't because I'm not listening.  It's because I'm waiting for you to get back to presenting information.

If possible, prefer a face to face presentation. Look also into RefPerSys

Here is what I found works best in Zoom

Use the chat. People have a much easier time writing questions in the chat, especially if you do as well. So if you write “2+2= ?” in the chat you’re far likelier to get answers than by asking out loud.

Zoom has polls that are great for yes/no/categorical questions. A dolphin is a reptile/fish/mammal in a poll will get much more engagement than asking it out loud.

Write questions on the presentation itself. Similar to (2) but for more nuanced stuff.

It requires you to adapt your style but I think will offer better results.

In a live department seminar there are often people who are not paying strict attention. Sometimes that's because the talk is not well suited to the audience, but even good talks don't grab everyone.
The kinds of questions you know how to ask in the live presentations you're used to  may not work over zoom. In a roomful of people some may be embarrassed by total silence, and speak up. Then dozers may be jolted awake. In a virtual room audience members don't notice each other. It's easier for them to be distracted, and harder for you to monitor.
If you have one or two colleagues with whom you talk about your work you might practice your talk with them, or ask them to be sure to respond when they attend virtually.

This is, I think, a symptom of the fact that the pandemic has ruined a lot of things and trying to use older methods when teaching remotely are almost certain to fail. But like most things, students need to be taught how to learn. If you want an interactive classroom you have to work to achieve it, not assume that it will occur and certainly not to assume it will be like face-to-face instruction.
Let me tell a story, which may be apocryphal.
There once was a law professor who walked into class the first day and gave out a reading assignment. He asked if there were any questions. There being none, he left immediately.
The next day he returned, gave out a reading assignment, asked if there were any questions. No questions, so he left.
The third day, exactly the same. Readings. Questions? None! Exit.
By the fourth day the student picked up that they had to ask questions if they wanted anything from the professor.
Part of this story depends on the fact that the class was in law, and lawyers never get anywhere if they don't ask questions. But other students are also in the same situation.
That is, of course, a brutal (and not recommended) way to approach it, no matter how effective. But, you need to do something to guarantee that questions will be asked. What you do depends on a lot of things, but you need to find a way. Award points? Require questions for attendance? Something. Don't assume students know what is expected of them, or how they can best learn.
One way to approach it is to ask individuals questions when the silences occur. Do this frequently enough and the silences won't occur any more, since many students would rather ask a question than be required to answer one.
Something. Up to you.


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What are some good ways to showcase one's research capabilities while applying for graduate programmes
I would like know to what are some good/effective ways to showcase one's research capabilities, other than paper publications, when the person is out of academia and applying for schools in USA for MS(preferably MS by Thesis)
Specific to my case, I graduated 3 years ago and now I am out of academia. I do not have any paper publications. So I am looking for other good ways to show the admissions committee that I am capable of doing research. But how?
For eg., a personal website where I can list my technical essays (which are not worthy as to be published as a paper) mentioning methods I tried to improve an idea, or where I failed etc. List of research projects I did independently.
Basically I want to know how can I make myself a potential candidate for the MS by thesis programme(other than paper publications) being outside an academia and working independently.

I think you have answered your own question.

I was hoping if there are any other ways ;-)

If you are applying for graduate school, you need to show that you can do good research. More than the actual field of research, it's more important to show the ability to do good research. That being said, of course, doing research in the area in which you're applying shows that you are motivated and equipped to solve research problems in your field.
Here are some things you could try :

Reach out to a professor in your alma mater (someone you've worked with during your undergraduate studies) - offer to be a voluntary research student. Work with the prof part time, if you have a full time job, otherwise volunteer to be a full time unpaid researcher. This doesn't mean you get a freebie research position, the prof still wants to know you can do quality work. Remember, the prof is also investing his/her time to coach you, and answer questions you (probably will) have during your voluntary research term. This, by far, is the best way I know of that you can do research outside of university.
Get an IEEE membership, or use google scholar. Go through research papers in your field, and see if there are any interesting problems you can solve (there are millions of awesome problems yet to be solved :) You may think you're way in over your head, but that's how you learn. Once you have an interesting problem to solve, reach out to peers (senior students, or current graduate students you know) and professors (including potential professors you want to work with during your Masters) with your work. Remember, researchers are looking for talented and passionate people more than anything else - test scores and grades are just an indicator of that, but not the only indicators. So if a professor is genuinely interested in your work and convinced that you have potential, they will  be interested.
It's about passion, intensity and potential - less about content. At the risk of being repetitive, the work you do demonstrates how much potential and passion you have. Your work is not a means to an end  - don't "do research" with the aim of getting into graduate school. Graduate school should be a natural continuation of what you are already passionate about doing.

Good luck with your future and applications.

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Searching for papers from a specific conference
Is there a way to search, using Google Scholar or another tool, for all papers that appeared in a certain conference?
For example, I would like to find all papers that appeared in the recent "EC 17" conference. While I can see the papers in the conference website, I do not have access to them so I would like to see them in Google Scholar too. I tried to use the "published in" field of their "advanced search", but it did not give any meaningful results.

It is always better to search a single article to know how the citation manager in Google Scholar has extracted the information. You can then use the information to search the full proceeding.
For example, an article looks like this:

Filippas, A., & Horton, J. J. (2017, June). The Tragedy of your Upstairs Neighbors: Is the Negative Externality of Airbnb Internalized?. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (pp. 537-538). ACM.

The required answer is here. You can see the full set of articles in this link under Google Scholar.
I hope you got the required answer.

Check the web site of the conference's organizer. The larger ones usually have at least the references (most also have the full text) on line.
A quick way to find them is to search for a particular paper you know was published there, and check the search results.


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Is it usually allowed to use grant money for voluntary contributions?
Recently I watched a series of video talks that greatly helped me understand a topic I am researching. I wanted to help the author create more such videos by making a Patreon donation. This made me wonder whether such donation can be done using money from a research grant? I looked at guidelines of some local grants. They usually allow to pay for professional courses related to the research, but do not say anything about donating to free such courses. Do other funding bodies have an explicit policy about this?

I think the most you can do for the author of the videos is: acknowledge the videos in any publications that arise from your grant.

Whether this is allowed or not will vary by country and your contract with the grant funder.

Now you got me interested in those videos...

I would look first at your prof dev funds, if any.

Since we are talking about original content creators that help active research, one possibility is to reach out to the creator and find a way for him to get involved for a compensation and the possibility for new content to be created. It might be easier to actually justify the money if something is done for that.

@Mast I referred to this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap2c1dPyIVo&list=PL6763F57A61FE6FE8 that teaches algebraic topology in a way that even non-mathematicians can easily understand.

I'd argue that you're not funding them for the work they've already done, but to produce more of the lectures you found useful. So, why not enter into a conversation  with the person making the talks directly about this? Ask them if there are upcoming talks they'd like to make, and then see if you can help fund the making of those.
This would then be very similar to, for example, paying for changes to a piece of software (even if those changes are then freely released)*, and should be possible to get past finance/the funding body.
You probably can't use grant money to pay for the existing ones though.
(*I'm a developer in UK academia, and paying open source developers for the changes we need is something we've had approved before, and it's simply been billed as "software development" on the grant)

This sounds like a good practical advice, especially for funds that explicitly encourage putting the products in the public domain.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of open source things, and part of that is being a good citizen around this stuff. It's not always easy with grant money, even if the piece of software/lecture/method is pivotal to your entire project. Sometimes the best you can do is reach out to the creator, and offer something else. In academia, letters of support can be helpful, but generally we do a really poor job of supporting the open source stuff we depend on.

I have to guess on this one, but can imagine that they haven't mentioned it because they haven't thought of it. I also imagine that they would be somewhat upset to learn of it unless you make provision for it in the grant application.
The reason for my speculation is that few grantors are so rich that they don't much care how their, perhaps, limited funds are spent.
But if you use something that is explicitly funded by donations, then you may be able to make a case that you should donate. Your suggestion of Patreon's involvement suggest that you may be in this situation.
But not all "donations" are prohibited or discouraged. Putting grant funded software in public repositories and making it open source or giving generous licenses to it is often encouraged. Another possible form of donation is the funding of a person so that they can donate their time and efforts to worthy public projects that can't afford their own funding.
I would ask the grant administrator before doing this, and suspect that different people will give different answers. And if the donations are a minuscule part of the grant, it is less likely to be forbidden. But that, too, is speculation.

"Putting grant funded software in public repositories and making it open source or giving generous licenses to it is often encouraged" - Indeed, the grants I looked at explicitly mention that datasets collected using fund money should be made available freely online. But donating money is something else.

The answer to this question will vary significantly based on the laws of your country, policies of your institution, and your contract with the grant funder. Although your profile specifies that you are not in the United States, some readers may find value in an answer specific to U.S. law and practice. I recognize this won't directly apply to you.
Mea culpa aside, for U.S. federal grants under Uniform Guidance the answer is definitely "no". To be an allowable cost, the expense must:

Be necessary and reasonable for the performance of the Federal award and be allocable thereto under these principles. (2 CFR § 200.403)

Since the video content would have been available to you even without a donation, the donation is not necessary or reasonable for your grant-funded project.
For projects that are non-federal, or otherwise not under Uniform Guidance, the details will likely be found in your specific contract with the funder. Research institutions typically have sponsored projects offices with trained staff who are able to assist you with answering these kinds of questions.


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How to determine who is the PI and who the co-PI?
Suppose I submit a grant application with other investigators. The application form has one "PI" and some more "co-PI"-s.
Is it important who of us is the "PI" and who is the "co-PI"?
E.g., is being a "PI" like being a first author on a paper, which (in some disciplines) is considered more highly than being a second author?
Is there a common way to decide who gets to be the PI and who the co-PI, e.g., by alphabetic order of surnames (like the author order in some disciplines)?

The answer likely depends a lot on the field and the particular funding source.

I have no documentation for this, but in my fields a "PI" is considered to be a much more important position than a co-PI.  The PI is the person who "really" has the grant, and the co-PIs are there for support in specialized parts of the project. At least that's how I've seen it (I'm co-PI on some multi-million dollar grants that I haven't seen a penny from).

The only people competent to answer this question are the admin people at the institution attributing the grant.

There are some significant issues that may influence the selection of a PI versus a co-PI or co-I. There are grants where eligibility requirements may vary, depending on whether someone is a PI versus a co-I. For instance, some programs may have a requirement that an investigator may apply for only one grant as a PI, but could act as a co-investigator on multiple proposals.
In addition, the PI will likely have additional reporting requirements or be responsible for ensuring the coordination of reporting for the entire team.
There might also be "programmatic" reasons for selecting the PI—for instance, if the program is designed to particularly support a particular kind of institution, having someone from that kind of institution as PI could be useful.
But, in general, there are so many different programs that, in the absence of more specific information about the program, it's hard to give any kind of general guidance about how to select a PI.

At my institution, when they are calculating your research income for the purposes of probation (i.e. tenure), promotion, or just hitting your targets, they only count grants that you are PI on. co-I do get subjective credit, but they hard number at the end is determined by PI.

This is an important consideration. I asked at my university and it seems to be similar here. Problem is, it may cause disputes between the investigators, as each one will want to be the PI...


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Is there a way to prevent the production team from messing up my paper?
After reading this post and this post, and after I also encountered a production team that made many unwanted edits in my paper (such as changing words and numbers in the text itself, removing separating lines in tables, etc.), I would like to know if there is any way to prevent this from happening in advance. I.e., after my paper is accepted and before it is sent to production, is it reasonable to contact the production team and say something like:

"Please do not edit the text of my paper. If you think there is a grammatical error that must be edited, please notify me in the author queries and I will fix it myself".
"Please do not remove the separating lines from the tables, as they convey important information".

?

Have you tried the first accepted answer to your first linked question?

Answers in comments and extended discussion have been moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment.

Generally, publishers will send you a version with the changes introduced by the copyeditors, and ask for your approval. Did they omit this step? If so, if it were me, then personally I would be very upset, enough so to complain to the editor-in-chief. Although standards differ in different disciplines, I concur with Bryan Krause's comment that this was extremely rude of them.
If it is not too late (i.e., if the paper has not yet been physically published), then I would instead recommend that you contact the journal and request that they start over. I would also request a detailed list (or annotated version of the paper) explaining every change that was introduced.
In general, you can't reasonably ask copyeditors to not edit the text of your paper. But you can certainly ask that they send you a copy of the edited paper, complete with a detailed list of changes, and that they await your corrections or approval before proceeding.

They did send me a version with the changes, but the changes were not highlighted. I had to read the paper very carefully to spot the dozens of changes that they introduced to the text, and email them (per their request) each change by line-number so that they can fix it. And, I am still not sure that I found all of them.

@ErelSegal-Halevi You can ask them to send a version with all the changes highlighted -- especially if you find a bunch of mistakes. When I was in a similar situation, I decided that I wasn't willing to do as you did.

Asking them to send the detailed list of changes seems like a reasonable solution. I will try this. Thanks

Is there a way to prevent the production team from messing up my paper?

Production teams don't want to mess up papers; the ones that do are performing poorly. Unfortunately, poor performance seemingly occurs amongst all publishers, regardless of prestige. So, you cannot prevent the production team messing up your paper.
Requesting that the production team, do not edit the text, makes the team's job impossible. Attempting to pre-empt mistakes, e.g., by instructing that they do not remove the separating lines from the tables, as they convey important information, won't help much, since you cannot pre-empt all mistakes. Moreover, such contact with the production team will suggest that you have a low opinion of them, which isn't in your favour.
Following the publisher's prescribed style may reduce errors, since the production team won't need to make as many edits.
All is not lost, since mistakes can be fixed before publication, albeit this is expensive (in terms of time). In addition, preprints or technical reports (which aren't edited by the production team), can be made public.


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How to count non-self citations of articles?
In Google Scholar, I can view the number of citations of each article, but this includes self-citations. Is there a way to view the number of non-self citations?
In this tweet from 2019, the author suggests a way to calculate this number for a specific article. But is there a way to do this automatically for all my articles?

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/55202/should-self-citations-be-excluded-when-calculating-the-h-index

On why you might not want to do this: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1020/what-is-a-fair-metric-for-assessing-the-citation-impact-of-journals-across-disci https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/41740/h-index-any-quantitative-or-other-measures-on-how-well-h-index-actually-measu

@AnonymousPhysicist The promotion committee in my university asks me to report the citation counts of my articles, both with and without self-citations. This is not the only measure by which they decide on promotion - it is just one of many tools. In any case, I have to report this number.

The Scopus tool ("h-graph") allows one to turn self-citations on or off for a given scholar if you have access (my institution provides access to the full tool after linking them with Elsevier).
https://www.scopus.com/freelookup/form/author.uri
Note that the total citation count will differ from Google Scholar, even if the profiles are aligned as to which publications count.

Great tool! But I do not see there a way to count the non-self-citations of individual papers.

I don't know. For an individual paper, maybe you can count manually.


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Are there grants that can be used to reduce teaching load?
In mathematical and other theoretical fields, there is not much need for expensive equipment, so grant money is mostly used to fund students and research assistants. But in some fields, good students and assistants are very hard to find (for example, in computer science, the salary in the industry is so high, that it is nearly impossible to beat with grant money). In such cases, apparently the most efficient way to use the money is to reduce teaching load from the principal investigators (e.g. by paying external teachers to teach the basic courses), so that they can spend more time on their research. Is there any fund that allows to use the money in such a way?

Don't turn this into a shopping question.

Make sure you agree with your department what duties the money can/will buy you out of before applying for the grant/fellowship.

My university has such grants locally, on the depau-level. Answers will differ depending on locale.

I'm sure that this varies from country to country, but I think a lot of grants (and universities) will let a researcher "buy out" of some sorts of teaching using grant funds. Fewer will let you buy out of all teaching, since that would defeat one of the main missions of a university. But, buying out of an undergraduate class might be possible.
I'd guess that long term buy outs from teaching would be very rare, only for superstars, and not applicable to doctoral advising, or maybe even advanced specialty courses.
And, in some places, doctoral advising counts against the teaching load also, but not one student per class.
Also note that it isn't just up to the grant provider. The university also has to judge that this is a worthwhile tradeoff.

Here is a policy at one university:
https://www.umass.edu/sbs/faculty/professional-resources/faculty-resources/course-reduction-policy
And here is a program that doesn't rule out course reduction necessarily:
https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=505892

Note, also, that there are other reasons a university might grant a reduced load than buyouts.

@DanielHatton In my experience this is done through "effort reporting"; personnel working on grants have to certify that some percentage of their efforts have gone to one thing or another.

@DanielHatton I see; it's ubiquitous in the US due to US federal law.

@DanielHatton, in the US, at least, most grant compliance is done by the university, through a "grants office" or similar.

Israel's funding agencies and universities, may have their own rules, of course.

Thanks, this gives a board perspective of the topic.

Indeed this depends on the country.  The answer is mostly that Europe has grants like this moreso than North America in my experience. I don't know about other continents so I will focus on what I know below:
In the USA, the way grants from the NSF often work is through providing summer salary. I haven't seen much there.
On the other hand, UK Research and Innovation grants usually pay for a certain percentage of the academic staff member's salary in order to pay for their time to execute the grant. Typically this number is somewhere around 20% for a standard grant for a permanent faculty member (so a day a week reserved for the grant). One prestigious style of UK grant is the fellowship. In the UK, fellowships will fund somewhere between 75-100% of the researcher's stipend, with some having explicit maximum requirements of time used off the grant (e.g., only x hours a week can be used on academic activities such as teaching and admin off the grant).
European Research Council Starting / Consolidator grants often fund sizeable portions of the PI's time as well. Advanced Grants less so as they expect it is harder for the PI to get out of certain obligations as a senior member of a department.

I'll add that this is also field dependent. UKRI reserach grants in my field generally only pay for 10% of a PI's salary, and departments rarely reduce teaching load irrespective of how much of your time is paid by UKRI (on project grants, the fellowships mentioned are different). So for example, URKI pays for 40% of my time (across various grants), but I have the same teaching load as when I had no grants.

It is entirely possible but (as you can imagine) such grants are not so easy to get.  Basically, it depends on the rules of the grant.
There are some “non-traditional” grants that are designed for this:  basically the amount of the grant pays for buyouts and the scholar must produce some report at the end of the grant periods.  Some think tanks contract academics in this way.
It is not that uncommon for institutes to have core members with no defined teaching duties: they can teach courses (usually graduate courses) when they want on the topic of their choices.  In  physics the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo operates this way: its core members are affiliated with the university (and thus can supervise students) but do not operate as regular faculty members (although this situation is not strictly a grant, but a perk of appointment there).
There are also exceptional circumstances: endowed chairs for instance might come with full or partial teaching buyouts.
It goes without saying that such grants or positions are highly competitive.

Would you answer the same way if the question was instead "are there grants that can be used to pay all or part of a professor's salary"?

@BryanKrause No.  There is an accounting distinction.  The grants I know that allow buyouts do not technically “cover salary”.  If it costs X (plus overhead)to hire contract lecturers so the academic gets a buyout, the university receives X+overhead.  Salary and benefits are still paid by the home institutions.   For endowed chairs or institute positions, I (regrettably) have no first hand knowledge of how this is sorted out.

Gotcha. The grants I am most familiar with (NIH grants in the US) cover salary if it's requested (the percentage can vary, as long as someone isn't paid more than 100% since they're expected to spend a proportional percentage of their work effort). I don't think they particularly care whether a professor uses those funds to "buyout" their teaching; a buyout is just an arrangement between the professor and their institution. Certainly things may be different elsewhere.

ERC grants allow to apply for funding for the PI him-/herself, and thus to buy out of teaching (of course, this requires the university to agree beforehand).


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Is there a feasible mechanism by which reviewers can indicate papers they want to review?
Currently, the process of selecting reviewers for journal papers is based on take-it-or-leave-it offers: the journal editor invites me to review a particular paper, and I can either accept or decline. Often, I get papers that are quite far from my current interests, so I either decline, or accept just in order to help the editor. On the same time, there are some newly-submitted papers (that I see in arXiv) that I will be much more interested to read and review, but I have no way to tell this to the editor, as I do not even know which journal these papers are submitted to.
In contrast, in conferences (particularly in computer science), the process is much more efficient, as the PC members can bid on papers, and usually receive papers they are interested in.
My question: is it possible to design a similar mechanism for reviewing journal papers? E.g., a central authority to which all papers will be submitted, so that researchers will be able to indicate papers they would like to review, before the editor chooses the reviewers? I know this sounds quite vague, but maybe someone has already thought of a similar idea?

In some journals I know of, the panel of referees are urged to indicate the topics they are interested in reviewing.

One very simple approach would be to contact the authors of preprints in your field and tell them you would be interested in reviewing. Then when they submit their manuscript to a journal, they can indicate you as a potential reviewer - either in the appropriate field in the submission form, or informally in their cover letter.
Of course, then the editor will have to decide whether to go with this suggestion or not: Do editors really follow suggested reviewers? But then again, this should really be a feature of any process that does what you are asking for.
And you could always read the preprint and offer suggestions to the authors quite apart from any submission to a journal. With the drawback that you have less of a lever to encourage the authors to actually make the changes you suggest.

If I suggest myself as a reviewer to the authors, doesn't it negate the principle of anonymous reviewing? Usually the authors should not know who reviews the paper - only the editor should know.

Certainly. But in many fields, authors can suggest reviewers. Whether reviewer 1 then is one of those the authors suggested is, in a blind review, in principle not known to authors.

If I find a preprint in my field that I find interesting and where I immediately think that I have something interesting to say about it (content-wise, not style/form-related), I'll often just write a quick email to the first author with my comments. Usually, they respond quickly and are very happy about the feedback (and that their papers seems to get visibility, of course). Whether they end up actually incorporating the feedback is a different question.

This is an alternate version of "review" that is typical in the Software Patterns community in (mostly) computer science. It isn't blind, and the "shepherd" (not reviewer) works with the authors over a period of weeks to improve their submission. Shepherds are usually experienced at it and don't normally earn an authorship position from their work to improve the paper, though there was discussion about that some time ago.
The program committee publishes a list of papers with full authorship visible and potential shepherds offer to work on one or more papers (with the authors). If a "bid" is accepted by the committee then shepherding begins and a paper may go through several versions between authors and shepherds, generally a minimum of three. Both shepherds and authors are fully visible to one another and a shepherd is normally given an acknowledgement.
Ultimately the shepherd makes a recommendation on whether the paper should be accepted or rejected, and rejects usually come from authors unwilling to work with the shepherd on the contents. A paper that gets no bids from potential shepherds will likely be rejected, though someone might be assigned to work with the authors in any case to improve the paper for the future. There is also the potential for a workshop at the conference for these "not ready for prime time" papers, again with the goal of improving them.
This works in this, relatively small, community, in which experienced shepherds are generally known to conference committees.  Shepherds make their availability known to the conference committee through an email campaign asking for shepherds. I don't know how it would work in a wider realm. I don't believe that in this community it has led to abuses.
Note, also, that these "pattern papers" are about the practice of things like software development and are not theoretical. Their intent is to spread the knowledge of "good practice" along with the evidence that it is, indeed, good. One of the "required" elements of a good patterns paper is the "known uses" of the practices described, so such things aren't especially "new". That is quite different from advances in scientific or other academic theory. That likely limits the applicability of such a practice.

I'm an experienced shepherd as well as an author in this community, so have seen the process from both sides.

SciPost, a transparently run non-profit diamond open-access publisher, has a Reports needed page on their website. There, everyone can see current submissions in need of refereeing, and volunteer contributing their own reports. The journals also use invited reviewers, so volunteer reports are more of a bonus than a replacement for the typical system. I tend to think it has to work this way, because otherwise you'd have to rely on people actively looking for more reviewing work. Since the journals publish referee reports (anonymous or signed, as chosen by the referee) one can see that some papers indeed receive contributed reports.

It's not really possible. As you mention you need some kind of central authority, and the only way that is going to work is if all publishers in the world unite into a single mega-publisher. Which would of course not be sustainable, because someone will inevitably complain about how the mega-publisher is a monopoly, has too much control, etc.
For individual publishers, though, this is doable. The mechanism is similar to the one for conferences that you describe: you need to volunteer as a reviewer, look at all the available manuscripts, and then apply to review. Right now the only major publisher I'm aware of that runs this kind of program is MDPI. If you're not already aware, I should warn that MDPI is highly controversial to the point that I will not review for MDPI on a personal level, but your mileage might vary.
Caveat: from the other side of the table, my experience is that most volunteer reviewers are patently unqualified to review the papers they apply for. I don't know why they apply anyway. Maybe because most of them are based in countries that receive few reviewer invitations, and they're looking to contribute (see this, page 15).


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Citing full names of authors
Different journals have different standards regarding author names - some mention only the first name (i.e. "William Webb"), some mention also an initial of the middle name ("William A. Webb"), some mention only initials ("W. A. Webb"), etc.
So, when I copy BibTeX records of papers to my bibliography manager, the names are copied in different styles, and also appear in different styles in my bibliographic listing.
My question is: is this a problem? Should I go over all my bibliography, each time I write a paper, and make sure all names have the same format?

I keep full names in my bibtex files for exactly this reason.

Let me cite Donald Knuth (from this webpage):

Do you know any of these people?
[...] I try to make the indexes to my books as complete as possible, or at least to give the illusion of completeness. Therefore I have adopted a policy of listing full names of everyone who is cited. For example, the index to Volume 1 of The Art of Computer Programming says "Hoare, Charles Antony Richard" and "Jordan, Marie Ennemond Camille" instead of just "Hoare, C. A. R." and "Jordan, Camille."

I also think that a database with complete names is the way to go. The more complete the names are, the less ambiguous (consider all the different "A. Smith's", "X. Zhang's" or "H. Kim's"…).

I love the fact that you cited Harry Kim.

I like to use full first names, but I"m not sure Knuth's approach is optimal. In addition to knowing that the man's name is "Charles Antony Richard Hoare", it would be useful to know that he's called "Tony".  Notice also that Knuth uses this sort of completeness in indexes, not in bibliographies, which were the subject of the question.

No, you shouldn't change your bibtex database every time. Bibtex converts automatically from its native format "Surname, Firstname I. and Other, Author" to whatever the journal style is (for instance: F Surname, A Other), as long as you have full names in the database. Name formatting is something that people often get wrong at first when they have little experience with bibtex.
So you should aim for having full names in the database, at least for those papers that you need to cite with an unabbreviated first name. Everything would be easier if all journals used initials, but it's a tough world.
I suggest initials for theses, preprints and submissions, and only switch to full names after the article is accepted in a journal that demands them (and after being asked by a copy-editor that demands them). This is the solution that minimizes the workload on the author.

Small correction: "Everything would be easier if all journals used the same format". It doesn't really make a difference as long as everybody uses the same format. If I had to choose one, I'd choose full names, this minimises the information loss and makes disambiguation easier. I am personally confused with more than 7 authors in social networks (e.g. researchgate) because we all share the same initial and surname. Everything would be easier with URIs that work as URLs.

I see your point, but I have already spent hours in the past trying to look up the first names of the authors of a pre-internet-era journal article that had only initials in the author field...

@Trylks However, you have people who insist on only initials being used, to some extent. Therefore someone is ever A.B.C. Smith, and someone else is ever Donald E. Knuth etc.

@tohecz if it was for me, researchers would be identified with the ORCID or an equivalent alternative. Given names and surnames make for poor IDs.

If you're using BibTeX, then this should automatically be taken care of through choice of the bibliographystyle.
If you are not using BibTeX or a similar package, then you should go over your references to make sure they're consistent with the papers you've cited. However, you're under no obligation to find the full names of authors if they've published the papers with their initials instead.

The issue here is surely more that journals' bibtex export styles are highly inconsistent.  Many output the names in a similar format to what they would print.  So if you want full names and have only got initials, you're in for a few hours of tedious hunting and retyping. In other words you'd have to really want full names. If you have control over the format, pick a style with initials only, I suggest.  The journals I have published in use initials (and don't even print the paper titles or give clickable links) in the references, so having a mixture of formats isn't an issue

I would personally just leave the formats as is, because

Some people feel strongly about having their names displayed in a certain way.
It would be a huge hassle to find full names of all the authors that you cite.