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Undergraduate not doing homework (case method)
I've recently started teaching undergraduate students using the case method (management subjects). However, I'm finding that most of the students simply don't do the reading at home. Even though I (so far) have used only short cases (just a few pages), they still just don't do the work.
For those unfamiliar with the case method, if the students do not do the reading before coming to class, there is little to discuss in class. In the end, I feel like the class time is wasted.
Because of the design of the course, I actually don't have the flexibility to have this affect their grade other than to simply fail them. I cannot, for example, reduce their grade by 10%.
If anyone uses the case method with undergraduate students, I'd love to know how you get students to actually do the reading / thinking work required before they get to class.

Could you clarify I actually don't have the flexibility to have this affect their grade? Did you mean the grade is either pass or fail?

Yes, it is pass/fail.

Are there going to be exams?

@Raphael No, but there are assignments on which they will be assessed. However, the assessment for the module is strictly pass/fail.

@earthling Make the assignments so hard resp. the assessments so strict that those who don't prepare (probably) fail. Demand some percentage of assignments points for passing the course.

@Raphael It's no problem, I can fail them simply for not doing the homework, however, then I will end up failing 80% of the class and I'd like to see if there is some way to avoid that.

If they see every week how close they are from failing, chances are they will prepare better (i.e. do the homework, if the assignments are designed properly). The vague thread of "I'll might fail you in the end!" does not work as well. Of course, that's extrinsic motivation.

Is the reading material interesting? When I was an undergrad I skipped over any reading material that was boring simply because it ended up wasting more of my time than it was worth. Is the reading material in a digital format so that students can read it on their Tablets/Phones/computers/etc? The less convenient it is to do the assigned reading, the less likely students will actually do it.

Have you actually talked to them about it?  I am in one class (graduate level class) where the students were not doing the reading.  The professor indicated he was very disappointed in the class.  Most students felt bad enough that now they are doing the reading and participating in discussions.

@James Actually, I have spoken with them about it but I just get silence and looks of shame. They are quite shy but embarrassment doesn't seem to phase them. Strange to me since they are all Asian (in their home country). The strong students do the work but the weak students do not. The weak students are unwilling (or unable, but I believe unwilling) to answer the question about why they don't do the work.

If students can pass the course without doing the reading, only the self-motivated will read.

@G.Smith Often there is not a lot one can do does not imply there is nothing you can do. The issue may be tough to deal with. As a prof, the OP needs to find a way to motivate his students. If I tell you there is not a lot one can do to solve a problem in topology, do you just give up as a mathematician? (I read your profile).

@G.Smith You probably misunderstood my point. IMO, motivating undergrad students is part of Prof's job. Grad students should be self-motivated, no arguement there. There are courses undergrads need to take to fulfill the requirements. The profs need to motivate them to learn more. I understand your point. I don't disagree. Just in the OP's case, we need to help him to do a better job. That's all.

@G.Smith To be clear, it is not the teaching undergrads that's new. It is teaching them using the case method which is new.

I have some experience with lab practice in physics and chemistry, where we routinely ask students to read up on the work planned and do some preliminary calculations before they can come to the lab, in order to maximize their use of actual lab equipment. It's sometimes hard to motivate students for things that should be done in advance, but there are ways you can improve their involvement:

Make sure that the amount of material is compatible with the time they have to study it, and the demands on their time by other courses. If you're going to require something of them, it should be within reasonable limits. Also, make sure you convey that point to them: I have, on a few occasions, had to reschedule things to give them more time, because the material was very heavy and taking more of their time than I had assumed, or because they just had many other things to do (e.g., a full week of exams).
Be crystal clear that reading the material before classroom is actually one of the requirements of the class, and that it is entirely necessary to actually pass the class.
If you want further motivation, introduce some sort of evaluation of their reading at the beginning of the lecture: get two or three students to come up, and argue the case (or whatever it is you do in those lectures) before the others. Then, give them a frank assessment of how they fared, including “you failed miserably because you didn't do your homework”. Even if that evaluation doesn't count for the final passing/failing grade, it will motivate them and might introduce some friendly competition.
If some of them still don't do a thing, fail them. After all, you had told them (and more than once) that reading the material is a requirement for passing.

2, 3 and 4 are sort of sticks. Do we want to give the students some carrots?

@scaaahu good point… I count #3 as a carrot, as increasing student participation should help better motivate them. And the only carrots that actually work are actually those that raise their internal motivation, i.e. making the exercises more relevant to them, more interesting/appealing.

The most important part of this method of teaching is acting like they did the reading, even if it is obvious they did not. Ask them questions. Yes, the first few sessions will be painful, but they will get the idea, even if only to avoid embarrassment. If you start acting like they did not do the reading, then you will never get them to do it.

@BenNorris - it's difficult to act like they did it when I ask them their opinion on it and they just stare blankly. When I ask them what was most interesting, then they start to read (but there is not time in class to read a few pages of text and still have time for discussion). They don't seem to feel embarrassment because they (non-readers) are in the majority. In the end, I am just falling back to lecturing and I'm not seeing any progress being made (after eight sessions).

@scaaahu - got any carrots in mind?

@earthling Not really other than praising those who did do the reading.

when I ask them their opinion on it and they just stare blankly — Stare back.  Wait.  Wait.  Wait.  Wait.  Do not say anything until they answer.  Just wait, even if it means you're just staring at each other for an hour.

As a student myself -- it's basic physics, most students will take the path of least resistance to pass the course. Negative reinforcement will only get you so far, if you start failing half the class for not reading anything, they'll just skip-read enough to pass. I'd look for a deeper problem or cause other than just saying "the students won't do what I tell them".

@earthling:  I would say don't fall back to lecturing.  If they know that you will just tell them what was in the reading anyway if they don't read it, they probably have little motivation to start doing the reading.  Sitting through a lecture is much less effort than participating in a discussion class, so they probably prefer it that way.

I think encourage and praise are important.
Encourage them to say things even if they have no idea what they are talking about. If they say something wrong, point out why it is wrong. And tell them this is exactly why they need to take this class - they are there to learn.
If they say things right, praise them. Particularly, to those weak students. Everybody has his own weakness and strength. The weak students will get things right sometimes. Praise them when they did right.
Initiate the discussion in the classroom is your job. Find some hot, interesting topic to start your class. The topic may seem to be unrelated to what you are going to discuss in the classroom in the first place. Lead them to discuss the issue you want them to discuss. Encourage the discussion. Praise them when they arrive at right conclusions.
Once they are used to the discussions in the classroom, it will be natural for them to do their homework. This is because they are afraid of embarrassing themselves. They know they must prepare enough so that they can have something to say in the classroom and say the right things so that they would earn the praise instead of embarrassment.
Of course, you need to tell them if they keep quiet throughout the whole semester, you'll have no choice but fail the ones who never say anything because you have no basis to pass them.
Finally, I'd like to use this place to thank JeffE. I remember he said "scaaahu's excellent advice" in response to one of my first answers here. I was very much encouraged by this remark. I felt like my answer must not be a bad one. Otherwise, why did he say that? Thus, I continue to participate. You can see how important is encourage and praise to a mature adult. Not to mention undergraduates.

You're welcome!!  (And it was excellent!)

I teach courses that include lecture and discussion. If reading is not completed it is difficult to get the most out of the material. One thing to try is to begin with a 'low risk' reading assignment - something more fun and popular, or pepper your reading list with scholarly and more popular reading. There has been a lot of scholarship on the value of using graphic novels with college students. Decoding images and text at the same time is good for developing brains and can serve as 'bridging' literature to more complex readings. Fun reading can be a hook.
I also have all my students on Twitter. This is new for me this semester. I have seen increasing participation from students if I ask them to post a discussion question, based on the readings, on Twitter. I was able to assess the depth of their knowledge of the materials based on the relative sophistication of the question. Most posted something, which I measure as engagement, what I am seeking.
I allow the use of social media in class as well - Storify is a fun way to get students to summarize readings by harvesting multimedia from the Internet.

I know I'm basically just reiterating the earlier answers here, as most of these points have already been raised in one form or another (by F'x and scaaahu in particular), but I'd just like to add my summary of how I'd approach the problem.
[Note: Oh, wow, this answer turned out way longer than I thought it would.  If you don't want to read all of it, I've highlighted the key parts so you can just skip the rest.]
For some background, I'm a graduate student in Helsinki, and I've grown up and studied in Finland.  While Finns generally aren't quite as focused on "face" as people from some Asian cultures are said to be, we do tend to be rather shy and quiet, and sayings like "talk is silver, silence is gold" or "it is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt" definitely find resonance here.  Thus, getting a lively classroom discussion going here can indeed be hard, something which I've heard several teachers from other parts of the world comment on.

First, as you correctly note, you will need to make the students understand the importance of the assignments, and vague threats of "I may have to fail you" aren't going to do it.  It's completely natural for students to try to minimize their workload, and if they think they can pass the course without doing the homework, most of them (except the few truly motivated ones) won't do it.  And if enough of them think so, it's likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, unless you're actually willing to fail the majority of your class.
To address that, I'd suggest that you introduce a points system and make it clear to the students that:

X points total are required to pass the course,
each exam / project (out of m during the course) is worth up to Y points,
each discussion class (out of n) is worth an additional Z points, and
getting any points for a discussion class requires active participation in the discussion.

Having all this clearly set out in advance lets the students make their own informed decisions about how to prioritize their tasks.  In particular, setting a definite pass/fail threshold means that they'll know exactly how much work they need to do to pass the course, and that if they don't meet that threshold, they will fail.
Yes, some students will probably use this as an excuse to skip some fraction of the discussion classes, figuring that they'll still score enough points in the exams to pass — but those are the same students who otherwise probably wouldn't bother with the homework at all, figuring that you wouldn't fail them just for that as long as they did reasonably well in the exams.
Choosing the point scores and thresholds is up to you, but a fairly common choice around here seems to be that the exams make up 50% of the possible points, and 50% of the total is also the minimum level needed to pass.  Thus, in principle, one can pass the course without any classroom participation... as long as one is confident of getting an absolutely perfect exam score.  (FWIW, as a personal anecdote, I did that once as an undergrad — I signed up for the final exam of a course with such a grading policy, mistakenly thinking it was a stand-alone exam, and managed to just barely pass.  Got the lowest possible passing grade, though.)

So much for the stick; you'll also want a carrot to go with it.  I'd suggest telling your students that the aim of the course is not to stress them out, and that you're willing to adjust the homework to fit their workload, within reason, as long as they'll tell you in advance when they expect to be busy and when they'll have more time.  Depending on how varied your students' schedules are, this might even involve some personalized assignments for students who, for some reason, won't be able to attend as many classes as they want or need to.
Such small kindnesses go a long way towards building goodwill and motivation, but there's a more subtle trick involved here as well: asking for adjustments to the homework is itself a form of classroom participation.  Sure, it doesn't actually involve the subject of the course in any direct way, but as scaaahu notes, an important part of the process is to just get the students to speak up in class about something, whatever it is.
Another reason why discussing the appropriate amount of homework with the students can help is that, psychologically, being involved in making a rule makes people feel invested in it, and thus much more likely to follow it than if it were simply imposed on them by an external authority.  I'm pretty sure there's actual psychological research on this, if I just knew the right keywords to find it, but it's definitely an effect I've noticed in practice.  Effectively, by setting up a mutual agreement with your students about the appropriate level of homework, you're depriving them of the mental excuse that "there's way too much stuff for me to do, I'll never have time for this."
As I already wrote above, I also think scaaahu's suggestion of encouraging classroom discussion in any form, just to get the students used to it, is a good idea.  In particular, while stressing that active participation is necessary to earn points for a discussion class, I'd also suggest explicitly noting that having read or understood the material is not required (albeit highly recommended), as long as one is willing to ask questions and discuss the topic.  Of course, you can still make demonstrated familiarity with the material a requirement for getting the full points, if you want.
One way in which that could help is that, just possibly, some of the students who say they haven't read the material (but can't say why not) actually have read it, but just don't feel that they've understood it well enough to discuss it without "appearing stupid" or "losing face".  If you manage to convince those students that they'll at least have to ask questions about the material, they may even come to realize that their understanding of it is neither as poor nor as embarrassing as they thought.

Finally, since I mentioned my background in the beginning, let me include a couple of tips and traps I've noticed specifically regarding Finnish audiences.  I can't say whether or not these might apply also to your students, but they may be at least worth considering.  (There are also some implicit assumptions about classroom style in the way I've presented things below, but the general points should be adaptable to different teaching methodologies.)
(Also, just to be clear, by "Finns" here I really mean "me, and some other people I've observed in class".  Of course, as with any cultural or ethnic group, there's a huge amount of within-group variation, so nothing here should be construed as universal rules.)
One is that Finns generally don't like to interrupt when someone else is talking; it's considered rude.  By the same token, if they do feel the need to interrupt you, they're likely to just politely clear their throat (or, in a classroom setting, raise their hand) or say "excuse me..." and wait for you to stop.  Thus, one way to kill off any hope of an active classroom discussion is to just talk too much yourself.
Going off on a long uninterruptible monologue whenever someone asks something remotely relevant is particularly bad — you may think you're rewarding the asker by seizing on the topic they brought up, but it's more likely that you're just teaching everyone in the class not to ask too many questions if they want to get on with the course.  Engaging the asker in a back-and-forth discussion is a much better approach, both because it gives them a better chance to participate, but also just because it gives them a chance to tell you "oh, I get it now, thanks!" without having to interrupt you.
Another trap is that Finnish students tend to be quite reluctant to answer questions which they consider trivial — there are several reasons for that, but I suspect it's partly a side effect of the early school system, where the teachers generally try to learn the progress level of each child and to direct questions of different levels to different students.  While this is generally an excellent way of dealing with a heterogeneous group of students and making sure everyone gets to participate, it does have the side effect of teaching the more advanced students (who, of course, are the ones who mostly end up in academia later) not to even bother raising their hand for questions they feel are below their level, since they won't get to answer them anyway.
The problem here is that, if you don't already know your students well, you can end up asking a question and getting no answers, and having no idea whether the question was way too easy or way too hard (or just possibly both).  My suggestion for dealing with that situation would be to ask something like "OK, so you all know this?" and seeing who nods.  If not all do, direct the question to someone who didn't.
A third point, somewhat related to the first, is that Finns stereotypically don't like asking questions if they believe they can find the answer by just listening or reading more instead.  (If you look at my Stack Exchange profile, you'll see that I'm a perfect example of the stereotype; I just counted that, excluding meta sites and code golf, I've posted well over a thousand answers and just four questions across the entire network.  And most of those are self-answered.)  If your students are like that too, they may be much more likely to speak up if they believe they have a reason to disagree with you than if they just don't understand something (even if they might actually phrase their argument as a question).
One rather cheap, but potentially effective, trick to encourage student participation in situations like that could be to deliberately make trivial mistakes, like replacing a plus sign with a minus in a simple equation, and see if your students spot them.  If they do, thank them and encourage them to keep an eye out for anything else that might seem funny.  If they don't, you can always just "notice" the mistake yourself a little later and correct it.  Either way, you end up looking a little less like an infallible authority.
And, yeah, I realize that I've gone way off on a tangent at this point, so I'll just stop here.  Sorry.

I took a graduate course in immunology a couple of years back. The requirements to pass the course were simple:

each student made 2-3 presentations in front of the class of basic research studies from a provided list.  We had to create our own powerpoints, include the paper's graphics or provide our own, understand every line of the article, follow the footnotes, and possibly read related studies for perspective.  Be prepared to answer questions from the class and the professor.  Describe the research in our own words to prove we actually understood it.
while others are presenting, we were expected to have already read the article being presented, and be prepared to ask intelligent questions.
Write a paper based on other peer reviewed articles.

Each of these requirements was worth about 1/3 of the grade.  You couldn't pass if you slacked off on any of them.  Everyone had to show up for class prepared.
Obviously, this is a graduate level of responsibility, but I feel strongly that undergraduates can be just as responsible when properly motivated.  Presenting a case study in front of their peers and professor is a strong incentive, and it can even get a bit competitive in a healthy way; someone showed up with a $3 laser pointer they bought on ebay, and suddenly everyone was getting one.  The powerpoints got fancier and fancier as the semester went on.  People really got into it.
For pass-fail I suppose you would simply make #1, #2, and #3 into requirements to pass the course.  Why should someone pass if they didn't learn stuff?  Anyway, this is just one data point and in a different field probably, but hopefully it might spark some ideas.
And I love Cailin's use of Twitter.  Best use for that thing that I've heard of to date!

Maybe this could work for you. I once took a course where every lesson started with a brief quiz. We would get a very simple, very general question from the reading material, and use 5 minutes to answer it in writing, signing our names on the top of the paper before handing it in. It was made clear that this was not part of the grade, i.e. that the only purpose was to ensure we read the material. It worked well though, because nobody felt comfortable handing in an empty paper.

There are already a lot of answers and I feel a little silly about adding yet another one, but I think my view is very different. I would classify all the other answers as taking a carrot/stick approach to provide an extrinsic motivator. I would push for trying to use an intrinsic motivator. You need to demonstrate to the students that class is better and that they will get a lot more out of it if they read before hand. I would devote some time at the beginning of the next few classes for the students to either read the material or be lectured. You could either use a show of hands or an electronic "clicker" type quiz to decide when to move on. This will allow you to get to the "good" stuff, but obviously isn't sustainably. Stress throughout this initial period that the later portions of class would be better if they spent time before hand doing the reading. Further point out that less material will be covered if they don't do the reading before hand, or that you might have to switch to a less desirable teaching method (e.g., lectures or presentations).

I encountered a similar situation with some groups, but now only find the problem among the minority of students. When working with students who are not self-motivated, you must make them fear for their grade.
First, assigned students a short reading task to fit each assigned reading. One potential task might be a KWL. These are quite simple, but cannot really be completed if the students do not at least actually think about the topic.
Then, set the deadline to shortly before the class (or the night before), asking students to submit their short answers via E-mail. This lets you verify that they read the passage.
To deal with the pass-fail grading system, which I assume is for the total course grade and not for individual assignments, consider telling students that you will count how many times they miss these assignments, and if they miss 3, they have failed the course. Make sure the students see you keeping the record early on and let them see the tally for themselves.


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After PhD - Need advice
I completed my PhD about 2 years ago. During the PhD period I left lots of bad things that affected my life. I divorced, moved to another city, lost motivation because of some big political situations which were directly related with us in my country etc. After all those bad things I finished my dissertation and graduated. Now I'm working as an assistant professor in a university. Everything looks better than before, absolutely. But I want to move to another country. Some problems are still going on and this seems to be the only way to get rid of them.
I don't have too many publications. In fact, I have just my thesis and a paper which I wrote from my thesis to show my expertise. The other ones are generally related with different subjects, stemmed from the many courses I took during the PhD period.
I'm trying to find the best way for me to go abroad. I have 2 options. First one is postdoc. I'll find a project or fund and try to find a permanent job. The other one is long period graduate certificate programmes. I will take a year-long advanced certificate about my area, and after completing the university based course, I'll apply for academic or non-academic jobs. However, I'm unsure if taking an advanced certificate course as a PhD person is possible in the US, Canada, and Australia?
I'm not sure which one is the best option for me. I hope I can consult someone who has similar experience, as I really need to find the best option for me.
Thank you in advance.
With best.

There is another option for you, of course, which is a regular position in a non-research oriented institution. In the US, most undergraduate colleges require some research but with lower intensity than at research institutions. Teaching is highly valued and helping undergraduates get started in research, even if not  publishable is also important.
There are, in fact, many fine such colleges and they do send students to graduate school as well as into industry. You might spend some of your effort in exploring such opportunities.
But, in general, institutions don't depend on narrow criteria in hiring. There are a lot of things that can influence a decision. Your current experience as an assistant professor can be a help if it is successful. Depending on your field and the level at which you enter employment, your past publication record may have more or less impact.

Dear Buffy. Thank you for your advice. I'll spend some times in exploring such opportunities and increase my research quality as well as number of publications. I think it completely effects the first impression in job application as less or not.

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Why are 31.8% of retracted papers not noted as retracted?
I read on STEEN, RG. Retractions in the scientific literature: is the incidence of research fraud increasing?. Journal Of Medical Ethics. England, 37, 4, 249-253, Apr. 2011. ISSN: 1473-4257. that:

Journals do not do a careful job of alerting the naïve reader to a
  retraction notice (table 2). The most common way to alert readers
  about a retraction is with a watermark on the pdf (41.1% of retracted
  papers). A total of 149 papers were given such a watermark and noted
  as retracted at the website as well. Among 305 watermarked papers,
  48.9% were also retracted at the website; of 248 papers retracted at the website,
  60.1% were also watermarked. However, 31.8% of retracted papers were not noted as retracted in any way at all so the naïve reader would not
  be alerted to the fact that retraction had happened.

How comes 31.8% of retracted papers are not noted as retracted?

Those percentages add up to >>100%, even allowing that some options are overlapping??

@smci yes~~~~~~

The only reasonable answer I can think of is "laziness".
In particular, when journals existed only in print, the only thing a journal could do when it retracted an article was to print a notice in a new issue.  There was no way to modify or recall issues that had already been sent to subscribers.  Some journals may still have retraction policies from that era, which don't contemplate trying to actually do anything to the original article.
Note that the article you quote is almost four years old, so matters may have improved in the meantime.

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Postdoc salary. Fair offer?
I was just offered a postdoc at 34 000 USD a year.
I am wondering whether this is an ok offer. Can someone give me feedback on this?

Field? (requir...)

Natural science

If "hard" science, this is low, I think. Vanderbilt is in a funny spot: money in a poor area of the U.S., etc. so maybe those dollars will buy lots more than ... er, "other parts of the U.S.".

Don't want to be more specific but it requires long hours in lab...

Maybe it would be good to make this into a more general question, just to not set a precedent for everybody asking about their specific offers?

These are the times when I am really happy that I work in Europe. To answer the question: it may or may not be usual, but I would consider it at least a factor of 2 off from "fair".

@xLeitix: (being in Europe as well) I have to say that depending on where you are, I see at least a factor 2 between fair and fair (and maybe more in terms of what the usual wage can buy). Not to speak of another factor 2 between gross and net (and the funny factors in the tax depending on how exactly your contract is called).

@StasK: An offer may be fair or unfair regardless of whether it's the normal offer or not. So it's not a duplicate question. I have an answer I want to provide here, which could not be an answer on the supposed dupe question.

Biology or physics? My impression is that there is an immense difference in postdoctoral salaries between these two fields.

It sounds like it's on the low side for the sciences, but not unheard of.  For comparison, NIH NRSA postdoc stipends start at about $39k for people with no previous postdoctoral experience and go up from there.  Postdoc salaries can vary a lot by field, location, institution, etc.; if you have no other offers to compare with but want to know what's typical, I'd recommend searching online to find information that fits your background.
As Paul Garrett pointed out, you also need to consider the cost of living.  According to CNN Money's cost of living calculator, $35k in Nashville is the equivalent of nearly $70k if you were living in Brooklyn.  Of course these calculators are far from perfect, but they give you some indication of how prices and rents vary across the country.  If you are going to live on $34k, Nashville is a good place to do it, and I would expect typical salaries there to be lower than in more expensive locations.
Ultimately, unless you believe there is discrimination or bias involved, I wouldn't worry too much about abstract notions of fairness, or even comparisons with other people in different circumstances.  Instead, I would focus on three questions.  What do you need to live happily in the short term?  What are your long-term goals and prospects for achieving them?  And what other options do you have, including not just similar postdoctoral offers but also career changes?  Only you can weigh these considerations and decide whether a given offer is acceptable to you.

For what it's worth, most Ph.D. chemists that I've seen graduate and move to post-docs get around $40k. The amount depends on how much was budgeted in the grant proposal that is paying the post-doc salary and typically there isn't much wiggle room. Considering the dwindling grant resources, current hiring climate, and level of competition in this field, most are happy just to get a job.
On your question of fairness, did anyone else offer you another post-doc for more money? If not, I'd consider it fair.

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Is it true that PhD students need to work 10-12 hours a day every day to be productive?
I hear a lot of people brag or complain about how many hours they have to work for their PhD. Is this the norm? And if so is this really a wise choice to make? Do students really 'work' during this period of time (as would be expected in a corporate office), or do many also spend their time goofing around?
I've read that it's only possible to do 4 hours of deeply creative work everyday. Since energy often depletes over the day, I've personally found that outside of a small number of hours in a day, the rest of my time is spent doing mechanical tasks or straining myself in vain to think about a problem.

A "standardized"/objective measure of time spent on PhD work might be needed.

During course work, that's not unheard of (but not 7 days a week, 5 or 6 maybe). I would probably dismiss your friends' chatter as macho bravado though: wrong statements to this sort seem to give some people a kick, and a sense of tougher-than-you.

I've heard that if you can put in 5-6 productive hours a day, 5-6 days a week, for 5-6 years, you'll have enough for a PhD in most fields. The key is productive hours though, most people have a hard time getting 6 productive hours in an 8-hour work day.

Related: Is a PhD right for you if you hate doing research in your free time but love doing it as a job?

Related: Is it normal for an advisor to expect >80 hour workweeks from PhD students, and threaten them with dismissal?

I think you've hit the nail on the head with your second paragraph. If you can balance out your workload so that each day you are doing some tough creative tasks during the period when you work best, but also have some more mindless tasks that you can tackle at other times of the day, you can be productive for much longer than if you try to slog through one task all day.

But in my experience  it is not the norm to work so many hours. Several people at my department (in the UK) have recently had successful PhDs (finished and gone on to Postdoc jobs) having worked normal 8x5 hour weeks most of the time.

I believe empirical evidence shows that you are usually more productive if you do not overwork yourself. Of course, towards an upcoming deadline, one may work a few extra hours a day to catch up, but regularly I believe this is highly discouraged.

I would like to add that results and research outcomes, as well as productivity, are by no means related to how long you work (of course provided you at least work some).

There are places where you are supposed to keep the chair warm for 10-12 hours on weekdays (and even 4-8 on weekends). No one said it actually helped with productivity, though.

Define work? Define productivity?

Possible duplicate: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8542/how-hard-do-early-career-academics-in-the-united-states-work-really/8543#8543

Looking busy is not the same thing as working.  Looking idle is not the same thing as not working.  I solve some of my toughest problems when I'm running, walking the dog, and playing games (when my mind is relaxed).  If I found myself in an environment that demanded that I look busy for 12 hours a day, I would do my best to get out of it.

I personally worked on my research an enormous number of hours a day when I had the time, but that's because it was entertaining, not because it was necessary. Of course in pure math "research" mostly means getting lost in thought while scribbling, and who doesn't want to do that all day?

Not only you should work but seem to be doing work. On the other hand even the sub-conscious works while resting  but mentally  committed.

If you're working on the wrong thing, even 14 hour work days will still get you nowhere. Though perhaps you might get there faster.

Nobody either needs to or can work 10-12 hours a day to be productive. I saw a massive IT project with > 100 people on it get a year behind and then recover after some management measures, one of which was to ban overtime.

I'll ask my bro doing a phd...he's just finishing his daily morning game session on counterstrike after waking up at 10am and sleeping at 11pm lool

"I've read that it's only possible to do 4 hours of deeply creative work everyday." Could be, I suppose it varies, but my own experience involved a significant slug of time in simple roll-up-your-sleeves activities: identifying new research, tracking down leads, working with library staff, and so forth. And if you're in a field that requires wet-lab work, that's a whole different time sink.

The answer is no.
There are a lot of factors in play. With my work, a lot of it is creative so it is hard to say when I am working or not.
Do people expect students to work that many hours? Maybe, but it isn't healthy (and maybe not legal).
Do people really work the entire time they are at work? Probably not. Your productivity certainly goes down the longer you work. Whether people goof around or not isn't specific to Academia and can happen anywhere (I don't find goofing around to be a negative thing).
I too have read several studies about the limited number of hours that people have for mentally demanding tasks. In fact, I read a study about programmers that said they were lucky to get 1-2 hours of solid work done in a day. This info can help you organize your day so that you work on difficult tasks in the morning and then mechanical tasks in the afternoon. Also, studies have shown that taking breaks and going on walks can help improve your productivity.
There isn't a cookie cutter answer for everyone. It depends on yourself, the type of work, your advisor, and your coworkers.

I agree, it's hard to say when exactly I am working. I like this photo a lot: mathematician at work. Though I usually prefer to do my "work" (the creative part, anyway) during the night. When particularly productive/stubborn, I can stay up until late morning.

It is important to emphasize this can be very field-dependent. In some fields that are based on lab work, you may actually have to spend long hours doing technical non-creative work. However, this still does not mean you necessarily work the whole time - often there will be down-time while waiting for the experiment to run.

A good example of not working while being as work, is the fact that a large portion of people will be reading this while at work.

I don't agree with the programmer 1-2 hours of productivity. I work two jobs as a software developer and I am capable of being fully productive for about 4 hours after a full day of classes, and 6 hours if I don't have class the day that I'm programming. Perhaps I'm different from most, but I would find that only being truly productive for 1-2 hours per day would run all of my projects into the ground, and I would subsequently be fired. Then again, for a lot of people productive is subjective. I suppose that as long as you're getting results and meeting deadlines, then it doesn't matter!

The programmer being productive 1-2 hours a day is ridiculous.  If you are only productive for that long, you are in the wrong field!  I'm a software engineer.  On a really terrible day that might hold true, on a great day I can be productive 12 hours, maybe 16 hours. Additionally, regarding the primary question when I was in grad school (in a different, scientific field), my days were that long, and they were very tough.  They were very different kinds of hours though compared to my current work.  There was more variety and socialization for sure working in a lab filled with students.

"I would say in any given week I do about 15 minutes of actual work" - Peter Gibbons

@BuvinJ: I should think the programmer is making progress on something his management demands for many more than 1-2 hours, but perhaps he doesn't consider debugging using customer data and writing a detailed explanation, why the bug is invalid, for the 17th customer who reported a bug after feeding incorrect data into the program to be "productive" use of his time.

Or answering questions from other developers, or answering the phone, or getting distracted by email popups, or any one of the hundreds of other things that eat into your day (like visiting stack exchange...oops).

Most people who brag about how many hours they work are inefficient. Because they are inefficient, they feel a need to point out how many hours they work - rather than pointing to the quality of work. Keep this in mind.
Some PhD programs will allow you to be more isolated from non-PhD related work than others. If you have to teach, for example, that might take a considerable portion of your week - preparation, class, grading, etc. This might cause you to have to work many more hours if you want to make progress on your dissertation than someone who does not have to teach.
If you are unlucky and have your "paid research" different than your dissertation research the same thing can happen - you have to split your time into different buckets. The quality of your advisor and their expectations thus has a big effect here, too.
How quickly you want to graduate can affect this too.
That being said, how you work affects how efficient you are.

Quality of your working hours

Sitting at a desk for 12 hours straight is most often bad.
Working 12 hours, taking 10 minute exercise breaks every hour? Much less bad.

How deliberately you work

Do you sit aimlessly without tasks?
Do you have a system to keep track of what you need to do?
Do you manage your energy (doing high energy tasks when you have energy, low energy when you don't) or do you just blindly do tasks?

Do you know when to call it quits -- or keep going?

If you have a high energy task you are doing great at, do you keep that momentum going?
Conversely if you feel burned out, do you just take a break? Or keep going anyways?

When do you work?

Some people rock 5am-7am. Some people rock 1am-3am. Some people are afternoon people (my prime time is about 4-6pm - I can accomplish insane amounts in this time compared to the rest of the day). Figure out when your times are.

Do you have distractions?

An hour with no distractions during writing might be better than 4 with continuous interruptions.

Read this article and apply it ruthlessly to your life. You are a maker, your advisor is probably a manager.

You will likely find that the better you work, the less you have to work. But simultaneously realize the more you could work (so if your goal is more X then it's great).
The how, when, and what for when we work dramatically affects our ability to work tons but also whether or not we have to.

The first line is not really true. Some people have to work huge hours because they have no choice. It's "work all the time, or you wont get your PhD" right up until the day before they get their certificate. To go through hell and then be labelled inefficient it the definition of adding insult to injury.

@J.J how many of those people brag about their hours? My experience is people who are forced to work many hours generally don't brag about it. If anything, they lament it.

Ah, true. I rescind my downvote :) (could you just edit the answer slightly so i can)

@J.J I added something I wanted to add anyways :)

I'll take the folks who brag about what they actually did than how many hours they worked.

My experiences suggest the answer is: possibly. Or perhaps more accurately sometimes.
A lot depends on the field you're in. I studied for a PhD in life science, where a lot of time at the lab bench was required. This is skilled work, but it's not "creative" nor does it involve much mental effort. So it's certainly possible to be productive at it for longer than four hour stretches.
In addition I often had to go in at the weekends to observe the results of my experiments. Cells don't grow to a useful 9-5 weekday schedule, unfortunately! I imagine other areas of science will impose similar time pressures.
I treated my PhD as though it were a job. Although I did work longer than 8 hours a day and I did work weekends when necessary, I viewed this as an annoying imposition and tried to minimize it. Other students and postdocs in the lab did longer hours and were more productive.
When it came time to write up my thesis, I discovred I simply did not have enough material to make it worthwhile. Ultimately I was forced to apply for a lesser research degree (an MPhil) and when it came to the crunch, I was not even able to obtain that with the evidence I'd gathered. Part of this is unquestionably down to lack of bench-hours.
I cannot speak about non-practical subjects, but even there I would imagine the amount of reading, learning and documentary research required would be significant, and would not involve creative mental effort. But my experience suggests that while ten hours a day, seven days a week is likely excessive, a successful research degree does involve time and effort well beyond that required for a regular highly-skilled job.

This attitude is unfortunately prevalent in many "lab" fields, in which students are often used as cheap technicians rather than getting a proper PhD education.

@jakebeal That may be so - I only have the experience of the one institution. But if that's the case here, how do you explain the lack of thesis material?

I don't know particulars of what you worked on and how and in what context. Things I have seen happen elsewhere, however, include: 1) "good thesis" equated with "publish in Nature, Science, or Cell" which is too high a bar, 2) students working only as directed, and on risky or long-term projects, rather than allowed to help scope and de-risk their own research program, 3) lack of lab techs and automation such that students are required to work very inefficiently (e.g., students shouldn't run the mouse colony), 4) "saving up" for big publications, leaving students in danger of scooping.

@jakebeal Interesting, thanks. I was never much good at lab politics to follow this sort of stuff. Sounds like I may have been a victim of a mixture of 2, 3 and my own laziness.

In addition to what @jakebeal said, I would certainly include lack of supervision. If your results don't look like they would help you achieve your goal, it is your supervisor's task to identify this early on, and steer you in a more productive direction. (Personally, I have yet to meet a supervisor who actually had the time to fulfill his tasks properly, but maybe it's just me and/or bad luck.)

Just to add to what is around:
Dr Hugh Kearns, famous speaker and researcher in "high performance psychology", has a very interesting course that is given to PhD students around the world, "The Seven Secrets of Highly Successful Research Student", with research that has been published in Nature.
I was lucky enough to have the chance to go to this workshop, and one of the secrets that all successful PhD student share is "Treat it like a job".
He mentioned (as conclusions of his research), that if you do a PhD and work (but really work, not procrastinate) 8h a day, 5 days a week, thats enough to have a successful PhD.
So the answer is no! Just, treat it like a job.

I would like to present how I think about my productivity as a PhD (note: it's Computer Science & Political Science). It might help getting an understanding about the hours and numbers.
My work is divided into "Thinking" and into "Doing".
"Doing" is the stuff that you can work on for 8 hours per day. Dull research assistant jobs involving filling out excel sheets, having to write the literature review, reading literature for taking notes and getting background, office hours, teaching and preparing teaching. Writing emails, applications, funding requests, finishing off papers, going to conferences. "Doing" is the stuff that I can plan and that usually has an end in sight.
"Thinking" is the hard work of which might not happen on a daily basis at all. It involves actually sketching out and developing my models and my hypothesis, reading difficult literature with challenging methods/theory that is crucial to  my own work, thinking about how to convert theory into a computer program. "Thinking" is the stuff that happens when I read a completely unrelated book, when I am cooking, in the shower or on the train. I can plan to try, but I cannot plan to succeed. I cannot say "On Thursday I will have my theoretical argument". I can say "On Thursday I will work on my argument doing x and y. No promises".
It is the second category that makes it so difficult to break down a PhD into simple numbers. Sometimes it takes a day to make huge progress, other times (most of the time) you grind on a seemingly simple problem for weeks, even months.

I have a very relevant personal anecdote: about a year ago, I was working on a paper. I had been pondering for over two weeks about a particular area, and wasn't able to make any progress whatsoever. I was effectively spending hours looking at sheets of paper, scribbling nonsense just not to stare at blank sheets of paper.

Then I went to visit my parents, anxious to leave the work unfinished. We went to visit some relatives, and well, I got more than a bit tipsy. However, on the way back, I had a veritable flurry of the ideas. As you can probably guess, when I sobered up and considered it, it turned out, the ideas were not quite right. However, after a few weeks of polishing them (which was mostly doing at that point), the stuff I came up with during the one-hour car ride (thinking) turned into about a fourth of the entire paper.

I'd be careful with social comparison. While it can be helpful to see how other fare, the work time alone is a really bad measure for a couple of reasons:

often based on subjective impressions (not, e.g., time studies with automated measuring)
often no differentiation between "being there" and "actively working"
ignores discipline
ignores difficulty of topic
ignores state of the PhD thesis (usually there are ups and downs)
ignores time to think (incubation phase, time where you do something else)
claims are sometimes used for ... strategic reasons
ignores efficiency of the work ("Don't count the days, make the days count.")
some work is difficult to classify -- could be PhD work or not (e.g., teaching, doing stuff your adviser wants you to do that might or might not be relevant to your work)
some PhD students are exploited to do irrelevant work (costing them time to do their PhD thesis)
etc. pp.

In short, the PhD is not a prison sentence (although at times it might feel like it). Time doesn't cut it.
Instead, I would recommend to focus on what is needed to do a successful PhD (look at those PhDs that came before you, esp. those in the same department/with same adviser). Find out what people need to be successful in your discipline (likely: publications, publications, publications). Much more useful than time alone.
P.S.: Regarding creative work, yes, you need ideas, lots of them. But that's why you need time off work. And not all work is creative -- usually there is a lot of routine work involved.

It really should not be the norm. Like Austin already pointed out, there is no universal answer to that.
When I did my PhD (in computational chemistry), I also had a commitment to look after students as a teaching assistant. This was certainly my main work during the semester and not a lot of research could be done while simultaneously preparing the next day with the students, grading protocols, discussing related things with the supervisor.
When you are finally at the point where you can do the research for your PhD, you may as well do not consider it as work any more. There are plenty of ways, how you can boost your own productivity. If the environment is right, co-workers, supervisors, friends, equipment, then you should be able to find your way of getting the most out of it.
I personally prefer staying long at my workplace, while goofing around (primarily on the network). I like the quieter hours during the evening, where I can concentrate better. But that is certainly my own choice, so I might end up staying longer than 10 hours, but I would neither complain nor brag about it.
In any case, it should not be a requirement and it is certainly different for any individual.

Ideally, a PhD student should work 0 hours a day. If you do the work you love, you won't work a day in your life.
Of course, most people have to overcome tough obstacles in the beginning of their scientific careers, but it is what you make out of it. I personally enjoyed the hardships because I learned a lot from every difficult problem I had to solve. I spent almost every hour I was awake and sometimes even dreamed at night thinking about my research, but not because I wanted to get it over with or get a degree to show off or even start making real money quicker. I just wanted to know how things work, to know the truth.
But even though you might not feel like you are working, others will. Friends and family will get much less of you when you spend weeks in the lab or in front of computer.
I've seen peers for whom PhD program was a toil. Most of them dropped out. They didn't seem to be spending too much time working on it either. I guess the key is what everyone says: pick the right topic. If you do something you are passionate about, the time will fly and you will wish it would just freeze so you can keep working on what you do forever until you find what you are looking for.


text:
Dissertation proposal before admission: Is it possible?
It seems that most universities in Europe require an outline of the planned dissertation at the application stage. I think even choosing the title of a dissertation needs a lot of dialogue between the student and his supervisor. It also requires a thorough investigation on the state of art in the targeted area.
Is such proposal the definite proposal or it may totally be changed after the admission? Can you provide some tips for writing such proposal draft? How much time you think I should devote for such plan (at least)?

First, to answer your titular question:

Is it possible?

Likely yes. Otherwise, all PhD students at this university would fail, wouldn't they :) ? Let me go over the rest of your question one by one:

It seems that most universities in Europe require an outline of the planned dissertation at the application stage.

Most seems a bit extreme. I know that this is how it works in some universities, but it certainly did not work like that in all places I worked in.

I think even choosing the title of a dissertation needs a lot of dialogue between the student and his supervisor. It also requires a thorough investigation on the state of art in the targeted area.

Correct. At my current university, people hand in their proposals during their second year usually.

Is such proposal the definite proposal or it may totally be changed after the admission?

It is almost certainly not a very definite plan, but whether it can totally change I am not sure. For instance, I would assume if it changed so much that it started to fall out of the area of expertise of your advisor, I would imagine things would get tricky.

Can you provide some tips for writing such proposal draft? How much time you think I should devote for such plan (at least)?

Rsearch the state of the art in the field you are interested in. Take a few days minimum to browse over the keywords of the papers of the top conferences in the field. Find out which professor at your university publishes in these top conferences (if there is nobody, this university may be a bad match for your field of interest), and see what the typical keywords and style of his work are.
Think about ~3 coarse-grained research questions that you think are not answered yet by existing work. You probably already needed to define a research question for e.g., your master's thesis. Make sure that the scope is a bit broader now for a PhD - you don't want research questions that are basically answerable within one paper in a few months of work (Bad: "Q1: is it possible to apply algorithm A to problem B?"). On the other hand, you do not want to be too general either (Bad: "Q2: how can security be introduced in service-oriented systems?" - this one is a real-life example).

Is such proposal the definite proposal or it may totally be changed after the admission?

I had to do a similar task to get into PhD program here in Australia. It is mostly a formality and people's actual topic can vary widely. Actually it would be strange if you did not change your topic slightly. After 6 months - 1 year we are expected to give a seminar and a much more detailed proposal, this was the real one. Although again your topic can still change after that.

Can you provide some tips for writing such a proposal draft?

I would ask your supervisor for tips. Maybe they can provide you with a copy of one from a previous student. Usually the university provides a general outline of what you should discuss.

Another Australian here, and this accords with my experience. It would help further answers if you, OP, tell us what they're expecting in terms of a format for this thesis proposal. Mine was only about 2000 words I think, and was meant to demonstrate that I had a minimum interest/knowledge of the topic before undertaking a doctoral program. Mine changed dramatically over the following 4 years. No one will hold you to exactly what you wrote in your thesis proposal.

I once had to write a thesis proposal for admission to a UK university. It was explained to me that this is more of an entrance exam than an actual proposal. It is also used to gauge whether your interests lie somewhere in the vicinity of what is generally done at the department.
I don't know how other countries or universities work, but I can't imagine that anybody would hold you strictly to a proposal you wrote before becoming a graduate student. It's normal to expect that your research should be adapted along the way based on your findings, even for an experienced researcher.
The proposal I wrote (which was successful) had to be short, so I went with the following format:

Theory so and so implies that A is true
But this other theory suggests that the converse, B, would be true
These could be pitted against each other in an experiment involving so-and-so (details details details)

The time you need entirely depends on your knowledge of the field. It is good to invest quite some time in these things though, as they can really improve a lot the more you think about them. I'd say that it's best to try to finish it a good month before the deadline, and then take a look at it at biweekly intervals to make improvements.

At least at the European university where I work, we do not require such a proposal.
However, in general, the thesis proposal is a planning document, and therefore its contents are not considered binding. Especially given the nature of research, committing someone to a particular course of action before it even begins seems counterproductive.
The proposal should be allowed to evolve over time, and possibly be changed completely if found to be unworkable or unmanageable.

I had to write a proposal as part of the admission process in a university in Ireland for a MLitt in History. Here are some thoughts based on what you have asked and my experience.

I think even choosing the title of a dissertation needs a lot of dialogue between the student and his supervisor.

I had 2 meeting with my supervisor before the proposal was handed in. These meetings did not just entail discussion on the title, but they formed a part of it in so far as was this professor the best person in the department to supervise the masters. We had a working title quite early though.

Is such proposal the definite proposal or it may totally be changed after the admission?

I have found in my case that the title may be refined after admission. It has not being the case where we have made a major chance but rather refined the project as the research is completed while keeping it within the overall framework of the original idea.

Can you provide some tips for writing such proposal draft? How much time you think I should devote for such plan (at least)?

In my case the proposal did not have to be a long document. I think instructions were to keep it under 1,500 words. I used the following heading for my proposal.

What I'm going to research
Research Methodology
What has been researched about topic already
What will this thesis add to existing knowledge.

Finally I also put together a draft reading list of publications that I thought would form part of my research. This was not required but I felt it was a good exercise for myself and my supervisor appreciated a copy of it as well.
Thinking back I believe I had my proposal document completed in about 2-3 weeks(this includes drafting and amending).


text:
Will my accepted paper appear in conference proceeding without presentation?
Will generally accepted papers appear in conferences proceeding without presentation? In particular my paper is accepted for this conference. In the conference web site they pointed out: "Accepted and presented papers will be included in the IEEE CPS Proceedings." In its registration page they have told:

Please register your papers before 20 July 2014. It is strictly
  enforced. If we do not receive your registration by that date, your
  papers will be moved from the proceedings. Thank you very much.

Does this mean the registered papers definitively will be appeared in the proceeding? Unfortunately there is no contact info on the web site and they do not response emails. I could not attend the conference and I wonder should I pay regitration fee or not?

The paper submission site lists a contact email

@ff524 They don't responded to any of my emails and they do not provide any phone number. Do you think it's normal? Does the conference seems OK for you?

By "appear in proceedings" do you mean the proceedings that is distributed to attendees at the conference? or that is distributed on IEEEXplore?

@ff524 distributed on IEEEXplore

The IEEE policy on non-presented papers is as follows:

Authors are expected to attend the conference in person to present their papers and share their ideas.
To encourage attendance, IEEE recommends that conferences exclude or limit the distribution of any paper that was not presented at the conference. This policy is not mandatory and only applies to conference proceedings where IEEE is the copyright holder.
If authors are unable to attend the conference and present their papers, they should contact the program chair as soon as possible so that substitute arrangements can be made.

That is, it is at the conference organizer's discretion. Some IEEE conferences do pull a paper from the published proceedings if it isn't presented at the conference: for example, the IEEE Signal Processing Society has the policy that papers not presented will not be distributed on IEEEXplore.
The only way to be sure your paper will appear in the conference proceedings is to confirm with the conference organizer.

In general, at least for the better conferences in the computing and information science research area that I find myself working in, if your paper is accepted and at least one author has registered for the conference, then your paper will be included in the conference proceedings and available in the usual archives (ACMDL/IEEEXplore/DBLP etc.)
I have done this multiple times when I lived in different countries and could not afford to travel to a conference in a far flung location. Sometime ago, I wrote another (very related) answer which might be of further help to you.
However, this may vary for the particular conference that you have a paper in.
Added: (to incorporate Jeff's comment)
In some conferences, an author may not even register. A colleague or otherwise could present your paper for you. Of course, this needs the permission of the organizers.

... and at least one author has registered for the conference — In my experience, ensuring that someone presents the paper is sufficient, even if that someone is not an author.  (I've presented papers for authors who couldn't travel to the conference, and who therefore did not register.)

@JeffE Agreed! In fact, I've had this happen to me as well. I didn't present but my paper was presented by another colleague from my department who could attend that conference.


text:
Can I publish parts of the Ph.D thesis as a paper in a journal?
I recently finished my PhD thesis which will be published as a book soon.
Now I'm wondering if it's possible or allowed to submit parts to a journal?
Normally the process would be the other way round I think: Submitting papers and "gluing" them together for the thesis. I've read the guidelines of some journals which state "that the work described has not been published before" or that "Papers must present scientific results that are essentially new".

Could you be a bit more specific as to what you mean by "published as a book"? Are you simply making a few bound copies, are you self-publishing or is this going to an academic publisher?

Oh sorry :) It is going to a publisher and can be ordered there.

See also this complementary question.

This question is probably field dependent. For example, in sociology in France it is usually not possible to publish in a journal something that has been made available on the web, (and books are the most important research outputs).

The field of the dissertation is Management Information Systems. But the content is a mixture of biometrics and machine learning.

As a general rule, you cannot publish anything as original research that has already been published.  (You may be able to reprint it in other venues, but most research journals do not do this.)
Of course, the trick is what counts as "already published".  Nowadays, many publishers (including all mathematics publishers, for example) do not count informal distribution on the internet as prior publication.  It's common not to count extended abstracts from conference proceedings, although the journal may require some revisions or extensions.  Nobody counts submitting a dissertation as prior publication, even if the university makes it available for download or purchase, and technical reports are generally in the same category.
On the other hand, publication as a "real book" definitely counts as prior publication and would rule out journals.  Of course, this just brings up the question of what a "real book" is.  Basically, if it's published by a serious academic publisher, with some nontrivial selection and editorial advice, then that counts as publication.  On the other hand, if it's some random publisher printing copies of Ph.D. theses and selling them online, then you could make a strong case that it's not really published (and that this is not so different from ordering a dissertation copy).
However, I think you need to discuss this explicitly when submitting your paper.  For example, you could add a sentence to your submission letter along the lines of "This work is based on my thesis from University X, which is available for sale by Y but has not been traditionally published".  It's much better to deal with this upfront than to have someone later ask "Wait, why is someone selling copies of this work online?"

I think Dave Clarke and I fundamentally agree, but I felt it was worth expanding on the issues.

Thanks for the answer! Basically that's what came to my mind upfront. The publisher will be a well known one, but it'll be published as a dissertation. This means there will be no editorial advice except in layout questions. Selection is based on the grade. So to sum up, I'll check the contract with the publisher and also ask the potential journal(s) if submission is allowed under this constraints.

As a rule of thumb, I would say any publication with an ISBN/ISSN is an official publication, anything without that is nonofficial and OK for submitting to conference/journal.

In general, this is allowed, even encouraged.
The answer depends on what kind of book you are publishing. If it is the regular dissertation, then you can publish in journals. If it is a properly published book by Springer or equivalent, then I doubt that you can publish again.

Thanks for the quick response! What do you mean by regular dissertation? It'll be published as a book available on amazon, etc. in German. Why does this distinction matter in your opinion?

If it's published by a scientific publisher, then you (probably) cannot republish it as papers. If it is just published in the dissertation series, then you can. Check with the publisher.

@John: If you are dealing with a real publisher, you will sign a contract. Check the terms of your contract.

Ok, thanks for your responses so far! Yes indeed I'm currently waiting for the contract and I'll check it. I was wondering whether (given the contract with the publisher of the book permits it) a journal accepts content, which has been published in some altered form already. As the dissertation is in German, I'll have to rewrite the parts and translate them, so it won't be exactly the same.

Yeah, whether the journals approve is at least as big an issue as whether the dissertation publisher does.

I agree completely


text:
Releasing one version of a Scientific Paper under an Open License
I am going to release a Technical Report that will be archived and made available online by the university's library. An abridged version of the work was accepted by a peer-reviewed conference and will be published in the proceedings. For this to happen, I have to sign a copyright form, assigning to the publishing institution all rights under copyright.
My questions:
a) What is the best way to grant readers of the Technical Report the freedom to quote (unlimited length), distribute, and build upon the work? And point out that they have this freedom without asking for my permission?
b) Is a Creative-Commons License the way to go? If yes, in what form should include the lincense in the work?
c) Is there any conflict between the copyright form for the conference paper and releasing the Technical Report under an open license?

It's actually rather different from the arXiv.  The IEEE copyright form already deals with electronic preprint servers like the arXiv (see #8 under "Author Online Use"), and seems to allow this (maybe only if you submit it to the arXiv before the IEEE?) provided you use the accepted version rather than the IEEE published version.  By contrast, this question is asking about granting far more rights.

A Creative Commons License is a good way to achieve this.  It doesn't really matter how you convey this information, as long as it's clear.  (A footnote on the first page is fine, for example.  Whatever you prefer.)  The attribution license (CC BY) sounds like a good choice for what you're looking for.
However, this definitely conflicts with the copyright form.  You can try asking the IEEE for permission, and there's some chance they will agree, but they tend to be picky about copyright.  If you can't come to an agreement with them, then you will have to decide whether publishing in this conference is worth giving up copyright, and they will have to decide whether it is worth losing your paper over this issue.  (If you have already signed the form, then there's nothing you can do except ask them.)

Do you think the conflict exist no matter how different the actual texts are? Technically, the TR is the original work, and the IEEE paper is the derivative work.

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think this argument works.  (It would be an enormous loophole in copyright law, if one could sign over copyright to something while secretly knowing that it was just a derivative work of a longer work and planning to release that longer work.)  I think the right thing to do is to discuss it with the IEEE and try to come to some arrangement with them.

...or you could just break the law, like most other people (at least in CS).

I talked about this with more experienced colleages/coauthors, who said that there might be a legal conflict, but that it is common practice to self-publish a longer version of your conference paper. So maybe I should rephrase my question "is there a conflict" to "How likely am I to get into trouble". ;)

Not likely, but I'd be careful with CC licenses, because you are granting other people rights.  If you just post the paper online, then the worst case scenario is that the IEEE makes you take it down, and I don't think they will do that (it would look bad).  If you license other people to create derivative works, then they may end up someday being asked to take them down (perhaps via a DMCA takedown notice sent to their hosting company).  Again, that's not likely, but I'd be really annoyed if I discovered that I had relied on a CC license that the author wasn't in a position to issue.

P.S.  I think it's highly likely that the IEEE will allow posting a longer journal version of a conference paper (and I imagine that's what they mean when they say "Although authors are permitted to re-use all or portions of the Work in other works, ...").  I'd guess that the only issue would be the license.

Similarly, I'd also recommend the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY). A good guide explaining why this is best, written by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) exists here. This would fulfil all the criteria you ask for in a)
However, it does matter how you convey this licence. For example if you included just a CC BY 'badge' as an image in the PDF, it would be difficult for a web crawler or machine to detect that the manuscript is Open Access. Thus it's good to signpost the licence in a clear machine readable way
e.g.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
  Unported License.

(specifically including a URL link to full terms of the licence, and make sure you choose the unported license, rather than any of the country-specific variants)
With respect to c) the trick is (if it's not too late now) to upload your CC BY version as a preprint before you submit to the journal & their draconian terms & conditions. Journals can't stop you uploading your work before you've signed any agreements with them.  Some journals don't 'like' this and will reject submissions that they know are openly available on the web prior to submission, but these journals represent a small-minded, old-fashioned minority in my experience. Even Elsevier allow preprints!

There's a huge difference between rejecting submissions because they are available on the web (which I believe is rare in most fields) and objecting to a CC BY license (which I believe is common).  Releasing a paper under such a license before submission may substantially restrict how it can be published.  That's not necessarily a problem - if you care enough about the ultimate form of open access, then you have no choice.  However, there's a genuine trade-off here.  For example, Elsevier allows preprints, but their published policies certainly do not allow CC BY, and they are far from alone.

@AnonymousMathematician CC-BY doesn't affect redistribution under different licenses; CC-BY-SA does. And the author still reserves the right to confer more permissive licenses to others. That's why even Elsevier doesn't restrict licenses on pre-prints, although they attempt to dictate the CC-BY-NC-ND for post-prints.


text:
Under what circumstances can one republish a conference paper/presentation?
For conferences that "peer review" and "publish" full papers, when, if ever, can you resubmit essentially unchanged versions for publication in a peer reviewed journal?
In my field, when conference papers appear as book chapters, people often "republish" them as journal articles.
I have just had a talk accepted at a conference which is now (decided post submission) planning on publishing the proceedings as a special issue of a journal. It appears the journal is complete crap with an extremely light peer review process in general, no impact factor, and essentially not indexed. I think this "article" will be worthless, but I am concerned that I will not be able to republish the results in a respectable journal.

The "special issue of a journal" designation sounds worrisome to me.  Even if it is just the usual conference proceedings repackaged, I think you are right that it will cause problems for later publication.  (Even if the second journal agrees not to count the first as a "real" journal publication, it may still appear to onlookers like you are publishing the same paper in two journals.)

You always have the option not to submit to the post-proceedings, or the associated special-issue in this case. If you are worried about crappiness of the venue which is effectively imposed on you, simply do not submit your work to the journal and inform the editors about the decision. After all, nobody can publish your paper without your consent, such as a formal copyright transfer in the case of "traditional" journals. Just save your good stuff for a better venue.

In math, FPSAC (Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics) accepts and referees "extended abstracts" for presentations. Presenters are selected based (in part) on the quality of these abstracts, and the abstracts appear in a special issue of DMTCS. The submission guidelines for FPSAC state

The authors will retain the right of publishing a full version of their work in another journal. Authors who do intend to publish a full version elsewhere should however make sure that their conference contribution is clearly an extended abstract of this full version.

Several conference centers publish proceedings of their workshops, for which presenters are asked to submit extended abstracts of their talks after the fact; for example, both AIM (the American Institute of Mathematics) and Oberwolfach (formally known as Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach) do this. Again, the norm is that the abstract should be a summary of your presentation, with less detail than the published version.
I think that the main answer here is going to be "see if the conference organizers have made a statement, and check with some more senior people as to what the unwritten norms are".

This varies by field. In (most) fields that have journal-based publications and no tradition of selective refereed conferences, it might be quite hard to publish a paper in a journal after it has appeared in some proceedings, without substantial changes.
In computer science, in which conference publication is the norm, it is expected that journal papers have first appeared in conference proceedings. This is especially true if the full paper does not fit in the page-limit of the conference proceedings, and proofs or other material had to be left out of the first publication. Typically you have to make some small changes between the conference and the journal version (i.e. include full proofs, include a fuller discussion of related and subsequent work, etc), but in CS, the delta between conference and journal version can be relatively minor.

What happens if a CS conference publishes the page-limited papers in crappy journal?

It probably depends on the specifics. If it actually appears as a paper in a journal, that might be problematic. On the other hand, plenty of conferences publish their proceedings using journal publishers like Springer, and its fine. Hard to know more without knowing the specific situation.

In some fields of CS, the delta can be relatively minor.  In theoretical computer science, the delta can be arbitrarily close to zero (although this is starting to change).  Other subfields of CS impose a lower bound on the amount of truly unpublished content (typically 25%-33%) in any journal paper.

Related: The question about the delta on CStheory


text:
Cleaning up/Uniformize bibliography for long document
I was wondering whether existed some software that would take as input a text file bibliography (for instance a bib file if you use bibtex), and that run it through google scholar (or any other database), so that it can return a uniformized bibliography.
As an example, suppose you have two items from the same conference
@inproceedings{mpi,
   author       = {Surname1 Name1 and Surname2 Name2},
   title        = {Some nice work},
   booktitle    = {Editor of the Name of Conference},
   year         = {2004},
 }

and
@inproceedings{RRnrj,
  author        = {Name3 S. and Name4 S.},
  title         = {Some nice work},
  booktitle     = {Name of Conference (Acronym)},
  year          = {2020},
  publisher     = {Editor},
}

and you would want it to return:
@inproceedings{mpi,
   author       = {Surname1 Name1 and Surname2 Name2},
   title        = {Some nice work},
   booktitle    = {Name of Conference (Acronym)},
   year         = {2004},
   publisher    = {Editor},
 }

and
@inproceedings{RRnrj,
  author        = {Surname3 Name3 and Surname4 Name4},
  title         = {Some nice work},
  booktitle     = {Name of Conference (Acronym)},
  year          = {2020},
  publisher     = {Editor},
}

(or whatever is the norm on the database).

Related question: "What are good sites to find citations in BibTex format?" over at TeX.SE.

I don't think that there exists software to reliably correct these kinds of errors in your bibliography -- especially given that the bibtex data available from publishers sometimes even contains errors.

Not aware of anything to "uniformize" in that way, and I don't think that running through Scholar would help - IME that and other databases have that sort of inconsistency in anyway. I fear that it's a hand-pruning task...

If you have the DOI codes, the best thing is to use the API and get the references yourself:
curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography; style=bibtex" http://dx.doi.org/[DOI code]

If you have them (and you should, for any modern article), parsing the bib to get them and getting the data can be done in a very simple script.


text:
When citing your advisor's past work, how can I proceed when their papers are poorly written?
I am reviewing the MsC. dissertation of a friend of mine before it is submitted to the evaluation board. I started looking for formatting errors, badly written parts, malformed citations, typos, orphaned references, factual errors, logical gaps, and other stuff like that. One of the authors that she most cite is, of course, her advisor.
However, when I checked all that stuff, I found that the works of her advisor are very sloppy, containing a lot of errors, typos, incomplete sentences, misnumbered pages, misnumbered sections, inconsistent spacing and margins, mixing text with two different fonts in the same paragraph for no reason, misplaced images obscuring parts of the text and even sentences that were left painted with red or yellow to be reviewed before publication, but that were published anyway without further review.
The worse is that her advisor works contains a lot of malformed citations. Those includes things like: typos in cited authors' names; opening quotation marks without closing them (so I can't tell for sure where the quote ends); closing quotation marks that didn't open anywhere; quoted parts that differ significantly from the quoted work when I double check; citations from works that do not show up in the references section; cited text parts that don't appear anywhere in the cited work (maybe misquoted something from paper A as being from paper B); papers in the reference section that aren't cited anywhere in the text; quoting things in the middle of the text without telling who or what is being quoted; telling that someone is being cited without actually providing a citation, etc. It is so sloppy, that it certainly even contains a lot of unintended plagiarism not due to malice, but due to the severe lack of competence and discipline on properly quoting stuff and on editing, formatting and reviewing documents.
Luckily, this is not my work and I don't have any relation with her advisor. Also, my job is reviewing her paper, not her advisor's papers. But, if I were in her place, what should I do if I am obliged to cite a lot of very low-quality work? Trying to argue or denounce or whatever with the advisor is probably just a way to ensure being dropped from the program, specially near the scheduled date for the deadline when the text is in its final development steps. Also, it is likely that this might cause some trouble inside the evaluation board that if composed by competent people would likely perceive all of those (since I did, surely could them). Further, even after the degree is received, the fact that the Master's dissertation is based in so much low-quality works is likely to cause problems further down the road. What should I do?

I note you are in the editing phase. The points you are complaining about are precisely the sort of thing I would hope to find in editing. I imagine your expectations are being let down here, but until it goes out to press or peers, it doesn't matter what condition it's in.

Did you find the advisors paper on scihub, libgen, or other similar paralegal sites? It's often the case they don't have the published version, but a leaked preprint/prepublishment one before the formatting and typos were fixed, and sometimes additional format errors introduced as it went through different conversions. Even arxiv papers suffer from this issue occassionally. Unless the papers are from the publisher itself, don't give much thought for it.

@Neinstein Some where paralegal, some were not. They both have the same low-level quality.

I think you are also overestimating the scrutiny an MSc thesis will get.

@Marianne013 Probably, If her advisor didn't get so much scrutinity, it is unlikely that she will.

Are there not two, very different paths open to you? One would be to challenge each and every one of her advisor's mistakes, as reasons to invalidate any objection on the advisor's part… The other would be to ignore any and all mistakes, and work from the premise that the advisor's work has already been accepted, with and in spite of all its errors.

Your question is very dependent on the locale and the time.
Over the last decade, in most of the world, the formal standards for scholarly work have increased a lot. People who are now reaching retirement age published in an era where there was no word-processing for the general public and students graduating even with a doctorate routinely employed other people to write up their thesis. Their advisors often had their thesis set, an expensive and cumbersome procedure, and there is at least one famous dissertation (or a dissertation by a famous mathematician) that was so marred by typos that its significance was only recognized later. Even if authors typed their own papers using something like troff, they made many mistakes. You can still see this in LaTeX-set papers where many people still do not know how to put text components into an equation.
The expectation on the quality of citations has also increased significantly. Thirty years ago in computer science, we used a lot of abbreviations and because there was not a lot of information on the Internet, we sometimes cited by (short-term) memory and got things wrong.
The acceptance and availability of modern electronic tools also varied quite a bit according to countries. In addition, the quality of work has increased a lot in certain countries over the last couple of decades.
Regarding your question: First make sure that you are applying contemporary standards to contemporary works. Only if the advisor's current papers are full of problems of the type you are describing, then maybe taking an action would make sense.
Second, what do you expect as the outcome of a complaint? Do you want the titles of the advisor nullified or do you want her to be fined? Presumably, the advisor is subject to evaluation and their evaluators will look at current publications and react to them. What you describe is only feasible in low-quality outlets for which no or very small credit would be given.
Third, your friend is stuck with the advisor. Is your friend really basing their results on bad papers or rather on poorly written papers? If your friend uses previous work, then your friend is held responsible for a critical reading of this previous work, independent on how well or poorly it is written.
Fourth, if your friend is forced to use invalid or shoddy work as a foundation of the friend's thesis, then indeed her degree might not be worth a lot. In this case, and only in this case, your friend should reconsider the relationship, even if it means graduating later. However, it might just be best for your friend to get the degree "and run". In industry or government, the title might be the only things that counts.

The only reasonable outcome of complaining is getting dropped out of the program, so it is a great no-go. It could be the "right" thing to do in a perfect world, but the world is imperfect and in a perfect world this issue would not even happen to start with.

However, it might just be best for your friend to get the degree "and run". - Exactly what I was thinking about.

Her advisor surely is already well past retirement age - 77 years old. Probably someone who never properly learnt how to use a computer.

"bad papers" ≠ "poorly written papers" - you are right.

Over the last decade? That would be ten years, putting us back in 2002. Typesetting was not some mysterious process, inaccessible to normal people. Computers were in widespread usage, and desktop publishing was commonplace going well back in the nineties, if not the eighties (for those with access to computers, natch, which should have included anyone attending an educational institution). Surely, you meant a much longer span of time than a "decade". Maybe half-century?

@CodyGray: It's 2023.  "Last decade" is from 2014-2023, not 2002.  (Which just makes your point stronger)

I am talking about two different periods. (A) In the last decade, in my experience, the expectations on citation quality have increased. (B) When people who are now reaching retirement age started their career, word processing was in its infancy.

You are making too much of this. Writers are not responsible for the typesetting or grammar in the papers that they cite. Citing a paper does not mean endorsing all aspects of it. Presumably your friend is citing her advisor because her new work builds on the advisor's previous work; so long as the parts being built upon are technically sound, and your friend's paper is itself well written, there is really nothing to do here.

This.  All day this.  The only impact the sloppiness (assuming it's just formatting and not factual errors) should have on the new paper is to choose citation-via-paraphrase and not citation-via-quotation.

This is the answer.  The quality of your friends thesis has nothing to do with the citations she uses (assuming of course that the citations are valid).  I think the real question you are asking is what do you do when already published material is sloppy?  Unfortunately there isn't much you can do in this case.

You only need to worry about the quality of the advisor's work to the extent that it impacts on the quality of your friend's work.  For example, if the advisor gives an ambiguous quotation from another paper (without closing quotes to indicate where the quote ends), that is only going to matter if your friend also uses that quote, in which case your friend should go back to the primary source to use the corrected quotation (citing the original source of the quote).  If there are mis-numbered pages that affect the ability to clearly cite the source then your friend should note this problem for the reader in their citations (e.g., with a footnote) so that the reader can find the relevant pages for the citation.
In cases where the cited work of the advisor contains an error relevant to the point being cited, your friend should note the error and act accordingly (e.g., correcting spelling or grammatical mistakes with appropriate notation of changes).  As a reviewer of your friend's work you can point out instances where you think the material being cited is erroneous and suggest appropriate changes.  However, it is not necessary to point out errors in cited work that do not impact on the work you are reviewing.  Many of the issues you raise with the cited work (e.g., aesthetic problems with fonts, etc.) are not things that are going to impact the other paper.
From what you have described, it sounds like some of the works being cited are working papers, rather than properly peer reviewed work.  (I would certainly hope that some of those problems would not appear in a final version published in a journal.)  In such a case the bibliography will make clear which references are working papers.  It is of course possible that the level of mistakes in the cited work is so severe that you might legitimately question whether that work is trustworthy to cite at all.  If you form the view that it is not then you can make this known in your review, though your friend is probably constrained by the fact that he is working with this advisor.

Almost none of this matters. To my mind, there are three reasons that you cite something:
(1) To reference specific facts established in that work.
(2) To acknowledge the precedence of previous research in the area.
(3) To point the reader to other sources in the area which might interest them.
For (1), if the source establishes your fact correctly, it basically doesn't matter if the typesetting, formatting or grammar are unclear. If there are material errors in the source, then I would indicate how to fix them in as non-judgmental language as I can.
For example: "See SOURCE for the complete table of X's. Note the typo in the third line of the table: The 2 should be a 3," or "The equivalence of conditions Y and Z is Theorem 1 in SOURCE, but it appears to us that the authors of SOURCE only prove one direction of the implication, so we provide a proof of the converse." If the badly written material is brief and easy to write well, you can also do "Theorem 1 was proved by SOURCE; since the proof is short, we include it for completeness." Note that there is no need to directly criticize SOURCE in the last example.
If you need to directly quote material which has a typo, you can use sic or square brackets to fix it, but I would consult with your advisor about how to do this without seeming rude; I think this is something where norms differ from field to field.
For (2), I think this doesn't matter at all. "This research area was pioneered by SOURCE" -- if SOURCE is badly written, this sentence is still true and you have done your job acknowledging precedence.
For (3), this can be a bit awkward. If I am pointing the reader to important earlier sources or surveys, then I don't want to leave out major papers, but I also want to give them sources which they will find useful. I usually opt for praising rather than criticizing: "For background on TOPIC, see SOURCE1, SOURCE2 or SOURCE3; the author particularly recommends the clear exposition of SOURCE3."

I am reviewing the MsC. dissertation of a friend of mine

You did not mention the country, but at least in Europe an MSc dissertation is a formality and there is nothing (or almost nothing) new in it.
You have to write it, and then forget it. Nobody cares about details and the reviewers have several of them to go through (which, otoh, means that a neat, readable dissertation will help). But nobody is going to check details such as the citations contents.

The country is Brazil. Brazil is not really known for the quality of our academic work, and also our regulations and norms are plagued with many problems for reasons that aren't in the scope of this question. However, what I saw from her advisor was well beyond anything that could be considered minimally acceptable, but on the other hand, as you and other answers stated, nobody really cares.

@VictorStafusa-BozoNaCadeia --- in our (European) case it is not really the quality of the academic world but rather the fact that we have a 5 years university education (roughly speaking) and the goal is to educate "doers", that is people who will use a very small part of what they learned. The final dissertation is a prerequisite for the diploma and people have been extensively tested during these 5 years; if this was me I would completely get rid of it as it is utterly useless in the context of what these people will do later.

@VictorStafusa-BozoNaCadeia (cont'd)  This is of course completely different if you actually go the academia way, i.e. a PhD.

This is generally the case, but not always. Occasionally MsC dissertations do contain original results.

@GiuseppeNegro: sure, there are always such cases (mine was definitely not :)) but they are extra rare (I saw a page on them once but could not find it again). The amount of time and trees lost on these theses is staggering.