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How can I create a sense of community in a research group?
I am beginning to develop research projects that will incorporate undergraduate researchers.  I have observed that some faculty manage to create a strong lab culture, where the students that work with them seem to get a sense of achievement from simply being part of the lab and the lab culture.  (I work in biology but I have seen this across disciplines)
Similarly, I would like to create an environment where there is a sense of community associated with my lab. What steps should I take to accomplish this?

Taking the students (assuming they are of age) out to the University Bar and being a bit less formal was always something I enjoyed in the lab where I spent my Undergrad / Masters.

@DQdlM Also check out my thread "In universities, how to team up with your colleagues?" http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1232/in-universities-how-to-team-up-with-your-colleagues

Enthusiasm: Students in a lab should get the feeling that the professor is someone who shows as much interest and puts in as much hard work in the project as themselves. The professor may have a lot of credentials and experience, but his enthusiasm level must be the same as that of his students.
Emotional management: Sometime there could be students who lose their focus on research; at others, there could be slight rifts and differences in opinion between the professor and student because of their approach to the problem. There may also be problems within the students which could be distasteful. The professor must be mindful of these, try his best to ameliorate the situation and not let things go out of hand. Without getting smarmily personal, the professor must manage his lab as though it were his second family.
Ensuring good placement: Placement is not an indicator of research, but in reality, people use this record to gauge a lab's quality. The professor must build contacts and be willing to counsel and recommend their students to good places (each according to his ability, etc).
Good Results: The most important point. If students must feel a "sense of achievement from simply being part of the lab", then the output from the lab should be sensational. This involves a lot of man-management; knowing what each student is good at and how to get the best out of each one of them. Finally, though it may sound cliched, hard work is the key to good results.

thanks for your thoughts, points 1-3 make a lot of sense but I am unclear on what you mean by "sensational" in point #3.  Do you mean that the results should be current and applied, like the kind of thing that the news would get excited about, or at the bleeding edge of the field, like something that other professionals would get excited about?  This seems like a high bar for research in any lab let alone one that is simultaneously trying to train undergrads.

Thanks @DQdlM. 'Sensational' depends on how you see it: a sensation to the media may not be so to a prof. To meet your criterion ("sense of achievement from simply being part of the lab"), it is necessary to be a well-known researcher - publishing current research, being reasonably well-cited, etc.


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What should new faculty focus on when meeting with the university public relations representative?
I am a new faculty member at a medium-sized liberal arts university that focuses on undergraduate education.  I have recently been contacted by the university public relations representative and he would like to set up a meeting to meet with me and talk about what I am doing.
I recognize that this is a good opportunity to get exposure for me and my lab so I want to make the most of it.
What should I prepare/present to the university public relations representative for this type of informal meeting.
NOTE: As background, I am brand new at the university so I have just begun developing my research and teaching here.

What you should focus on: think through what of your work might be of broader interest to the public.  Is your research interesting and on timely topics that the public cares about?  If so, be ready talk about that.  Are you innovating in teaching in a way that might be of interest to the public (maybe, teaching an unusually large class; teaching a MOOC; teaching a topic of broad interest; trying some innovative new experiment)?  If so, be ready to talk about that.
Do not plan on giving a talk.  Don't rattle on.  The PR rep will ask questions and ask for more details.  But be prepared to give a few highlights (a few sentences) on one or more areas like this, if they might be of broader interest.
If you don't have anything that might be of broad public interest, that's fine, too.  Go in to the meeting preparing to learn something from the PR rep, rather than the other way around.  Ask them to give you a brief tutorial on how to interact with the press.  If you're interested in it, ask whether they have a media relations training program.  Meet the person, and treat it as a networking opportunity to build a relationship you might use someday.
But overall: Don't overprepare.  It's not worth spending a lot of time preparing in advance for this one.  Go into the meeting, see how the PR rep can help you and how you can help your university, and move on to something else in your busy life as a professor.

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How can I prepare myself to advise students for jobs outside of academia?
The consensus on academic jobs seems to be that we are sending far too many students to graduate school to train for jobs that will not be there when they graduate.  Despite this, most of my undergraduate students have aspirations for graduate school. In part I believe that this is due to a saturation of exclusively academic role models during their time in college.
Since virtually all of my experience is in academia and I have basically succeeded in getting a tenure track position, I feel ill equipped to advise these students in making decisions about their future and showing them alternative role models.
Where can I get the experience and resources to show students that would potentially benefit from considering alternatives to an academic career that high quality alternatives exist?
(NOTE: I am in the natural sciences so answers specific to science would be great but if a cross-discipline answer exists, that would be ideal)

Excellent question! This is a crucial, and often neglected, part of advising students. And it's not only at the undergrad level, but also at the end of their grad school years…

You haven't mentioned which field you are in, but in CS the desire to go to grad school (MS/PhD) is driven by earnings and prospects in industry as well as academia. In fact more students look for industry jobs by choice after a grad degree.

Here I briefly describe two ideas regarding to what a professor can do in this situation.

Keep contact with former students: Frequently, professors establish relationship with students during classes or during an undergraduate or master's thesis. Probably, maintaining these relationships after students graduate may give you some interesting points of view regarding jobs in the industry. You can just send an email to a former student in order to ask her about her job or you can invite former students to give a talk in one of your classes.
Establish relationships with actors in the industry: If students are required to take an internship, you can contact institutions that receive students for internship and suggest those institutions candidates that you know. I suppose that if you are able to refer to them good students, you can continue the relationship with those institutions.

Another alternative would be to engage in professional activities in the industry. However, this depends on whether you are interested in working as a consultant or something similar.

In our university, we have good experiences with inviting alumni who are now in industry to give career-oriented talks. The students know that the person giving the talk was in the same study program as they are now, and I guess just this alone helps them to see possible role models in the persons giving talks. The best talks are when alumni not only report about the technical points of the project they are working on, but also give a more personal account of their development towards their current job.
These talks are organized by the alumni organisation of the study program, which certainly helps getting the contacts to potential speakers. But I can also imaging getting these contacts in other ways.

As a PhD student, I can say that it is rather daunting to listen to all those alumni because only the succesful alumni get invited. That means that it seems like the path to success is easy, whereas in reality, not everybody can succeed...

@gerrit yet it seems best to learn and get advice from those who succeeded, doesn't it?

@F'x To learn, yes it does, of course :). But it would also be interesting to hear a "what about plan B?" presentation. I don't mean from someone who ended up as a drug-addict in the gutter, but still alternative routes if one doesn't succeed to get a tenure-track position at all.

Do not define success=tenure and do not listen to the Impostor Syndrome.

@JeffE what is the Impostor Syndrome?

@DQdlM: I hadn't heard of it, either, but it has a Wikipedia article. Key quotes: "The impostor syndrome, in which [some] competent people find it impossible to believe in their own competence, can be viewed as complementary to the Dunning–Kruger effect, in which incompetent people find it impossible to believe in their own incompetence" and "It is commonly associated with academics and is widely found among graduate students."

@gerrit: The idea in this series is not to invite especially successful people, but rather those that have a quite normal job in industry. Of course, as you note, it wouldn't make much sense to invite someone with a totally failed career. Also, there are much more contacts to younger alumni, so many speakers are still at an early stage of their career.

Thanks for this answer.  I wound up accepting the other one bc it is more focussed on things I can do myself, but I like this idea and I am definitely going to talk with my chair about making it happen.

My university is only engineering, but I'll try to answer. The administration is working hard to allow graduate program internships (coops), as they are successful at the undergrad level. The other angle is that there are two flavors of master's degree: professional and research. The former is not an academic career path. Most students already have an idea where they want to go when they register, and the ratio is about 4:1.

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Are cover letters sent to referees and should you highlight the contribution of your paper in the cover letter?
How to write a cover letter to journal when submitting a manuscript?

In the letter, it is expected that I propose 5 referees. Is this the only reason to write a cover letter?
Will the cover letter be sent to the referees or only to Journal's staff?
I feel reluctant to praise my contribution in the cover letter. The article should defend it itself. Is the praising important part of the cover letter? Is it required?

FYI  Cover letter dataset

It is also polite to write a cover letter, even if nobody asks for it. And the purpose is often to ease the process of finding the referees, so helping to do so by giving insights about the paper that cannot be write in the paper is a good thing.
If you mention potential referees, I guess it will not be sent to the chosen referees. Otherwise (in my experience) it is.
You don't have to praise your results in the cover letter. Just state shortly the results (say more than the abstract, less than the introduction). If you think that there are issues related to the paper, this is also the place to state them (conflict of interest, new way of considering something - which can hurt someone's feelings -, direct negative comment on related work, etc.). If you think that, because your paper is gap-bridging, you need reviewers from several fields, you should say it as well.

Regarding the first point: If nobody asks for a cover letter and there are forms in the journal’s submission system for everything, I would expect that many editors consider cover letters filled with irrelevant or redundant information a waste of their time and thus not polite. Regarding the second point: In my field, a summary of the paper in the cover letter is uncommon (and also rather pointless, since that’s what the abstract is for).

If you are aiming for a high-impact general-interest journal, then the goal of the cover letter is to avoid editorial rejection.
When you are aiming at a broad journal that takes lots of submissions (e.g., PLOS ONE) or a field-specific journal that sends pretty much everything out for review, a bare-bones cover letter as described in some of the other answers is probably fine.
If you're aiming for something where there is strong editorial selection, however, it's a different matter.  A good indicator you are dealing with such a journal is if they make a point of inviting pre-submission inquiries (though some don't).  In this case, most papers are never sent out for review: they are rejected by an editor as "not being of sufficiently broad interest" or "not likely to have sufficient significance" or something of the sort.  In this case, the cover letter is a big part of the decision, because the cover letter is the first impression you will make on the editor, and is where you can explain your work and its significance more informally.
The form that I have seen used for cover letters of this type is approximately as follows:

Short summary of the paper and its key results
Explanation of the significance of the paper
Explanation of the community who will find the paper interesting (which should be one of the key communities served by the journal)

Transferred from this question, after clarification that "general interest" for mathematics != multidisciplinary journal.

Sometimes it could be. Sometimes one has to explain some prior publications and how they relate to the current manuscript.
Usually, the cover letter is not sent to reviewers.
Brief statement should be fine. It is not required.

This depends on the journal. In one journal i am involved with a cover letter is actually required and needs to contain a declaration that the manuscript is not under submission elsewhere and won't be sent elsewhere before the journal made a decision. And reviewers always get the cover letter.
From a reviewer perspective i think a summary of the paper contributions is not needed, as i am going to read about them anyway. If the paper is based on a conference contribution (and in my field, CS, this happens a lot) then a description of the differences is very useful, so i do not have to spend additional time reading the conference paper.

Nowadays when referees interact with the journal on-line, the cover letter (if any) will be available to them.  (Of course you send it electronically to the journal, right?)
No praising.


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Sign research contracts in a private university or create a "ghost" company
We are a research group from some private university and we offer research contract services. The problem is that when we get customers, the contract is signed by the highest authority of the university, and we appear on the contract as second players. Also they get 20% on the budget, and all intellectual property that might come from our work. I do not know whether the same situation is in public universities, but we do not like this and we are thinking about other alternatives, for instance, since we have now a lot of potential customers and contacts, to sign the contracts through a smallest possible company that we would create, so that our university would never know about this. The problem is that with this approach, we can not hire people for working on the projects in our university, so they should work out of academia, and we would never get officially recognition for this work. So it seems we have only two options, we stay in this university and accept the situation, or we leave completely and create a spin-off. I would like to know your opinion or advice about this, or what would you do in our situation.

so that our university would never know about this — So, then, you want to get fired?

No. We want to get 100% of the contract, and when we sign it, appear on the paper as the people that did all the work.

If you want to sell research contract services with 100% of the contract for you, under your name, you should leave the university and start your own company. I don't see how any other situation can be acceptable.

The situation you describe is fairly typical of research contracts—if you are employed at a university, then normally the university is the one that negotiates contracts on your behalf. This is usually for legal reasons, although it does, as you indicate, usually come at the cost of having to give the university some of the money in the contract as "overhead."
As you also indicated, however, it is possible to form a start-up company; there's nothing wrong with doing so in most countries, and such companies can engage in contract work with private firms. However, there are often restrictions on receiving government research awards unless they're partnered with universities or other approved non-profit organizations.
Some points to consider:

How much of your business leads are the result of the identification of your group with your host university?
Will you have enough outside business to support your staff through this outside research income?
It is quite likely that much of what you save in overhead payments to your university may go out to your government in the form of taxes as well as to pay for other business expenses you have.

You cannot expect to run a company while on-campus, using university resources. If this is discovered, you can almost certainly expect to be terminated for misuse of university resources (and worse, possibly public resources as well, depending on what country you're in). At a minimum, you would expect to have to have off-campus resources, and employ your contract employees separately, if you want to maintain this arrangement.

yes, I think you are right in everything you say. the "bad" thing is that we got all supercomputing resources and software licenses by ourserlves, we pay all publicatio fees with our money and conferences and the like, they only give us a not very well remunerated contract

You're trying to "have your cake and eat it, too": your university is providing you with office space, a fast internet connection, utilities, administrative support staff, and other resources. Those aren't free. As I said, if you were a private company, located off-campus, you'd have to pay for all of that yourself. So look at those charges as the expenses you'd pay to move off-campus!

Also they get 20% on the budget, and all intellectual property that
  might come from our work.

Only 20%, that is a dream rate, are you sure it is right? For research related activities from fedral agencies in the US 70% is not unheard of. See this table from Harvard. Charitable foundations often get discounted rates, while industry partners often have to pay extra. At my country university industry contracts usually carry at least a 100% overhead rate.
As for the IP, universities tend to be willing to let you give away the IP, they just want to make sure they get a cut if you try and make money on the IP. Whether or not the support the university puts in makes them a reasonable investor is a hard call. You have to make a business case to determine if you are better off going independently.

Federal research agencies can have overhead rates of over 200%! But in many places it is lower. Here our university charges roughly 60%, but a substantial portion of it is returned to the research group as "overhead" money to pay for supporting costs.


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From blog posts to research papers; successful cases?
I am subscribed to many interesting blogs. Some of them are related to my research field, while others not. Sometimes I am really impressed that some of the posts are in fact real pieces of scientific work (or sociological work, depending on the field), that although they do not follow strictly the scheme of a scientific paper, could be easily converted to a research paper. Therefore I am intrigued why these people do not convert sometime their most relevant and accessed blog post to research paper, do you know why? Besides, do you know successful cases where people have converted them to papers?

It would be worth asking the bloggers in question about a few of your favorite examples.  They may explain why they think it's not feasible or worthwhile, or your interest may prompt them to write such a paper.

As a specific an SE-relevant example, this cstheory answer by Abel Molina (originally on the now-defunct TP.SE) became this paper.

First, it totally depends how you define the term “research paper”. Some people uses a blog in such a way that (some or all) blog entries are actually akin to minimal-size “research papers”, albeit with a nonconventional publication mean and possibly nonconventional format.
Secondly, it also depends where you draw the line between “turning X into Y” and “writing X based on Y”. Obviously, many journals would object to publishing material that has already been published somewhere else, including on a personal blog. Moreover, publishing identical content in two very different media probably means that it is not fully adapted to one of the two (or both): to give only one example, you don't typically have the same language level on a blog as in an academic paper.
Finally, an example: scientific writer Philip Ball has a blog on the topic of Water in Biology, and he also regularly publishes “News & Views” articles for Nature (one example there). In both cases, he writes critical reviews the recent literature on the same topic: there is wide overlap, but he does not publish his papers by directly converting blog posts.

Ok, very nice example this one you refer to!

This not an exact answer, however PolyMath is an interesting example of a result which was obtain using social tools (not exactly blog, but related...)

This is very interesting. Similar is Kaggle, where people that won some of the prizes, later reported on papers what they did. But on both cases there was not previous blog post.

Here is an example from ecology. I think this is an excellent example of how an initial blog post/idea was developed with the help of comments from readers of the blog, and then turned into a paper. There was a follow-up discussion of the paper on the blog, also with an invited response from authors that disagreed with the conclusions in the paper (they also published a response paper).
Initial blog posts (with a very active comments section):

http://oikosjournal.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/zombie-ideas-in-ecology/
http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/zombie-ideas-about-disturbance-a-dialogue/

Paper:

Fox. 2013. The intermediate disturbance hypothesis should be abandoned. TREE.

Follow-ups:

http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/zombie-ideas-in-ecology-the-tree-paper-is-now-online/
http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/a-thumbs-up-for-the-intermediate-disturbance-hypothesis-guest-post/ (guest post from researchers taking the opposite view)

Why there are publishable blog posts that never become research papers?
Writing a research paper takes a considerable amount of time and effort. Also, publishing is a tedious process.
So, some people prefer to write research results in a more informal way, i.e., blog post, to focus on the research results rather than focusing on writing [and publishing] the results.

In CS and related fields it is not rare to start with a blog post that eventually will become a published research paper.
Bertrand Meyer, famous for Object-oriented software and the programming language Eiffel, has an article on the CACM blog titled The Waves of Publication. This article suggests starting publishing research results in a blog, then convert it to a technical report, then present it in a workshop, then in a conference and finally publish it in a journal.

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but the Daedalus Project was a long-running survey of MMO players. It had a blog that summarized recent results, which were then included in scientific papers.


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How to cite conference contribution that appears later in a Journal Supplement
People from our group attended some important conferences (Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society, etc) and sent abstracts that were accepted as posters or talks. Later, the abstract appears in a Supplement of a Journal (in this case, Biophysical Journal).
My question is, in such cases, can one cite this publication in the CV as a regular paper? Otherwise, what should be the best way to cite it?

They are not usually listed on the same list as “regular papers” in a CV. The reason for that is that they are not peer-reviewed. In the fields of physics, chemistry and biology, it is most common to list your scientific production in a CV by breaking it down into the following categories:

Peer-reviewed articles
Book chapters
Conference proceedings
Invited conference talks
Conference talks
Conference posters

I looked at examples from the Biophysical journal supplements, and the abstracts are quite short (one paragraph or two). Even though it is published in print, it is too short to be considered proceedings. Thus, I would list it as either a talk or a poster. That is was published as part of a supplement to one journal does not make it very different from any other conference.
In some countries and in some fields, it may also be typical to further break down between national and international venues (journals, conferences, etc.).

As a side note, the journal webpage has some information on how to format such citations:

Smith, R., S.E. Jones, T.J. Smith, (2006) Histone phosphorylation in DNA damage. 2006 Biophysical Society Meeting Abstracts. Biophysical Journal, Supplement, Abstract.

Unless, of course, the abstract becomes a short communication and undergoes the usual peer-review for a short communication.


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How to attend conferences without funding
I would like to attend some conferences this year, but we are running out of funding until 2015, so I need to look for other options. For instance, I organized a special session in a conference, and attained 12 speakers, so accommodation was free and also registration but not travel expenses. So my question is, if you do not have funding, which other options you know for attending conferences?
P.S. Given my position (PI of a research group), I can not ask for student travel grants, etc

This doesn't always work, and maybe I'm stating the obvious, but, when we've been low on travel funding, I've looked for conferences within driving distance. They're not always the most prestigious conferences, but they're better than staying at home.

I think under a pretty standard reading of "funding", this question has no answer except "use your own money".  If you can't get funding to attend the conference from your institution, from the conference itself, or from an outside grant, you have to pay for it yourself.  You then have new questions about how to save money, with answers along the lines J.R. suggested (find nearby conferences, ones with low reg fees, ones in a town where you know someone and can stay with them for free, etc.).

I had a friend who stayed as a Couchsurfer at conferences.  I think he also hitch-hiked or cramped in a car with 5 people.

The question Why do PhD students volunteer at conferences? should be helpful to you. In particular, my answer to that question.

If you don't have funding from your research group's resources, you obviously have to find someone else to cover the costs of your conference visits. It's not easy to achieve, but there's a number of options to pay for at least part of the costs, and if you can combine some of those, you might even be able to make this trip without stressing your own purse too much.

I'm not sure whether that applies to you, but in some fields, there's conferences where invited speakers get paid everything, including registration, accommodation, and travel. Usually you have to be well connected and famous to get such an invitation.
As you note in your question already, there may be ways to get a registration waiver and maybe even accomodation paid, for example by taking part in the conference organisation. That leaves to pay for travel, for example by the following:
It is usually much easier to get travel costs reimbursed when giving a seminar talk at another research institution than for a conference. If you can arrange an invitation to a research institution close to the conference location, they may be able to cover your travel costs. It would be difficult for intercontinental travel, but for national or continental trips it could be a good opportunity to get part of the costs paid.

The base line is to be creative, to use your academic network, and to try to cover different types of costs from different sources.

This is a very interesting point of view! I did not consider this idea, but I think this might work. Thanks for the point.

I know your question is based around the assumption that "funding cannot be found" but I write my answer as a challenge to this assumption.
Short answer: Sometimes you can go out and find funding in odd places.
Long anecdote: I was working in a research lab as an undergraduate.  We had very little funds pretty much all the time being in an undergraduate-only institution (with respect to my field of study which is chemistry).  We had some great work that we wanted to take to a fairly prestigious conference halfway across the country but we had no money to go.  Myself and a co-worker knew how much this conference would mean to our boss so we decided to go on a crusade to find money to make this happen.  We marched out of the lab with all pertinent information in hand and took it straight to the top.  We literally walked into the president's office (of the Uni) and asked the secretary if we could meet with him.  She was immediately concerned and amused at what we were trying to do.  Of course we weren't able to see him straightaway, if at all, for our shenanigans.  But she did allow us to make our case to her to see if she could help us out any.
This turned out to be a very profitable and endearing experience.  She dropped some contacts in various departments and suggested we go talk to them.  She even left us with some business cards to take with us.  We immediately contacted every single person on her list and, much to our surprise, we received some very positive responses.  I remember one office in general, "Undergraduate Enrichment", which dealt directly with the promotion and advancement of undergraduates.  They were nearing the end of the fiscal year and they had money lying around in some accounts that had not been used.  Well, long story short, they gave it to us.  All of it.  We managed to pick up a little bit here, a little bit there, through a few departments, and were able to come up with all the funds we needed.  It wasn't a cakewalk though.  My friend and I went as far as to appear before Student Government where we asked for funds and had to present our case to, for all intents and purposes, a group of dimwits who were not only apart of Greek life, but ran Student Government strictly around the idea of advancing Greek life (i.e. they didn't give two squats about anything we had to say) and it was one of the most painful and grueling 40 minutes of my life standing before them.  We managed to squeak about $500 from them which topped us off.
Summary: My friend and I dove in feet first and asked around for money.  Found the funds in some of the oddest places.  We went on the trip and were able to present our research in a prestigious conference.
Don't give up my friend.  Be proactive and think outside the box. You may walk away being quite surprised.

Wow, I'm impressed you got money out of the Greeks!  Well played.  My undergrad had a fund for undergrad research travel; it wasn't well publicized though and I actually got them to fund me for 3 conferences haha.  It was a good gig since no one else was using the money.

@cc7768 Its amazing how the concept of "It doesn't hurt to just ask" really applies in this situation.  I think that the display of passion and excitement really helped out.  (and yeah, I swore that I would never approach 'those Greeks' after that one time.  I seriously wanted to punch them all in the face.)

I do not have ideas on how to obtain funding other than personal money.  However, if using personal funds, you may have some options to decrease your overall costs.
First note that I am not a tax professional.  Attending conferences is normal for this type of business.  You should be able to deduct travel expenses to any conferences you attend.  This includes airfare, lodging, and, depending on distance, food.  Because these are expenses not reimbursed by your employer, you should be able to write them off.  Consult your tax professional.


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What to do when you have obtained very similar results with two different groups and you want to publish them both
I started a collaboration with some other research group, where the main objective was to model some data. The project was very interesting to me, since I had obtained that data. After some months I got no news from them, I wrote them and they always told me they were very busy and had no time. I understood they were not interested anymore, so that I contacted another research group for the same collaboration objective, and this time, the collaboration progressed quickly, and we reached the stage where we are writing the paper about the modeling of the results. At this same point I got news from the other group, telling me they had obtained very interesting results with their modeling technique, and regretting the previous lack of contact. It turns out they have obtained much better modeling results than the "second" group. My problem is that I do not know what to do now. One option would be to publish two papers, one with each group, that would be very similar. Other option would be to decide for one of the two groups and go ahead, forgetting the other, but that would not be ethical. Perhaps a last option would be to publish both papers, bur giving them very different focus and audience.
What would you do here?

"Other option would be to decide for one of the two groups and go ahead, forgetting the other, but that would not be ethical." Why is ditching the first group, which explicitly showed no interest before, unethical?

Is there any chance of combining the whole lot into a single paper?

'Perhaps a last option would be to publish both papers, bur giving them very different focus and audience' Yes. Don't forget to say that you used the same dataset in both.

I'm surprised you did not mention the option that I would probably do: combine all data into one paper. Based on your description it sounds as if both data support a similar hypothesis/line of enquiry. If that is the case, publish one much stronger paper using two independent sets of data. All authors would need to be included. You could check with both teams to see if they agree. Speaking of which, have you asked them what they want to do?

Well, Your two research team could do the research together again and combine all research data, then write a paper. Because one research papers must be rigorous, as you know, there would be many scholars will read it and cite it, only rigorous academic writing will not mislead them. At the same time, the paper needs to be peer reviewed by at least 3-5 professional reviewers, which could help you to improve the quality of the paper.

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List with 2018 JCR impact factors, categories and quartiles
I am looking for a PDF document or list that contains the new 2018 JCR Impact Factor for all journals, but not only showing Impact Factor, but also adding info about categories and quartile. Of course you can go to JCR website and look each time for each journal but this is very time consuming

You won't find such a list. The licence of Web of Science doesn't allow any accumulation of impact factors like in the form lists. Even Elsevier is not allowed to post a list of their journals including the impact factor. It's only allowed to put the journal impact factor on the website of the journal.

yes but you know that in some places people put these lists anyway. for instance sci-hub like sites

A quick google search gave multiple related answers, I am guessing this might be useful: https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php

Have you asked at the library of your institution? This is typically the kind of information that they get by subscription.

@TheHiary I was talking about ISI JCR, not Scimago

It might be useful to explain (briefly) what you want this information for, since that may influence the answer. For example, if you want the information for bibliometric research then Clarivate (the new name for ISI) may be able to provide the data, whereas if you want to know the impact factor for all the journals in a specific field, this can be downloaded from the InCites website. If you can provide a bit more detail, people may be able to provide more-detailed advice.

Here is a PDF uploaded to ResearchGate, which seems to be the most recent list.

this is not what I am looking for, since it does not contain information about categories and quartiles

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


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Where to find documents/information about research group policies
Due to different problems I have had in my research group (I am the PI) and in order to solve them I have decided to write down in a public document, what is our research group policy.
I considered did useless before since I considered it to contain laws that are straightforward in most of the cases, but now I realize about its importance, with the hope that previous problematic situations will not happen again.
The document will contain directives about who and how will lead research projects, what can be expected from the PI and the members, authorship and participation in papers and patents, who can add new members, how will be new collaborations established, etc.
Therefore I wonder if you know or can point where such documents from another groups can be found, I would like to read as many as possible in before I create ours.

I don't have an answer for you, but suggest that you develop it in collaboration with others, both in your lab itself, and with others leading similar labs at your institution. In some fields it might even be a good topic to explore at a professional conference via a workshop. This seems like a good thing to do, but if you have too few viewpoints it might come out wrong. Likewise, what is right in some fields, might not work in others.

I agree with your point. The document will have a part which is derived from the regulations of your University (and can not be discussed), and the other part will be discussed with other members, but here and anyway, a lot of care must be put in what is left for negotiation and what is not. For instance, would you discuss with a PhD student that it is mandatory to publish in a journal? I know cases they would say "no".

I am not even sure what it would mean to be mandatory to publish in  a journal. As opposed to what?

Is it usual for you that PhD students do not publish papers ? Is that good for a lab in your opinion ?

How does that relate to calling publishing in a journal mandatory? Mandatory for what? When?

Then I would ask you; did you publish during your PhD? And, why ?

You are asking some questions that I simply cannot see the connection between.

Partial answer:  https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Guidelines

@AnonymousPhysicist i do not see your point

You may want to check out this thread by @samuelmehr on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/samuelmehr/status/1139733291899080705
It gives an overview of typical content in what he calls a "lab handbook" (despite the different terminology, this is about the type of document you are looking for), plus a list of links to such handbooks which he reviewed to compile this overview.

this is insanely great and you gave me exactly what I was looking for, thanks a lot !


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How to efficiently get a mention of your just accepted paper in journals like Nature and Science
We have made a very important scientific breakthrough in the field of biomedicine. We have filed the patented and the scientific publication (in a journal with impact factor around 9.0) was published three weeks ago. Now we would like to make a huge impact and broadcast this as much as possible. Therefore we would like to know your opinion about how can we do this. We have already used twitter, facebook and linkedin, and contacted editors from Science and Nature so that they can mention our paper in highlights-like section, but no reply until now. We think that getting a highlight in such journals would be the best but we can not reach them and do not now how to do it efficiently. It would be great if you can share your experience here and give advice.

Also consider highlights in other journals - for example Nature Rev Genetics and Nature Methods are both very high impact and also have "highlights".

Often journals will issue press releases as will universities.

If you think this discovery was big enough for Nature or Science then why didn't you send the article to either of these journals?
You can't tell people what to be excited about and if the work is good enough then it will make its own headlines.
In the mean time, speaking to your university press officer seems like a good start and they can put something out to local newspapers. If its big enough, then it'll be picked up by bigger outlets.

+1 for university PR. However, you have to keep in mind that the quality of the PR office can vary widely between institutions.

Also journals have PR offices that will coordinate with university PR offices.

contacted editors from Science and Nature so that they can mention our paper in highlights-like section,

We got highlighted in Nature after: having a biomedical publication submitted, and accepted in, one of the specialist journals of the Nature publishing group (NPG), creating a professional media package with the media office of our university (interview, summaries, pictures about our work - using different artistic styles),  setting embargo date with the editors of the specialist journal, having media package distributed by NPG's internal system and local news agencies (the latter through the media office of our university) one week prior the embargo date, and obtaining large international media coverage upon lifting the media embargo, and becoming one of the most read articles of NPG of the month. Around two weeks after publishing our article, it was also highlighted in one paragraph in the main journal of the NPG.

Contact your institutions' PR office. Most have one, or at least someone who does press releases. They're often very receptive, as it always makes the university look good.
You can also directly contact some news portals like livescience or (gasp!) IFLS.  If you can get into one, others often pick up. They're all using each other for leads.

I'm no Biologist, but here are a few ideas:

Arrange to visit other relevant research groups/departments around the world; it's very customary for visitors to give talks presenting their own recent research.
Reciprocal: Invite relevant people to visit your lab. Of course, the visit can't be mostly about being impressed by your work...
Integrate your discovery in graduate-level courses, or develop a new one that incorporates it
If we're talking about something applicable - write the first paper about applying it.
There are all sorts of contests with prizes for research excellence - maybe your work qualifies somehow. That can also lead to more media coverage.
Speaking of media coverage, try to get mainstream media correspondents to run a story about your discovery.


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Best approach to suggest a PhD student from a external collaborator to be her/his PhD co-advisor
In several international collaborative projects I am working, it happens that in some cases I have to teach and do a thorough supervision of PhD students from the other groups. This is something that I like and I am motivated to do, but in such situations I think I might deserve to be her/his PhD co-advisor. I could ask this directly to her/his first PhD advisor, but I prefer better to ask the student first. What is in your experience the best way to suggest this to the student? Of course I would respect her/his opinion. For me the main advantage is that the hard work I am doing would be merited on my CV and for promotion/habilitation aspects. Besides, I do not think this would harm her/his PhD, but just the other way around.

I worry about the politics of it and urge a bit of caution. The relationship between the student and the formal advisor is essential to completion of the degree. The politics arises because there is the issue of the personality of the formal advisor and how s/he would interpret such a "move". I think it would be vastly different for different people. Some would take it as very helpful. Others as interference.
I think the best way is to propose it jointly to the student and the advisor and using somewhat tentative language. "I'm happy to help out there. Is there some way that we can come to a formal arrangement?"
You don't want the student to be conflicted. You don't what the advisor to be annoyed. And most of all, you don't want the student to be getting different, possibly conflicting, advice from you and the formal advisor.
However, there isn't really anything wrong with your intent. Just be sure you know the personalities and what the worst case scenario might be. Eyes open.

I could ask this directly to her/his first PhD advisor, but I prefer better to ask the student first.

That's the part that worries me. The student is irrelevant, and most of the time not experienced enough to be useful in administrative situations. Putting that idea in the mind of the student will, at best, waste time, at worst, backfire and drive a wedge between the student and the advisor. Bad idea all around.
Ask the advisor. They will be the only one that actually knows the lay of the land, the administrative/funding caveats.
More than that, anything academically related to my students is my business, going behind my back to one of my students proposing an official cross-institution/group arrangement would raise all kinds of red flags.

The student is irrelevant — Whoa whoa whoa hold up.  The student is arguably the only thing that is relevant here.

I agree with @JeffE . The student is the central point. If he does not like the idea for some reason, but I force her/him to be co-advised me because I talk with the first advisor before without consulting her/him,of course, he/she would not have any other option if the advisor says yes, but perhaps would be angry forever and just this, is not a good thing at all. In addition scientific output and quality of the collaboration would downgrade a lot.


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Software for tracking next manuscripts to submit
I manage a research group and need to track, for all manuscripts I am going to submit soon, things like funding agency I need to add for that manuscript, authors for the other, potential journals for submission, etc, etc. Currently I build an excel sheet but things are getting very complicated due to all details I need to add, and wonder whether you have the same problem and which solution did you find, if you can share it, or if you use any other software for this.

Personally, I'm finding Excel sufficient for my needs.

Excel or a relational database (eg Access) should work. Otherwise try Google Forms.

Usually I write that information in the manuscript itself.

Redmine? Kind of overkill, but it is for project management...

You could go to the stackexchange for software recommendations, and ask for project management software, since you are handling much more projects than what one individual researcher normally does.  http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/

I found this site may be useful, https://osf.io/

I've found that a carefully formatted spreadsheet (Excel or otherwise) is extremely useful and effective for managing my publication workflow.
To illustrate how I organize myself, here is a screenshot of a de-identified snapshot of my spreadsheet from late last year (there are also some removed columns, e.g., regarding internal processes):

In particular, this is organized as follows:

Each entry begins with the title, venue where it is submitted and type of publication (My type key is: J=Journal, C=Conference, W=Workshop, A=Abstract, BC=Book Chapter, TR=Tech Report, Tut = tutorial, E=Editorial, P=Patent)
I sort by date of initial submission, adding a new sheet each year. When a manuscript is rejected, revised, and resubmitted elsewhere, it gets a new entry.
The main workflow is submission, revision, final; each gets two columns, one for date and one to mark completion.  After that, I track when it appears and if I've put it where it needs to go.
For an easy "at a glance" understanding of the sheet, I color things green when complete, orange or yellow when I've got an impending action (depending on urgency), purple when I'm awaiting action from the other side, and blue for rejection.

All together, this lets me see at a glance where I stand in the publications process for a potentially large number of active manuscripts, and what I need to deal with most urgently at any given time.

I would consider looking at what project management tools there are which might meet your needs.
Trello is one free tool I am very fond of.  I do not use it for keeping track of paper submissions, however I do use it for managing course development.
Trello divides work up in to separate boards (which can be named for a specific topic or type of activity) and then each board is divided into a number of lists.  Then you can create cards which you can add a title and content to, and move between different lists.
'Lists' isn't really the best name of it, I think of them as stages.  Most of my boards are divided into 'Ideas', 'To do', 'Doing', 'Done' and 'Backburner'.  Once I complete a task, I will move it's corresponding card from 'Doing' to 'Done', for example.
Another invaluable aspect is that you can add checklists to each card, so you can break the task down into manageable chunks.  You can also collaborate with other people, set deadlines to calendars and its used in your browsers, so you can login anywhere.
One approach you could take is to have a 'Research papers' board and divide it into lists 'Ideas', 'Planning', 'Researching', 'Final draft', 'Peer-review', 'Edits' and 'Presented/published.'  Then you could create a card for an idea of a paper and move it along each list until published.
Trello shares lots of ideas and introductions in their blog.
Good luck!

Why not consider using source control through something like bitbucket? I use it for personal writing and coding projects as well as for a few small collaborations.
Features which it offers that meet your use case:

Unlimited private repositories (where each would correspond to a particular manuscript) with up to 4 collaborators per repository (Free tier).
Per repository issue list, each of which is a running dialogue that can be assigned to one or more collaborators, to which files can be attached, with task type, importance and resolution status built in. Issues can be cross-referenced. Custom filtering can be made for the issue list.
Unified issue list for all repositories, similarly searchable/usable. Good for overview of which manuscripts are at which stage and what tasks are most urgent.
Draft versions and revisions are submitted as 'source code' changes, and revisions can be submitted with comments. Diffs between drafts readily available to compare language in sections of manuscript.

Interaction with bitbucket can be through a web interface, the command line or their client application, depending on which is easier to integrate into your existing workflow.

I awarded the bounty to this answer because I think an issue tracking system or ticket tracking system is the right solution.  I picked osTicket, but there are many such packages, a fair number of which are free with no limit on the number of users (at least if you self-host).  Many of them seem to actually be too flexible.  I suspect that source control and issue tracking should actually be handled by separate systems.

Well, there might be a middle ground between spreadsheets and relational DBs. A couple years ago I signed up as a trial user for a tech startup called Fieldbook, which aimed at making data storage and manipulation in RDBs simpler and more intuitive.
Admittedly, I didn't have the time or need to play around too much so I don't know if it's good enough for your use case (for that matter you haven't really given any detail specs) but give it a go if you like (I believe they have a free trial).
The advantage here that it appears to be easily scalable and always available through online access, so no other software besides a web browser is necessary.


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Find articles that have certain keywords in supplementary material
I currently use Scopus or ISI Web of Science when looking for articles containing certain keywords in title or abstract, etc. But now I need to find articles that have certain keywords in the supplemetary material, any ideas about it?

What exactly do you mean by "supplementary material"? The more detailed is your question, the better answers you might get.

Supporting information

Depending on the journal, the supplementary material may simply not be indexed, even by services that index all of the main article text.  Supplementary material sometimes includes data files and other material that isn't reasonably possible to index anyway.


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How would you cite in your CV a "Meet Our Editorial Board Member"?
How would you cite in your CV a "Meet Our Editorial Board Member"?
For instance:
http://benthamscience.com/journals/current-bioinformatics/volume/10/issue/3/page/241/
It has DOI, therefore it must be citable, but it is of course not a research publication. So if one cites it on her CV, in which part would it go?

Why would you put that on a CV in the first place? If you are the editorial-board member to be met, you should have achievements that drastically outshine having been meetable (e.g., being an editorial board member). If not, just authoring such an article does not seem much of an academic achievement at all.

@Wrzlprmft of course being an editorial member is more impressive than being meetable, but OP may want to provide the DOI reference as a way to provide supporting evidence for the claim of being an editorial member (and subtly impress readers of his CV with a clickable link to his editorial board member bio blurb). That sounds reasonable, and in that case that would go under "Professional Service", e.g., as a bullet entry: "Editorial board member, Current Bioinformatics (2013-present). [hyperlinked DOI reference]". OTOH if (s)he authored the blurb, I agree that's not much of an achievement.

I also question the worth of putting it on a CV.  That said, if you are the one met, maybe in this sort of section: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/44809/19607 If you were the author, maybe in a section titled "Additional writings" or "Non-research publications."  Think about what else it could fit with on your CV.

as a way to provide supporting evidence for the claim of being an editorial member — Surely anyone who wants evidence will just look at the journal's web page.

Something like this, which is a minor byproduct of professional service, would be most appropriately not be listed explicitly at all.  Instead, it would be covered by listing the editorial position in the professional service section of the CV.
In this particular case, however, I would recommend not listing it at all and investing service elsewhere in something that is not a spamming scam journal.

For what it's worth, the open-access imprint of that publisher is on Beall's list; the journal the OP edits doesn't appear to come from that division. Beall has not said anything about the quality of the non-open-access part (which appears to have been reputable at some point, and perhaps some of its journals still are) as he only evaluates open-access journals. This journal has a genuine JCR impact factor, which some believe means it isn't a total scam.

@ff524 Yes, Beall specifically rules the hybrid Bentham Science imprint out of scope of his evaluation, since it offers subscriptions, but that says nothing about its quality.  I find it reasonable, however, that their massive spam and scam OA operation should strongly affect judgement of their other titles as well.


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How to proceed when you are coordinating a project among several research groups and they do not contribute to the progress of the project
I am principal investigator in some project that involves other research groups from other countries. When I was writing the proposal, I asked them if they would like to joint the project, and they agreed. I wrote everything, all paperwork, etc. Now, 6 months after the project has been officially started, they are not contributing in any way to the project, only attending project meetings where they talk about their universities, but nothing about the project. I am really annoyed because the situation. From my point of view they should get involved, as my group does. Before asking them directly for the last time in probably in an unpolite way if they will do their assigned part, how would you proceed here?

Is there a description of work DoW paper that hey have agreed on and says which party participates in what work package (WP) and what party is responsible for every WP deliverable?

the underlying question, "how to ensure proper implementation in collaborative projects" is rather broad. were actionable expectations spelled out clearly in advance and were the milestones of the project defined? did you ask why the shirking group did not contribute? maybe they have encountered problems that need your intervention or a collective decision? which incentives do the collaborators have to implement their part, and, in the very last instance, which sanctions are available?

The path to proceed likely depends strongly on four factors:

Does the project have clear and specific milestones in the contract that the collaborators are failing to meet?
Are the others subcontractors to your institution or independently contracted?
What type of oversight is being exerted by the funding agency, and how is the relationship with the responsible program manager?
Are you willing to burn a bridge?

Typically, as lead PI you are responsible for the execution of the entire project, not just your portion, and therefore have a responsibility to your funding agency to appropriately manage your subcontracting collaborators.  If the funding agency has instead decided to execute independent contracts to each of the PIs in the grant, then it is largely out of your hands and there is little that you can (or should) do.
Assuming you are lead PI, then if the contract (not the proposal) has requirements in its statement of work that they are not meeting by the given milestone deadlines, then you have much more leverage and a clear case for a "shape up or get defunded" conversation.  Similarly, if the funding agency is exerting strong oversight (e.g., in the USA, DARPA often threatens de-funding unless you meet strong milestones by particular frequent deadlines or regularly outperform other research teams; NSF has a much looser oversight process that often just wants to see that something interesting is being accomplished) then you have a strong case that their failure to perform is directly imperiling the whole research project.  In either case, as lead PI you have both the right and the responsibility to cancel their funding and redirect it to better accomplish the research tasks that you are being held accountable for.
If the contract doesn't have accountable goals and you aren't being held accountable for their behavior, however, then it is more just a moral offense to you, and you have much less basis on which to legitimately defund your colleagues.  Instead, you might look at it as a lesson for the future on writing more specific contracts that can give you the leverage you need to deal with non-performers.
Now if you do defund your colleagues, this has a high likelihood of burning bridges.  If you didn't trust them to shape up, why would you want to work with them again?  If they feel you defunded them unfairly, why would they want to work with you again?
If the mandate comes from the funding agency program manager rather than you, that may make the defunding somewhat more acceptable by making it "not your fault," but your colleagues may still see it that way.  Thus, if the relationship is more important than the money being lost, you may then want to just write this off as a lesson learned and plan more carefully for the future.
In short: there are no easy paths, but which one to walk depends on the balance of relationship value vs. accountability in your contract with your funder and your colleagues.

Thanks a lot for your insightful comment! I have to think a lot about the situation. Right now I take 100% for ".. you might look at it as a lesson for the future on writing more specific contracts that can give you the leverage you need to deal with non-performers."

"If the funding agency has instead decided to execute independent contracts to each of the PIs in the grant, then it is largely out of your hands" - actually, I have come across various projects where all participating institutions were individually contracted by the funding agency, yet one of them was the designated project coordinator who very much was supposed to intervene and confront project partners who did not deliver their due amount of work. Sometimes, an external entity was even subcontracted by all partners to check their work progress and complain about missing contributions.

@O.R.Mapper Yes, there are all sorts of contractual arrangements out there...


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Steps for creating a scientific journal
I have organized several times some international conferences on my field (computational chemistry), where accepted proceedings are afterwards evaluated again for it submission to a special issue of a journal. Now I am thinking that I could create a journal for all those submission, even if at the beginning we have no impact factor (ISI) or if people are not so interested, but I would like this idea very much.
So I wonder of you can point which steps should I follow for creating a journal. I think I could attract many submissions, and I have servers where I could host it, but do not know the other technical and/or legal details.

" I have servers where I could host it " ;)

Are there reasons why these articles couldn't be submitted to an existing journal? In my fields it happens that journals publish a special issue with expanded versions of a conference's proceedings.

There are a lot of journals in the world, including for computational chemistry.  Why do you want to create a new one, rather than use an existing journal?

Hmm... I don't know if it's the most helpful thing to question the value of staring a new journal or ask if there are unstated reason(s) unless it's critical to give a good answer... While I understand that there are varying opinions about staring a new journal when there are many already, I also think that OP already gave plenty of background information. And the question seems, at least to me, very much on-topic on its own. Would how-to's of starting a new journal like the one OP describes change depending on how OP responds to the questions by Cape Code and jakebeal?

@YuichiroFujiwara my comments asks for specific reasons because it's unclear to me how creating a new journal could be the best option. I think this question illustrates well the general naivete towards what it represents to organize and run a professional journal.

@CapeCode I know. Like I said, does it change the steps for someone (not necessarily OP) to start a new legitimate journal (that has objectives similar to what OP describes) just because it might not be the best option for OP?

I agree that "why do you want to do that?" does not seem like essential information to answer this question.

@YuichiroFujiwara because there might be something OP did not state that could make this question on topic. Otherwise it is a question about entrepreneurship and thus more appropriate for the startup site.

I want to create this journal because the explained reasons (lots of submissions from my conferneces) And also because there is a very specific topic (can not disclose information) for which no journal already exists

I'm not sure if OP's question is about entrepreneurship; it's just about how to launch a single journal mainly for extended conference papers. Anyway, here's what a founding editor of a small independent journal says about what it takes: http://www.ams.org/notices/201301/rnoti-p97.pdf (All that's needed is a strong editorial board and very little time from a small team.)

if I ask "what is the result of 2 plus 2", would you question why do I want to know the answer or whether it makes sense from the philosophical point of view?

@flow Running a journal is not something that academics are typically paid to do. So I was looking for ways of making your question on topic so that you get more attention and maybe even an answer.

I think it is important to be courteous to the posters and not try to pick them apart.  However, we also want to be helpful to the posters, otherwise why are we here?  If someone asks you how to do X, and X is a highly difficult and time-intensive task, then I think it is very helpful to inquire why the person wants to do X.  At the very least, the motivations will inform the answer about what and how much the OP is willing to do.

@PeteL.Clark That's a fair point, and I'd completely agree with you if this were a traditional discussion forum, where we wanted to help OP alone. But my understanding is that, on AcademicSE, if a question itself is on-topic, we want answers that help all people with the same question who will find this thread. I think that's why highly specific questions/answers are discouraged. By the same toke, we probably shouldn't ask for more information if it's not essential to answer the on-topic part of a question. Then again, everyone wants to be more helpful to OP. So, I don't disagree with you.

In any case, I'm glad that OP got nice answers before this question gets closed as off-topic.

Note this old meta post covers this chat discussion.

Having followed a few new journals from birth to quick success I can see the following steps:

Make sure you identify a scope that has long-term interest (pretty obvious)
Make sure the idea is supported by your scientific community; that they see a benefit in yet another journal. Community involvement really helps.
Assemble a group of enthusiastic and well-respected scientists in the field of interest to form a group to plan for the journal and who may constitute the nucleus of the editorial board (equiv.).
Create a proposal including a description of your goals and target audience for the journal.
Decide how the journal should be published. Open Access seems like a safe bet and initiate discussions with an Open Access Publisher. It is possible to publish on your own but using a publisher may provide access to other types of support so a careful assessment of the options are important.

----Now we assume the journal has passed the planning stages and will be launched

Make sure the community knows about the journal. This ground work can be continuous throughout the process but has to be realized by this point.
Try to attract as many prominent authors as you can and have them submit high quality work. This will help make the journal attractive. One goal, like it or not, is likely to get an impact factor (if that matters in your field) and that means publishing papers that get referenced. Attracting good papers in under any circumstances a good start.
Maintain high standards in your review process and make sure to maintain high publications standards. Good papers attract other good papers when people realize the journal is to be counted.

Only the contributions you can attract determine the success of the journal. Although some of the points above may seem obvious or even trivial, the more effort you add early on the higher the chance for success. In the cases I have seen, having the community on the train from the beginning and following the development has proved to be fruitful.

Peter Jansson's answer tackles a good part of the process, but let me add the question of the publisher.
You can go through an existing publisher, in which case you will have to choose one (and then convince it that it is a good idea to start your journal, but if you managed steps 1-5 in Peter Jansson's answer, it should not be difficult). There are several criteria to be considered:

What service does the publisher provide to the editorial board? Discuss with editorial boards of journals published there to find out. Also, a publisher which is well-known in your field can have an easier time making your colleagues become aware of the existence of your journal, but it seems that this task is largely up to the editorial board anyway.
What service does the publisher provide to authors? For example some publishers ask authors to format their papers in their style prior to submission, which can be a pain, or may have painful electronic system that authors must use to submit or to contact the editorial board. Your past experience can give you a good idea. Also, the question of usual cost the journal charges for extra pages or for open-access is crucial. Publishers can also have very different policy with respect to green open access, see the Sherpa/Romeo site for info about this.
What service does the publisher provide to readers? For example some commercial publishers provide very poor copy-editing; you can care or not. Also, the question of the usual cost of subscriptions for non-open access journal is crucial.

You could also want to go with your university's press if it exists, so as to be close to the publisher and interact more easily with it.
If you plan on act as publisher as well, things are more complicated. Let's assume that you do not want to manage subscription payments nor article processing charges; you will still deal with quite some stuff.

Your journal should have an owner; it may be you, or your university, or another institution, or you could create a legal body for this (e.g. a foundation), notably if you want some money to flow. For example, I know a journal run by department, with money and one full-time staff from a university and a national research institution.
Your journal should have an identification, most notably an electronic ISSN. This is not difficult to get as far as I know.
Your journal should be indexed in the databases used in your field (e.g. Zentralblatt and MSN in mathematics). Asking the publisher of the database would be the obvious way to go.
You will need a software to track submissions (which need to be assigned to an editor, which need to be assigned to a referee, which await for a decision, etc.) and to host the website of the journal. Most probably you know how to do this part since you did it for your conferences.
If you want a paper version, you will have to deal with a printer and with mailing issues, but this is very XXth-century and very likely for a journal that does not charge subscriptions.
You may need to use an anti-plagiarism software, depending on your field (sometimes in small fields plagiarism is easily detected, but this is not universally true).

I certainly miss some points, please free to add in comment and I'll try to keep the list up-to-date.


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How long should letters of recommendation for students be?
I have recently (finally?) had some requests to write letters of recommendation for graduate students. However, it's not really clear to me how long a good letter of recommendation should be. I've seen statements that it should be one page, but many of the best letters I have seen have gone significantly longer than that (two or even two and a half pages).
Is there really a limit as far as admissions committees are concerned? Or is it "whatever is needed" to get the point across, within reason (nobody's going to read a ten-page letter, even if it's written by Albert Einstein or Thomas Edison!).

I just realized that you say "admissions committees" in the second paragraph.  What sort of letter do you mean?  I interpreted "letters of recommendation for graduate students" as letters for graduate students applying for jobs, but now I wonder whether you meant students applying to graduate school (in which case the letters can be a little shorter).

Well, the particulars are with respect to graduate school applications, but I guess I shouldn't be so picky. Some of my applicants will probably be looking at professional employment as well, so your answer is still perfectly valid.

Idk, if it was Einstein's I think I would grit my teeth and read through it...

I'd guess that this depends on the field.  In mathematics in the U.S., one factor is your relationship with the student.  If you are the Ph.D. advisor or a close mentor, then the letter should be at least two pages long (maybe rounding up a little) or it risks looking unsupportive, and three or four pages is not uncommon.  For other letter writers, I'd recommend at least a page, and good letters are often two pages or longer.  Of course these aren't absolute rules, and it's possible to write a great letter that's shorter, but it's a little risky.
The reason for the length is to give a chance to discuss the student's work (you can explain what they did, what some of the background and context is, why it's exciting, why the student's contributions are impressive, etc.).  You can easily fill most of a page with generalities about other things - what your relationship with the student is, what your general opinion is, a paragraph about teaching and communication skills, etc.  It's hard to cover this and say much about the student's work within one page, so a one-page letter sometimes suggests that either the recommender doesn't know the student very well or they don't have much to say about the work.
Overall, I'd say that whatever is needed is OK.  The worst case scenario is that the committee will start skimming partway through, but that's not a disaster.

Can you please explain how "that's not a disaster"? (last statement)


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Data Set Definition , Where to Place (Introduction, Material and Methods)?
Machine Learning , Data Mining studies uses various data sets. If used data sets are not well known data sets, following points of these data sets should be explained. More can be added but these points comes to my mind immediately.

features/attributes (number, data type, domain definition)
How many instances exists in this data set?
Test / Training data (Random Sampling, All data used..)
Feature Reduction techniques
Any preprocessing/post processing

Thus my question is: Where should I put this data set explanation in article sections?

Introduction
Methods (Experiments)
Or entirely new section under Data Set heading?

In the same place that the papers you cite did.

In machine learning this is usually in materials and methods.

There is no universally-agreed way to do it. I usually place the information about the datasets under the experiments section, before reporting the results. Also, I prefer to present parameters about the datasets (e.g., number of features, number of samples) in a table. If many datasets are used, and there are some points that needs to be clarified, I would create a subsection for the datasets under the experiments section.


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Do I need to ask permission to provide a narrative of a scholar's methods?
I am writing a secondary school archaeology and history textbook. I'm inspired to adjust the book based on two types of students:

Some are excited about what they are studying, and tell their career counselors they want to be archaeologists/historians.
Others have grown up believing scientists are liars, and are just messing around creating a big conspiracy of "Fake News".

Based on this, I don't simply want to have a textbook that says "this happened" or "this is how they lived", but I want to also show students what steps the scholars actually too to arrive at their conclusion.
That means I'm digging through journal articles to identify which scholars came to those very detailed conclusions, and converting their "Methods" section into easy-to-read narratives:
Sam Spade was an associate professor at the University of Arizona. He wanted to find out
when the Hohokam switched from eating big game to farming. He sent graduate students to
collect thousand-year-old samples human feces from various archaeological sites. The Hohokam
people tended to leave this in areas near... Back at a lab, Sam used a machine called a
radiocarbon dating...

In a traditional textbook, Sam Spade's research would merely receive a footnote, but here he's considerably elevated in status, and his work presented in narrative form. This unknown scholar is presented as someone important.
Given how I'm using this information, is a simple citation of the work still sufficient, or do I need to be sending each and every scholar a detailed letter asking permission, and describing how their name and work is going to be used?

For writing a narrative about published research in your own words, you need a citation and that's it.
For quoting directly from short passages of published research, you need a citation and indication that this is a direct quote.
For images/figures you likely need permission from the publisher unless the images/figures have been released with a license that allows you to reuse them (you'll have to check for each individual image) or if your use falls under some form of "fair use" (the term is used in at least US and UK copyright rules; similar doctrine may be present in other countries). Writing a textbook you intend to distribute/sell is probably not fair use. Putting the figures in a slide show for educational purposes of your own class probably is.
If you were writing an entire book about one (living) subject I think it would certainly be good manners and perhaps a useful collaboration if you were to contact them and get their blessing, but it would not be strictly necessary to do so. It sounds like your intent is instead to provide narrative research descriptions from many different scientists at an appropriate reading level for your target audience, so I don't think it's nearly as important but you might still find some benefit to reaching out to some - scientists are typically excited to share their work, especially if it's an opportunity to spread their research area to the next generation.
Lastly, I'd urge a bit of caution in your approach. Papers these days are typically written in ways that suggest that science is clean and linear, when in fact it is often messy and circuitous. Your approach seems to make it even cleaner and more linear. It's common for textbooks to take this simplified approach to historical experiments, but it doesn't necessarily convey what science really is to people who may be interested in pursuing it. The conflict in expectations can be quite distressing when it is first encountered.

+1 for perhaps too clean. I'd suggest reporting on some current controversies, quoting/paraphrasing responsible arguments on each side.


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Do academics have any standard system for annotating text?
I teach secondary history classes. My principal is pushing for all teachers to introduce students to a annotation system which should be the same in all classes.  But the system doesn't seem appropriate for my student's needs, e.g. here are some of the 20+ items:

Underline key words.
Put a question mark next to questions you have.
Put a star next to important items.
Put an exclamation mark next to things you felt were interesting.
Write the infinity symbol next to a "connection" you made.
Etc.

The items don't help students to focus on achieving their goal at hand. The annotations might help students to closely read a text, but don't product meaningful notes that students can refer to for other purposes.
My students need to use annotations in two contexts, which I think also resemble the reason-for-annotating text in college:

To annotate a text, identifying items relevant to a given prompt, in preparation for writing a short essay.
To annotate a text, identifying items relevant to their own thesis statement (or possibly requiring them to reevaluate their thesis statement), for a research project.

I tried arguing for a simpler system that addressed these needs, but my suggestion was dropped, because the principal was using a method from a "credible" source, one downloaded from Pinterest. My principal might be swayed if I presented some "standard" method used in academia (i.e. something with a name).
Just as there is formal "Cornell Notes", which was even created by a Cornell professor, is there a named, standard system for annotating in academia?

If there is, I'd be amazed to see anyone actually using it. The best annotation system is the one that works for you, or for each individual student. For instance, I've never annotated anything and relied just on memory.

I don't know of a named "standard" nor even of a named technique, but a little poking with https://scholar.google.com found this: https://tidsskrift.dk/daimipb/article/download/6546/5665/ which contains a taxonomy of techniques.  Perhaps some more poking would find something hopeful.

Alternatively, perhaps one of us could post something on that singularly authoritative source, Pinterest.

I suggest that you contact this woman and see whether she's published anything herself or knows of something suitable: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meg-keeley-94711018/

I make my notes about their work on a custom excel spreadsheet - common phrases I use have shortcuts so I don't have to type much (simply because I can't type...) The sheet is individual per student and I print it and give them a copy as feedback... works for me.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/

The answer to "do Academics have a standardized system for X" is invariably No. At best there will be multiple competing standards.

If there is one competing standard, all I need is one. I don't need one everybody is using, just one promoted by an academic.

It's hard to prove a negative, but my experience is that there is no standard system of annotating text.


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Is summarizing a single source considered plagiarism?
Usually when I write a history paper, I utilize many sources.
Currently I have an article, which will be published, for which citing many sources isn't really necessary. Quite simply, I'm taking a 250-page novel (basically a log book describing an historical expedition in first person), published 500 years ago, and reducing it down to about 3 pages. Other than organizing the information with my own thesis statement and conclusion, it basically presents the same information, just in my own words. I'm simply summarizing a 250-page novel into 3 pages.
Though original work is definitely out of copyright, I'm citing to a translation published about 40 years ago, and so that is copyright of the translator.
Is summarizing a long work into a much shorter form regarded as plagiarism?

Are you sure that you can adequately understand a 500 year old text without engaging in any research about its context?

The term "novel" is generally considered to refer to fiction works. If the book is presented as non-fiction, referring to it as a "novel" it apt to cause confusion.

Are you sure you are writing a scientific paper, given that you only need to quote one source for it?

Isn't the broad definition that plagiarism doesn't acknowledge the source and is not for the purpose of legitimate study? Either way, condensing 250 pages into three seems at first sight to be dealing with the idea, not the translation… even though, presumably, the translation was vital.

Plagiarism is mis-representation of the work of another as your own work. If you credit the original work and make the relationship between your work and that work clear, it is not plagiarism.
Whether the original is summarized in your own words or directly quoted is entirely irrelevant. Likewise, the question of copyright is also entirely irrelevant to plagiarism: if I pretend a fragment of Isaac Newton's writing is my own, it is still plagiarism no matter how many centuries Newton's writing has been out of copyright.

I'd note that the translation will be fully covered by copyright even though the copyright has long expired on the original work.

jakebeal’s and Ilmari Karonen’s answers make several excellent points.  Just to add one more point: In many contexts, there is some kind of expectation of originality — e.g. most research journals, and also most educational assignments. Violation of this is often confused with plagiarism, and there’s certainly a large overlap, but it’s helpful to explicitly distinguish the two.  As the other answers say, you’re not in danger of committing plagiarism since you’re acknowledging the relationship with the source clearly.  But you should also make sure you’re fulfilling whatever kind of originality is required by your plans/intentions for the paper — and I guess this is part of what you had in mind when asking the question.  For most contexts I can imagine, I’d guess you should be fine — summarising a long work into a much shorter one, and making it more accessible to a modern audience, is creating something very distinct from the original work.  But this is certainly a point to be conscious of — knowing where you plan to submit/present your paper, make sure you understand and fulfil their expectations of originality.

To answer your literal question first, no, relying on just a single source isn't plagiarism, as long as you correctly cite that source and attribute any quoted or paraphrased material to it, so that a reader can clearly tell which parts of your paper are your own ideas or interpretations and which are merely summaries of what the source claims.
Also, plagiarism actually has very little to do with copyright violation, except that the easiest and most blatant way to commit both at once is to copy-paste a large block of text (or an illustration) without attribution from a source written by someone else and try to pass it off as your own work.  But once you get into less blatant examples, it's quite easy to commit plagiarism without violating copyright or vice versa.  So your mention of the translation being under copyright is mostly a red herring.

Aside: Copying a block of text or an illustration from another source and attributing it is usually enough to make it neither plagiarism nor copyright violation, at least as long as the copied amount isn't truly and needlessly excessive.  But the reasons for this differ.  The reason why copying with attribution isn't plagiarism is simply that, by correctly attributing the copied material, you're no longer trying to take credit for it as your own work.  The reason why it's usually also not a copyright violation is that copyright law in most parts of the world has a pretty wide exception — either codified into statute law or established as a form of "fair use" or "fair dealing" by courts — for quoting portions of copyrighted works for the purposes of criticism, education or academic research, which a properly attributed and reasonably scoped quote from a source in an academic article about or building upon the source will usually fall under.

All that said, I find it somewhat surprising that merely "taking a 250-page novel […] and reducing it down to about 3 pages", even if bracketed by your "own thesis statement and conclusion", would actually yield a good history paper without relying on any other sources.
Are you really planning on:

taking your sole source 100% uncritically at face value, and not comparing it with anyone else's account of similar or contemporary events;
basing your thesis statement and conclusion on nothing but the source text itself, without relying on any other information about the time, place and events covered in it;
trusting the translation you're using to be 100% faithful and accurate (it never is!) and not comparing it with either the original text or other translations; and
not contrasting your interpretation of the primary source with anyone else's analysis and interpretation of it?

If not, to any of these points, then there probably are at least some other sources that you should cite.  And if your answer to any of the points above is "yes", then I would strongly suggest you at least think twice about it.  A good academic paper is generally not supposed to just uncritically digest and regurgitate its primary source material, but to analyze it in a broader context and to illuminate aspects of it that an uncritical modern reader of the original work might otherwise miss, misinterpret or be misled by.
Unless, of course, your "history paper" is really just a "Cliff's Notes" summary of the original text.  Although even Cliff's Notes™ generally include some critical analysis and background context.

As Oxford defines it, plagiarism is "presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement".
Therefore it's not plagiarism to only use/summarise a single source, as long as you appropriately credit them and accurately and clearly show what you took from their work, compared to what you did yourself.
But there are other problems with only using a single source:

Mostly in the context of "dummy" research*, where the purpose is to teach you how to do proper research, as opposed actually having you contribute to academic literature (typically at undergrad level or below):
One may be penalised for only citing from 1 source. This is because you're meant to learn how to do "real" research, and there you're often going to want to look at and compare multiple sources (for the reason mentioned below), and you're going to reference the research for the purpose of adding to it (and simply summarising a single source is probably not adding much to academic literature, even though papers simply summarising multiple sources is a thing). Taking information from multiple sources and turning it into a coherent narrative is an important skill in research (whether you're doing so for its own sake or to support your research).
They may also feel that the work you did beyond what you got from the source is not substantial enough to justify a good grade.
Or perhaps they'll penalise you because the marker doesn't know what they're doing or because you were explicitly instructed to use multiple sources.

One source may not be an accurate representation of the topic.
The source may be inaccurate (whether due to malice, bias or drawing conclusions from insufficient data), they may not have a full picture of all the facts even though their account is accurate and, if applicable, the source may not be representative of the topic at hand. For example, if you're writing a paper about World War 2, an accurate account of one soldier who just sat at some base for years during the war without ever getting on a battlefield probably isn't representative of the war as a whole.
Combining that one source with other sources would give you more certainty that you have an accurate representation of the topic at hand.

In real-world research, you're often going to need to cite many sources, in which case this problem wouldn't apply, but you could still look at this from the context of individual data points within your paper. If something in your paper is only backed up by a single source and there are any of the above problems in that source, that could hurt the conclusion you reached, assuming it doesn't just invalidate it entirely. Although peer review helps to avoid this problem and some sources may be trustable enough to stand up on their own.
Only citing or summarising one source may be perfectly fine if that's the only relevant research out there, or if the purpose of your paper is simply to summarise the source. Although if you're summarising the source, one might still wonder whether it would provide more value to reference other sources as well (if applicable), to confirm or refute what the primary source claims and to provide a more accurate picture of what's addressed in that source. But this could heavily depend on norms and best practices within individual research domains.
*: There might be a more appropriate term for this...

As a side note, I wouldn't generally think of a novel as an appropriate source for a paper, as this is usually written for entertainment purposes and they can take quite a few liberties with the truth, as novels aren't generally held to the standard of academic literature.
But there may be some exceptions (such as a factual log book) and I am saying this with a technical background (technical papers usually cite other technical and scientific sources, which a novel generally isn't). You might want to get a second opinion on that, if this is for a paper that's particularly important to you.

I think this is unnecessarily critical of the OP's context. If the intended topic is an analysis of a single work, it may really be the case that nearly everything comes back to the same work. The OP also didn't actually say they aren't citing anything else (e.g., to establish context).

@jakebeal To me it seems that OP is intending to only cite one source ("citing many sources isn't really necessary"). But my point isn't really to criticise OP or tell them what they should do in this specific situation (we need more info for that), the point is to help OP and others understand the potential problems and consequences of citing or summarising only a single source, so they're better equipped to decide what to do in their situation or other situations. (If your assignment is to summarise a single source, then it wouldn't make much sense to ask whether doing so is plagiarism)

Why are you talking about "being penalised" when the OP is asking about work that will be published? They do not appear to be talking about an assignment.

@JackAidley Because my goal is to help OP and others understand the potential problems and consequences of citing or summarising only a single source. And I did preface this with "Mostly in the context of 'dummy' research".

@NotThatGuy While that can be a useful approach, I think in this case you've devoted the majority of the answer to something which isn't asked in the question. Sure, if you take only the title then it's relevant, but the question is more than the title.

@JackAidley I said as much about each part as was necessary to sufficiently help OP and others understand the potential problems and consequences of citing or summarising only a single source across the most relevant contexts. Having one part take up slightly more space than another part ... doesn't really mean much. If that part isn't relevant to whomever reading the answer, they should get about halfway through the first sentence before realising as much (at which point they can decide whether to read it anyway, quickly scan through it or just skip it entirely).

I think there are some opinion differences that won't be resolved in this comment thread. On one hand, this site is a place for askers to get answers, and so answers should be tailored to the question asked. On the other hand, this site is supposed to be building a resource of answers for future visitors to the site, who may have circumstances similar but not identical to the OP of any given question. Neither is wrong; there's no rule against giving answers that are more broadly applicable, as long as they answer the question asked. I'd ask, though, that everyone be polite to each other.


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How to shape quality research questions about conspiracy-drenched topics?
This year, I was working closely with many college-bound gifted students,  one assignment, a student wanted to research the "Roswell incident". Though I can generally quickly think up several potential research questions for any given topic, due the nature of the topic, I could not think of any.
Though I redirected the student to find another topic of interest, I can't help but wonder, what is a good way to steer a student when they want to examine a topic, such as the Roswell incident, that by its nature, attracts conspiracies, and, as such, is hard to view the topic from a academically rigorous standpoint.
How can students create quality research questions or thesis statements around a topic that is just a conspiracy?

One approach to avoid the issue of whether a conspiracy is worth investigating or not is to set constraints on what an acceptable research question is. In addition to the many resources out there on how to develop a research question and answer it, making it clear that the question should not be easily answered by Wikipedia or blogs may help.
Note that there is legitimate analysis around conspiracy theories. For example, while conspiracies themselves largely hold little merit, an analysis of the people who typically believe in them, how conspiracies evolve, differences in the evolution of varying conspiracies, similarities between conspiracies, etc. could all be interesting.