text:
Does the short-term nature of post-docs and PhD assistantships create research inefficiencies?
Most of positions in academia, I am referring to PhD and postdocs which make up most of the people working in academia, are short term contracts. Why? Isn't this creating inefficiency?

Point of view of the employee (the PhD/postdoc person): You change your job every two to three years, you are always learning new things which is cool but you will probably have to move accordingly (maybe even to different countries) which makes it very hard to settle in one place and start a family. You also cannot think in buying a house or anything because you know you will not be there for long time, so you are forced to rent.
Point of view of the employer (the university/supervisor with permanent position): There is a research which usually takes longer than just three years, so you will have to hire more than one generation of PhD/postdoc and teach them more than once about the same thing, which ends up in waste of time/resources.

There is probably a reason for this short-term contracts modality...
My context: I am in the middle of my PhD in physics, in Europe. I am working on a project that started some years ago and it will span several years after I finish. A postdoc in this group was working on this before myself. I started very few months before his contract ended, so there was a period in which he was quickly trying to give me all the information about this project so I could continue. This happened when I had just arrived to a new country so I had other priorities such as looking for a place to live. So then he was gone and I took on with the project. Now I am learning almost from scratch a poorly documented work which is taking me a lot of time, and I cannot stop thinking: Wouldn't it have been more profitable to the owner of the money (institute/my supervisor) to continue the contract of this other person instead of replacing him by myself? And this will of course happen again when I finish my PhD, somebody else will come to continue with this project and will have to learn everything again.

Related: Why do departments fund PhD students instead of postdocs?

Related: Do the fixed term contracts in academia lead to a brain drain?

At my national lab, a post-doc position is de facto time limited, both on the hiring end (must have received their PhD within the past X years), and on the length. It is, by definition, a limited-term position. But, 100% of the post-docs I've hired over the years have gone on to 'permanent' positions including into tenure-track positions in academia.

"I am referring to PhD and postdocs which make up most of the people working in academia," Don't forget all the undergrad RAs and post-baccs serving as study coordinators (which has never made any sense to me)

I strongly disagree with the most recent edit which changed the title to "Does the short-term nature of post-docs and PhD assistantships create research inefficiencies?". This changes the focus of the question considerably and renders many existing answers obsolete.

@JonCuster to what other permanent positions did the other post docs go?

@KrazyGlew, no worries and thank you for some good advice. I will delete my comments now as they are no longer relevant.

This is country specific. I am employed at CEA since almost 1985. Got my PhD in 1990. Went to INRIA in 2003-2004. And your question does not define what is research

In most European countries, the academic system used to work practically like this a few decades ago: in most domains, a person who had successfully passed their PhD was almost sure to find a permanent university position, if they want to have one.
To simplify a bit, the change is due to two main evolutions which started around the 80s:

The progressive domination of the capitalist economic model (primarily imported from the US, adopted by the EU) and its extension to every aspect of the economy of a country. This has deeply modified the culture of academia (and virtually any other domain), in particular by introducing concepts such as competition, return on investment, Key Performance Indicators, etc. Teaching and research started to be seen not only as a public good but also as an investment for which government, students, companies should get value for their money. In research, this lead to the current project-based system: researchers compete to get funding from government-funded institutions. Since projects are funded for a limited number of years, a large part of the research is done by contractual workers. Institutions have no say in this since their recurring funding is limited and mostly pre-allocated. It's worth noting that the position called "postdoc" virtually didn't exist in some countries 30 years ago, and it was still rare 20 years ago.
The massive increase in people reaching university level, followed by the massive increase of people reaching PhD level. Giving a permanent academic position to all these people (or even to only 10% of them), would require drastically higher research budgets. Needless to say, most governments/societies don't consider research a priority worth investing so much in it.

These two points work well together: the consensus is that a competitive research system takes care of eliminating the least productive people, thus solving the problem of having too many qualified people in academia.
Of course, this actually works if the system can reliably evaluate research, thanks to various KPIs, rankings and bibliographic measures. It's an open question whether this assumption is true or not, in my opinion. But even if this system doesn't necessarily produce the best results, it's the one we have.

I will point that postdoc positions (in physics at least) go back at least 100 years.  As an example Niels Bohr was a postdoc in Rutherford’s lab in the 1910s.  The position had different names then but they were basically short term research positions which typically preceded permanent positions.  My thesis director had a postdoc position 60 years ago, and in my times as graduate student (more than 20 years ago) there were plenty of postdocs.

The reality is that we now overeducate large segments of the population for the job they will have, resulting in a massive increase in the number of PhDs.  A research-enabled academic position is a really good gig so one cannot blame students for wanting to remain on the gravy train.

@ZeroTheHero I have worked with several physist from the previous generations, and they unanimously said that postdoc positions, especially multiply postdoc was rare. Also many times those were not like nowadays: one had a position somewhere and if got a fellowship or as visiting opportunity, then choose to go there.

Indeed one of the problem of the overproduction of PhDs. The basic idea is step one: more doctors, step three: profit, and very popular among policy makers without much elaboration on details.

@Greg agreed there is massive oversupply of PhDs for the number of postdoc positions available, although I'm not sure this means such positions are "rare" (even if they are rare compared to the number of possible applicants).

@Greg - I believe the post-doc situation is field and country dependent. When I got my PhD in OR in 1978 in the US, a post-doc was nearly unheard of inthe field. Likewise, it was virtually unheard of for CS as well. On the other hand, it was already quite common, bordering on universal for chemistry and physics PhDs to post-doc before being offered a faculty position at a research university.

Two postdocs has long been the norm in biology as well - at least long enough for it to be the norm when my father postdoc'ed after his PhD (he is now a retired emeritus professor). And certainly in biology, prior to the current funding system, the vast majority of academics simply didn't do much research. Grants still existed, but it wasn't expected that most people had a grant most of the time. In general your employer might pay for a technician and you'd pootle about the lab occasionally between teaching classes. i.e. Permanent research positions were uncommon even then.

@ZeroTheHero (talking about the situation 30+ years ago, not 10 years ago, yes I am that old) In Physics, it was very rare that someone got multiple post-doc positions one after another. It may happened that someone got a long postdoc (3-5 years), kind of “till you find a permanent job” situation. It also happened that someone having a job in Easter Europe or Asia visiting prestigious labs more than one times as visiting professor or post doc. But hopping from one to another 1-2 years postdocs were not the norm.

I don't understand why this answer has so many upvotes. It does not address the question in the title at all. Granted, the body also has the question "Why?" but the question about "if" is in the title and is the body.

I’ve deleted a discussion that contained comments not in line with our Code of Conduct. Anyone wanting to discuss the rights or wrongs of this answer, please keep a civil tone. Further comments violating the CoC will be deleted without notice.

A PhD position is naturally time-limited because it should end when the candidate obtains their PhD.  Your question implies, but does not state explicitly, that you are referring to research rather than teaching or other (admin, technical) positions.  Therefore, in the rest of this answer, I will focus on post-docs.

Wouldn't it have been more profitable to the owner of the money (institute/my supervisor) to continue the contract of this other person instead of replacing him by myself?

It would, and it happens.  I've met people who had been effectively¹ a post-doc for decades, chaining dozens of temporary research positions, sometimes with gaps involving short periods of unemployment — always within the same research group.  I've seen a researcher in the USA retire after working with the same supervisor for 40 years, always on temporary contracts.  In some countries, laws put limits on how long people can be on temporary positions.  Examples include the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz in Germany or comparable rules in The Netherlands or Sweden.  Among the aims of such laws is to prevent "career postdocs", with the idea that after so many years on temporary positions, the employer must offer a permanent position.  The effect is rather that the postdocs leave and are replaced by new ones, leading to the situation you describe.
This raises the question: why do the employers offer chained temporary positions (where regulations allow) rather than a permanent position?  Most employers will only be willing (or able) to offer a permanent position if they have a permanent source of money.  Much research funding is project-based, so the employer usually doesn't have a permanent source of money.  Even if the professor would want to hold on the post-doc permanently, they probably can't because they don't have a permanent pot of money.
It would be possible for a university to offer a permanent position to researchers, with the understanding that if money should dry up, they can still be made redundant, just like what would happen in business or industry.  This approach is rare, but it exists (I seem to recall it exists at the University of Bristol, for example; and at another British university we organised post-docs trying to convince the university to do the same).  In countries with strong labour laws, it would mandate the university to try to find a new suitable position for a postdoc when their contract approaches the end, although they may anyway have to do that (in EU and UK) for researchers chaining temporary positions long enough.  If the professor keeps finding new sources of money, or the work in other research groups at the same department is similar enough, it can actually work.  This approach is rare, probably because making people redundant is much more work than simply letting their contract expire, but I think that at least for large departments where there are many postdocs staying longer than 5–10 years, it certainly could be explored.

¹I use the term post-doc here loosely to mean any time-limited research position that requires a PhD.

It is already the case in the EU or UK that if you are on a series of short-term contracts with a single employer for too long then they have to treat you as a permanent employee: this merely means they have to go through a dismissal procedure when the grants dry up, so doesn't give that much peace of mind. (The UK govt site admits to this but of course doesn't cite the EU directive underpinning this.)

@LouKnee Thanks for pointing that out, I had forgotten that.  Edited to point this out.

I would not say that PhD position is naturally limited. If I consider myself, right now I have set up a lab in my group to perform certain specific types of measurements that I know will be required for some time even after I finish my PhD, and right now I am the only person that knows how to operate all this. I know that after I finish and I go to somewhere else, whoever comes in my place (be it a new PhD or a postdoc) will spend at least 1 year learning. Considering a contract of 2-3 years, we have 10-30 % of wasted time.

@user171780 The goal of the phD is learning: that 10-30% is the main point of the phD, not wasted time!

The British situation you mention is partly due to employment law. An open ended contract with a relevant factor effectively means you're at notice of redundancy fairly far into the future (I've just started a new 3-year position in a new group, continuous service for pension/mortgage etc. purposes).  Once someone has been in place for a certain amount of time with new or extended contracts, it's basically inevitable.  And looking internally first when filling new positions is also the norm (my PhD was in Bristol and I still live there though I work in Cardiff)

After all, if you lose someone and have to replace them, both recruitment and getting the new person up to speed are big overheads. Postdocs can often provide a bit of assistance (training etc.) to former groups if they're still around, and this massively softens the blow of losing an expert

@user171780 - The funder that is paying for your PhD is pay for someone to be educated, not for some research to be conducted. They want to pay the minimum neccessry for this. Once you have reached a point where you can pass a PhD exam, you are finished and the funder doesn't want to pay any more. Any research that happens as part of this process is of secondary interest. This is not why supervisors take on students - they take on students to get research done, but its the funders that decide things, not supervisors.

From the perspective of someone who spent 18 years on 1-5 year contracts before getting a permanent teaching position: the problem was that the number of positions used to be fixed (partly for administrative, partly for financial reasons) - implying that a permanent position became available only when somebody retired. This was not great, but nothing else was possible at the time :-)

There are various interesting and involved aspects to this question. I'll just pick out one of them that has not yet been addressed by the other answers.
Context. My experience is in Germany where (a) the university system is almost completely tax funded and (b) the vast majority of non-applied research grants are also tax-funnded.
If the university system is tax funded, a major question is how it benefits the society overall. One benefit of PhD positions is that they can be used as a mean to educate highly qualified personnel for both the private sector and also certain non-academic positions in the public sector. The point here is that doing a PhD will often give you a different set of skills than most types of vocational training or training on the job. While this type of qualification will not be needed for the majority of jobs, it can be very useful to still have a significant number of people around who do have this type of qualification.
From this perspective, it makes sense to have considerably more PhD candidates than permanent positions in academia:
the majority of PhDs will leave academia when they have completed their PhD, which makes a significant number of highly qualified personnel available for the private sector.
From the same perspective, it also makes sense to replace, for instance, a Phd student with a new PhD student after a certain amount of time. It will, at first glance, "burn" some public money since it lowers the efficiency of the project work - but actually this is an investment in making PhD positions available as a mean of education and traininig.

(In a since-archived comment to another answer I did post a link to an ASCB blog infographic that tries to illustrate the situation quantitatively, but doesn't explain the "why" behind it.)
The claimed positive: the short-term postdocs provide a framework that lets you pick up new skills and techniques, and build your network of contacts, by working at other places before "settling down". In practice, "settling down" to a long-term career at a single institution has generally meant something like a (UK) lectureship which has a significant teaching load.
It has been a long-standing issue that there is no long-term research-only career path in UK academia, hence the chaining together of short-term (1-5 yrs, in my case) contracts and even the effective permanent status stemming from the EU Fixed-Term Work Directive
doesn't prevent redundancy at the end of a grant (though at least it adds some extra hurdles for the employer).
Recently, the notion of research software engineers as a profession and initiatives such as the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers have finally started to appear. But this just points up the continued persistence of, and dependence on, short-term contracts. So why has the situation gone on so long?
The reality: it keeps entry-level wages down (both within and then outside academia) and then on top of that provides a mechanism that allows junior staff to be abused and exploited(*): object to illegally working overlong hours? We won't continue sponsoring your visa. Considering complaining about harassment by PI? No time to write letters of recommendation for your next post.
The Wellcome Trust report What researchers think about the culture they work in covers this at some length, but there's nothing in there that doesn't go back decades. It's notable that in response the UK Government's R&D people and culture strategy has four executive bullet point actions on pulling in new people, four bullet points on getting people in from abroad(**), but not a single one on retaining existing skilled/experienced staff in the sector. (It's like they're afraid we might recognize bullying and call it out...)
* Reported rates of bullying and harassment in the research sector (i.e. not just universities) are about double those in UK general employment (R&D people and culture strategy, p.26)(***)
** hence the HPI visa scheme announced recently
*** Note I don't mean that there is any specific intent to enable bullying and exploitation, but I do believe it's an inevitable side-effect of how vested interests have shaped, and continue to push, the sector
N.B. I drafted & wrote this answer in relation to the original headline wording of this question: "Why are there so few long-term [research] positions in academia (before professorship)?"

How do post-docs keep entry-level wages down outside academia?

If pay and conditions in academia are poor, then how hard does e.g. industry have to try, to be better?

Your reference to bullying valuably brings out something that is sometimes kept under wraps as if it's just 'not done' to speak of it.

It's a neat infographic, suggest you copy it into this answer.

@daniel I don't think embedding the graphic would be useful, as it doesn't really get into explaining the causes. But it is neat. I do worry that a lot of people drift into STEM/research/academia without looking closely at the issues "hiding in plain sight" in the ASCB graphic or that Wellcome Trust report, instead getting swept along by over-enthusiastic outreach events and misleading features in New Scientist and the like.

In some sense, the answer to this question is just "because the system has evolved to be this way". Some factors in this evolution are:

In many (most?) countries, research funding is primarily organised around grants to conduct comparatively short-term projects with a defined set of objectives. This makes some sense: research is inherently unpredictable, and something that looks promising today may be a dead end in 5 or 10 years' time. In consequence, institutions cannot guarantee that they will have funding to support any line of research beyond a 2-3 year timescale.

Researchers are not fungible. Projects tend to require specialist skills and knowledge, and someone hired for Project A may not be well-suited to (or interested in) Project B. This counts against hiring someone on a permanent contract: what do you do with them if Project A loses funding or reaches a natural end?

Research directions are heavily dependent on the whims of individual members of staff, and not set centrally. If Prof. X leaves and is replaced by Prof. Y, there will often be a substantial change in research focus. Again, this counts against the institution making any long-term commitments to specialist staff.

'Long-term positions' do exist: they are the faculty positions. So perhaps the question could be reframed: Why don't professors do more research themselves, instead of hiring contract staff to do it?

Consider the supply and demand factors (in addition to other points)
From an institutional viewpoint, it is attractive for universities to "try before you buy".  If they can hire staff on a time-limited contract then it is usually possible to successfully renew them or move them into permanent positions if that is desirable.  However, if they want to get rid of a staff member in a permanent position then that is more difficult and costly.  Consequently, the time limitation in the employment contract can be seen primarily as a clause that favours the interests of the university.
Other answers have pointed out a range of factors relating to the conduct and funding of university research that make it desirable (from the university's point of view) to use time-limited contracts for postdocs and other junior academic staff.  These are all good points, but they don't really get to the root of why universities are able to successfully enforce their desires in the employment market, when this imposes serious costs/problems on employees.  My view is that this is largely a result of the supply and demand dynamics of our modern education system, where we churn out PhDs at a high rate.
Setting aside very recent events, there is an abundance of PhD graduates relative to the number of available postdoc and academic positions, so universities can impose employment conditions that are not especially desirable for postdocs and still get plenty of good applications.  (There have been some recent reports that "the great resignation" has limited this, but we'll see.)  This is just one manifestation of the general economic principle that if you increase the labour supply in an industry then (ceteris paribus) the wage/conditions for employees in that industry will fall.

If you don't make short term contracts, you will keep the next round of students from getting PhD positions. As universities don't have unlimited ressources, every person that stays in a position takes a PhD position away from somebody. And with the contract law being as it is in most of Europe, once somebody holds a position that is not limited term, you cannot fire them easily, which could result in people staying in their position for years and years, keeping another person from getting a PhD position every 3 years of it (or even faster, as long-term employees tend to get more expensive due to raises).
This is already the situation with most professor positions - unless people chose to vacate their professorial post, they stay in office until retirement. This is one of the / the main reason(s) why so few PhD holders become professors.
By making academic positions permanent, you would make it next to impossible to get a PhD or postdoc position.

Plenty of postdocs stay for years and years.  I know someone who has had 25-ish contracts in 40 years, all at the same place.  Although his case is extreme, it is by no means exceptional.

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

@Trunk I don't remember his title, but it did not include "professor", nor "postdoc".

I finished my PhD in 2002. I'm still employed at a UK university in a postdoc position 20 years later.

@Marianne013 were you chaining fixed term contracts all this time? Have you ever felt this had in any sense any disadvantage (or advantage as well) WRT if you were been in a permanent position instead? Like labor instability, hard to get a home, family issues, future uncertainty, or whatever?

There was a time when the majority of people holding a Master's degree or higher aspired to a "teaching position"---that is to say a job where teaching would be the primary source of their income while (possibly) leaving them enough time to pursue their research.
People with such qualifications do not any longer aspire to such positions unless they are at "Research Universities" (which is to say at organisations where people are evaluated and promoted based primarily on their research contributions).

One reason is that salaries for simple teaching positions (at colleges and lower) are typically quite low and in many countries there does not seem to be a policy to prioritise education via better paid teachers.

Another reason is that as a matter of policy it was decided that funding research leads to economic growth. Hence such people should be encouraged to continue their research and prove themselves as researchers capable of being "principal investigators".

Perhaps another reason is that research in many areas has come to be dominated by projects that require extensive funding and so a teacher cannot realistically continue to carry out research without being attached to a large research organisation or university.

As a combination of these (and perhaps other) factors, there is grant money that supports post-graduate research positions. It seems natural to put a cap on the amount of time in such positions so that (in principle) only the best people get funded.
In many departments, there is not much grant money and post-graduate positions are funded through teaching. However, the principle of time limitation is applied there as well, perhaps to "give a chance" to more individuals, or perhaps to have a "uniform system across the university".
In any case, this does lead to a "brain-drain" as people with adequate subject knowledge drop out of academia and no longer contribute to the dissemination and development of human knowledge. It may be pointed out that many of these "research-only" positions are extremely focussed and thus probably do not produce graduates who have adequate subject knowledge to be good teachers.
In summary, it would appear that there is an inefficiency of this system. However, it is not at the location where the OP asks the question, which is research. Instead, it is in education where the loss is the greatest.

This varies by country of origin and field. For example in nordic countries there exists the concept of a reserach engineer that nowdays technically is a Masters degree but ist not the same education nor the continuation of a  bachelor's degree. These are meant for industrial positions for things that require more long term reserach work. Nordics had similar ideas about other areas too as many university students were destined for masters degree without a bachelor on the way.

A common type of position in academia is "tenured professor", which I'd say is pretty long term. But besides that, there are many specialties like lab manager, lab technicians, statisticians, pathologists, data scientists, software developers and so on that tend to be employed indefinitely, and sometimes even accrue advancement to seniority like other government workers do. Also, the industry, and certain research institutes (moreso in the past I'd say) also have the practice of employing researchers for multiple decades, so it is certainly a workable model.
What stands out to me about many of these exceptions (except professors) is that they tend to not be in a leading role. PhD students and postdocs are usually expected to have some independent research goals, even if these happen to tie in closely with the rest of the team. When you are expected to choose your own path in life with respect to projects, it is inevitable that people's interests would change between their 20s, 30s and 40s. An older professor may also change their research interests, but at that point in their career they are not as dependent on their immediate colleagues and institutions to succeed. Whereas for a PhD student, it is very difficult to break into a field if you have no mentors who are at least tangentially familiar with it. Because of this, even if academia did offer permanent positions to younger researchers, many of them would quit and go elsewhere anyway, because as they learn more about the scientific community they'd change their minds about where and how they should fit in. Except unlike the current system where there is some expected "end" of your employment that everybody is anticipating, there would be a risk of projects being interrupted mid-way due to the researcher suddenly leaving, and resulting in a lot of disruption. This is exactly what happens in the industry with various knowledge workers who are employed "permanently" (which means they can quit or be let go any time with only 1-2 weeks warning, so it's very difficult to plan a year or more ahead).
On the other hand, the historic origins of academia are more of a special society, with its own internal rituals and traditions. At the time that academia originated, it was common for people to advance through specialized ranks within the society (for example guild members progressing through apprentice, journeyman, master craftsman). Little survives of the guilds after the technological, economic and political changes of the last couple of centuries, but academia holds on to a lot of the traditions, so I suspect that is also part of why there is a ladder of "graduations" people are expected to go through.
By the way, if you really want to stay in the same place through your PhD, postdoc and beyond, it's certainly possible. The PhD and postdoc are usually so transformative that people tend to end up with very different outlooks than when they began, and also many eminent academics feel that it's good for young people to go out, see the world and be exposed to different ideas. However, this isn't such a hard and fast rule, and you occasionally someone staying in the same city, same institution or even the same lab for a long time. If that is your goal I'm sure you could discuss it with your mentors and get some useful suggestions.
However your question is motivated by your frustration at a rushed project hand-off. I think this has very little to do with durations of employment. The same problem could occur from unexpected catastrophes (the so-called "bus factor") or people being assigned to new projects and having to abandon old ones. I think that it's important to have a culture of transparency, accountability and documentation. When you work on any project, especially a long term one, you should thoroughly document the work in a way that would be accessible to others. That way you will never be "caught with your pants down" if suddenly someone else needs to work on it (either with you or instead of you). You should also take initiative to speak with your colleagues and evangelize your work, so that they have a good idea of what you're getting up to and why, even without reading your notebooks. These things are generally part of good research hygiene anyway: Meticulous documentation and advocacy for your ideas have often been the cornerstone of major developments in science. Sounds like the person from whom you inherited the work has been a little lax in this regard. Unfortunately it's not uncommon in the field - but hey, maybe when you're finished, you can try to do better.

TLDR: PhD studentships and post docs aren't best thought of as short-term jobs, though getting the dissertation done is the job of the PhD candidate and publishing articles is the job of the Post Doc. And the university and the supervisor aren't best thought of as employers. The university is a school and the supervisor is a teacher, and the PhD program is a specialized professional training program with a single aim - making new researchers.
I earned my PhD in the US, so our experiences might be a bit different, but I'm pretty sure the aim and structure of the academy is pretty similar across the globe. If you were my student, I'd say that this question demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the role of PhD's and Post Docs in the academy and the relation in which they stand to the university and their advisors.
PhD programs are professional schools in which fledgling scholars undertake a course of study, which includes coursework, practicums, traineeships, direct supervision, formal and informal mentorship, participation in the peer-review process, academic enculturation, and individual research. PhD candidates are first and foremost students who are at the university in order to learn how to be academic researchers that understand the norms of the academy and their discipline, who have developed the skills needed to conduct research in their field, and who have the capacity to make novel contributions to the sum of human knowledge. At the end of this process, a new, matured researcher who no longer requires supervision and who can now, in turn, supervise new graduate students will have been produced. This new researcher serves to replace (and to build on the work of) existing researchers, as full-time academics at new institutions, as existing researchers resign, retire, or pass away. The PhD is a professional certification, like an M.D. or J.D., that signifies that the individual has met the basic criteria for performing the job of an academic.
Although PhD's typically receive payment for their participation in such programs, research assistantships and teaching assistantships are typically framed as traineeships for the PhD candidate to learn how to teach and conduct research - the basic jobs of the university-based researcher. The relationship in which the PhD stands to the university and the advisor is not best conceived of as an employee-employers relationship. Naturally, there are serious concerns about the treatment of graduate student labor in the academy - as previous commenters have noted.
If the university, the PI on a grant, or the director of a lab were seeking an employee, in the form of a lab assistant or project manager, it doesn't make sense to bring in a PhD candidate (although it happens), since the cost of educating a PhD is significant and the skills of a PhD are not needed for basic lab research. The B.A. or B.S. is a certification that the individual understands the basic research process or has a breadth of knowledge in a discipline that would allow them perform basic, repetitive research tasks. They are typically not researchers - they merely participate in the research process (a lit review is not "doing research"). The M.A. or M.S. certifies that the individual has specialized knowledge or skills that would allow the individual to perform highly specialized tasks in a particular research domain. Neither are research degrees and are not generally expected to conduct novel research on their own (though the UK has the M.S. by research which is a degree that might be thought of as a "PhD prep" program).
It makes even less sense to bring in a post doc for this purpose. Post doc positions are typically opportunities for the recent PhD to build a network of colleagues and references and to make progress on their original research, lending credibility to their candidacy as an academic, prior to scoring a full-time, tenure track academic position.
I will acknowledge that the norms are different in different disciplines. I'm a philosopher, and we are primarily a single-author discipline. So, my PhD involved no lab work under the direction of a supervisor. I didn't work on my supervisor's project. I set my agenda and picked my projects. PhDs in the sciences often work in grant-funded labs. Their research assistantships (i.e., research traineeships) often involves labor in the service of the PI and grant topic, in return for the use of a lab and supervision by the director of the lab. Work in the lab and on the grant generally contributes to the supervisor's research agenda, but the novel findings belong to the PhD candidate.

The distinction you draw between "work done as an RA" and "one's own original research" holds up in a some fields (esp. in the humanities), but it's non-existent in much of the sciences: your entire PhD/postdoc may be one subpart of a larger project or grant.

Point being -  you typically don't just work on the advisor's project in order to progress solely the advisor's research agenda. Once a lab is established and the advisor had matured, they're primarily overseeing and supporting the success of original research by PhD students. Ideally, your project would be included in the current or next grant. The proposed work is the research program you plan to pursue for the dissertation. While often collaborative, PhD work speaks to the individual's ability to come up with new projects or questions, and make progress on them (one's own original research)

Wouldn't it have been more profitable to ... continue the contract of this other person instead of replacing him by myself?

At profitable corporations in free markets, it is very common to replace employees and retrain them.  The observational evidence suggests retaining employees costs more than replacing them.  I see no reason why academia would be different.
Contracts are finite because money is finite.
Keep in mind that in many places the norm is that employment can end at any time for any reason.  A one year contract is a luxury by comparison.

"The observational evidence suggests retaining employees costs more than replacing them" - citation needed?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0149206311424943 seems to indicate the opposite, and that the effect size from turnover varies depending on, e.g., the type of industry and employees. Certainly one would expect significant training costs in knowledge-intensive jobs.

"Contracts are finite because money is finite." This is not a good point because the number of PhDs and postdocs does not vary too much, they just go from one position to another (or keep renewing temporary contracts for a long time). I can imagine that if Intel replaces all the people who works in the design of their chips every 2-3 years the cost of an i7 processor would be much higher just because of the extra training required.

@user171780 Setting aside PhD students for a second, which I think it makes no sense to think about in this context because they are students, in my experience in the US (which may differ from Europe) it is not possible to continually renew a post doc position, as these are also training positions. Funders will not fund post doc positions past some time limit. There are other semi-permanent research positions, though, like the one I have, where my contract is renewed annually, but there is no need for me to leave every 2-3 years.

@BryanKrause A citation is not needed for an employer behavior that is frequently in the news: https://news.google.com/search?q=employee%20turnover&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

@user171780 Actually, 10-15 years ago Intel was one of the most notorious companies for routinely terminating employees and hiring replacements.  They used stack ranking.  https://www.perdoo.com/resources/stack-ranking/

@AnonymousPhysicist: Those sources do not paint employee turnover as a positive thing, in particular to the companies. Sure, it happens, but that doesn’t mean it’s desired or economic.

@Wrzlprmft If you claim employee turnover is not desired or economic, then you are implying employers do not know how to prevent employee turnover, which is obviously false for large companies.

@AnonymousPhysicist: I am not implying that. Preventing employee turnover comes with a cost, which might outweigh the benefits. But that doesn’t mean that employee turnover (at least above a certain rate) is desired per se. The top find on your link is titled Employee Turnover: Early Warning Signs and contains sentences like: “employee turnover negatively affects almost every aspect of a building services contractor (BSC)”.

@Wrzlprmft "Preventing employee turnover comes with a cost, which might outweigh the benefits."  Yes, that's exactly what my answer said, except without "might."  What is your point?

@AnonymousPhysicist: Your answer suggests and only makes sense if this is about inherent costs, i.e., if you have an existing (satifying and useful) employee, it is preferable to fire them and hire somebody new instead (for some economic benefit you don’t name). This is not what most companies do; instead they are battling turnover arising from people wanting to switch jobs. By contrast, academia has plenty of people who want to stay but it doesn’t let them. And that also completely changes on the professorship level, where retention efforts are immense.


text:
Do I have any legal right to fair grading by my university? (UK)
I have recently been given a 0 for one of my online exams at university due to technical difficulties that meant I was unable to submit the exam before the end of exam time. Unfortunately this was quite an important exam and will likely have a big effect on my grade this year.
I think that although I was partly to blame, the university is also partly at fault. So currently I'm trying to dispute the issue with them, hoping they will do something to make this a bit more fair such as not weighting the exam towards my grade or allowing me to resit but they don't seem too keen to do much right now.
So if it comes down to it, given that the university was partly responsible for the fault that happened, would I be able to take legal action to get my university to do something to make this more fair?

The problem with this question is that "fair" and "unfair" are such vague concepts. There are of course laws that prevent unfair discrimination, such as because your race. In this case it also refers to the fact that you personally feel it's unfair for you to lose marks because of your technical issues.

The partly/partly thing is what needs to be resolved. An extreme case would be someone with sights on their smartphone stepping on a busy road being hit by a speeding car. Much would depend on how much the car was speeding to resolve responsibility. So, much depends on the details.

The procedure for complaints and appeals against  the decisions of UK Universities is managed by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (known as the OIA).
They will only consider your case when you have completed any formal internal processes of the institution and the institution is required to issue you with a "completion of process" letter confirming your complaint or appeal is at an end.
To make a formal complaint or appeal within your institution you will certainly be able to get advice, help, support and representation from the Students Union and their respective Education or Welfare officer. It is highly likely that there are also University staff who can assist students with this process, perhaps called Senior Tutors, or some such title.
Before going to the formal process you should also see if an informal resolution can be made, as is often the case when it is a simple error or system fault. You might need to contact the departmental Director of Studies, Programme Director or Head of Department. You are also likely to have your own "student reps" within your class or programme that also can raise a case for you within the department. They often raise such matters of quality within a framework of a "staff student committee". The UK Office for students would  likely expect such student representation to be present within a UK institution.
There will  be information about this on the web page of the university and the web pages of your students union or student association.

Oh wow that is really helpful, I think this answers my question perfectly :)

It sounds like you are referring to a public university in the U.S., but it isn't particular clear from the question. Universities will generally have some formal or informal means by which one can "appeal" a grading decision (usually by raising an issue with a department chair or a dean), but have extremely broad discretion.
If internal universities remedies don't provide you relief, your odds of having a remedy legally enforceable in court are extremely low. Public universities also often have "sovereign immunity" from lawsuits of this kind.

UK tag added following clarification by the OP

No idea what the situation would be in the U.K., although I suspect that the distinction between governmentally owned institutions and non-governmentally owned institutions might still be material.

@ohwilleke All significant UK universities are a special class of organization called a scheduled charity, which means that legally they are separate entities from the government, but with the government being responsible for them not going insolvent.

@user1937198 Do Oxford and Cambridge have that character?

@ohwilleke Yes, they are explicitly listed in the Charities Act 2011 Schedule 3, Section 1: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2011/25/schedule/3/enacted

@ohwilleke The reason for the government ends up ultimately responsible for their solvency is due to few odd quirks in UK charity law. So far it doesn't appear to have been tested in practise, as the universities try to keep solvent as separate corporate entities.

Yes
But "fair" doesn't mean what you think it means.
From a legal point of view "fair" usually means that you were afforded what in the USA would be called "due process" and in most other Anglophone countries "natural justice" and/or "procedural fairness".
Whatever you call it, what it means is that your university must follow its rules and processes. If you have a right to appeal, then you have been afforded "fairness" when the university has followed the rules of that appeals process to the end.
The actual decision as to what academic grade/mark to give you is a matter within the discretion of the university. That is, it's their decision to make and so long as they followed the rules in reaching that decision, the court will not interfere.
For your particular issue, if the rules state that late submitted exams will be scored at 0; then you have been afforded "fairness" - they followed the rules that they set.
There is a lot of case law that amounts to: “We’re judges - we don’t get involved in the evaluation of academic merit or marking systems that are rightly the province of academia. All we will do is tell the institution to follow the rules it set for itself.”

@AmeenIzhac Like any other business, the incentive for fair treatment is that unfair treatment leads to bad publicity.

@DanielHatton thanks, that guide actually seems really useful, so what exactly is the Office of the Independent Adjudicator?

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Is it common for a published paper to have some small mistakes?
I submitted a paper for publication several days ago. This was a resubmission after I had responded to the critique from the reviewers for my first draft. However, while I was looking at my data again, I saw that there was a section where my data points increased between phases, but I had written that they decreased. What's more, I had qualified why it made sense for the values to decrease, according to literature, so it's possible that the data I acquired was flawed. The reviewers had not marked this, and I had missed it upon reading through everything.
Apart from this, there is a missing comma and a missing word at another spot in the paper.
What I'm wondering is, is this a common occurence? And would it harm my credibility as an author/chances of getting published?

I fixed a typo in the question title. Are you sure "the data I acquired was flawed" is a small mistake?

@scaaahu thank you! and these particular data points were not that important to the primary conclusions from my paper, they were explaining one additional parameter, and I may simply have needed more trials to get a better estimate

Still, the errors in the data are disturbing. Even if they don't impact the main conclusion.

I can tell you with absolute certainty that almost every published paper contains at least one minor mistake. At the very least, I know that every single one of my papers has at least one typo that survived several rounds of reviews and revisions, and I can always find an error or two in every paper that I read carefully.
If the error is not a substantial one, i.e. one that significantly impacts the validity of the main results, then you shouldn't worry about it too much.
If you realize that your methodology is broken, your data is wrong, your theoretical analysis has logical flaws, your conclusions contradict known results or something of the sort, then it is worth considering taking some immediate action. The ethical thing to do would be to contact the journal's editor before the paper is published and have it retracted (as painful as that may be), and resubmit it if/when you manage to fix the problem.
For fixable mistakes found after the fact, some journals publish errata - appendices to the published paper that resolve issues found post publication.
If it's just a typo (missing comma/missing word/use of antonym) then don't stress too much. If you feel like the decrease/increase typo is in a key sentence describing your results (say, the intro/abstract, or in the sentence describing the key findings), it may be worthwhile to contact the editor and ask to resubmit a correction.

I agree with @Spark's comment that minor errors are ubiquitous, and (taking the information from your comment that the errors are indeed minor), you could contact the editor and ask if could submit a corrected version immediately.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most journals follow a procedure where they will contact you before publication with proofs for you to check. These proofs typically have a few queries from the typesetter (e.g., requesting page numbers for a reference that you left out), but you can also use them as any opportunity to make small corrections. (Technically, these are supposed to be to correct errors made by the typesetters, but in my experience you can get away with making minor corrections of your own errors at this stage.)

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


text:
How should I interpret a book editor not responding to me after accepting my chapter proposal?
I had a detailed chapter proposal accepted about five weeks ago for a collection of critical essays in my field, edited by a retired professor who has been prolific in publishing while retired. In the acceptance email, the editor stated that "in the coming days," we'd all receive further information about our specific chapters. I replied to the acceptance email shortly thereafter, saying I appreciated it and was looking forward to receiving the information.
About ten days ago, having heard nothing, I sent a polite, concise follow-up email in which I requested clarification on the timeline/details of the chapter and reaffirmed my interest. No response.
A few days ago, I left him a polite, brief message on his office phone, identifying myself and providing a number of ways to reach me--hoping one might be easier than email. No response to that so far.
So all I have in hand is this initial chapter acceptance. I'm confused, a bit frustrated, and a bit worried. The CFP stated that initial chapter drafts were due in August.
My questions:

What should I do at this point? I need to plan my workload for the summer, and if I'm still a part of this project, I'd need to set aside significant time to complete it. I really want to complete it; I'm passionate about the proposal, and the book looks like it's going to be great.
Is it reasonable for me to assume that I've been booted from the project? Does it ever happen this way, where, after an initial acceptance, someone changes their mind and simply stops returning all communications?
I realize there's a possibility the editor is in fact slow, suffering a health/personal setback, or facing some other obstacle. But in this case, given my previous attempts to contact them, how should I proceed?

Some pertinent points:

The editor of the volume and the press are both well-known and (as far as I know) well-regarded, or at least ubiquitous in the field. They're not cranks or unknowns.
The acceptance email was a mass email, and me and the other accepted authors were all BCCed, so I can't contact one of them to ask if they've heard from the editor.
If I don't hear from the editor within some timeframe over the coming months, would it be reasonable to contact the volume's publisher or the editor's colleagues, asking if they know (a) whether this person is OK (not injured or worse) or (b) a way to get in touch with them?

Thanks for providing advice to a junior scholar here.

Your clock is running faster than their clock. They have a lot of people to coordinate with and a lot of editorial work, I suspect.
This isn't the only publication they are dealing with, most likely. And if everyone is sending them mail every few days it just bogs down the process even further.
It may even be a good thing that it is taking time. A predatory publisher would be after you quite quickly for payments.
Perhaps you should just relax.

How long would you wait before walking away from a project like this one, in such a case?

If I had no other options, probably forever. But you don't need to put things off while you wait.


text:
Article Screening Without Formal Refereeing
I lately received an email from the editor-in-chief of a journal to which I submitted a paper draft last week, informing me that my submission has been rejected. What surprised me is not the rejection, but the fact that that paper was rejected before being peer-reviewed, or, using his own words:

Facing a large excess-supply of good manuscripts, we have established a screening process of articles without formal refereeing to avoid long delays in editorial decisions.  As a result of this, we have taken the editorial decision not to proceed with your submission. We wish you success elsewhere.

What does this mean? How has the paper been rejected without being peer-reviewed? Was it read by a machine? What might be the reason that caused the paper to be screened out? Any answer would be very appreciated.

Look up the term “desk rejection”. This is relatively common.

I do note that you said you submitted a paper draft. To increase your odds of getting a full review, you should submit full manuscripts in as final a form as you can.

@Dawn that was a mistake, what I submitted was a properly formatted manuscript using the required template.

It is very common for staff at a journal to make an initial assessment of the submission to see if it meet the criteria for publication.  If the assessment is that it does not, the submission is not sent to peer review.  In a more marginal case the journal may ask a “senior referee” or a member of the editorial board to quickly read the manuscript and confirm or infirm the assessment of the staff; the manuscript may or may not go to refereeing after the recommendation.


text:
My scientific data was used by my colleague without my permission in a IEEE paper, is this misconduct?
I am a scientist currently working on a project where there are several other partners. My job was to work with raw data, do analysis, create attributes, and prepare AI model. My other collegue's job was with hardware where he has to use my prepared data for hardware acceleration. I found out recently that he has recently published a paper where he used my data. He even had a chapter on data quality, attributes, and data length which is similar to one of my already published papers on the same data. After publishing the paper he told me that he acknowledged me in his paper for providing the data. I don't know if I should be overwhelmed that he used my prepared data(took me almost a year) for his paper without even asking me and never used me as a co-author. Is this okay in the research community? Am I overreacting?

This is hard to tell without details, and there are cultural aspects to this. Generally, building on published results does not need permission from any of the authors. The question is rather whether the dataset itself should be considered to be published, and that depends on what you wrote in joint publications. Depending on the culture, your colleague may have assumed an implicit permission by you....or not. Whether you should have been considered to be co-author depends on whether there was any intellectual contribution by you.

While the "research community's" probably has no 100% uniform view on handling of datasets between colleagues, certainly every case that could be remotely seen as questionable warrants communication between dataset owner and user for unpublished datasets. Note that your "Copyright" tag is misleading because copyright is a legal matter, and not a matter of what is OK to the scientific community ("ethics of academia").

@DCTLib thanks for your answer. There was an intellectual contribution to it as I mentioned before. It was not any published result. I received the data from a 3rd party and process it to be usable in the next phase. The part of my data work was more than a year's job where I put my own methods and analysis for data preprocessing before it can be used by my colleague.  I agree with you that it depends on cultural differences. Not sure, if in any culture it is not required for permission to use someone's work before using it in a paper.

You wrote in your original post "...which is similar to one of my already published papers on the same data" - so there may have been the implicit assumption that the data itself is published, too. Regarding the culture: In fields in which the PIs have to bring in huge money to get anything done, datasets may be considered to primarily belong to the lab rather than the researcher working on the dataset (who in turn is paid from the money acquired for the lab). The lack of communicating with you may in such a setting be a simple mistake, especially if your PI was involved.

You write that the data was acquired from a 3rd party. Who signed what kind of agreement with the 3rd party? Did the agreement specify who was the primary academic user, and what could be done with the data?

@StephanKolassa, thank you for your comment. It was a govt. data which was signed by the university to work with. It specified the primary user which is my faculty and also mentioned it's working principle. I would be happy to explain you a little more. I, from the faculty used that raw data and had to preprocess it, analyze it, segragate it in different subsections based on requirements and finally modified the overall data to create a scientific model. My colleague used that preprocessed data and scientific model without my permission.

I want to add that often data and models/software/techniques are technically owned by the university or lab in which they are developed. So in some sense your permission was not required. And it may be (although this is field dependent) that simply processing data is not considered a contribution warranting authorship. Assuming that your prior work was cited properly (since you mention this was already published elsewhere) and you were acknowledged then I'm not convinced this was anything more than a communication breakdown.

@sErISaNo, I understood what you meant. Yes, the work belongs to the lab. Although, my supervisor apologized to me yesterday as he was the second author and told me that in the future he will check strictly if someone is using my contributed work without my permission or giving authorship. I decided to let it go afterward. I believe, not everyone has the decency or collaborative mentality.


text:
Contacting external reviewer (post-review) to discuss issues with my supervisor
A few months ago I passed my first Ph.D. review: I got interviewed by an external reviewer on things I produced during my first year. My supervisor was present during this virtual meeting. Through his remarks and comments, I felt like the external reviewer had knowledge of problems in my supervisor's group.
These problems include:

The supervisor is busy being busy and simply does not have time to care about our projects.
Bad group structure, too many PhDs for only two post-docs.
Our projects are too different.

The consequence is really simple: Google is your best friend, and your only friend. No one is able to help each other.
I can handle this, as I am quite able to sustain myself. The only problem is that without advice and help everything is slower. I am worried that it will limit the amount of work I will be able to provide during my Ph.D. I already try to speak to him but he doesn't care and I am afraid that it will affect my relationship with him.
How serious is it to contact this external reviewer to ask about a meeting in order to speak about these problems?

I would suggest not doing this if you don't already know and have some relationship with the person.
Partly this is because you have already diagnosed the problem yourself so have a handle on it. Speaking "out of school" won't be appreciated if it becomes known and the external reviewer probably can't give you advice you can't find elsewhere.
If you want to contact the person, just ask them, without a preamble, if there is any additional advice they could offer, technical and otherwise, beyond what they already have said/written. Let them be proactive if they feel the need.


text:
Can I apply to another position while only spending three months in my current position?
I got a UKRI postdoc position for two years and I currently worked only for 3 months, I want to leave this job because of the toxic lab. I found another position and I want to apply for it. Will it affect the outcome of the application? will it raise questions that I left the position early?

Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

Assuming you aren't bound by law or contract you can apply. How it is perceived that you left another position is up to those reviewing the application.
And the funding of your current award is likely not going to be transferrable to a new position, though I don't know the rules for these.
But, you may have a ready reply to any questions asked of you.
So, it is probably better to try than not if the current position is bad enough to take the trouble.


text:
How do I reply to a professor whether I accept his postdoc. offer?
I have been applying for postdoc positions recently. Yesterday I got an offer from one professor, but I didn't reply to him whether I accept it or not. The reason is that I am waiting for another professor's reply, whose university is much better. But I am not sure the second professor can give me the job. So I am worried to lose all if I refuse the first professor right now. Could you please give me some suggestions to deal with such situations?

Possible duplicate: How do I deal with postdoc acceptances that come in before my preferred institution makes its decision known?

See also: Can I delay a while signing an official postdoc offer letter

And: Decision time on a postdoc offer while applying for other positions

I think you are thinking of it backwards. You should use this offer to try to get an early decision from the other professor!
You can say that you're very interested in their position, but you also have another competing offer. You could ask them to make a decision, or give you a timeline for when a decision would be made. Then, to the professor you have the offer from, just write a polite e-mail thanking them for their offer. You can be honest and say you're waiting on a competing offer, or you can say something vague like you need a few days to consider, and give them a deadline (probably no more than 10 days) for your decision.

There are no strict rules on how and when one should respond to an informal offer (offers from academics are considered informal until you hear from HRs officially). Generally, you should treat professors as human beings and apply your best judgement. There is nothing wrong in asking how long you can consider the offer, e.g.

Thank you very much for your offer. I am currently waiting for an outcome of another application. I will be able to give you my answer on DATE. Would it be possible to hold your offer until then?

Obviously, if they agree, you should respect this date and make your decision without further delays. The situation you are facing is not unusual, and there are likely other candidates trying to make their decisions at the same time.

Here, you ask the other professor about their timeline to determine DATE.

If you were given a deadline to accept or reject the offer, you should respect it. Otherwise you can wait a short time (a few days) before replying. If it is longer than that you need to find an explanation for your delay and ask for a bit more time to consider.
Your situation isn't unique, of course. A few days delay is acceptable, but after a week your offer might be withdrawn if you don't explain.
But it is also acceptable to ask for a fairly short delay before giving a final answer. I doubt that you even need to give a reason. That could be the basis for an earlier reply.


text:
Letter of Recommendation Reminder (deadline tomorrow)
I asked my professor to write a letter of recommendation in late July, with the deadline of October 1st (which is tomorrow). He responded in the affirmative, and was quite happy to write my LOR. I sent him a reminder email a week ago, which he did not respond to. The deadline is tomorrow, and I still haven't received any notice that he uploaded his LOR.
The other professor I asked already uploaded his LOR, so I'm just waiting on this professor. At this point, unless he uploads the LOR on the deadline, I'm afraid it will be late.
How should I send him an email to prompt him to upload his LOR? I already graduated so I can't visit him in person. Is there a chance he's backing out of writing one for me?
Thanks for any advice in advance!

All you can do is send him another email, or visit him in person if possible.

Or calling them via phone.

With a deadline of tomorrow I'd say it's too late to email him. Phone him instead. Try to pick a convenient time (accounting for timezone differences). If you can't reach him, call the department office and leave a message.
If he's already committed to writing a LOR for you, it's unlikely he's backing out now. Yes, he might have underestimated the amount of work he has left or procrastinated a little too much (don't we all), but he'll be well aware that you've put your faith in him to write, and if he refuses to write one now you'll almost surely miss the deadline (and by extension fail to get admitted). It's only responsible for him to finish the letter then.


text:
Imaginative Student Has Trouble Adjusting to Workbook-based Curriculum
I am a freshman at Alfred University. I've been out of school for 6 years and am returning as a non-traditional student.
I'm having some trouble that I hope someone may have insight for me. I love and adore mathematics and am endlessly intrigued and interested. Usually, back at home, I would work on little projects, like building toys or games or web apps and would explore the mathematics of the problems I was solving and generally have a wonderful time. Now that I'm in college I'm in a structured environment where we work in groups to solve problems in a workbook, and I'm assigned specific problem sets to work on in a specific topic every night.
I am having difficulty adjusting to this format of exploration and study.
I have a very free-wheeling approach to learning and it follows a spiritual bent; as I develop as an individual I also develop my skills and soak up more knowledge. The spirit isn't exactly something that you direct to sit down and do work and I'm not sure how to bridge the two worlds. No level of understanding that I've achieved will galvanize me to the discipline necessary to complete homework every day of the week, or even to set a goal of completing homework three times a week. Although now that I'm writing that, making a small goal like that seems much more reasonable.
I know I have to shed the habit of project-based learning however it's dying a hard death. I don't really know what to do about this.
Is this enough information for someone to possibly give me advice?
Thank you,
Khari

I'm not clear which part you are asking advice on and it feels a bit broad and/or opinionated. No one really can tell you what to do. You have to decide what your goals are for school. Why are you there? If you don't have a concrete goal in mind then I think you will just continue making excuses for why you can't get your homework done. Though some kids that are described as "free spirited" tend to be ones that actually have some sort of learning disability. If you really want to be at school, but just can't concentrate/focus then you might talk to your physician about it.

Funny. Out of a math-specific context this reads quite differently, this being the post I made. Context being that I posted this in the math SE first. I'm mainly angling for advice on how to go from being a person who is used to doing projects on his own and learning that way to being a person who learns through teacher-directed activities. It's a leap for me. I've gotten that it's too bad that math is taught through a workbook and that the approach doesn't work across the board, and that it's all I can do to just plug away. Good advice however it would be nice to leave my net out to see

if anyone can relate.

It is difficult for anyone but you to tell how you can adjust best. Some things which usually works well for new students are:

Put a structure to your student life. Have a fixed schedule, when to read, do exercises etc. Stick to the schedule.

Set smaller goals for yourself. Having a goal like 'I want to learn math' is so broad that you will never feel accomplished. 'I want to learn this proof/method/etc' is better.

Attend the lectures.

Join a study group. Having others counting on you can greatly help.

You are trying to achieve something, presumably a mathematics degree. Often, it is necessary to do dull, uninteresting things to get what you want. You have to decide first whether you want the degree, and the opportunities it will bring, enough to be willing to do things you do not enjoy to get it.
If the answer is "No" drop out now without wasting any more of your time and money.
If the answer is "Yes" you need to think in terms of doing something today, doing it now, to get what you want in several years time. Each homework assignment turned in on time is a small step to your objective. Its entertainment value, or lack thereof, is irrelevant.


text:
Doing a PhD in data science / machine learning after a PhD in civil engineering
I am about to finish my Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, I would finish it by the age of 28.
(one could ask why did you pursue a PhD in a field you don't like; the answer is pretty simple; it was the only way to get out of a third-world country :D)
seeing the big-fat salaries of data scientists/machine learning engineers around the world makes me jealous sometimes and makes me super unsatisfied with the work/research and the field I am pursuing.
I am really considering getting some undergraduate courses once I finish my current Ph.D. and start applying for CS masters. I will try to apply for double grants also, don't know if my current Ph.D. could help get those grants which will make me financially comfortable pursuing research in other fields again.
Also, I want to pursue a Ph.D. in machine learning cause I see the salaries are fatter for those dudes; I don't like academia and I don't like research and I really do hate teaching but I am used to doing a lot of things I don't like.
What are your perspectives?

Normally a second PhD is a waste of time and effort. The first one should have given you experience in research. And if you hate research, why do something that is fundamentally research?

I hate doing academic research as a PhD student because I think it's a new form of slavery (that is a very personal opinion); I don't hate industrial research/ or doing research while you are well paid; and that is the case for PhDs in data science / machine learning

"Big fat salaries" are being earned by people in AI without PhDs too. The market continues to be flooded at the low to moderate talent levels and sparse at the higher. It's probably the latter you're hearing about. Best of luck to you in your endeavors.

A lot of my cosmologist friends have gone into data science. You don't need a PhD in the subject, having a numerate PhD with some programming experience is probably sufficient.

@M_1993, In the US, I've seen people with Ph.D in Electrical Engineering or Physics, and they work as programmers (software engineers) in unrelated areas such as the financial industry, etc... I guess you only need to have some strong programming skills and then network with some company or someone who is willing give you a chance to work as a programmer, then you will excel.  (As other people said,  1 Ph.D degree is great enough, you don't need to spend another 4 years to earn the second Ph.D in Computer Science.)

Fat salaries tend to create a highly competitive market, be ready for that. I admire your spirit, good luck. Hard work is one of the components of success.

I will agree with the commentators who say that one PhD is enough. I am sure you can start applying ideas from machine learning in your field (civil engineering) and perhaps after a while even move to a completely different field. PhD is essentially a qualification that demonstrates your ability to engage in abstract learning and research. You don't need two of these degrees to doubly-certify yourself. If you feel that you are lacking in certain aspects of knowledge related to machine learning or data science, find collaborators in these fields -- that's way more efficient than taking classes (and more productive in terms of research output).


text:
Could trying to prove myself after being accused of academic dishonesty cause me to get a more severe penalty if I don't do well?
I have been accused of cheating on my math final. I did not cheat. There was no "trial" and the only evidence is that (1) my hands were out of the frame, and (2) my work "looked like a machine did it." The professor gave me a zero on the final, which gave me a D in the course.
Now she is offering me the chance to let her watch as I work through (previously unseen) problems. I guess I can "prove" I didn't cheat by getting the questions right and formatting my work in the same way as I did on the test. My concern is that, even though I am innocent, I could still "fail" this exercise in her judgment. If this were to happen, is it likely that I could receive a more severe penalty than I have now? Like if I don't "pass the test" in front of the department head, will I still have a D and 0 on the final? Or will something worse happen?
More details....
Here is a timeline of the events:

I got an email from my professor saying because my hands were not in the frame (it was a remote test), I violated the testing environment and am getting a 0 on the final. Additionally, it appeared my answers were copied from a "commonly used math website" so she is failing me in the course.
I emailed her back and asked to meet. Because that is the process at my school.
I met with her, she didn't say what evidence she had against me, said she already filed the report and that I will be getting a letter from the office of student conduct.
She also said I can talk to the department head. She decided not to fail me because she found that I haven't ever cheated in her class before but the issue was with the supporting work so I had to take the 0 on the final.
I got the letter, they said they won't file any sanctions against me and that it will say on the report "For Information Only" but I can get an academic penalty. I did. Which I can appeal.
Met with the department head, again didn't really provide any evidence other than that it looked like a "machine" did my work for me.
The department head offered this opportunity to work through a set of random problems and "prove" I didn't cheat. I am trying to decide whether to accept this offer.
If I "fail" to prove I didn't cheat, I do not plan to pursue it further (not that I would have many options left in any case).

Update: I took the "test" with the department head. She is recommending that my grade not be changed :/
I appreciate everyone's comments and concerns!

Welcome to Academia SE. It appears that you are posting this question under your real name. In my experience with similar posts, there is a good chance that you will regret this soon, when it is difficult to undo. Please strongly consider either changing your username or deleting your question and re-posting it under a different name. Moreover, unless I misunderstand something, your question mostly depends on your school’s policies and therefore we cannot answer it. Please see this FAQ.

I must say, I think it is admirable to post under one's real name.  It is a legitimate question about misconduct policies, and posting it with a real name is courageous.  I don't think it is necessarily a good idea for us to encourage people to delete questions like this and repost anonymously.

@Ben I now believe I see where you are coming from. You say, if I understand correctly, that since OP denies the cheating, showing their name both indicates courage as well as their confidence in their cause. Maybe. I still think it is asking for trouble - there is a reason why accused have the right to not reveal information about themselves; it might be used against them. I am not sure if one would call it  courageous for them to talk. Were I to advise the OP, I would tell them to not use their real name to not leave a history.

Hmm, yes.  Perhaps it is "courageous" in the sense that Sir Humphrey uses the word Yes Minister (i.e., a bad idea).

OP gave a lot more detail in the comments to Ben's answer. I have edited these into the main post, and thus removed now-obsolete comments. OP: if I botched anything, feel free to make further edits to the post (but try to keep the length under control).

It is unlikely that the sanction will be increased if you protest your innocence. But you don't say whether you did actually cheat in some way. If you did, then you should probably accept it and move on.
But if you didn't then, to me, the "evidence" seems a bit circumstantial. If it were me and I was innocent, then I would protest vigorously to whoever would listen.
The "infraction" is likely in your file in case there is a repeat accusation. But, in most places, it won't follow you after graduation - and it would be improper if it did.

"It is unlikely that the sanction will be increased if you protest your innocence" - that is true, as long as the evidence is not so strong that it's clear the person in question is lying. I had a case where the student protested innocence extra hard, but our proofs were rock solid. It does not improve how the student is perceived, and everything in the future is going to be scrutinized with extra attention. Whether there is a separate penalty for insisting on a lie will depend on the local regulations.

Also, sometimes the higher these cases go in the university administration the harsher the penalties get. Practically, at some institutions it could for example be risky to move from the professor level (zero on the question or final) to the academic integrity office (failed course) to the university tribunal (they're not shy to expel students)... And these cases only escalate up the food chain if the student denies the charges. I understand this can put innocent students in a terrible dilemma but seems to be reality at some universities.

Yes, I am trying to prove that I did not cheat whatsoever. I take cheating allegations very seriously and my academics. If for whatevr reason they don't believe me because of the "evidence" which I think it is circumstantial because they can't say I cheated because my hands were not in the frame and it looked like a "machine" solved my math problems.... I will accept the D and the 0 on the final. No point in going to the dean which is the next step. I have to worry about summer classes and don't have time for a "trial".

Yes! I think it is risky going up higher in the food chain, which I don't plan on doing because 1. I don't have time and 2. it is risky even though I know I didn't cheat, I will have to move on

It should certainly be possible for you to challenge a finding of misconduct made in this way.  Indeed, the fact that the student conduct office even made a finding without first seeking your evidence or input sounds extremely dodgy to me --- it constitutes a lack of due process in the misconduct assessment, and could also constitute evidence of bias.
Now, if you decide to challenge the finding, it is almost certain that the school would need to withdraw their present finding in order to provide you with due process in the matter.  (The only exception to this is if you have been too tardy in appealing the matter and have thereby lost your chance due to delay.)  Due process generally requires that you have a chance to see the evidence against you and respond to this before a finding of misconduct is made.  Once you have given your version of events, the school would make a finding, and if they find that you have committed misconduct they could decide to impose a higher penalty than was their initial assessment.  In this event you might have some grounds for arguing that the initial penalty should stand (e.g., that imposing a higher penalty constitutes retaliation against you for insisting on due process), and you might or might not win that argument.
As others have pointed out in comments, there are a number of aspects of your post that cast suspicion on you, including the fact that you never explicitly state that you did not cheat.  (Though you do claim that cheating was impossible, which we can take as an implicit denial.)  Ultimately, any misconduct process will need to have regard to the evidence, including your own statement about your behaviour and whatever was captured on video.
Ultimately, it is difficult to predict the outcome of these two avenues of action.  If you appeal the misconduct finding you might succeed (or fail but receive a penalty no greater than the present penalty), or you might incur a larger penalty.  If you did not commit the misconduct then I recommend you appeal the finding even just for the principle of the thing, but that is just me.

I agree with the part where you say the student office omitted taking the student's evidence. However, it's not clear where OP says that this has been the case. I do not agree with the part " imposing a higher penalty constitutes retaliation against you for insisting on due process". That's not what the problem is: the student seems to evade the issue of whether they cheated. If they try to paint it as if they didn't when they actually did, yes, they deserve a harsher penalty due to the additional energy they invest in making themselves look innocent. Courts reduce sentences for confessions.

Courts also wait until after trials to render verdicts.

Indeed so. But whether or not one aims at full court-level process quality, I would consider hearing out the accused a minimum requirement. Equally, I would also punish someone found guilty at cheating more harshly if they, after being under investigation, put additional effort in obfuscating what they did.

Agreed.  However, if the student merely says, "You need to give me due process in the misconduct process ---e.g., finding after evidence" and then they proceed with this and impose a harsher penatly at the end, one could easily mount the argument that the harsher penalty constituted retaliation against the student for insisting on due process (which would of course be illegitimate).

We are in full agreement. Due process is a right, not a privilege.

@Captain Emacs  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-R8T1SuG4   :D

@IiroUllin Some people think I am a cynic, but - don't tell anyone - I am not that of a cynic... ;-) But seriously: rights are a social contract. In such a contract, the status of a right and that of a privilege is different. The latter can be lost, the first not, as long as the social contract exists. Of course, in an apocalyptic world, one better be Clint Eastwood or Kevin Costner, but I do not think this is what we are talking about now...

@Captain Emacs I agree, I just couldn't hold myself from posting that video in response to your comment! :)

You can't prove or disprove that you cheated or didn't cheat by taking another test. There are two issues: if you want to contest the cheating accusation, you have to contest the accusation in a proper manner, especially now, once it has been elevated to the college level. A separate issue is improving your grade (which may depend on the outcome of the cheating case) -- that's where you can potentially make a deal with the instructor/department. You can pursue both lines or neither, or just one them. If you didn't cheat, I will also suggest that you fight vigorously to defend yourself. If you did, I don't really have any other recommendations than don't do it again!
EDIT: with regards to your specific question,

If this were to happen, is it likely that I could receive a more
severe penalty than I have now?

The answer is: check your college regulations. It should mention something about consequences of (first time) cheating...

Appearances are strongly against you. But the proposed test is to check how you go about it when you are doing it yourself, not so much getting the answer right as such. If you do get the answer (approximately) right, that would help a lot. Then again, if you turn out to be hopeless at stuff no more difficult (or even easier) than the stuff you very strongly appear to have cheated on, you will have incriminated yourself even more.


text:
Difference between Visiting Lecturer and Lecturer?
May you please tell me what is the difference between

Visiting Lecturer

and

Lecturer

Can Visiting Lecturer be considered an affiliation or academic staff, for Ph.D holders?

Which country? Lecturer has one meaning in the US and another in the UK, for instance

"Visiting" would suggest a temporary appointment.  At my US university, "visiting" appointments are considered as "temporary" and fall between "faculty" and "staff" and have their own  category on university books.

And what about Australia?

It surely depends on the circumstances.
Perhaps in some cases a "Visiting Lecturer" is someone not normally on the staff, who comes for one term or one year and serves as a Lecturer.  After that, going back to their usual job.
Whereas a "Lecturer" is a regular member of the staff.

In Australia lecturers are paid. Honorary Adjunct Visiting and Emeritus aren’t.
In Australia a visiting lecturer is generally an unpaid position which allows access to the library. Visitors either have a substantive academic rank elsewhere or an equivalent.  Jane comes over to do a sabbatical here, Jane is appointed Visiting Senior Lecturer.
Other purposes unpaid
Honorary: retired with former rank or equivalent, they turn up for occasional seminars or coffee with their mates.
Adjunct: substantive external profession or trade, ie surgeon, coder, manager, fine artist
Emeritus: generally only professors (E) equivalent of full professors elsewhere. Like Honoraries but they’re so prolific you can’t stop them publishing full time, or they won a big gong (Nobel, field specifying monograph, etc)
These days you keep publishing or the title goes away. Often this is a way to rope in ERA publications.
Australian Ranks:
A Associate Lecturer / Tutor
B Lecturer / Tutor (course coordination)
C Senior Lecturer
D Associate Professor
E Professor


text:
Journal turnaround time of 18 months
I submitted a paper to an economics journal. They have promptly replied to let me know that the review process generally takes 12 to 18 months. I also have to give them a go-ahead confirming their policies before they can begin the review (so I could effectively withdraw at this point). Since this is my first paper, I do not want to be too picky about journal timelines. However, I also planned to apply for a PhD at the end of the year (less than 12 months), and was hoping for a better chance to be able to put a publication on my CV.
My question being: should I attempt to get published faster with a different journal, or is this timeline of 12-18 months acceptable to stick around with?

Submission times vary between journals and between disciplines, and I can't comment on economics journals. For your PhD application, you could always list the manuscript as under review, hence, all is not lost if the manuscript isn't published.

I work in a field (not economics) where a review process takes 1.5-2 years. (And it takes another year after the article has been accepted for it to actually appear).  Everyone in the field knows that. A paper is not discounted just because it is under review. Any concern about the quality of the work can be addressed by a quick reading of the paper.

Do you have another journal in mind that has a similar reputation but is substantially faster? I Would not sacrifice impact for speed.

This is a very good question to ask, because it is so very field specific. In computer science-related areas, this would be a crazy long amount of time - yet in economics I'm told that a year or more is not at all uncommon (and that most papers are rejected multiple times if you target top journals, so stories detailing 5+ years in review are not uncommon either) - but I'm not familiar enough first-hand with econ to give a confidence answer of the current norms in the field over all.

I assume that is turnaround time conditional on the paper going out to reviewers, correct?

For a sense of Econ journal turnaround times, see here. https://www.econjobrumors.com/journals.php

I advise to move to a faster journal AND to make sure the papers are absolutely as clean as you can make them in logic, writing, etc. so that they fly through reviews.


text:
If a professor accepts me as a PhD student, does their offer bypass the committee's selection?
I'm applying for Ph.D. this year. As far as I know, many universities are strong-committee, i.e. one has to pass the committee so that he/she could get a Ph.D. offer. But when I contacted one professor at Yale (which is also strong-committee), the professor guaranteed that if I apply, he will accept me. I'm wondering, can I count on this oral offer? how sure should I feel about this Ph.D. offer? Would new professors have the privilege of choosing the students they want, bypassing the committee?

I doubt that the committee can be bypassed. He probably means that "if you are accepted into the program, I'm willing to be your advisor."

I like this question, can anyone figure out a better title?

@Dawn I edited the title, what do you think? OP, I added the united-states tag, but feel free to add another country tag if you are applying elsewhere (admissions processes are different in different countries).

@astronat Yes! I think that will be much easier for future searchers to find!

can I count on this oral offer?

No. This is not an official offer from a graduate program and you should not count on anything that isn’t an official offer. It’s certainly nice and somewhat reassuring to have an informal promise of this type, but that’s all it is. Individual people are occasionally careless with their words and are known to break promises occasionally, so you should not treat this as a sure thing.

how sure should I feel about this Ph.D. offer?

Reasonably confident, but hold off on popping the champagne. You will live long enough to see various low probability events happen. The possibility that a formal PhD offer will not materialize in this situation is a low probability event, but not a zero probability event.

In the US, if a professor had the actual power to admit a student into a doctoral program it would be extremely unusual. Professors are employees, not officers, of the institution, so would need to be granted explicit power for this. It is the institution that grants degrees, not the advisor, though in some fields the advisor provides funding for students.
Likely what is intended is that if you get accepted (by the committee) he will be happy to be your advisor.
Some professors might have some informal influence over committees, but not much more than that.
It is encouraging, however, but you have to make a formal application.

Sometimes there's a different bar for "students we want to admit" and "students we can fund", where the university only really extends offers of admission to the second category, but a professor willing to pay can get students in the first category through. Still need to pass that hurdle, though, and that's nothing a professor can guarantee.

Could be the prof is fairly confident that they can persaude the rest of the comittee?

@IanSudbery, it could also be explained by arrogance, unfortunately.

@IanSudbery Confident/arrogant - often the same thing. Just because you are "confident" doesn't mean you are correct.

I think this varies across institutions.  At Michigan, my understanding was that if a professor had money to cover a student, they could pluck the applicant out of the list on their own.

I feel things could vary a lot across different programs. My intuition is that well-funded faculties (e.g., in CS/EE) may have a larger freedom than those who are mainly funded by the department/institution (e.g., math/stats in many schools). But not sure if well-fundedness can be translated to bypassing the committee.

@BrianKrause "that's nothing a professor can guarantee" What if they're the committee chair/head of school/the boss, and they can just instruct the committee to take you on as a student?

@nick012000, unlikely. Department organization doesn't really work like that in US. Doing so would indicate a breakdown.

@nick012000 It's possible in some systems the chair of a graduate program has some power like that, but not in the US systems I am familiar with. Department/program chairs are closer to peers of their fellow faculty than they are a "boss", and admissions is typically by a committee that they don't necessarily even head or stand on.


text:
Supervision/mentorship norms and options for assistant professor
Currently I am an assistant professor in a research group of a field which is not my main field. I do have a group leader of course, but I only see him for my yearly performance evaluations. I do have my own collaborators outside of my university, but within my university I am relatively isolated. I do not really like this, but I also do not know if this is normal. So my question is

is it normal to have any sort of regular meetings with your group leader as assistant professor, for example about your research line, or more high level coaching?
if not, how do you learn the skills you need to be successful in academia?

When you say you are in a group- do you mean a department? Or are you in some sort of medical context? Something else?

Yes, you you could say a department. In this case the department has been split into smaller research groups, but I think that that does not matter so much for the question.

What country is this?

Many universities I have been a part of have had a mentor/mentee program for new faculty. Often this was rather informal but encouraged by chairs. Usually the mentor was supposed to be someone other than one’s chair, although periodic meetings with the chair (maybe 3 a year) were also encouraged.
In terms of how to get mentorship more broadly, I would encourage you to look at the areas where you need mentorship or support more broadly and then identify specific people who could fill each role. Maybe the chair helps you with university politics things. Maybe your informal mentor helps you prioritize your projects.
In addition, I will encourage you to consider you could have peer support for some of your “mentorship” goals. I have a group chat online with 5 peers and we will have a daily check in and also talk about things like model specifications, the most important robustness checks, and how to respond to specific reviewer complaints.
For more information, the NCFDD group puts out a module on mentorship. You could also look at the concept of a “personal Board of Directors”.