text:
Why don't poorer countries suffer a complete brain-drain?
My question is about countries such as:

EU countries like Bulgaria, Romania or Poland and
non-EU countries like Russian Federation, Ukraine or Belarus.

A PostDoc fellow might earn at most US$ 2500, say, in Poland, while they can earn $4000 at minimum, say, in Spain. The same argument is applicable to university professors.
Why do highly educated/competent/qualified scientists and engineers still work in these lower income countries?
Why do poorer countries in the EU and the neighboring countries not suffer a complete and decisive brain drain?

Comments are not for extended discussion nor for answers; this conversation has been moved to chat. Please see this FAQ before posting another comment; additional answers-in-comments will be deleted without warning.

This question has an unstated assumption:  there are brain people and no-brain people.  Everyone is different and unique and everyone has a brain.  "Complete brain drain" would occur when every single person has left the country.

@emory Right. If we all worked hard enough, we could all be like Feynman!

Since no one has said it yet... They kind of do.
I live and work in Russia and A LOT of people graduating from top universities either land a position in top management outside of academia locally or move abroad. It is still not quite as noticeable as the fact one keeps encountering Russian surnames under research produced elsewhere; a good bunch of labs in the US and Europe has gotten a huge influx of ex-USSR researchers during the '90s. Talking to some of these people reveals that they either don't feel a particular tie to any country and go after higher quality of life or would rather stay, but given poor funding it starts impacting their research they are passionate about way too much. @Allure points to political/ethical issues which are also definitely a thing.
I'd say in most departments around me from those who stay in academia well over half move abroad (at times, going to whopping 70-80%); with these numbers being lower but still significant in "lower end" universities. If this is not a brain drain, I don't know what is.
As to why the remaining stay... They either can't move, don't care or actually don't really have a reason to (like Oganov!*). Academia has adjusted - instead of keeping 10 people on staff with none of them able to do science because they have to earn a living elsewhere, sometimes living wages are kept okay and positions very restricted, immediately making it competitive with similar positions abroad. If you don't do military research (or your ethical/political stance allows for it), still get funded (which is admittedly somewhat rare) and can get equipment/pay people to do research... Doesn't have to be making great money, just enough to actually do research and live an agreeable life. Those who don't get it, move or quit academia. Those who can, commonly stay. Simple as that.
*EDIT: as @Allure has pointed out, Oganov first moved abroad and then returned to Russia. I'd still argue it's one example of having very decent and competitive working conditions; these are, of course, rare.

I actually have & had lots of colleagues from Russia and Ukraine but I don't think they necessarily emigrated because of money. The other conditions are usually much more important, e.g. cost of living, work conditions, crime rate, health insurance, better education. Many of them come here as students.

@sulthan, where'er is here

@Sulthan Money is essentially never more than just a proxy for the quality of life one could expect. Crime rate for one is a very major factor; no one likes to worry about their life and wellbeing constantly. However, it is interesting to me you list education among other factors: it was traditionally perceived as strong if not far superior (vs say US public schools) until very recently, and to people who wanted to move the "perfect" track was to get up to sophomore or so locally and then transfer abroad to get education here and job opportunities elsewhere. Many do come as students indeed.

Oganov didn't stay in Russia, he moved there from the US. Check the article I linked or his biography on Wikipedia. To quote, "Artem Oganov, a Moscow-born computational materials designer formerly at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, relocated to the Russian capital this month."

@Allure Oh, fair enough, my bad on that one. I kind of assumed that based on some passing familiarity with the present state of affairs; his lab gets quite a lot of PR in my institution, largely spearheading megagrants coverage.

@Sulthan I am also curious to know where is "here". I am from Ukraine who came to US. In USA work conditions are harder, crime rate is higher, health insurance is non existent, education is worse. The only thing I agree on is cost of living, that one is better, yes.

The question seems to assume that people move to where their salary is highest. This is not true; people have lots of different reasons to live where they live.
It also makes little sense to compare salaries without also considering cost of living. There are lots of ways to calculate cost of living, but just relying on one data source, the cost of living in Spain is about 160% the cost of living in Poland. Said another way, if you have US$2500 to spend in Poland, it goes about as far as 2500 * 1.6 = US$4000 in Spain - in other words, as long as you spend the money locally, it's exactly the same salary.
People may also prefer to stay in their home country to be near family and childhood friends, to be near a spouse or their job or their family, to live in a place where people speak the language they are most familiar with. They may have a sense of national pride. And crucially, for academia, there are a very limited number of positions, period. There are more qualified applicants than there are jobs. If you are offered an academic position in Bulgaria, there is no marketplace where you can take this offer and exchange it for one in another country.

What about 3rd world countries like India, etc? There are public amenities, healthcare issues, and crime involved.

A lot of university professors migrated from Russia, Turkey, etc to UK, USA, and Canada.

@user366312 I don't know what salaries are for academic positions in India, but I would assume that they are at least relatively consistent with the cost of living there compared to elsewhere in the world. I won't claim that there is no "brain drain", but that isn't what your question asked. Many of the reasons for historical academic "brain drain" migration in the second half of the 20th century involved academic freedom and ethnic/political/religious persecution; these reasons still apply today, of course, but perhaps in different places.

"in other words, as long as you spend the money locally, it's exactly the same salary." except that some things vary in price around the world more than others and some things can actually cost more in poor countries. If you crave for tech toys you are probably better off in a rich country, if you crave for domestic servants on the other hand you may be better off in a poor country.

The brain drain does happen because H1B has been propping up scientific achievements in the US despite the declining quality of its education. Of course, the exact effect is not going to be 100/0 drain but it exists.

There's significant brain drain in India. Large US employers have a very large Indian work force, both living in the US and in India. Academic institutions in the US have tons of Indian students/professors. But India has 1.36 billion people. There's so many people  that they can lose 100 smart people and keep 1 and still have a ton of smart people left.

@RobinClower From https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/indian-migration-to-the-us.pdf as of 2015 there were about 2.4 million Indian immigrants in the US, and in the same year India's population was 1.3 billion. 0.18%. Certainly not all immigrants are part of the "brain drain" (I did not look at how many are H1Bs, though certainly Indian immigrants to the US are on average more educated than immigrants to the US as a whole), but even if they were it doesn't seem to approach "complete brain drain" levels, or "lose 100 keep 1".

@Peter Green:  And other things cost far more in the richer areas of developed countries.  Try pricing a horse property around Silicon Valley, for instance: you're looking at $10 million and up.  Just over the state line in Nevada, similar or larger properties can be had for under 10% of the price.

@Nelson Citation needed, lmao

@PeterGreen additionally, if you ever decide to not spend 100% of your income, then making 2x and spending 2x means saving 2x absolute dollars. Which would still remain 2x dollars if you then return to a lower COL area. Geo-arbitrage. And besides, one specific reason brain-drain isn't a complete loss to the exporting country is the significant remittances back, sometimes >100% GDP/capita anyway.

@obscurans yeah, I always laugh at people doing simplistic COL calculations. You have to calculate exact dollar figures earned/spent/saved instead of using "rule of thumb".

@user366312 For one thing, India has (had) a big medical tourism industry, so it's not like it's impossible to get medical care there. As far as day-to-day living goes, you're really underestimating how nice a nice neighborhood can be even in a country where most people can't live that way.

@BryanKrause And overwhelmingly academics (or for that matter other professionals) emigrate from India for better economic prospects and facilities/luxuries/quality of life, not due to "academic freedom and ethnic/political/religious persecution".

@user366312 Even in those countries, if your income is significantly above the national average, you can have a very high quality of life. The issue is often that those services are inaccessible to the majority of the population, not that they are entirely absent.

There are as many reasons as there are people, I'd suppose. But don't forget that salary isn't the entire financial consideration. Other places with higher salary also have higher living expenses. "Poor" may be true relative to the global economy, but not the local one. But some other reasons are:

Language

Culture (and food)

Family

A sense of service to the place you grew up in.

Patriotism

Lack of acceptance/friendliness by some in other places.

Sense of comfort where you are.

Being highly respected in the local academic culture.

I'm sure there are many more.

I think another important factor: Effort. Moving to a different country (or even continent) requires serious effort. I also think a lot of people never seriously consider it.

@Trunk, I think family obligations is a big factor, generally.  Even "family regard" if not obligations.

@Trunk: this also exists the other way round, at least some western countries have scholarships for students from poorer countries that also have a contractual obligation to return afterwards (or pay a fine so part of the scholarship becomes a loan in hindsight)

A very good list of reasons. I'd like to add: education may not be fully accepted in the new country. I've seen this mostly in health care related professions. E.g. a fully approbated physician in country A may need to retake a whole lot of courses and exams in country B. Research where they won't ever treat a patient may be OK, but it severely limits the positions they can apply for. And  if they're without research position (if only temporarily) they cannot fall back on working in their profession, they are immediately down to "taxi driver"-type of work.

The question may be rephrased as:
Why don't ALL people from poorer countries migrate into rich ones?
The income difference is not limited to academia, most jobs in a poor country make less money than in a rich one.
A poor country sometimes offers worse security, worse medical services, worse social services, worse education for children, etc, etc, ... for academics and plumbers alike.
And the common answer is that the income and the expenses are not everything someone takes into account. Culture (including, but not limited to, language, food, mating partners availability, acceptable work/life balance, recreational activities available), personal ties, patriotism (in the broadest sense), reluctance to change, availability of different carrer path - all these things play a role.

Edit:
the people drain may not be complete, but it is still quite possible to be decisive. The migration is rarely representative in the political spectrum.

“A poor country offers worse security, worse medical services, worse social services, worse education for children, etc, etc, ... for academics and plumbers alike.” This is not necessarily true.

@CarstenS I can talk from personal experience (I am Bulgarian). And when this is not "necessarily true", the academic people are in worse position than those in the industry.

@fraxinus Tech industry sure. But that is all over the word, even in rich countries. But worse position than people selling street food or cleaning those streets? No way.

@VladimirF: Oppressive regimes, for historically valid reasons, fear academics more than they fear street food sellers. (But see the Arab  Spring). Income isn't everything, as noted in the question. Being followed by secret police also causes brain drain

@MSalters Are we still talking about the EU??? Fraxinus explicitly mentioned Bulgaria, what has the Arab Spring have to do with that? I do actually have some friends in academia in Bulgaria. No, they did mnetion being followed by the secret police.Of course the tech and IT industry  pays more, but that is the case everywhere.

Yes, Bulgaria. De jure in EU, de facto a small-scale Russia. The police (be it secret or not) is pretty much a thing here. Especially if you are somewhat politically active.

A major reason why ALL people from poorer countries do not migrate into rich ones is that they are literally not allowed to. Strict immigration policies prevent this.

@FedericoPoloni the Q specifically asks why the complete migration doesn't happen when NO administrative limits are imposed, like inside the European Union.

In addition to the points brought up in the other answers, not everyone is motivated by money.
Here's an article from 2014 about political disagreements among Russian scientists. Note some people approve of what the Russian government have done (like annexing Crimea), while others disapprove. Hence we get quotes such as:

“Any discussion about the future of Russian science is pretty much pointless when this country behaves like a bull,” said Kondrashov shortly after he stormed out of the meeting. “I love Russia, but the outlook for science here is gloomy and I’m very concerned about where that country is going.”

This implies Kondrashov will not work in Russia regardless of financial incentives as long as the country "behaves like a bull". Going the other way, there is:

“I’m not a refugee, nobody treated me badly, and I am perfectly at peace with my country,” [Artem Oganov] says. “I do worry about the sanctions and the growing economic problems here, but I could never forgive myself if Russia needed me and I was not there.”

Yes, indeed, this is an explanation... but, in some ways, it does reveal the sort of endemic problem that goes forward into the future ... about people finding a (relatively good) reason to support, if only passively, a very bad larger regime.

@paulgarrett That point is relatively easy to make about Russia given that it has largely flouted international norms in recent years. But I'm sure this is much more difficult to make unambiguously for other countries. Are American scientists complicit with Trump's policies regarding immigration, climate, the ICC, etc., for staying in the US? What if that quote by the Russian scientist was intended to say that he feels compelled to stay because he thinks that its government will change in the near future? I think it is quite difficult to condemn people who want to stay in their country.

Without the young, urban, educated and cosmopolitan population leaving Hungary in droves, sending remittances home and leaving the less-educated, national-chauvinist, elderly and rent-dependent population behind, Orban's autocracy would have a much harder time to sustain itself. See https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13501763.2020.1712455?journalCode=rjpp20

IMO, what Kondrashov and Oganov say is not important. They just tried to pose some argument in favor of their career decisions. I guess, if Oganov could not secure a mega-funding from the government to build his own lab, he wouldn't have stayed in Russia.

@user366312 Oganov didn't stay in Russia, he moved there from the US. Check the article or his biography on Wikipedia. To quote, "Artem Oganov, a Moscow-born computational materials designer formerly at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, relocated to the Russian capital this month."

You also need into considerion the quality of life. In terms of internet access, electronic payments, heating, drainage, infrastructure, agriculture and service availability Spain is less developed than Poland (the first two are also true for Germany), while Spain offers less bureaucracy and stress.

I am a drained person in the West. Many of my friends remained home, while they could have gone with me. I think the reasons to remain, in decreasing order of probability:

Lack of language skills. Actually talking with native speakers of a foreign language, and understanding eachother enough well to work together effectively, it is f*g hard. Particularly if your first language is out of the indogerman language family. (Resulting that all the grammar and all the words are totally different). Today this is compansated by learning English from the early childhood, but it is only today. As I was a child, lesser than 1% of the population could speak on it.
Family wants/needs them at home. Like wife who can divorce, resulting that she gets away your children. If this wife does not want to go with you, you will remain home. (Or the evolution will vote you down.)
Lucky or particularly useful people sometimes can get a salary close to what they can earn on the West.
Many people actually tried the West. Now emmigration into a foreign country results that the first years are f*g hard. It is absolutely not the way that you simply continue your previous life on a foreign language. The most important problem is that at home we were typically on the top of the job market. A foreign country uses different indicators to measure the usefulness of an applicant, and the language barrier will be always a huge disadvantage. People collecting too much negative experiences will likely go back, and don't try the West again.

Indo-German family?

@RodrigodeAzevedo, Indo-Germanic is an older name for Indo-European, mostly still in use in German ;)
https://german.stackexchange.com/q/65646/3237

The Slavic languages are part of the Indo-European language family. The question was about countries where Slavic languages are spoken, except Romania (Romance language, also Indo-European).

Brains themselves are a stronger attractor than money
IMHO academics are less motivated by money than other job hunters. Access to the right lab, the right colleagues, the right competences, the right professor can easily outweigh the monetary gain you get abroad.
I have seen though, that given other kinds of resistances (racism, sexism, "class"-ism) there is a significant brain drain. Example: Women emigrating from oppressive religious regimes to further their academic progress.
Also, interestingly enough, many top notch research groups are located in rather low salary countries. I would suspect that to a certain extent money can distort research. Application of research is usually the great money maker, and if you want to work theoretically, or with a different application or different idea - you might want to be somewhere else.

This is actually a "con". There are many situations where, to meet the relevant people and work with the appropriate equipment, you need to travel. Typically, travel from a first world country to a third world country is easier than the other way around. People from poor countries face numerous difficulties travelling as compared with those from richer countries.

@kapil the whole third world country thing is utterly confusing to me. Like Sweden? Japan? Singapore? Cold War definitions aren't useful anymore.

Cost of living. As a Pole I can attest that 2500 EUR can go a long way in Poland. This is especially relevant when your funding comes from abroad (e.g. a European funding agency). Even if better money abroad is tempting, it's probably not as tempting as you think.

Stability / availability of jobs. It's generally much easier to get a job in Poland than in Spain. When I finished my doctorate, I could have gone back to Poland and have a near-guarantee permanent position. Such opportunities didn't exist Western Europe.

It is US$2500, not EUR.

Yeah, fair. I suppose in an European context I automatically switched to EUR. At the end of the day, what matters is the ratio between the salary in the two places.

In Poland you have permanent possitions in academia? How competitive they are?

After seeing the excellent accepted answer by Lodinn I wasn't sure whether I should just leave a comment on his, as I have found some sources which confirm what his answer mentions anecdotally.
However, I think mentioning the source materials confirming the claim that there in fact exists a very decisive brain drain deserves it's own answer.
I am talking about the World Banks "Europe and Central Asia Economic Update, Fall 2019: Migration and Brain Drain".
The most relevant information is summarised in Map 2.1 (on page 27) and Table 2.1 (on page 29). To pull out some data specifically relating to some of the examples you inquired about:

Out of EU countries, Bulgaria and Romania both have around 20% emigrant share (precent of emigrants of their total population) together with Latvia and Lithuania. Croatia (22%) and Malta top the charts (24%).
Among non-EU countries we can see stats such as Kazakhstan with 22%, Armenia with 32%, Moldova 24% and then a whooping 40% for Albania and 49% for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This effect then further disproportionately affects rural areas and areas further from the countries capital cities (where the life standards tend to be higher and the Universities situated), with e.g. certain municipalities in Croatia losing up to 40% of their population in 5 years (as found here).
All of this is happening in spite of all the possible reasons for staying many other answers mention: language barriers, family obligations, sense of national pride or a wish to give back to the community. In addition to all of these reasons, moving has a high financial cost which is an additional barrier posed to (even highly educated) workforce from low-income countries because the difference in cost of living as well as the immigration documentation required, and a high social cost to any person. In short, the ability to be mobile is a luxury some can not afford.
The fact that anywhere between 20 and 50% of the population of some of the countries mentioned in your question and my answer now lives outside of their  country of origin, despite the high cost of mobility, is a very strong argument that this brain drain is decisive, if not complete.
Note: I've rounded the percentages from the report to the closest full percentage point.

The premise of this question appears to be that because some countries rank lower on certain statistics of income, nobody in their right mind would live in them if they could help it. The question is then expressing confusion about why reality is not quite so.
Of course, the premise is hopelessly wrong:

Money is not the only nor the most important thing for many people. Even if they would genuinely be wealthier in other countries, they may stay for other reasons that are more significant to them than wealth.
Just because a country is apparently "poor" based on some contrived statistic, such as average income, doesn't mean people are poorer. You have to adjust for purchasing power, taxes, cost of living, government services, quality of life... You are also not considering the income of the spouse, which can easily come from a non-technical field.
Immigrating is easier said than done. Presumably, for truly brilliant people it's easier, but there are still many general (eg. cumbersome immigration law) and special (eg. having a significant other that doesn't want to leave) barriers.
It's not like the best places in the "rich" countries are just letting anyone walk in. Everybody has heard they're rich, everybody wants to be there. Hiring is very competitive. Even after being hired, you are surrounded by and must now compete with other brilliant people. The natives are already very competitive, and the foreigner must deal with the additional handicap of immigration, so they are fighting a very uphill battle. Whereas as an alternative, one could stay home and be the big fish in a little pond.
Many of these so-called poor countries have also seen the Wikipedia article on "brain drain", and they offer various incentives to convince their citizens to stay. These may be in the form of rapid career advancements, more prestige, other non-monetary benefits... Stuff that won't show up in your comparison of average postdoc salaries.

I think that in sum, you are confusing aggregate differences (poor vs. rich countries) with individual situations (having a good career opportunity here vs. there). This fallacy is known as Simpson's paradox - you are seeing a trend of smart people finding it desirable to stay in "poorer" countries, while overall it seems like the "richer" countries are much more desirable. The linked page has more details.
That's not to say there aren't people that do leave. There are certainly plenty. But there are quite a few who don't, and no - they aren't crazy, not all of them anyhow - they can easily have quite sensible reasons.

Adding one more argument I haven't seen here yet...
Not everyone is good enough
As an example, Russia's education system (both on the school level and the university level) has been falling apart for three decades now with government funding drying up or getting embezzled ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. So unfortunately for Russian citizens, its becoming harder and harder to become a highly educated/competent/qualified scientist or engineer when measured by Western standards. And if you're not highly qualified, moving abroad is exceedingly difficult unless you're willing to settle down for menial labor.
Some Russian citizens take a somewhat easier path of going for a degree in a foreign university but this is likewise difficult: you need money, know-how on immigration, solid language skills, willingness to learn extra material to get on the same page as local high school graduates, etc. If they do manage to obtain a foreign diploma, they usually end up staying abroad. Otherwise their odds of successful immigration become vanishingly low unless they're the best of the best in what they do.

Do you have actual knowledge of the state of the education system in Russia, or are you speculating?

@Buffy I'm Russian and know a large number of Russians in academia

Thanks for the clarification. My data is aged a bit, but I found that Jewish emigres from Russia to be quite highly educated. I taught quite a lot of them. It was a "brain drain" of a different sort as they were pushed out for religious persecution reasons. But they still got a good education before they left.

@Buffy yes, the Soviet education system was top notch when it came to fundamental sciences and certain branches of engineering. Things started falling apart in 1991 and rapidly accelerated once professors started leaving en masse to work in the West.

@Buffy One does not need to be "highly educated" to be smart.

@Buffy: Russian-Jewish emigres typically came to the U.S. before even the USSR collapsed; given sizable antisemitism there, there was both a drive to leave and no particular desire to keep them. This is a huge part of what allowed places like Little Odessa in New York to form. Given the time frame mentioned in the answer, it so doesn’t contradict your experience (which I share).

@gnometorule I'd of course note that Russia still has tens of thousands of world class academia members but getting to that position is a lot harder for smart Russian kids than for smart American/British/Polish kids. In the Soviet Union there was a government funded system of magnet schools and exceptional universities that helped bright kids maximize their potential but its been slowly rotting away. Jews have been particularly far-achieving because they weren't allowed to hold many otherwise lucrative jobs, so their only choices were engineering or medicine if they wanted to make a living.

This answer is based on my experience in industry and working on the recruiting platform for my current company for several years.
In any case, the mere fact that someone has a certain skillset doesn't automatically mean that it's easy to secure a position in another country. For example, maybe their skills in the target language aren't very good. I'm not terribly familiar with the job market in Spain, for example, but I imagine that if you don't speak good Spanish it could make it more difficult to secure a job there (regardless of how good your other skills are). It's also often an advantage to have good English, so you could potentially be expected to effectively be trilingual (if you come from a country whose primary language is something other than English or Spanish).
Many wealthier countries have highly restrictive immigration policies as well that deliberately make it difficult and expensive for employers to hire people from overseas; between that and potentially being expected to help out with relocation costs (and obviously the cost of flying someone in from a foreign country and putting them up in a hotel and providing them with meals), many companies have a strong incentive to hire local candidates where available. Obviously the immigration issues wouldn't apply to applicants moving between E.U. countries, but it would definitely apply to cases where either the candidate or the target company is outside of the E.U. Also, the relocation cost and interview cost issue would still apply.
If a flight costs, for example, $300, two days of a hotel costs an additional $250, and meals cost $50, it costs $600 to interview someone from a different country (vs. $0 to interview someone locally). Multiply that by 5 candidates and you've added $3000 to your recruiting cost for that position. That's not even including relocation costs, which according to this source at least costs, on average, $21,000 - $24,000 (in the U.S. at least). Again, the relocation cost of hiring a local candidate is $0. That being said, hiring an out-of-country candidate could cost an extra $27,000. These are obviously very rough numbers, but you get the point: it's a significant added expense.
This is particularly the case for academic fields that have an oversupply of people that have a terminal degree; for example, in the U.S. at least there's an oversupply of people with law degrees and the number of law schools is decreasing, so the remaining law schools could presumably afford to be quite picky about who they select. This also particularly applies to areas, such as certain arts, where it's common for a master's degree to be considered a de facto terminal degree. In these fields, there's little incentive to hire from overseas unless the applicant has a truly exceptional record.

Visas.
Depending on your nationality and the country you are moving to, you may need to expend considerable effort to get a visa, or it might take a long time to get an appropriate visa. You may not be allowed a visa (even with a job offer) depending on your history (maybe you have a criminal conviction, which can include even minor convictions ). I am not suggesting everyone is a criminal, just that visa decisions can hang on whether the visa-officer likes/or dislikes the paperwork and proof you provide. There are no guarantees in getting a visa. You may comply with all rules and regulations and then find that the destination country suddenly decided they don't want people from your country anymore (See Trump's attempted immigration bans). You may also find it difficult to bring partners or children with you as well.
Of course this is not just a consideration for academics but for all people emigrating to another country (especially for people outside the EU trying to get in or anyone trying to get to the USA).

The question asks specifically about moving from an EU country to another EU country. There is no need for a visa in that situation.

Except the question includes non-EU countries like Russia, which does need a visa.

Depending on the country, previous criminal convictions would be a showstopper for any applicant, rather than just for those that need a visa. That's especially the case because universities are public institutions. In Germany, professors are public servants, and previous convictions usually mean that you can't be employed as such anymore.

Even suggesting that even a little sigificant portion of academics cannot go to the west because they are convicted criminals is just as absurd as it gets. But really, if can get the position in academia, you are most likely to get a visa. My colleague got a visa for a post-doc and for his pregnant wife in USA even when that meant that their children will be born there and become US citizens. Those countries are generally glad to accept really skilled people.

Certainly most are not criminals but many visa issues occur, for many reasons. I know someone who did not get an academic job in Canada because of a DUI.  Everyone saying visa's are easy have clearly never tried to get a visa (or if they have, are white males from a western country). Can every academic get a visa? Maybe, eventually but the hoops that get put up (especially for non westerners) can make people decide not to try (or drop out during the process).

@Rob All those countries mentioned in the question are almost completely populated by whites, they are much more white than the western countries, so being white is no privilege here. The question was not about Africa or Asia.

@Rob the biggest group of immigrants to the US in the past 20 years is Chinese and Indian citizens. Granted a lot of them are male but they're certainly not white.

@JonathanReez Both of those countries are dwarfed by Mexico, and dwarfed by many others if you consider the % of population rather than raw numbers, since China and India are the two most populous countries.

@BryanKrause in any case "non-white"/"non-Western" immigrants are now the majority in the US, even if we presume Mexico as "white".

At least European scientific system has written and unwritten rules who can enter it, who can stay and who should go away. While it is relatively easy to enter it as a PhD student, or by getting the individual reasearch grant "without any possibility to prolong", this does not mean you will be able to stay for more than a few years. You must be smart enough to move into the industry ASAP. Depending on the area of expertise this may or may not be easy to do.

This is more of a hint at an answer than an answer. "European scientific system has written and unwritten rules who can enter it," you need to explain this a bit more. Also, short term research grants are common to all early career academics. To be clear, I think what you are hinting at is an important part of the picture, but you need to explain it, not drop hints.

You just apply and do not get a position, even if you do have some articles in completely reputable, peer reviewed journals. I think this is an answer.

that's not really a written or unwritten rule. Why do you not get a position? When can you not get a position? My university has a majority of international staff, so it's clearly not always true.

There is no such thing as a "European scientific system". For instance, to mention only three countries, there are various huge differences between the academic systems of the UK, France, and Germany.

Why don't poorer countries suffer a complete brain-drain?

Reality.
There aren't enough positions to go around in the "good" countries. Also, immigration/emigration laws.
If a complete brain-drain occurred then they wouldn't have been able to even study in their home country to begin with. The brain-drain would simply be referred to as existence since the country no longer produces smart people.
People are motivated by more than salary, you know.
If you're smart and charismatic in your home country then you will quickly realize you can gain power over the masses and make your life quite comfortable. If your home-country superiority is considered average in the "good" country then why try to move exactly? It's quite noble to always try to challenge and improve yourself but stopping to take a look around can sometimes prove fruitful.

authors: Vladimir F Героям слава


text:
Completing undergrad in 4.5 years
I'm currently in my junior year, doing CS and math double major. For the next year, I have the choice of spending a semester abroad at a top 20 CS program. I have completed nearly all of my required courses, except one.
The thing is that, if I cannot take an equivalent of that course in the semester abroad, I won't be able to graduate at the end of four years, I will need an extra semester just to take that.
On the positive side, in the semester abroad, since I do not have much course requirements, I will be able to spend time doing research (the school I will be going has undergrad research program).
So, my question is, how much one extra semester (probably with only one course in it) would affect my chances in graduate school admissions (for US)?
Note: I know that the extra semester would cost me a whole year due to the admission cycles. In that semester, I can stay at my current home instution (maybe again working with a professor), because double major students are allowed/expected to complete in 5 years.

Please edit your question to include your country

Many US PhD programs require you to start in the fall. So you would probably have to delay grad school for an extra year, not just an extra semester. Have you thought about what you could do during that year where you only need to take one course?

"The thing is that, if I cannot take an equivalent of that course in the semester abroad..." Does this "if" means you're not sure if they have an equivalent or does it mean you know they don't and you're just talking about the known consequence?

They seem to have an equivalent one; but I am not sure if my current instution will accept it as equivalent and there is always the possibility of not being able to take that due to some restriction, prerequisite etc.

@xaqar, I see. In that case try to get those sorted out. If this program is affiliated with your school then your school should know. If not, gather the syllabus and petition for getting its credit acknowledged before you took in abroad. Make sure to keep all communication in writing.

Extra time you spend doing research will almost certainly do more to help your chances of admission in graduate school than taking >4 years to graduate will hurt - especially if you don't have other strong research credentials (with the caveat that admissions committees are full of people, and you might run into one person who for some reason decides that taking >4 years to graduate is the mark of a failure - it isn't really worth your time worrying about each of these possible types of people).
However, you should keep in mind that graduate admissions, particularly for PhD programs in the US, typically occur only at one time in the year, for fall semester, so you should have a plan for what you intend to do the rest of the year. If you can get hired in a university lab in your field of interest, that would be ideal for graduate admissions.
This answer is based on my experience in Biological/Biomedical Sciences in the US, and advice may vary by field and country; I also have in mind primarily PhD admissions.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Collaborative development of teaching materials and assessments
I have been teaching for 10 years. During this time I have also been developing and contributing to open source software. The collaborative nature of open source projects and scientific research has contrasted strongly with my experience of teaching. People publish their research results in journals for peer review and they post their source on GitHub and other online repositories for review and collaboration, but there seems to be a dearth of collaboration on the development of good teaching materials and assessment. Am I overlooking a community somewhere where there is good peer review of teaching materials with a focus on current pedagogy?
I would like to be able to upload the pictures, notes and so on that I have developed to explain a particular concept and have other people critique it and make it better. Further, I would like to be able to contribute a question which assesses a particular skill and have it reviewed by peers and improved. This way we could build a repository of high quality materials and spread the load of development of new questions.
My specific field is chemical engineering process dynamics and control, but I would be interested in knowing if there is such a community somewhere in any tertiary education field.

Try Software Carpentry (http://software-carpentry.org/) for computing. I've also heard about Course Source (http://www.coursesource.org/) for biology, but don't know any more about it.

I think the computing part is well covered. I'm specifically interested in resources which don't look like code, like an excellent picture or slide to explain some concept, or a good exam question or concept test.

Good startup/nonprofit idea!

Course Source appears to be exactly the kind of thing I've been looking for. Unfortunately it appears as though there aren't similar things for my field of study.

I agree with @Ian -- Software Carpentry has done a lot to promote software development in academia. I'm not familiar with Course Source...

Although it's not exactly what you are looking for (they want formal lesson plans, and you have to be a member), I think you might like http://www.iteea.org/Publications/ttt.htm

There are several possibilities to do so. However, there seems to be a lack of a single resource being really strongly used. I just came to this question because I was looking for a single service similar to the arXiv, but for teaching materials.
Wikiversity

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. We invite teachers, students, and researchers to join us in creating open educational resources and collaborative learning communities.

Source: en.wikiversity.org
Examples:

School:Electrical_engineering - looks pretty good
School:Chemistry - many resources, but it doesn't look very structured

Wikibooks
Just like Wikiversity and Wikipedia, this is a subproject of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project for collaboratively writing open-content textbooks that anyone, including you, can edit right now by clicking on the edit link that appears near the top of each Wikibooks page. Wikibooks has two sub-projects; Wikijunior which is aimed at children and the Cookbook which is our collection of recipes and culinary topics. Contributors maintain the property rights to their contributions, while the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License and the GNU Free Documentation License makes sure that the submitted version and its derivative works will always remain freely distributable and reproducible.

Examples:

General Chemistry
Physics Study Guide

GitHub
You can put your material on GitHub. I did so with a book I wrote about an introduction in Geometry and Topology (see MartinThoma/LaTeX-examples/tree/master/documents/GeoTopo). All source files as well as the compiled PDF are there for download. You can use the "Issues" to give others the possibility to give you feedback / note what you want to change. Forks make it possible that others fix typos directly by themselfes, just making a pull request instead of writing an e-mail.
arXiv
People seem to upload lecture notes to the arXiv, too:

Introduction to QCD
Introduction to Soft-Collinear Effective Theory
Introduction to parton-shower event generators

Comparision

arXiv has a good reputation in mathematics and computer science (I guess in physics, too). However, it seems not to be usable for non-physics related chemistry. However, there might be plans to extend it for chemistry (see Tweet). I would definitely use it for publishing lecture notes. arXiv guarantees that the content will be available, makes it citable and gives a relatively central point to look for new content in the field
GitHub is great for collaboration with arbitrary structures / content. However, your collaborators need to know how to use git and the lack of structure might also be a disadvantage.
Wikiversity and Wikibooks ... well. They exist for quite a while and some content seems to be pretty good, but I've never used it myself. To me, it seems like a negative compromise between a website, a Wiki-system and slides. I just think it doesn't look good. On the positive side, one has to say that using it is really easy and the materials you create are available for everybody. Especially for images (see my images for mathematics, for example) it is very nice if people add their content on Wikipedia Commons.

What I would like
A web service where people could create accounts, upload arbitrary stuff (especially PDFs, probably also LaTeX which gets automatically compiled, images).

There should be a possibility to describe the content, tag it.
With the description and the tags, it should be possible to search for it.
People should be able to make comments
There should be a StackExchange like privilege / reward system to prevent bad content / comments.
People should have the possibility to make them identifiable (e.g. post a link to their profile on their university website which gets automatically checked or receiving a code to an .edu e-mail address).

I would like to discuss ideas about such a web service. As this seems to be the wrong place for such a discussion, I've created a GitHub repository and an Issue: What do we want? #1

I really like these ideas and will keep you posted on the progress of our project as well.

It's a wonderful idea.
In the spirit of start somewhere, how about:

Publish these teaching materials (pictures, notes and so on that you have developed to explain a particular concept) on a website of your own, and open it up to moderated comments.  Invite others to contribute guest posts.  You might want to include something like this: "You are free to use these materials in your own teaching, as long as you acknowledge the source."
Borrow liberally from this and create one or more Wikipedia articles.
Consider asking your university to videotape your lectures.
Write up a more scholarly version for publication in a journal.

My initial class notes, developed as IPython notebooks are up on GitHub. I suspect that one would need a bit of a community to start getting contributions, though. I also think that you'd need more than just comments. I plan to apply for a grant to build something for the South African scene and this was part of my preliminary research to ensure that I'm not reinventing the wheel.

Sounds very exciting.

Regarding copyright: I would strongly recommend choosing a Creative Commons license, rather than developing your own, in order to ensure compatibility with other licensing.

@jakebeal - Sounds like useful advice.  Could you flesh this out?  If you need more space, perhaps you could come up with a Question, and then provide an Answer.  Thanks.

@aparente001 The goal of Creative Commons is to make it easier to share work openly and compatibly.  Their set of licenses have a simple "human interface" backed by legal code that has been "ported" to dozens of countries around the world, such that they are internationally compatible and enforceable.  They have also been widely adopted, including by Wikipedia and StackExchange.  As such, Creative Commons licenses are a very good choice for any open community project.

@jakebeal - Thank you.  I visited the link in your first comment and found they have a whole list of types to choose from.  What would you recommend for the chem eng pedagogy materials project?

@aparente001 There are basically three independent choices to make: 1) allow modification? 2) allow commercial use? 3) require people using the work to share using the same license?  For collaborative development, you clearly want to allow modification. The other two could go either way, depending on the philosophies of the site.  Personally, I would go with CC-BY to be the least restrictive, but others might choose differently (e.g., this site enforces ShareAlike).

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


text:
Copy text from co-authored paper into thesis
I am the third author in a journal paper that is accepted but not published. I am wondering if it is acceptable to copy text from the paper to my master's thesis.
I have read from many places that it is common to take texts from papers that I wrote to form my thesis. However, in my case, after many rounds of editing, my texts in that journal paper were intertwined with texts from the other authors and there's no easy way to separate a block of text that is exclusively written by me. In this case, how do I reuse texts from such paper.

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


text:
Help me find the ISSN number of the journal or book and its publisher URL
I have been trying locate an article/Journal from one of the citations. I am in need of the article to complete my literature search for project. Help me locate ISSN number of the book or Journal and its online URL cited as below attached is the resource from where took the citation .
"Anatkov A, Gekova K. The use of large intravenous doses of iron in the treatment of iron deficiency anaemia. Problems of Haematology and Blood Transfusions in Medicine andPhysioculture 1970; 295-8."

That's the sort of work your university librarians are actually very good at!

I think it's Russian, Problemy Gematologii i Perelivaniya Krovi. Looks like it morphed into Gematologiia i Transfuziologiia. See https://www.safetylit.org/week/journalpage.php?jid=11123

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


text:
Is there a limit to the number of times a journal editor will send my paper for review if referees keep declining?
I submitted a paper to Physical Review D, an APS journal, approximately a month ago. So far, the editor has forwarded my paper to six referees for review, all of whom have declined. I suspect this may be due to the summer break. My paper is a concise six pages long and I find it to be interesting. I am eager to learn about the next steps in this process. Is there a limit to the number of times the editor will send my paper to referees for review?

Editor here. There's a point where if everyone you ask declines to review the paper, you come to conclude that one of two possibilities must be the case: (i) the people you asked looked at the paper and thought it was a waste of their time, (ii) the people you asked had no idea of the topic and did not think they are qualified. More often than not, it's (ii). The conclusion you draw as an editor is that if you, too, don't know the area well enough to find the right people, then the paper is not within the scope of the journal: If you don't know the area, and the people you ask to review the paper don't know the area, then the area is not well represented by who (you think) the readership of the journal is. So you decline the paper as "out of scope".
For me, at six people declining, I would already give up on the paper unless the majority of these people wrote to me with good reasons for declining, and perhaps nominating others.

Comparing your answer with the other one, I guess there may be a difference between math and physics.

@Kimball Possibly. Though in reality, I suspect that after 6 refusals to review, editors in other disciplines also give up. I do not believe that people's willingness to review a paper in their field is noticeably different between fields -- in parts because I've never heard anyone make such a claim.

Could there be a difference in terms of how many decline due to not "having time to provide a timely report"?

From my experience as editor, six reviewers declining to review is by no means a large number. The problem is exaggerated if the journals requires two reviews (I don't know about the practice at Phys Rev D). Usually, there is no upper limit, but if they cannot find reviewers even after a long time (6-12 months), the editor may decide to give up and decline the paper on the basis that they cannot find reviewers.
If you are worried about a delay to publication, you could post it on the arXiv now.

"If you are worried about a delay to publication, you could post it on the arXiv now (unless you're not sure it will pass peer review)." If you are not confident enough in a paper to go to on the arxiv, you should not send it for peer review. What you are suggesting here is a rather unethical waste of reviewer/editor time.

(Note that if the paper is not on arxiv, this can be one reason for potential reviewers declining the review.)

@TimRias You can see the full paper in APS' referee portal before accepting to review, so declining just because it isn't on arXiv (yet) would be a bit weird and overreaching, IMO.

@Anyon There is actually a number of good reasons for doing so. One of them being the apparent lack of faith that authors have in their paper.

Thanks for the answer and comments. PRD requires one review for our paper. If my paper is not reviewed by PRD after being published on arXiv, I may need to consider submitting it to another journal. However, if the next reviewer sees that the paper has been on arXiv for an extended period of time (e.g. 1 or 2 months), they may assume that there are unresolved issues with the paper that have prevented it from being accepted in previous reviews. Hence I prefer not to publish my work on arXiv unless being accepted.

No reasonable person will decline to review a paper just because it is not posted as a preprint on arXiv. There is no formal or informal requirement that people post their papers there. Why would a reviewer feel like such a requirement should be enforced?

@TimRias I agree with your first comment and have removed the offending "(unless you're not sure it will pass peer review)".  However, I disagree with your second comment.

@WolfgangBangerth Many reasonable people (that value their time) do.

@TimRias This makes no sense to me. What reason would they have? Why would a reviewer insist on a paper being posted to a preprint server? Posting a preprint is not an indication of quality or any other property of the paper a reviewer may be interested in. I don't buy your argument that posting a paper on a preprint server is a statement by the authors that they have faith in the correctness or importance of the paper.

@WolfgangBangerth I think the key element you are missing is that in the subject areas that PRD serves, arXiv is the defacto primary way that research is disseminated to peers. So, the question to ask is what reasons can authors have to delay disseminating their results? None of the answers to that question bode well for the quality of the manuscript. There are various practical reasons as well, but this is not the place to discuss them.

@TimRias I posted a separate question about these reasons https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/212321/17254 Hope to see your perspective fleshed out more in the form of answers there.


text:
What is a note article?
I submitted a paper to Classical and Quantum Gravity journal. One referee said it is good but the other one posed some questions. After answering, the referee has said:
Unfortunately, I will not be able to recommend this manuscript for publication.  However, I do still find the analysis of Section 3 interesting, so perhaps with some restructuring that section alone could be published as a note.
I do not understand his/her meaning by “publishing as a note”.
It is worth noting that I am a PhD student required of having a paper.
Moreover, the status of my manuscript is now “minor revisions required”!
Following is the editor’s note:
As an editor of CQG, I was asked to consider whether the author(s) have satisfactorily responded to the requested revisions by the referees. I do not believe that the authors have satisfactorily responded to Referee 1's concerns.

Wait, if the editor in charge says "Minor revisions", then it doesn't matter what the reviewer says! If you're confused, ask the editor!

Look at the Instructions for Authors for the journal. Many journals have different formats for different submissions. There is no standard, some will only have one type. I would expect something called a "Note" to be shorter in format than other publications in that journal.
Whether a "Note" counts as a "paper" for whatever requirements your institution has for PhD students is not any business of the journal. It's not their decision or responsibility at all, that's up to your institution and an issue you have to raise with them and them alone.
Your next steps will be to

Learn what a Note is; start at the journal website.

Once you know what a Note is, decide if you might want to go that route. This might include consulting with your institution to find out if this "counts" for you.

If your preference is not to publish as a note, you should try to better satisfy Reviewer 1 or ask the editor for clarification on what they think it would take to accept your manuscript, because it's a bit unclear if they are both giving you "minor revisions" which suggests minor changes that are easily addressed and also saying you have not responded sufficiently to Reviewer 1's concerns.

If you're fine publishing as a Note, you should ask the editor if they agree with the reviewer and would consider Section 3 as a Note.

If you can't get your full paper accepted by this journal you may need to withdraw and resubmit it elsewhere.


text:
What to do with a wide text in appendix of a paper
I am writing a paper and want to include my Mathematica commands in an appendix. By exporting my commands as a .tex file and including it in my paper’s tex file, I end at a text too wide to be fitted to the resulting pdf (I receive a huge horizontal overfull warning). I prefer not to change anything by hand. What is the best (usual) solution?

Consider putting it in the supplementary material that can be downloaded. Perhaps even as a native Mathematica file. See journal instructions.

Thanks Jon. That is also a good choice. But actually I prefer to include it in an appendix.

LaTeX lets you extend the margins.

The right place for questions about TeX is https://tex.stackexchange.com/

Agree, this is better suited for TeX.SE. We could migrate it, but I'm not sure this meets their quality standards, as it is not described in enough detail to be reproducible. Consider adding a minimal working example, reviewing their guidelines and then making a new post over there.

I am not sure about my information, but I, for a very long time, believe that an appendix of a paper can be formatted in the landscape mode. Or is this not available in all places?

While it does involve changing your code by hand, in similar situations I've edited my code to break lines with the line continuation character before a new line, which tells the interpreter to keep reading the next line as if it were a continuation of the previous. That way, you will have code that executes as desired if copied to input, and also prettyprints as needed.
In Mathematica, if I remember right, the line continuation character is \, so something like
expr =
  Function[x, x^2 + \
  Sin[x] + Log[x]];


text:
Secondary citation with APA 7th - Does one have to adpot the quotation style?
Let's say an author A doesn't use APA 7th and quotes an author B. I cannot access author B's publication and therefore use a secondary quote. Do I then need to adpot the quotation style of author A for the bold part in this example? (e.g. this is relevant when Author B consist of 4 authors, making an "et al." necessary - what if Author A though doesn't use apa and therefore writes down all 4 names?):

Text Text Text (Author B, Year B, p. 2 as cited in Author A, Year
A, p. 1)

Thank you!

No. You are not quoting A's citation of B. You can cite B in your APA 7th way with "et al."
Why can you not access B's publication? Have you tried a university library? It would be better to look at it yourself.

The publication unfortunately isn't available anymore and I couldn't find anything equivalent.


text:
How to cite a book with no editor but different authors for every chapter?
I want to cite from this book. It has explicitly marked different authors for the chapters, but there are no editors given on the front pages. Is this then regarded as a monography rather than a miscellany/anthology or do I use all authors as editors?

I think you cite the particular chapters you refer to, each with its authors.

So I use the authors as editors of the book?

@manuel459 The front matter doesn't make any mention of an editor, so it seems more appropriate to consider them all as authors of the book.

I would say something like

Joos, Erich,  title of appropriate chapter ,  in
Decoherence and the Appearance of a Classical World in Quantum Theory , Springer, etc,  Chapter zz   pp. xx-yy.

in whatever format best matches the bibliography style of the journal.

I've used this format for a chapter in a book with no known editors. If I wanted to cite the whole book rather than a particular chapter, I'd just delete the part "Joos ... chapter, in" from Ethan's example.

@Ethan Bolker gives the right answer, and the only thing that one should add is to remind you of the purpose of a citation: It isn't an elaborate exercise in testing whether you can follow a specific syntax (this is for all of you APA folks out there! :-) ), but it is a way to help your readers find related literature. If you provide the citation in a way that makes it easy for readers to find what you are pointing to, then you've succeeded, and the example by Ethan Bolker achieves this.


text:
Navigating the Thorny Issue of Receiving Job Offers While in a PhD Program
Question
I'm wondering about people's experiences with navigating job offers while pursuing a Ph.D. How did you make the decision to stay or leave? If you left, how did you break the news? Were you satisfied with the decision you made?
Context
I'm currently in an internship, which is required as part of my program. The internship is outside of academia. I've been doing great work there, and there's already been some insinuation from management at the internship that they'd like to keep me around. Honestly, I really like the work I am doing at the internship.
In regards to the work:

I am working on projects where I can showcase my strengths.
I am working at a level where I can see lots of potential for professional growth, and I am in the midst of experiencing that growth.
The work I am doing is boosting the marketability of my resume by orders of magnitude above and beyond what I have, could or would get from my program.
I've been able to take on a leadership role with high level projects and contribute in valuable ways.
I think the work I am doing is meaningful and has the potential to make a difference in the world. It also has the potential to end up as a brief that sits on someone's desk, but potential exists nonetheless.

In regards to the job/employer:

I'm surrounded by very smart people. I'm quite sure that management thinks of me as an A-Team caliber employee, but I know that there is a lot to learn from the people I am surrounded by at the internship. Honestly, I have not felt this way in my program.
There is a great work life balance. Full time salaried employees can work no more than 39.5 hours a week. Anything above that is considered overtime, and employees are compensated appropriately.
The benefits for full-time employees are better than what many people in my field will likely have when they are employed.
Compensation is slightly above average, but stable with guaranteed incremental raises.
There's modest potential for career advancement. If I did go to work for them, how much I could advance would likely be due to the level they hired me at. Honestly, at the higher levels (i.e., the level of my current boss), there's really not a huge difference in pay as you move to other levels in the company.
MA/MS with experience are not compensated less than those with a PhD.

Bottom line: It is a place I could see myself putting in a decade for sure. I'd leave the job after that decade in a good position to work in a variety of other contexts.
Tension
I really don't want to piss anyone off too bad if I get an offer at this job and leave. It's never been my intention to stay in academia or even in the research firm circuit, which is still kind of academia. I've always been very clear and direct with my advisor about that point. My advisor has been fine with that, although very pointed in telling me that she/he has never worked outside of academia and all he/she really knows how to do is prepare me to be an academic... so if I want something additional from my experience in grad school I need to figure it out myself. My advisor has largely been supportive of allowing me to find my own path in graduate school, and I've been successful at finding that path and not too much wandering along the way. So, really it's a question of whether or not I owe it to my advisor to stay and forgo being paid an actual salary that I can live on, passing on a potentially great job opportunity, etc. A part of me says yes, but I'm wondering if the more mature answer is no. Everything I wanted in a job appears to be right in front of me. Would you take it?

The obvious response is: "You don't yet have an offer." The company/agency is currently recalibrating budgets. If they do have the money and I insinuate I want to stay then they'd make it happen. They've done this with other talented interns in the past.

How far into it and how away is your PhD?

I ended up taking a job while finishing in my last year. Made for some fun times dissertation, but not impossible. Took the job exactly a year for defending.

As an advisor, I want students to be up front about what their long term goals are. If a student is not interested in an academic career, I'll take that into account when I decide to work with them. Part of that calculus is the concern that the student might jump ship part way through.
It sounds like you've been up front and honest about your intentions with your advisor at every step of the way. Your advisor will probably be disappointed, but they will not likely be surprised. I don't think you owe it to them to stay and that seems like a bad reason to stay doing something other than what you want to do with your life. Your own time is simply too valuable and your advisor should respect that.

You lay out such clear preferences for taking the industry job that there seems to be little doubt that you should try to pursue this option.  If you didn't want to stay in academia anyway, why wouldn't you try to take the kind of job that you wanted to get after getting your degree?
As a PhD advisor, I find the idea that a student might "owe me" enough to make it plausible to pass on a lucrative, stimulating career of the sort that they always wanted completely crazy.  People have a tough time deciding whether they owe their spouse, their parents or their children that much.  I don't see how you could possibly have accrued this much indebtedness to your thesis advisor.  The more indebted you feel, the more help you can provide in ensuring a smooth transition and that he has someone else to take over your responsibilities.  That's really about it.  Also, you really do well in industry, maybe your contact with your former advisor will turn out to be advantageous in a way that your work for him was not.  So your relationship with your advisor and your department might not even suffer at all in the long run.
The one warning I would give is that things can move much faster in the business world than academia.  As you write, you certainly want to get an offer before you burn any bridges on the academic side.  Even if you do, I would try to angle for taking a semester or a year off, or to leave the door to that particular academic program partially open.  You don't say how long you've been doing your internship, but I assume less than a year.  It is plausible to me that they think you're doing fantastically now and are willing to offer you a job...but that offer would be to try you out and maybe after a few months to reevaluate your future in the firm.  True career security in the business world is hard to find.
But you really sound like you are finding your joy outside of academia.  Above subtleties aside: when that happens, you should leave academia.  You can do it: it's your life, not ours.


text:
Pre-print servers: Authors using wrong parametrisation to avoid reproducibility before publishing?
I am physicist and my research is on Physical/Computational Biology. As most of my colleagues, I am used to visit ArXiv daily to check new articles on my field. Some weeks a go I found a really interesting article with a new method that I would like to implement together with a model I am working with.
At first glance I noted that the parameters used in the article were something strange, but I thought it could be due to the different spatial discretisation employed. However, I changed all my parameters to fit with their method and concluded that they are completely non-sense. Even the most simple case proposed in the article is impossible to achieve using their parametrisation (I was able to reproduce using another set of parameters).
My question is: Have you faced something similar with papers in pre-print servers? Is this something people are used to do in order to avoid other researchers to reproduce their work and advance before the article is published in a journal?

I don't work extensively with pre-print servers, but I would frown on anyone who writes a purposedly misleading paper using such an excuse, in particular because in all fields that I am aware, arXiV does guarantee originality. I would first assume that the mistake is due to a typo. This kind of error would be very easy to uncover when attempting to reproduce a paper, which is exactly what you did. I would inform the authors about their typo.

@FBolst I assure you, it was not a typo. The whole set of parameters is wrong. I agree with you that if they did that, it is very strange because of the guarantee of originality given by ArXiv. However if they are that paranoid they should not put their work in a preprint server at all.

I would not assume that this was intentionally done to mislead other researchers. If they wanted to keep their paper confidential, they would not upload it to ArXiv with incorrect parameters. As you have already shown, people are able to find a valid set of parameters by theirselves.
Please consider also the following possible reasons:

The wrong parameters were accidentally put into the paper. One may have forgotten to update the parameters in the paper and left in some placeholders.
You overlooked some important fact, e.g., scaling of parameters. So the error might also be on your side or the corresponding section of the paper is difficult to understand.
The parameters might only work under certain conditions, thus, the authors might be at error.

However, I would recommend to contact the authors using a short and friendly email. You should not assume an error on their side from the beginning as this might come across as rude. You may rather formulate this as a question, e.g., whether they have an idea why you are not able to reproduce the results.
You might either be able to see your own error or help the authors with improving their paper.

I like the placeholder theory. It's not a scaling problem, this was my first thought and I tested it. I would never accuse someone, I was just puzzled. I won't contact the authors because I've already invested time parametrising the model myself and the authors won't need my feedback, since the paper will pass through peer-review.

I think it'd be good to contact the authors anyway. Best case scenario the authors might even be able to correct things before the paper goes out for review. That's assuming there is a mistake - otherwise you might learn something useful for your own research. Worst case scenario if you don't contact them is that neither reviewers or authors spot the issue at all. Plus it's always nice to hear from people interested in one's preprint.

I agree with Anyon. Unfortunately, I have seen several papers with obvious errors that were not detected in peer review. Most reviewers do not have the time and ability to rerun all of the experiments, thus, I highly doubt that incorrect paramters will be noticed at all.


text:
Is a recommendation letter from my PhD advisor unethical?
After finishing my Ph.D, I asked my advisor to provide me a recommendation letter for a possible future application, and they replied: "according to my standards it is unethical to provide recommendation to my collaborators."
Does that mean they refused to give it to me, or is it truly not useful?

Did you mean a letter to be placed in your possession or one they might send in the future?

Only your advisor can clarify what they mean.

In my possession

In my experience, recommendation letters are given to the person doing the hiring/admitting/etc directly, not to the applicant. Are you sure that isn't what your advisor is referring to: giving you the recommendation letter directly, versus writing a letter on your behalf to give to someone else?

If you want useful answers to this question I think you need to edit it to clarify exactly what the situation is. Someone is misunderstanding something here.

Please do clarify your situation, in line with comments and answer(s). That is, for one thing, being unwilling to give support to one's PhD students would be bizarre. On another hand, being unwilling to hand to a student the letter written supporting them would be absolutely typical in the U.S., for example. What, exactly, is happening with you? Also, the specific mention of "not writing letters for collaborators" is very hard to understand. Context?

I'll echo a comment of Brian Krause about how letters are sent to potential employers (etc.) rather than being given directly to former students. I hope you've misunderstood something.
Many places will almost require a letter from your thesis advisor, collaborator or not. Many posts here talk about the difficulty of getting by without such a letter.
My opposite view would be that it is unethical for them to deny you a letter if your performance was good. I hope you can work this out.
It would be appropriate to ask them to have a letter prepared so that, over time, they don't forget the needed details and can send a good letter. Losing track or losing contact can be a problem.
If the department has adequate clerical staff, a professor might place a letter with them to be sent at their request when you ask the professor to have it sent. The request would come from you to the professor and then to the department. Sometimes this is possible.


text:
What does renunciation of scholarship mean?
I want to know what renunciation of scholarship mean? Is it the same as withdrawing from a scholarship program? Which one is better to quit a scholarship?
Does renunciation of scholarship form enables a person to re apply to a scholarship again?

It depends on context. It could be anything from a person withdrawing from the scolarly community/profession, to a funding body declaring they will not offer a scholarship (funding) this year/again, to a person declining scholarship funding after previously accepting it (which they might do for any number of reasons -- from withdrawing from university, to (scandalously) being shown to not have been eligible in the first place, to protesting the actions of the funding body).

What's the context? Who uses the expression in a situation that is relevant to you personally?

It will depend upon the specific rules of the funding agency and at what point you are renouncing the scholarship.
For example, I renounced a Ph.D grant from one agency before starting any further commitment because at the time of the results I already had received funding from another agency. In this case there was no drawback.
In Portugal you are able to renounce a Ph.D grant at latest 1 year after the start without penalties. However, after the first year if you renounce the grant and are not intending to finish the Ph.D the funding agency will demand the reimbursement of their investment on you.
For a more specific answer you should look at the rules of the particular scholarship that you have interest.


text:
Coauthor used large part from common paper almost verbatim in another paper
Some time ago I was approached by a fellow researcher that had an idea on an earlier work of mine. We started a collaboration and as a result we submitted a manuscript in a prestigious journal. Recently, I stumbled on a publication of my coauthor in which he had used almost verbatim a large part of our common submission (a page long). These parts include results which were entirely mine. I am really disappointed and I am not sure how to proceed with this.

Do you have any record that the results were yours first - lab books, etc?

Contact the editor? Or contact the collaborator? Or both... Have you already published that material in any form?

@arboviral We worked on the manuscript through dropbox. I think there is a history of versions in there wherein my edited versions might appear.

The submitted manuscript is proof enough that you also have worked on the results he published alone. You have authorship rights over all the content of the manuscript, do not worry searching for proofs that you have worked on those particular lines.
You should contact your collaborator and ask for a retraction of the article. If he disagree with that, you should contact the editor and send proofs that the results were submitted before in another journal, which breaks one of the rules your collaborator accepted when submitting to this journal: "The manuscript/results shall not be/were not submitted anywhere else.".
This is very serious because if the editor handling your manuscript find the other publication with the same results he will reject the manuscript and, worse, your co-author could be accused of self-plagiarism.

I do not think that I can be accused for self-plagiarism since the date of submission of the published paper is several months later than our joint submission. How could I know this? I should also state that his results could stand independently if he only referenced our joint work and omitted the related proofs.

You are right. You could not be accused of self-plagiarism, but your coauthor could. You can state that of course and you should send to the editor which parts of the manuscript are from your joint work. However, probably there will be no way to save your collaborator publication, because it was accepted for publication as it was. If a large part of the manuscript and results changed, the only solution is retracting the  whole paper and submitting again for peer review. But if I  was the editor I would not accept manuscripts from your collaborator anymore due to ethical misbehaviour.

It seems rather serious.  You could be be involved in plagiarism via self plagiarism.  Just to give you the idea, in reality it will be clear that the other one did self plagiarism and submitted the same (in part) twice.  Fix it!

Not to say that of course the other stole your work.


text:
How to request author's name correction in a published paper?
I published in the journal "The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology (2019) 105:2857–2867," as "Amir Hussain". However, my name should be corrected to "Aamir Hussain."
I would appreciate the right direction to request this correction to the journal. For instance, who should I contact?
The reason why I didn't notice before, is because I was working in industry and had no plans to come into academia.

Has this correction been published or are you hoping that it will be? Are you asking what actions you can take?

I don’t see a question here.

We can provide advice and answer questions if you provide more information. Otherwise this is likely to be closed.

@TheDoctor, I think you made assumptions in your edit that may not be warranted.

@Buffy which assumptions?

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10700/how-to-edit-name-on-existing-publications-after-a-name-change

@TheDoctor, the OP hasn't asked how to edit, nor indicated the reason for this post. Let them speak for themself. Your edit might be fine for a comment.

This is subject to interpretation. For me the question could be improved but his intent was clear, especially with the reference where you can check that "Amir" is the name used in the publication - so I don't think my edit carried much assumption. But I'll refrain from editing posts from now before asking.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

Thank you so much for answering the question, it is already published @Buffy

Contact the journal and ask. The journal website shows the following info:
Production-related enquiries
Queries about accepted manuscripts in production or post-publication corrections should be sent to Igan Dagoy (igan.dagoy@springernature.com).


text:
Is it ok that I am a first author on my predecessor paper?
My predecessor did all the experiments and included them in his thesis but he didn't have the complete analysis done and there were some mistakes in his analysis. Now that the paper is ready after I spent multiple months working on it and correcting the analysis, my advisor put me as a first author. I feel bad for my predecessor because I know he really worked hard on it.
So is this common thing and accepted in the academic community? Am I overthinking this?

What is your predecessor now doing? There’s a difference depending on if they’re still in academia, or have taken an industry position.

@RLH Why? Shouldn't the contribution be the only factor? Or at least it should be about the work of the person, not the person themself.

@Mihail: In this situation, we’ve got two authors with a reasonable claim to first authorship, based on the work they’ve done. If the original author is still in academia, they may still have some “ownership interest” in the work; if they’ve gone to an industry position, they’ve most likely abandoned this interest, and the question of who gets first-authorship becomes much less tricky.

What they currently are doing should not influence their claim to authorship.

There seems to be enough evidence here that your advisor is making the right decision. Perhaps not obviously so, but enough ambiguity about primary authorship that it could well be right.
This might be especially true if the original idea about the research came from the advisor.
You could talk to the advisor about their reasoning and your doubts, of course.

Although I completely understand your position in relation to your advisor, it seems contrary to generally accepted ethical behavior that your advisor should determine the order of authorship. Authorship order would usually be a matter for a mutually agreed decision among all those who contributed to a paper. Many journals make that idea pretty clear in their submission guidelines. My institution used to make it mandatory in their own guidelines for staff and students.
It also seems a bit strange that neither your supervisor nor you has actually talked to your predecessor about the issue. Perhaps you might consider raising that possibility with your advisor.
There are numerous places on the web that offer guidance about authorship and authorship order (some contradicting others), but here is one from the American Psychological Association.

In many experimental fields, the generally accepted ethical behavior is that the manuscript comes out of the lab group, which is headed by the lead PI who retains corresponding authorship. The advisor directs the students and gets final say on what the publications coming out of that lab group look like.

This is not uncommon - and in the best case scenario your supervisor will have the experience and expertise to estimate if you "deserve" first authorship. Often, one of the things to be considered is not necessarily how much work was put in overall, but how much of that work actually ends up in the final manuscript/paper and who wrote the first full draft of the manuscript.
Of course this isn't black and white, and this is ideally something that is discussed openly between all authors. Everyone decides on authorship differently, although there are some best practices and I find that I keep refining how I do this as well, trying to adhere to those best practices (using some rational measurements where possible).
First of all, did you ask your supervisor how they arrived at this conclusion? What were their considerations? Is the former student still on the paper? You could graciously offer to share authorship with the former student? This all depends on your exact situation. Maybe your supervisor has some arguments/things to consider that you are not aware of?
Depending on the answer you get from your supervisor (or better yet, in preparation), there are a couple of things you can do (and this will also be field dependent):

Read up on authorship rules and when you qualify for authorship to begin with (for example, an author needs to be able and willing to take responsibility for the paper and especially the parts they contributed to - and at least one author (main, either first and/or senior author) needs to be responsible for the work as a whole, for years to come. The grey area here is often encountered with students or technicians, where some labs or universities/institutions try to give them authorship and others are very strict because technical/practical execution of the work may in and by itself not be considered to be sufficient.

Try to use the Credit system (https://credit.niso.org) to score the different contributions and roles. Who came up with the idea? Who did the actual work (experimentation/coding/analysis)? Who did the actual writing and editing? Try to put percentages to this if the tasks were not allocated to one individual.

Does the manuscript contain an author contribution section? You can write this too based on the Credit system, or use other definitions (look in papers in your field/area to see how this is typically done).

Your point about work in the final product is important. Significant efforts that do not make it into the final paper for whatever reason just don't really count. I took on a collaborator once to do data analysis and their mistakes were so grave and widespread it was decided they shouldn't remain an author at all since their work needed to be completely replaced by work done by someone else.
Besides this, worth taking into account that not all work is created equal in terms of intellectual contribution.

Raise the possibility with your advisor to share first authorship / equal contribution. With today's large scale studies often integrating numerous different experimental approaches and experiments, this is commonplace. Nearly all journals allow it.


text:
How to find research internships in Europe?
I am a mathematics graduate student, and I am searching for a (preferably paid) research internship that could last to 6 months in the field of probability theory. I have searched for opportunities in Europe, mainly universities (Oxford, Cambridge, ETH,...) but I am finding it a bit hard to find a long internship (the most popular ones are summer internships for undergraduate students). Also, I did not find any independent research centers that explicitly work in this field.
Therefore, I am asking for help in this matter. I do not know if it is possible to contact professors and ask them to organize internships (especially in the UK) and how I would approach this matter (do I just send an email asking to do an internship, or should I specify my professional project?).

Your question is ok as long as you ask "how to". Asking to find you a program would be off topic. But focusing only on the very top institutions isn't likely to be fruitful for many reasons.

Just guessing here, but I'd think that (paid, especially) internships are more frequent and available in applied, rather than pure areas of math. Is that relevant to you?

@Buffy Thanks for the comment. I have only mentioned institutions on my mind, which (as expected) were top institutions, but are not the only options. Regarding the internship in applied mathematics, that would also suit me, especially that I have previous research internship in applied mathematics in industry. However,  I am finding it bit hard to find industry internships that contain a sufficient amount of usage of probability theory. I am insisting on this because I want to apply to a master's degree in probability theory and I would like to strengthen my application. Thanks for the help.

Probability theory is a research domain, I think. There aren't many (if any) companies left with budgets that allow spending on pure-math research; IBM Research and Bell Labs were the only two I knew of that could look at things that basic and hope they would eventually produce enough profit or prestige to justify that investment.

It's hard to prove a negative, but I don't think internship like this exists, in particular not in the UK. In Mathematics an intern has hardly any chance to make a net contribution to a research project (mentoring them takes more effort than whatever research contribution one could reasonably expect from an intern). The few internship-like opportunities will typically be available only to local students, as the rationale is to improve the student experience.
For people keen to get some research experience who are either unwilling to commit to a PhD, or maybe not yet qualified for a PhD, the intended route in the UK is to do a research master's degree (MRes, or MSc by Research). These are typically 1-year degrees focused primarily on research, with maybe a small taught component. There are some funded scholarships for such degrees, but I believe the majority of the students on those programmes are self-funded. I wouldn't be surprised if most scholarships for MSc by Research degrees are restricted to UK students.
Regarding emailing UK academics directly:
What is behind the "Indian Undergrad Research Experience"-spam?

This was a useful clarification. I did not know exactly how the "internship" stuff work in the UK. It turned out to be different from other European countries. I do not think I will follow a research master in the UK, as right now I am only looking for research experience, and after that I will continue my studies in my school in France. Thanks.


text:
Joint submission in two Physical Review journals: can I use the same plots?
I am submitting two papers to two journals from the Physical Review journals family; this is a joint submission. I am going to use the same plots in these papers. Am I right that it would not cause any problem with copyright as the publisher is the same?

I think you are just better off asking the publisher/editor/whoever.

As Allure proved, this question is answerable based on the guidelines provided by the journal. Therefore, it should not be closed in my opinion.

@TheDoctor While that may be true, if it depends on the journal(s), we don't want this same question for every pair of journals out there.

@AzorAhai-him- The answer covers not only two journals, but it is general to Physical Review journals, which is the most important publishing venue in Physics. For me it sounds like broad enough, if it was general it wouldn't be possible to answer. And this situation is probably more common in these journals,

@TheDoctor So you'd be ok with having one of these questions for the most important venue in every field? Here, I'd be OK with the question being generalized and the answer changed to "In physics ..." and then we can add answers for other fields. There are fields besides physics.

Yes, I would. :)

@TheDoctor Is "Physical Review" the name of the publisher or what?

@AzorAhai-him- Physical Review Journals is an umbrella that encompasses 20 journals published by the American Physical Society.

It should be fine copyright-wise, but you still want the letter and the full article to be be distinct from each other. As stated in the Publishing Guidelines

In all cases, the longer article should present considerably more (or different) information than contained in the abbreviated publication, and it should lead to a substantially improved understanding of the subject. Some duplication of figures, tables, and text material will often be appropriate, but should be limited and must be properly referenced.)

If you're "using the same plots" in both publications, as opposed to re-using some of the plots, you may want to check with the publisher that what you're doing is still appropriate. As a side note, I'm not sure how enforced the "properly referenced" part is. For example, there seems to be an overlap between some of the panels in this PRL and ones in this PRD but it does not seem to be explicitly mentioned, which agrees with what I've seen in PRL-PRB joint submissions.

If this figure is some general illustration that does not show your original data but rather illustrates the introduction (e.g. showing schematic of your experiment or previously published results), I see no problem at all. However, if it illustrates your original results, I would be a bit more careful. If it's a joint publication, it should be possible to cite your PRL paper in the PRD paper as the source of the figure ("reproduced from Ref. X"). Joint submissions are typically reviewed by the same referees, and if I got two papers for review with the same figure appearing in the results section, I would probably consider it as an attempt of a duplicate publication. At least, this thought would cross my mind and I would need to look for arguments in favor or against it. However, if you cite the second paper as the origin of that figure, this concern would be resolved immediately.