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What can I do if I still have not recieved the rights review from ACM?
We finished shepherding a paper recently and we still have not received the Association for Computing and Machinery (ACM) rights review to finalize our camera-ready which is due very soon. Our hotcrp page says accepted and we are cleared but we still have not received the rights review. I have reached out to the publicity chairs for the rights review email and they claim to have sent it but I have not received it. I don't know who else to ask because they have yet to reply to my emails where I ask again for the rights review link. I also do not want to turn in a not ready camera ready, what should I do?

You are correct, sorry about that.


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On choosing a license for software in academia
In my university, professors in Computer Science decide by themselves the licenses for the code of their research group. This happens without consulting the university legal team (or the university, more generally). As an undergrad researcher, this strikes me as incredibly odd.
I have the following questions:

Is this common practice?
Is this good practice?
How should a situation like this be handled?

Is it reasonable to expect the software only to be published only if the contributors that did most of the work agree on it?
The software may or may not have economic value. Is it reasonable to expect the professor to consult if he is allowed to distribute it under open-source licenses?

For more specific context, I have checked the percentages of ownership on patents. It turns out research Groups get <10% of the ownership. My university doesn't have any special rules for software.
I have no interest in my possible ownership of this software. However, it worries me that my group director is able to make this decision on his own.

You clearly have never dealt with lawyers trying to get a simple straightforward answer! And, often, the determining factor is the grant the work is performed under, or other non-university controlled aspects.

I have updated the question to clarify point 3. It is not clear to me the university is not involved. From my point of view, the software has a shared ownership between university, contributors and research group. This software may have economic value. Is it weird that I find unreasonable that the group director is able to open source this software without consulting the university directly?

First, the university may not care and so doesn't want to get involved in such faculty research decisions. Second, to publish something, one needs the consent of all of its "authors". Other people may contribute and not rise to the level of "authorship". It is not outside the realm of possibility that the PI has consulted with the others who need to assent. Some paid/contract work, for example, doesn't result in authorship. It depends on who has contributed the "intellectual content", not those who spent a lot of hours working at the direction of the "creator".

I know for a fact the director has not consulted with any author the decision (myself included). His contribution is close to 1/4 of the total work involved.

I feel like there's too many questions for one post here, especially the consulting one.

The software developed by most academics has no commercial value. It is a research product, similar to a paper, and is usually shared with other researchers by hosting it on the researcher’s web page (as I do) or on GitHub or other repositories. There is usually no need for any sort of license, but some people will include a license to make clear what use by others of their code they see as acceptable.
There is also no need for the university to be involved in any of these decisions, just like the university doesn’t tell researchers what “license” to use for the papers they publish. I think your main source of confusion is related to thinking of research code as some kind of valuable property that needs to be protected. In 99% of cases that’s not the reality.

Patents and software licenses are completely different. Relatively little software is actually patented, and I'd suspect the university wants to be involved in any patent applications. University involvement in patents is also a way for a researcher to avoid the high cost of patenting anything (lawyers and such).
Patents need to be registered. Copyrights don't (US law, but it can vary elsewhere). Publishing a "creative work" implies a copyright for the creator.
A software license is usually about permitting some limited use of copyrighted materials, though patents can also be licensed. Some, but not all, universities want a say in software licensing. More want a say in patents.
Distinguish carefully between copyright, patent, and trade-secret (which doesn't apply here). All apply in different ways to IP.
In general (US, anyway) creative works get an automatic copyright. Only "inventions" are subject to possible patent. There is some controversy about whether a piece of software is an "invention", but in recent years it has often been considered so. This has led to some strange outcomes.
Currently (US again) copyright lasts a long time. Disney would like it to be infinite. Patents are more limited. This pushes some to prefer copyright when there is a choice.

A college or university that isn't heavily involved in research (teaching institutions) may have much less restrictive arrangements generally, since such questions arise less frequently - especially for patents.

The Public Domain article on Wikipedia has a general discussion of various aspects of IP and how long protections last. There are other, more specific, articles there, also.

I didn't intend my question to ask about patents. I meant that specific comment to draw an analogy between open sourcing code and releasing patents. If this software were to be a patent, the research group would have no say in the matter because it is a 10% shareholder. How come the director of the research group can open-source software with tens of contributors unilaterally?

@Oca But if you draw an analogy with research papers (which are also subject to copyright) instead of patents, you get a very different intuition. Researchers regularly license or transfer their copyright to a third party as part of their work. The question of co-authors' consent is a separate question, but it is a question that also applies to research publishing in general.

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PhD students publish without supervisors – how does it work?
In my field (experimental physics) the supervision of PhD students works roughly like that: freshmen come to the lab, they are given tasks, then they do experiments, discuss the results with their supervisors, do more experiments, discuss more, and then at some point they start writing papers about their results. There, of course, both PhD students and their supervisors are co-authors on papers, often together with other internal and/or external collaborators.
I've been working in a few countries, and the system was always more or less like that. I do understand why it is functioning this way: in a relatively complicated field of knowledge, a new PhD student is absolutely incapable of writing a paper which would stand up to the standards of the respective scientific community. So the student gets supervision as to which experiments are interesting to do and which not, how to do the experiments, how to analyze results, how to present them, etc. In return, the supervisor, at the very minimum, publishes a paper and gets the work done (and published), as it was described in the funding proposal from which this PhD student is paid. I mean, it is not usually referred to as a deal between a student and a supervisor, but if everything goes well it's a win-win for sure, and it's all pretty obvious, so I am not even sure whether I should have written it in so much detail.
However, surfing through Academia SE, I found a number of questions from PhD students about whether they should publish papers without their supervisors, and, surprisingly, a significant number of answers encouraging them to do so, in the spirit of: “It’s your PhD, how are you supposed to work independently if you can’t publish a paper on your own”. From this I conclude that there are at least some places where this is indeed how the system works, so PhD students publish papers without their supervisors as co-authors. And so, I wonder: How is this system supposed to work long-term? What would be the motivation for supervisors to actually accept and supervise students, if they don't even get a publication from this student's work? Supervision, if done properly, takes quite some time, so as a research scientist, I'd rather spend this time on my own work which will be published under my name, rather then help other people publish their papers.
I can foresee an answer that goes like, it is a sort of moral obligation of a scientist to "raise" PhD students, and he or she should not expect anything "in return", not even a publication. Although some people might indeed share this belief, it would be very naive to build the entire system on moral grounds, so I am sure there is something else.
Update. I would like to quote @AlexanderWoo: "Mathematics is weird is that standards for authorship usually differs in an advisor-student context than outside of one. There are definitely contributions that would merit coauthorship if one were not the advisor of the other author but does not if one is the advisor." Sounds bizarre but again, what do I know.

I think it's more field- than place-dependent. There's an old poll on the meta site showing that the Academia.SE demographics is (or at least was) skewed towards CS and maths, where students publishing as solo authors is much more commonplace than in physics. And even in physics it seems more common in more theoretical groups than experimental ones.

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This is not meant as a complete answer, but as one of several observations.  I may end up submitting several different answers to this question.
There is a big difference between math and physics in the way people become leaders in the field (though perhaps physics is gradually becoming more math-like in this).  In physics, it seems to me that everyone agrees what the big important problems are, and one becomes a leader by solving (or making substantial progress) one of these problems.  In math, there are some big problems one can become famous for solving, but most leading mathematicians get their status by convincing the community that the problems they can solve are important, not by solving problems that were considered important beforehand.
As a first approximation, every research mathematician is by default interested in their own problems and no one else's, and every time you convince someone else to be interested in your problem, you 'win'.  Your advisees, if they become successful research mathematicians, are naturally people who will have some interest in your problems.
My general research area of algebraic combinatorics is a good example.  Forty years ago it was a niche area in which only a handful of mathematicians worked.  Now there is an algebraic combinatorialist in almost every sizable math department.  Part of the reason for its growth is that mathematicians (for example Robert MacPherson) in other areas of mathematics respected this area and appreciated its contributions towards understanding (non-combinatorial) problems they were interested in, but in large part the growth has been because of Richard Stanley having had 60 successful PhD students, many of whom went on to have PhD students of their own.  As a result, Professor Stanley is famous (for a mathematician) and has been invited to speak everywhere.  (He is now retired and travels a lot less.)
For me, I can certainly say I would get a lot more credit, both from my university and from my research community, for having a student who went on to a research-oriented postdoc(*) and a tenure-track position with research as significant component than I would for another several papers.
(*) My small department graduates about two PhDs per year, with about one in some area of theoretical mathematics (as opposed to applied mathematics), and, in the memory of the faculty, has never had a PhD who went on to a research-oriented postdoc in theoretical mathematics.

Thank you! very interesting comparison. When asking my question, I was indeed thinking about mathematics as a field where this should be more common. I do understand that when supervising a student, you might not be interested in a publication as much as in "creating" a new researcher with a similar mindset (i.e. having interest in your problems) because this would be sort of an investment in your future. Yet, this does not exclude co-authorship, so I suppose traditions in mathematics also play a role here.

most leading mathematicians get their status by convincing the community that the problems they can solve are important, not by solving problems that were considered important beforehand. – This is not so much different from other fields (including most of physics). The difference seems to be that finding some task that is important and arguing that it is is considered a major part of the creative work and happens in the papers.

In biology, a paper doesn't make it into nature/science/cell unless it either solves an existing problem recognized to be important, or identifies a new problem, convinces people it is important AND solves.it. This second is more common because most easy ways to solve existing problems have been tried, but there are an almost infinite number of problems that could be interesting with easy solutions that have not yet been tried.

I published two single-author journal articles during my PhD in a field where a PhD student publishing without their supervisor is uncommon. So uncommon, in fact, that I can't think of any other examples in my subfield.
My case is probably unusual in that by a few years into my project, I was far more of an expert in the subject than my supervisor. My former supervisor is a bit of a generalist, so this is not unusual for them. At a certain point during my PhD I started disagreeing strongly with my supervisor about what to do, which is when I started working more independently.
I actually would have been offended if I were required to put my supervisor's name on either paper, as they had negligible intellectual contributions to the papers and were even harmful to them in my opinion. My supervisor made it quite clear that the work was my own, and even stated so during my defense. (They already had tenure so I don't think they needed their name on the papers, though this could be a factor in other cases.)
From my own experience I can say there are advantages and disadvantages to publishing without one's supervisor as a PhD student.
Some researchers will have greater respect for a student who has published independently. I've been pleasantly surprised to be treated as an authority on certain subjects during my PhD. I admit that those people might just be nice all around, but I didn't see most students getting that sort of treatment.
Unfortunately there are people who are suspicious of more independent students. One reviewer brought up the fact that I was a PhD student publishing without my supervisor in their review, as if such a thing were something to be suspicious of. They did not elaborate about what they found suspicious, but in my response I wrote that they are welcome to ask the editor to contact my supervisor if they believe I had not credited others sufficiently. I've also been warned to emphasize successful collaborative work on my CV and cover letters when applying to jobs, as some people will assume that I'm hard to get along with if I work independently too much.
I personally prefer to work more independently. I think the current research environment incentivizes collaboration far too much. I see a lot of groupthink/lowest commmon denominator type thinking in much of heavily collaborative work. Good ideas are avoided too often simply because they are unfamiliar to most people whose approval is needed. Good research often comes from unfamiliarity.
That's not to say that collaboration is often bad, just that it's too often bad. I fully agree that certain projects are impossible without collaboration. But given the choice, I'd bias my own work towards what an individual can handle, which I think is more than most believe.

+1 your penultimate paragraph is excellent food for thought, thank you.

I think what you wrote has a few valid points, but it misses the main point of my question: why would your supervisor hire you in the first place. I still suppose, guessing on your story, that they were hoping to publish with you in the beginning but due to strong disagreements you mention, the solution was found to let you publish alone and basically let it go.

@sleepy While I can't speak for my former supervisor, I do believe that they would have preferred that I published with them. With respect to my supervisor's motivation, I would guess that they view hiring as a numbers game; you can't "win" them all but if you have enough researchers, you will get enough wins. They probably shrugged my case off like they surely shrugged off previous students of theirs who quit, no fault of my supervisor.

Experimental sciences are the exception. Research in them usually requires funding for materials and lab equipment, which limits the intellectual freedom a student can have.
I did my PhD somewhere between theoretical computer science and bioinformatics. Research was usually done in small informal groups, because there were no significant expenses apart from salaries and travel. Students were seen as junior colleagues. PhD students and their supervisors naturally published many papers together, as they were discussing their research daily. Later in their PhDs, students often had other collaborations that did not involve the supervisor.
One key feature of theoretical computer science is that the papers are "small". If you have a side project that yields promising results, you can often turn that into a single-author paper with a reasonable effort. I had two such papers during my PhD, which was uncommon but not that rare.
Now I work in bioinformatics, where the focus is on "bigger" papers that require more effort. Students still have plenty of intellectual freedom, but even the side projects are so big that coauthors keep accumulating and eventually the supervisor gets involved too.
Many of my friends in social sciences and humanities were independent researchers from day 1 of their PhD. They did not have as much supervisors as mentors, who were much less involved in their research than what is common in STEM fields. I guess that's the nature of the fields. While STEM students spend most of their undergraduate and master's degrees studying an established body of knowledge, students in social sciences and humanities spend more time learning how to do research.
Research involving extensive field work probably has other mechanisms in play, but I'm not familiar with such fields.

+1 for social scientists spend longer learning how to do research. I often feel that in my field (also bioinformatics/computational biology, but the more applied side), students arrive relatively underdeveloped as researchers and have only 4 years to get a PhD.

I think you have fallen victim to a false dichotomy:
I published one single-author paper during my PhD and one afterwards on a project that already started during my PhD, both in a field where this is unusual (though not an experimental one).
However before doing so, I also published five papers with my PhD advisor, three as a first author.
These papers went exactly as you describe:
The research was outlined by the principal investigators of my research project (including my PhD supervisor), thoroughly supervised, and they contributed strongly to the writing process.
That’s how I learnt how to perform and publish research of my own.
My single-author papers differed from the collaborative papers as they originated from my own ideas (both times recognising a lack of methods).
My supervisor supported me working on these projects, and these contributed to the overarching research project that paid my salary.
My supervisor wasn’t an author of these papers as he couldn’t contribute to them – most of them was executing the original idea.
Also, thanks to my previous collaborative publishing experience, I could handle the writing process on my own as well.
(Of course, I made use of internal peer review both by my supervisor and other colleagues.)
Performing and publishing a small research project¹ this way is something that I think every PhD student on the verge of graduation should be able to do.
After all, that’s what a PhD ideally certifies: the ability to independently perform research.
However, this doesn’t mean that all graduating PhD students should work like this all of the time or even most of the time.
It does not suffice that the PhD student is capable of publishing a single-author paper, but you they also need to have an idea that works, can be realised within a sufficiently short time, does not require extra resources and does not digress too much from what they are paid for.
Still, we probably see fewer such papers than we should on account of supervisors forcing themselves on papers, students prematurely adding them to avoid conflict or not knowing any better.
Finally, mind that there are also differences between fields of what makes for (ethical) authorship.
To quote a comment by Alexander Woo:

An advisor might say "try this method" or "maybe this paper I've only looked at the abstract of might be relevant" or "what you suggest can't work because of this result in this paper which you should read", none of which quite counts as working with the student on the problem but is more than "here is your problem".

Depending on the field, these kind of contributions (posing the problem, choosing and refuting methods) are the main creative work, whereas the execution is mere legwork.
By contrast, in some subfields of mathematics, only performing a proof and similar seems to be considered worthy of authorship.
Something similar applies to the writing process:
For example, in most fields context embedding, motivation, arguing for relevance are crucial parts of a paper and properly writing those requires some skill that can arguably be only learnt on the job, i.e., in collaboration with the supervisor.
By contrast, there are subfields of mathematics where papers are almost completely devoid of these parts, but consist almost exclusively of definitions, theorems, and proofs.

¹ Mind that this already excludes fields, in which small research projects are not a thing and every project requires several people.

True, an experienced PhD student close to graduation sometimes might be capable of performing their own research and publishing alone. I should have mentioned that my question is not exactly about those cases. However, even there I am not quite sure why you said "My supervisor [...] couldn’t contribute to them"; was it completely different field outside of their expertise, or maybe they simply did not want to?

@sleepy: I should have mentioned that my question is not exactly about those cases. – And what do you conclude from that? If people cannot publish on their own anyway, …, well, they can’t. — was it completely different field outside of their expertise, or maybe they simply did not want to? – As I said, after conception, the rest was execution, and there was no point in them (instead of me) doing that. There simply was no good opportunity for them to help me.

Mathematics is weird is that standards for authorship usually differs in an advisor-student context than outside of one.  There are definitely contributions that would merit coauthorship if one were not the advisor of the other author but does not if one is the advisor.

@AlexanderWoo: While this certainly happens, I think the claim that standards for authorships usually differ between these situations, is too general. I think that it depends a lot on the people involved, and also on the country where the PhD is done.

If I understand correctly, the OP's question is mainly:
"Why would a researcher support PhD students without the benefit of writing papers with them?"
(Where "support" can mean a number of things, such as hiring and supervising students in the first place, "allowing" them to publish on their own, encouraging them to publish on their own, and so on.)
Disclaimer: As mentioned in a comment, I am not completely sure whether I interpret the focus of the OP's question correctly, so let me specify that this answer refers to the presumed question that I marked in bold above.
A lot of important things have already been mentioned in other answers and comments (in particular, the dependency on the field), but I think in order to specifically answer the question, it is important to point out the following observation:
The question is based on the premise that the only primary goal of a researcher is to maximize their paper output (where "paper output" is probably a - somewhat individual - function of both qualitiy and quanitity, and in some fields also of the position within the list of authors).
However, this premise is incorrect.
The actions of human beings (rumour has it that even some scientists are human beings...) depend on various intrensic and extrinsic motivations and - most importantly - on the very complex mixture and interplay between the both.
Here is a non-comprehensive lists of goals that, say, a professor at a research university might (or sometimes might not) seek to achieve (in arbitrary order):

Make for a living, i.e., earn sufficient (what ever this means) money and/or retain a high amount of job security.

Gain and retain social esteem (including self-esteem, esteem by their family and friends, by colleagues and collaborators, their students, their university, their wider scientific community, sometimes even by complete strangers, and so on).

Enhance scientific progress in their specific subfield(s).

Promote their subfield(s) and, in particular, those parts/theories within their subfield(s) that they are particularly fond of (for instance, because they think a theory is particularly important, or because they consider it "their" theory, "their baby", "their legacy", or whatever.)

Make a contribution to solving problems that human societies are facing.

Have fun during their work.

Develop and study exciting ideas.

Collaborate with other people (most humans like social interactions, at least to a certain extent, on collaborations are one kind of social interaction).

Retain sufficient spare time to spend with their family, their hobbies, etc.

Behave what they consider ethical.

Co-authoring papers is not an end on itself; instead, it can be seen as one of several means that are instrumental to pursue some of the goals listed above (and probably also further goals). In fact, they are certainly a rather important mean, but there are also other things that can - and should - be done in order to achieve goals such as the ones listed above.
One of these further means is supervising PhD students, even if the supervision does not result in additional papers on the supervisors CV.
So to actually answer the question, let me discuss by a few examples how supervising students can help to achieve the goals mentioned above:
(The order is, again, irrelevant; I enumerate the points merely to facilitate later reference in case that some users wish to comment.)

(1) An important part of "making for a living" is to get a permanent position first (for instance, in the US this is what it typically means to "get tenure").
In order to get such a position, co-authoring many papers is certainly helpful (at least at the paper's quality does not significantly suffer from their numbers), but hiring committees, tenure committees, etc., will also expect other things, for instance, experience in the supervision of PhD students. So supervising PhD students can mean a considerable benefit for the superviser, even of the latter does not co-author any (or not many) papers of the students.
For people who already have permanent positions, the pressure is probably a bit less; but still it is in many cases considered as part of their job to supervise PhD students. If they don't do this, this might (or might not, depending on the circumstances) cause them considerable problems with their employer (i.e., their university).

(2) Supervising PhD students will often earn people social esteem from several sources: for instance, from the PhD students themselves (at least if the supervisor does a decent job), from their department, from other colleagues. Depending on the culture of the scientific field, the country, the university and even the department, the amount of esteem that a supervisor earns might even be considerably higher of their PhD students are perceived as working quite independently.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you often claim co-authorship for contributions which are usually not considered sufficient for co-authorship within your field, precisely the opposite thing is likely to happen: You might earn contempt instead of esteem.

(3) An excellent PhD student will obviously be an asset for scientific progress, so if the supervisor has an execellent PhD student, they can befinit scientific progress by supporting this student. Giving excellent students the opportunity to work independently can benefit these students in various ways (and might hurt them in others, of course - it certainly depends on the situation and the people involved).

(4) If a PhD student specialises in the same (or a closely related) theory as their supervisor, then it will likely help to promote this theory if the student successfully pursues an academic career after their PhD. In many (though not all) cases, such a career will be supported if the student has evidence of their ability to work indepently - and papers authored by the student alone are sometimes (often?) considered as such evidence. Similary, papers that the student wrote with other collaborators, but not with their supervisor as a co-author, have a good to chance to be interpreted in the sense that "the student's ability to do research is not ultimately tied to their supervisor", which can also benefit their career opportunities.

(5) In order to help solving society's problems by means of scientific research, it is a reasonable course of action to choose those PhD candidates who are most likely to do an excellent job and make good contributions, rather than to choose those who are most likely to co-author papers with you.
Also, leaving people a good amount of freedom and giving them the opportunity to work more independently, will often increase the probability for good new ideas and innovation.

(6) People are more likely to like their work if there's a good climate at their lab. Professors who prevent students from publishing papers on their own even if the students were perfectly up to it, are not likely to have a positive impact that climate. Professors who force their name onto articles to which they haven't contributed at all, are also unlikely to have a positive impact on that climate (at least be this particular action; of course, they might still impact the climate positively by other things they do).
So if a professor is does such things too often, there's a non-negligible chance that this turns (or at least takes part in turning) their own lab into a place where they wouldn't like to work and where their students wouldn't like to work, either. The first of those consequence clearly has a direct negative impact on the professor's well being, while the second can have negative impacts on some others of the proefessor's possible goals discussed here (for instance, to enhance scientific knowledge, since dissatisfied students are less likely to do good work).

(7) Developing exciting ideas is more likely if you work with people who are able to think and work independently. But there is certainly a positive correlation between people's ability to think and work indepedently and their desire to actually do think and work indepdently. So I you like to work with students in order to develop exciting ideas, you're often better off if you supervise students you are able to think and work independently - but this will sometimes (often?) have the consequence, that those students will also expect the possibility to work independently to a certain extent.

(8) If you like collaborating with other people, then you do, of course, have an incentive to... well, collaborate with other people. This particular incentive is independent of the question whether this collaboration also yields an additional paper on your CV. (But surely, in many cases the prospect to get an additional paper on your CV might be another and additional incentive for a collaboration.)
Whether a collaboration will probably result in a paper with you as co-author, depends, of course, on many things. If you supervise a PhD student, then your contribution might sometimes (though certainly not always) be of a kind which does not automatically warrant you co-authorship in some (!) scientific fields.

(9) If you have a lot of things to do (as professors typically have), and would still like to reserve non-zero spare time, then it is reasonable to delegate a certain amount of work. For instance, if you feel that a PhD student is up to doing a certain project mostly on their own, and that they will probably benefit from doing so, then you might choose to indeed let them do it mostly on their own.
This will (again, often, though probably not always) reduce you're committment in terms of working hours you put into the project, since giving guidance and feedback is less time consuming than making more detailed contributions to the project. On the other hand, this might result in a paper for which you don't have a good claim to be a co-author.

(10) Many (not all, obviously) people prefer to keep a clean conscience - so they try not to engage in actions which they consider unethical. Some people (their percentage is certainly field dependent) do consider it unethical to write their name on a paper they contributed (almost) nothing to.

Please note that this is just a sample list (which is light years from being comprehensive); I wrote it in order to demonstrate two things:

Researcher do have many incentives to supervise students, even if this doesn't always yield a new paper for the supervisor.

In some situations, insisting on co-authorship might even be counterproductive to some (or many) of the professor's goals.

Final remarks.

Please also keep in mind that, while many people have a considerable interest in performing very well on their jobs and many people put a very large amount of work into achieving this, most of them have little interest in over-optimising their performance at the upper end ot the scale.
For instance, assume you are an accomplished researcher and tenured professor, with a lot of experience and many achievements; you write many high-quality papers, are liked by your scientific community, do really enjoy your job, and like to work with your students. Then there is only very little incentive to insist on yet one more paper on your CV.
Say, you're in such a situation and you're facing a "borderline case" of a project by one of your students, where one could well argue for or against your co-authorship, and both decisions would be unlikely to have any considerable negative impacts on anyone: in such a situation, why would you really care whether you're going to have this paper on your CV or not?

One more word on field dependence: What has, as far as I can see, not been emphasised in this discussion so so far, is that fields do also have different conventions on how to order the authors of a paper. For instance, in pure math, authors are almost exclusively ordered alphabetically. In more applied fields, on the other hand, authors are typically ordered to indicate how much they contributed to the paper.
In a field where authors are ordered by contributions, there's a natural option to include authors who contributed significantly less to the paper than other authors. In a field where authors are ordered alphabetically, though, the minimal contribution in order to be recognised as a co-author will naturally be higher.

Thank you for your long and detailed response. I disagree with you on many points you mentioned, but nonetheless appreciate the effort. For example, I do believe that proper supervision of PhD students involves making creative and intellectual contributions to their work, which naturally results in co-authorship of the papers. Anyway, an interesting point about alphabetical co-authorship and higher threshold of contributions.

I published several papers as a PhD student.

some were together with 500 other authors, this should ring a bell to you if you are in particle physics. I value these papers the least (note that this is a personal approach: people who work in high energy physics often do not have other ways to publish as they are part of a collaboration and it is not that easy to build an accelerator and detector in your barn)
some were together with a smaller team, where everyone contributed something. A great way to learn how to collaborate across diverse teams.
some were with my advisor because we discussed topics together and his input was valuable
some were by myself. Out of these, I wanted to publish two that were from "me and my supervisor" but my supervisor told me "your idea is too valuable to be diluted with me as a co-author. I have all the publications I need, you do not". He was truly a role model for me (in other aspects of Academia as well)

So every kind is possible.
Now, academia being what it is (or was, 20+ years ago) - I know some people who could not publish by themselves because their supervisor insisted on being added  to each publication. They were not competitive enough to send the publication anyway (and get into a conflict), so some of the publications were by "author, author and leeches". You must take that political aspect into your publication strategy (very, very much unfortunately)

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Job Titles at German Universities - Proper English Counterparts?
At universities in Germany, there are the following standardized job titles that I find difficult to express in English in a useful manner:

Studentische Hilfskraft: a student who does not yet hold a degree and is paid to perform tasks often only remotely related to their field of study (such as data entry, helping older professors with digital technologies, etc. I was myself once paid to be the driver to a group of visiting scientists during their stay). This is the lowest pay grade and there's a time cap of 20 hours of work per week at most universities. The max average (it varies between the various federal states) salary is around 12000€ per year before taxes, so let's say it'd be 24000€ if they were allowed to do the 40h/week which are kind of seen as the country-wide default. The most common English translation is student assistant.

Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft: a student who could either be holding a Bachelor's degree, which is one pay-grade higher than a Studentische Hilfskraft, or even a Master's degree, which is the highest pay-grade for this job title. There's quite the discussion in some circles about these employees being underpaid and overworked, both in the sciences as well as the humanities. From my own experience I know that their tasks often (but not always) far exceed anything one could see as "unskilled" labour, as the "Hilf-" in "Hilfskraft" would imply. This is especially true if the employee has had non-academic vocational training or even work experience before going to university. Up to around 18000€ (would be 36000€ for 40h/week, but same or similar time cap of around 20h/week). It is permissible for employers to keep employees in these positions for 5 more years after removal from the register of students ("Exmatrikulation"). The most common English translation is student assistant.

Wissenschaftlich/technischer Mitarbeiter: the least-known of the bunch; these could be employees who are not academics at all and instead hold a title they gained by doing an "Ausbildung" (the traditional German vocational training system held in high regard by many employers; in an English-speaking country someone might write "did a 3-year degree to become a state-certified chemical-technical assistant"). Others might have done an Ausbildung in one field and then studied at University in some other field and end up as a Wissenschaftlich/technischer Mitarbeiter because of a combination of skills from both fields. Obviously there is a wider range of salaries for this title, perhaps somewhere between 38000€ and 62000€ per year (if you happen to be really good at something that's in high demand, such as, say, performing PCR tests). Unless the employee manages to attain a Master's degree, even better yet a PhD, there's little chance of climbing the ladder any further, but if you get real lucky you might end up with a life-time job in government service, which does provide a high degree of perceived social security. The only English translation for this that I'm aware of is scientific-technical staff.

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter: things seem to become more comparable from now on. It's difficult-ish, but not impossible, to land one of these jobs with only a Master's degree. Normally, you'll hold a PhD degree, though. I've known Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter in their early 20s who I feel might best still be described as research assistants, but the most common, and probably most apt, English translation is research fellow. You can end up holding this job title for the rest of your (working) life and your salary will increase based on how long you've been employed, anything between 42000€ and 57000€ if "the internet" is to be believed.

after that, and only achieved by very few, there's Juniorprofessor and Professor, of course. I won't get into these as they're so easily and aptly translated into English.

My question is: for the above-mentioned job titles, what are the best English translations in terms of conveying, without much explanation, to a prospective future employer or an academic colleague from an English-speaking country, what your job encompasses and what salary level you're roughly at?

Usually in my experience a resume includes a list of duties/responsibility in each job; these are at least if not more important than job titles, which are frequently meaningless especially across companies. If you think these things vary a lot in academia, wait until you find out how much it varies in industry.

That might be true for a resume. What about a conversation, though... but you might have a good point. Germans are big on standardized vocabulary. The rest of the world, perhaps not so much. This might be an inter-cultural issue, too.

I think it would be even more unnecessary to mention a title in a conversation. People mostly want to know what you've done, not what you're called.

I totally agree with Bryan. Descriptions, list of papers and projects, supporting documents, etc are more important. In my experience, many people come with long resumes full of great titles. When I investigate the details, I see they were doing a job as a graduate engineer, but because the company was small, the applicant got the self-confidence to call himself an engineering manager! Similarly, there were applicants who called themselves professional engineers, but their qualification were not internationally recognized, just a local nonsense test! Details are more essential than titles.

This is veering off-topic, but: would you say it's fair, in a CV, to just keep all the titles out of it and just keep the list of things you did?

I would point out that reseach assistant might also very well refer to a student assistant, i.e. not a PhD student or other scientific staff but probably with already a Bachelor degree. I once experimented a bit by going back and forth between German and English wikipedia pages (maybe not the most accurate way) of the terms "wissenschaftliche/studentische Hilfskraft*, "wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter", "student/research assistant/fellow" etc.

The first one is more like a "personal assistant" which implies to an English reader their duties were administrative (scheduling, driving, etc.) rather than related to the field of work.

I was faced with the same dilemma. I just used the original German together with my attempt at a literal translation.
If your experience is pertinent, you will have to elaborate on what you did anyway.  If you are applying for a job involving teaching for instance, you better lay this out.  If you had Übungsgruppen as a Hilfskraft to supervise, this would be useful to you in the teaching context and you describe elsewhere what you did. In this case, you would be closest to a Teaching Assistant.
Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter are not exactly the same of post-docs, since they usually have different tasks. At the FernUniversität, we wrote exercises and their solutions, organized the grading, and drove through Germany in order to supervise exams and to give tutorials. If you were on a grant doing research, then researcher would come close.
TLTR: I propose using the German with a literal translation. If you are applying, describe your pertinent job experience elsewhere.
As you move on with your life, this problem becomes moot.

In my experience, no-one really distinguishes between Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft and Studentische Hilfskraft, the difference is in the pay: in general, the pay of university employees (even student ones) is fixed on a federal (or in some cases national) level. For students, some places there is no differentiation between student employees with a degree (BA) or without, in other places there will be salary tiers: without BA, with BA, with MA (although if you already hold an MA and are not enrolled in another MA or BA program, the time that you can actually work under student conditions is very short). The translation for such a position would be either student assistant or student researcher.
As for Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter (WiMi), it is quite common that those positions go to recent MA graduates that get their PhD while being fully (or, quite often only at 50%) employed as a WiMi. There are also people with PhDs that hold WiMi posts. The salary here is also regulated and normally at Level E13, with your salary increasing with time. The best translation is either research fellow or simply researcher.


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Influence of Habilitation's field of study on the Professorship
Suppose person X did Bachelors, Masters, PhD, and postdoc in Physics. Then, X wants to start a Habilitation. Although the work will be relevant to Physics, the supervising professor is officially a computer science/mathematics professor, and therefore, the Habilitation will (officially) not be in Physics.
I want to know how does this affect the X's career in terms of
(1) becoming a professor
(2) going to industry

Does habilitation have any use/value outside academia? (Not snark, a question.)

Habilitation is simply a certified licence to teach. So, no. But semi-leading a group can count as experience.

Are there several meanings of the word? I normally assume it is like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habilitation. That is, a higher degree than a doctorate enabling a full professorship, not a license to teach.

It is the same: you are conferred "facultas docendi". Since last 2 decades it is not the only route to Professorship in Germany.

@quantum In Germany, you don't need habilitation to become a professor so it is not a requirement. I would, therefore, assume that it does not matter from which faculty you obtain it (Btw. nothing to do with the supervising professor but the faculty issuing the certificate).

In France, it's a habilitation to direct research, and in particular supervise young researchers including graduate students, and is often necessary to move up academic ranks.

Is there even such a concept (officially!) as a "supervising professor"? (Of course, you need teaching experience to get your habilitation, and those lectures must be officially supervised by a professor, but I don't even think it always has to be the same professor.)

@user151413 Not a supervisor but a reviewer

@Younes A reviewer is - I guess - yet again sth. different: For a Habilitation, you need to get reviews (typically also external). But you also need to demonstrate teaching experience, and since w/out a Habilitation, you are not allowed to teach independently (e.g., you are not allowed to take exams), someone has to take responsibility for your lectures, which is some kind of "supervisory" role.

@user151413 I would not call him/her a supervisor. You can be hired in Landstelle/Haushaltsstelle (as a teaching position) without habilitation and you will be responsible for everything. Of course responsible for the course will have an eye on you during the semester but he won't testify anything for your habilitation. I think the evaluation of the students will be much more important.

@Younes I agree I would not call them a supervisor. But also not reviewer -- that sounds like the person who has to write a (scientific or didactic) report for the habilitation.

The field of habilitation will, with all likelihood, not affect the chances to become a professor, and certainly not anything related to going to industry.
In fact, a habilitation is not even needed to become a professor, and in particular in physics and related fields, almost no-one pays attention to it.
(It is of course conceivable that the lack of a habilitation might be used as an argument against a candidate in a committee if someone wants to push for another candidate, but it would be seen as a very weak argument (if at all), and even less so if it were a habilitation in a different field.)
On the other hand, where the field of the habilitation does matter is in exactly what the habilitation is for: To give you the right to independently teach lectures, and to independently supervise PhD students and act as the official supervisor. If your habilitation is, say, in chemistry, this will a priori only give you the venia legendi in that field: Thus, if you want to teach/supervise/... at the physics department, this might be difficult. (Not sure about the formal implications.) Similarly, if you would move to a different university and would like to move your habilitation (so you could call yourself Privatdozent), this would most likely again have to be in the field of the habilitation.


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Can I use English terminology in my German-language thesis?
I am currently writing my mathematics master's thesis (in topology) in my native language, German. Most of the literature is in English and some of the words are hard to translate. Is it ok to mix both languages?
For example, the German term for "adjunction space" would be  Verklebungsraum, but no German mathematicians use that either.

What is acceptable in a thesis is up to your university and your thesis advisor. Ask there.

Indeed, only your advisor can answer. There are a few notable examples of the opposite happening: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/62218/german-mathematical-terms-like-nullstellensatz. I am frequently facing the need to jankily translate to the native language because of editorial decisions while no local practitioner actually uses those in speech.

Are there no German-language topology journals / book at all? What about former students? I can't believe you're the first person to ever face this problem....

Where did you get the word "Verklebungsraum" even from?

@AzorAhai Google reports 9 hits for "Verklebungsraum". 3 out of those use this for a room in which you glue something (which the word literally means), and one is this post. Leaves 5 hits for the word which look like maths (which upon closer inspection all turn out to be only 3 different sources, one book and two lecture notes) - so it does not seem to be used much.

@user151413 I was more confused by XP's phrasing. I edited the question (although idk how good Google is at googling words outside of the language you usually use it in).

@AzorAhai "idk how good Google is at googling words outside of the language you usually use it in" - might be, but why would this matter? Also, note that "could be translated" is likely not the right phrased - it is not at all a literal translation by any means. Rather, it is the correct technical term, but no-one seems to actually use it (at least in the database which google indexes, but this should include recent and not-so-recent books).

@user151413 "Could be translated" does not mean I am suggesting it's a literal translation in any way. I think it's more appropriate because the OP is suggesting a translation that doesn't appear to be in wide use, but I don't really care any further.

The (to me) obvious thing to do: Write the whole thesis in English! English is the de facto language of science. All your literature is in English. You even think (partly) in English. For sure writing in English is allowed by you Uni.

In the end, it's a matter your thesis style guidelines or your advisor should know.
That being said, in my (German-language) Diplom and PhD theses, I did use English technical terms, sometimes in addition to the German translation. I was told to mark foreign language terms in italics.

Follow these points:

Ask your adviser
Check if there any University guidelines
Check previous (German) theses in your field from the same
university
Check standard textbooks in your field written in German

(no one here will be able to answer your question)

+1, though I might have ordered these differently (i.e., #3 first and probably #1 last).

As a question of style, it is not fine to mix two languages. If you introduce a technical term, you are more than encouraged to put the English term in parenthesis, maybe with a quote:

Potenzreihen (Power Series [Cauchy87]) have the form ...

There is still Mathematics published in German, though less and less because authors actually want to be read, and there are still textbooks in German, which you can consult for the German expression for a mathematical concept. If you cannot find one, you get to translate yourself, trying to be as literal as possible. So adjunction space would become Adjunktionsraum, if (contrafactually) there would not be a German expression for it.
Ultimately of course, it is the guidelines of your university and / or of your advisor(s) that matter.


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Moving from Switzerland to Germany during my PhD, how do they count working experience I already have?
I am currently doing my PhD in Switzerland. Since my professor recently get a job in Germany and will move the whole lab there, I need to go with her. That brings up to the question of working experience on the table. Both in Switzerland and Germany, the salary increase with the year of PhD. However, I am not sure if I move to Germany I would be counted as the level starting from the first year or they will consider the time I already had in Switzerland. Anyone has related experience?

It seems to me that the answer is known by your current University / supervisor / funding agency. I would ask them rather than SE

@Roland This is only automatic for time spent in German public service. It is likely they will count time spent abroad during the PhD, but by no means automatic. Also, AFAIK the time with in the level is not even counted when transferring within public service, so I think chances are very slim even existent at all.

@Alchimista Asking here can help to know what one might, or might not, push the administration to. Especially since the supervisor might also not yet have experience with that.

@user151413 sure, I get that. And in all cases I would dig for the chance to keep the Swiss salary. This seems to me the most logic thing. However, if the move of my supervisor would have happened in my case, formally I would have had to follow him leaving my country 1 salary. I was payed as university assistant and not as PhD student. But as that move was planned, being him a good boss, it would have resulted in a better or similar pay for everyone. Of course, the situation can vary greatly from case to case.

Also a very common situation is you finishing your experiment in Switzerland. It depends much on the stage of your studies.

@Alchimista Well, then you certainly also wish to keep the Swiss costs of living! No way to keep the salary, Swiss PhD students earn significantly more than German postdocs. But the costs of living scale the same way.

You will have to ask the administration, or ask your advisor to ask the administration. Unless you transfer within Germany, this is decided on a per-case basis. But in principle, if you have equivalent experience to the current position (which you do), this should be feasible. However, as also pointed out in the comments, you will only get the corresponding level, but with all likelihood you won't get the runtime within the level counted. It might help if you add how much time you spent on your PhD in Switzerland at the point at which you will move.


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TVL Stufe in Germany based on previous degree
I hold two bachelors degree and after that went straight to finish a PhD degree. I have recently landed as a postdoc in a German university in the region Rhineland-Palatinate.
During the hiring process the administration started complaining about me not having a master degree. My postdoc advisor intervened skillfully and arranged that if my bachelor studied credits added up to a German bachelor plus master then I could be hired, as it happened.
The process was real quick but when signing the contract they tell me I would be in Stufe 1, not counting the 4 years of my PhD. Then they tell me with the agreement of my advisor they could modify this. I got his agreement.
Today, they told me that in fact they cannot count the PhD with the following reason

Thank you for the documents. However, we can only recognize
professional experience if you have completed the degree required for
employment. This usually corresponds to a Master's degree. Since we do
not have a Master's degree in your case, we have to take the doctorate
as the required degree and can therefore only recognize the
professional experience from June 2023. You will therefore remain in
Stufe 1, but remaining periods will be recognized for you, which will
allow you to move into Stufe 2 early.

The question of course is how can I negotiate with the administration.

What position is this? Postdoc or more permanent?

@Buffy postdoc position

Are you being hired and paid directly by the university or through some third party funding from your professor? If it is the university directly you will need to come to an agreement with HR but if it is third party funding, your professor has a lot more power in the decision.

@quarague I am paid by an ERC grant, so I'm assuming it is third party funding

I worked for three different universities in Northrine-Westfalia. So the same government, same TV-L (very similar to TV-ÖD), but really different interpretations of the same documents. One considered University of Cambridge (UK) as Fachhochschule, one did not. One considered a PhD as sufficient substitute for a German diploma, one did not. One considered my PhD as experience, one did not. There may be some room for negotiation, but not by you, but some senior member of the faculty, like e.g. a dean.

E13/1 or E14/1?

@quarague Also hirings on grants have to follow the rules of the public sector.

Question on the side: Why would a university pay by TVöD, rather than TVL? This sounds more like you are hired by a research organization?

@user151413 i have tvl but someone edited wrongly the question

@user1868607 Then you should edit it back (or undo the edit)!

If you become a member in an union (i e. GEW) you pay monthly a percentage of your loan and get free lawyer's help, free insurance for laboratories'/university's keys (in case you loose one, could be very costy) and similar help for your workplace. Then you can ask persons who are trained and experienced this question.

@Allerleirauh thanks for your addition

The best way to enter negotiations with the university would be to find a "Präzedenzfall", i.e., a case of a person in a similar situation who had their PhD time counted as relevant work experience despite having no Masters degree. Ideally, this case would have been at the same university or at least within the same federal state.
If you find such a case, it is also worth checking with your advisor who within the university administration is actually able to make decisions on cases that don't fit within the German academic norms (in Germany you would not be able to get a PhD without Masters). Often, people in administration will simply quote back some regulation without consulting with higher level administration in these "special" cases.

Also, I know of at least one person who was put on "Stufe 13/3" without having a Masters degree. If you add any information to your profile on how I can get in contact with you, I'm happy to share more details.

I added my email to my profile. Thank you

You’re right that such information isn’t likely to be publicly available. The best source would be word of mouth. Given how much fuss universities can cause in such cases, you’ll likely know about them if they are within your network.

With my experience you cannot negotiate with administrative staff directly. You can make them aware of the agreement with the professor, but they won't negotiate directly with you because they are just administrative employees.
However, what you could do is to talk to your professor about this or someone else important at the university (head of faculty or head of department). They will likely have access to someone who is little bit higher up in the chain of command and they might be able to help.
Nonetheless, if you are at public university there might be some laws and regulations set by the state. Even if professor promises you something that they later discover is not allowed there is little you can do.

Find out how to contact the Betriebsrat, and ask them to intervene on their behalf. If you don't know the German concept, a Betriebsrat is roughly analogous to an organization-internal union which represents the employees' interests.
That being said, it's not clear whether they (or anybody else) will be able to resolve this in your favor. In the cases I have seen, at two different academic institutions in Germany, it was the administrations' decision that counted, and the advisor was not able to do anything about it, no matter how much clout he had in the faculty pecking order. We've lost good people, more than once, because of a bad Eingruppierung; from the point of view of administration, that's not their problem. Their task is to keep the spending on personnel as low as possible.
Nevertheless, do try the different avenues available to you - advisor, Betriebsrat, maybe even a lawyer, especially if you have legal insurance and can get consultations for free. Somebody might find a way to talk the administration in accepting your experience.

Universities  usually have a Personalrat (since it's public service) instead of a Betriebsrat. Same thing, but correct search term may help OP to find them.

"Their task is to keep the spending on personnel as low as possible.": I don't think this is (at least officially) their task. Their task is to follow the rules, which ideally ensure that everyone is treated fairly. Whether this is achieved in practice is a different question, of course.

Some thoughts in addition to the other answers:

In my experience, your professor telling administration in no uncertain manner that you have relevant work experience of x years or equivalent to x years at this university is your best bet. From what I've met, administration cannot decide themselves, they typically rely on the professor judging how relevant your work experience is.
I'm not sure how well precedence cases work, since in my experience they tend to argue very explicitly your particular case. (To the point where they argue that changing public service employers within Germany in the same scientific subfield means you have only limited experience with the new employer)

While it is true that German PhDs typically require a Master or equivalent as prerequisite, people from abroad do do PhDs directly after their Bachelor. The universities where I have closer knowledge on the procedure (different Länder than RP, though) had the students do extra exams to prove they have an equivalent level of skills and knowledge as after a Master's in that field. (The same btw for students with Master applying for a PhD in a very different field.) As far as I know, the employment of these students was counted all the time into the usual Stufen experience.
If you find that this is the procedure they follow at that university, you have a strong argument that your experience during your PhD cannot be dismissed.

I find it highly unusual that they actually require a degree, and I'd recommend to protest to downgrading your PhD to a Master equivalent.  Requirements I'm familiar with in Germany are always "degree X or equivalent", and I think they have to allow equivalent skill/experience for legal reasons. If your PhD had coursework, you may be able to argue that even though no particular Master was awarded, the coursework (or the first x months) is equivalent to the Master, and the remaining part of your PhD is relevant work experience.

Keep in mind: they can rather easily assign you into fresh E13/3, which would otherwise require 3 years relevant work experience from fresh E13/1. I.e., what you negotiate for now are as many as possible of the 32 months of relevant working experience that you are missing.

To put some numbers to this: over the next 32 months, this is a total wage difference of about 5000 € net and 1900 € pension contributions (and some loss in unemployment benefits if needed), or about 5.5 % of your wage. (Further projection of having reached higher Stufen earlier are uncertain, since it is usual to change employers again after a first postdoc, and then new negotiations on the Stufe or similar come into play)

That being said, these negotiations are always a PITA even if you have a standard set of German degrees (you may also find yourself in Stufe 1 under those circumstances). OTOH, postdocs from abroad are not rare at all, so you may also ask around (or ask your professor to talk to colleagues) what successful arguments others had with this particular administration. (Like precedence case, but not on the legal level.)

This does not really answer your question "how can I negotiate with the administration", which was addressed in the other answers (though maybe it does, because knowing the official rules should ideally help with that), but if you consult the relevant information:
https://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/pdf/tv-l/tv-l-nr12-anlage-a.pdf
it says for E13,

Entgeltgruppe 13
Beschäftigte mit abgeschlossener wissenschaftlicher Hochschulbildung und
entsprechender Tätigkeit in der Forschung sowie sonstige Beschäftigte, die aufgrund gleichwertiger Fähigkeiten und ihrer Erfahrungen entsprechende Tätigkeiten ausüben.
(Hierzu Protokollerklärungen Nrn. 1 und 2)

Protokollerklärungen:
[...]
(2) 1Eine abgeschlossene wissenschaftliche Hochschulbildung liegt vor, wenn
das Studium mit einer ersten Staatsprüfung oder mit einer Diplomprüfung oder
mit einer Masterprüfung oder mit einer Magisterprüfung beendet worden ist.
2Diesen Prüfungen steht eine Promotion nur in den Fällen gleich, in denen die
Ablegung einer ersten Staatsprüfung oder einer Diplomprüfung oder einer Masterprüfung oder einer Magisterprüfung nach den einschlägigen Ausbildungsvorschriften nicht vorgesehen ist.
[...]

So it basically says that to get in E13, you need a completed university education, which involves a study completed with a master's degree or the like - and that a PhD is only equivalent to that completed university education if in the corresponding system no master is foreseen.
Thus, it (1) says that the PhD can be counted as a completed university eduction, but (2) it can very well be interpreted (I'd say, quite compellingly so, but I'm not a lawyer) that in that case, the PhD counts as that higher university education which is a prerequisite for getting into E13 - and as such cannot counted also towards your experience beyond the prerequisite (just as your study and high school can't).
So, leaving aside whether this is fair, reasonable, or whether there are contrary precedents, I would say that the administration has a strong point, by the words of the official regulations (and it is their job to go by that).

Thanks. Could you clarify what is the context of the pdf you linked? Regarding the "no master is forseen" certainly not since I enrolled directly in PhD

@user1868607 The PDF contains the official rules for the conditions to put someone in a specific level of TVL, such as E13. My interpretation of those rules is that for E13 in research, you need a master's degee, which can be replaced by a PhD without a master if your PhD did not require a master. But then, that PhD replaces the master, and thus, it is a prerequisite to get into E13 in the first place. Thus, it cannot be also counted as additional experience on top of the requirement to get into E13. (Otherwise, why not count undergrad studies, high school, ... ).

Your answer is valuable as it adds detail on what laws were ruling here which I didn't even get to see. For future OPs it turns out that there is room for negotiation but somehow signing directly (even if they tell you that it can be fixed later) complicates things more. So if you can don't sign and wait until the reasonable negotiations between your hirer and the university take place. In my case I was lucky to get a compensatory measure from an independent research institute that is not linked to the university.

@user1868607 In the end, I don't think it matters much whether you discuss this before you signed or after. While they can force you to do the job you signed a contract for, no reasonable superior in science will insist on that if you are determined to terminate the contract. Congratulations to the independent compensatory measure, but this is nothing one can rely on, and requires a sympathetic supervisor who has access to alternative funding sources.


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How would you handle a colleague offering your PhD student a postdoc position?
How would you handle a colleague offering your PhD student a postdoc position?
I had applied and received fund for him to continue with me as a postdoc immediately he graduates. We had this discussion before the application. Now I'm informed that a colleague offered him a longer postdoc contract (+2 year) and he's accepted to work with him. I spent years training this student in this field and we work very well. So I believe the extra two years is what was used to attract him.
I need opinions to make sure I don't appear confrontational or bring my ability to finalize this student's PhD supervision without bias to question.
Some points:

Politically, I think I am disadvantaged to have direct confrontation with this colleague. My position is under contract. And my work visa is dependent on keeping my job.
The student in question is on a student visa and I believe he wanted to stay longer hence going for his offer.

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

I had applied and received fund for him to continue with me as a postdoc immediately he graduates. - Is this normal in some fields?  In pure math, it is very unusual to do a postdoc with your PhD advisor.

"You have learned well, grasshopper."

@Kimball In my experience in psychology, it's not common, but certainly not that unusual if people have projects/experiments ongoing.

Sorry to say it, but you sound a bit like a parent who is disappointed when their child reaches adulthood and makes their own decisions about their future. You should be congratulating yourself on a job well done.

Would you clarify if the PhD student applied to the other position, or was your colleague reaching out pro-actively? In the former case, would your colleague be bound to treat the application confidentially in your country/at your institution?

The position was not advertised. Not to the public at least. He was approached as he's close to one of my colleague's postdoc. I understand I have no control over this but I feel this is unfair to me. I shouldn't have a problem with this but the manner of approach from both of them is wrong. Especially from my colleague. We have sat together and had lunch on various occasions and he didn't think to bring it up. If the position was advertised publicly, then I understand my student can apply to whatever position he likes.

Why do you think confronting your colleague would put your visa in danger? I guess your colleague and you are working on similar topics (since he tries to draft your student), so peaceful discussions would be beneficial for all three of you in the future.

Long comment: If your student had agreed to continue with you, then at least you deserved him notifying you about their decision. Perhaps that's how you learned about the whole situation, in which case the student is behaving professionally. OTOH, I do believe your colleague should've discussed their plans with you before making the offer. However, they weren't obligated to do so. This is a lesson on how this particular colleague handles things professionally that you should take into account in future interactions.

Once your student finishes their PhD they are officially an independent mathematician in the job market, and you are one of their potential employers. They were offered a job they prefer and that seem to suit their career and life goals. If you do not have a better offer, or if they were originally interested in your offer but found a better one, congratulate them and let them continue with their career. There is no need for any further action, specially if no contract was signed with you originally (but there is not enough detail to say more here).

In this, Academia is no different than the professional world, at least in my part of the US. You can have a prospective employee all the way through on-boarding and shazzam, they end up taking a job elsewhere for more (money, benefits, whatever). Wish them well and ensure you remember their name.

You don't own your students; your role is to educate them and teach them about their field - in terms of content, in terms of conduct of research, and in terms of navigating the professional environment.
One of the first marks of your success in this process is the successful graduation of your student.
A further mark of success will be if your student is able to find a next position that suits them and furthers their career goals.
It seems that most academics agree that for a student who wants an academic career (which usually means eventual hiring as a professor, though there may be other long-term options in some fields) it's important that they demonstrate some independence in their post doctoral years, meaning that they do work separate from their PhD advisor. Ideally, this would be at a different institution, but another advisor at the same institution is better than the same advisor.
You can congratulate your student on their new position, wish them well, offer them support and a place to turn to advice in their future, etc.
For their remaining time as your student, there's no good reason for you to have nor to demonstrate any ill-will towards them for taking a job that's best for them. If you're feeling upset or like you can't advise them in their best interests because of some perceived snub, that sounds to me like a personal problem for you to resolve that shouldn't involve either your colleague or the student directly.

A commenter pointed out that you may be specifically bothered because you've obtained funding for this student to continue with you as a post doc. Given that information, I think the courtesy owed depends a lot on additional information not provided here, but it wouldn't change my overall answer too much. You say that you applied for funds, and that you had a discussion before the application.
It's not really fair to expect a student to be ready to commit at that point - yes, if they don't have any other options at that point, they certainly are going to want you to produce an opportunity for them. On the other hand, they can't stop all other plans just because your application for funding might be successful.
It is possible that you both reached a mutual agreement that the student would continue in your lab as a post doc, and that now they've accepted a different position without letting you know. I still think it's important to recognize that the student has to keep their own best interests in mind, and that staying in the same lab that they did their PhD work is probably not in their best interest, especially if they have another offer for a longer duration.
However, it's also possible that you've done these things more unilaterally, and I don't think it's fair to consider obtaining funds for a student or offering them a job because you want them to work with you to be any constraint on them should they choose to go elsewhere, nor should colleagues see it as a limit on whether they can make their own offers to the student; there's no "calling dibs". Hopefully you can use the funds to hire a different post doc, and if not, then you should have had a more concrete agreement ahead of time.

100% agreed in principle, but I think your answer doesn't consider "I had applied and received fund (sic!) for him...We had this discussion before the application." While it's best to let bygones be bygones, and what you write describes the general situation of transitioning Ph.D. -> PostDoc well, a conversation with the other PI strikes me as in order. And the student should have at least mentioned it given that they were on board with OP securing funding.

@gnometorule Thanks; I had interpreted that more along the lines of "I have funds that could fund a post doc and offered a position"; though OP may have had this student in mind for that position, they didn't say that the student accepted the position, only that they discussed it, and at least in my experience with grants unless it's something like a fellowship that is really to the trainee, a grant for a post doc is for a post doc, not a specific person.

@BryanKrause don't you think the colleague should have informed the OP that they are reaching out to the student as a courtesy? While I completely agree with the main gist of your answer and see no issue with the student's actions, it does feel like the colleague acted in an underhanded way.

With respect to "handling" his colleague, do you think it's appropriate to say something like "Hey, I'm glad ___ found a good spot in your lab. In the future, would you give me a heads-up on plans like that, just to help me plan a little better?"

@terdon Maybe, but only if the colleague was in contact with OP and knew he was pursuing funding specifically for this student, which I doubt is the case.

This answer is mainly unsolicited advice. Where does OP ask about the PhD student's behavior?

@terdon If the question were asked from the opposite perspective, maybe I'd recommend it as a courtesy. It's not clear who reached out to who, though - just as likely the student asked the other professor about a position. I don't think the other professor has any duty to share the information before the student has accepted their offer, either - that implies that the PhD advisor has some control over the student's post doc job search that they shouldn't have. I'd think differently if the student was changing grad advisors or leaving a postdoc early.

@fectin I think that could be reasonable to ask, but I'd be careful not to imply that there is an expectation that offers need to be approved in advance. I'd also consider that a colleague may be wary of causing retaliation against the student. It's an unfortunately common complaint that some PIs try to hold on to their students past their earning graduation; a PI that feels like someone is trying to 'steal' their student might respond by delaying their graduation so that they get the work out of them they feel they deserve.

@fectin thank you. This is exactly the reason I feel bad about this. The position wasn't advertised. He was approached apparently. I can't hold my student back from doing what he thinks is best for him but this poaching may get worse in the future. We can even see postdocs switching to different labs under first year of contract.

@Roland You somehow believe that the problem is from the losing group which in this case is mine. But it's not. We have seen PhD students leave to work in the industry after a year or two. We have also noticed same tends in some postdocs. Some of them complete the first year before leaving. We can't do anything about this as some of them are in the country to stay. So they go for any option that guarantees longer stay and more pay. This also applies to switching groups. What this means is that Prof A does the ground work of bringing a postdoc into the country and the university. Then Prof B wi

@BoltzBooz Your question here isn't about you bringing in a postdoc and then someone else in your department hiring them away before they completed their time, it's about a graduate student who has completed their time with you. In any event, I don't find your comment very convincing re: Roland's suggestion - it sounds like you're not providing the best opportunities, so people go elsewhere. They have that right; you don't own a person just because you hired them first.

Why do you want to "handle" your colleague? It is nice for the student to receive multiple offers and choose what's best for them. It is also nice for the student to be exposed to different research groups, mentors and supervisors before they become an established researcher and form their own group.
You may be able to keep the funds and use them to invite another postdoc, which means you would not lose the funding. It all seems rather a win-win situation and I am not sure why you consider confronting your colleague on it.

Concerning 'Why do you want to "handle" your colleague?': I think it is a rather natural reaction to be disappointed, and from that emotional state all sorts of irrational thoughts may follow. Nothing wrong with that. It is just advisable not to act out of the emotion.

Sure, but Dmitry is asking "why" in the sense of "what professionally defensible well-thought-out reason do you have...", not "what fart of brain-chemistry is causing this emotion".

@Ben, I do not think that kind of language gets us anywhere.

Your colleague did nothing wrong here (most likely).
The only questionable behavior comes from your student - IF you have clearly communicated the intended postdoc and IF the student clearly affirmed they are on board with it. If that is the case, you have every right to sit down with them and discuss why are they breaking the promises they gave so explicitly, and it triggers some kind of a crisis resolution sequence which all three of you will have to navigate.
However, if that is not as unambiguous, I would consider actively clawing them back abusive, as you are clearly currently in a position of power with respect to the student, and they may feel threatened by the confrontation. Students are a bit like children - like others have said, you have to do what is best for them, not make them instruments of your personal ambition. And being able to independently (!) find a new job with better prospects than you could offer (!) is a great career step.
On the flip side, you could be on the other end of this arrangement and become the one poaching others' students. To avoid situations like yours, I would advise asking students about the possible conflict of interest they may already be in and helping them to solve this issue ethically by raising their awareness of the other perspectives.

An interesting answer (+1), but even here, a "promise" to take on a particular professional role is always subject to other better offers coming along --- that is a natural expectation in almost every profession when dealing with job applicants (save perhaps the military or the mafia).  It is always an inconvenience when good employees leave to go to greener pastures, but that is part of management.  This is why employment contracts typically are not signed in blood.

@Ben Maybe I am reading too much into the original post, but I got an impression of OP learning about the student leaving for greener pastures from third parties. And this is problematic, because then the situation becomes "I am pouring resources into you being under assumption you will continue working in my lab for a while and it will bear fruit in 2-3 years time. I am also willing to accept the risk you jump the ship at the last moment, but you already know you would be working elsewhere and keep me in the dark; I would still then need to invest resources, but differently".

You have to think long-term.  You may feel disappointed now but your working relationship with students does not end when they graduate or they move on to a new position.  For example, I have had a student who graduated more than ten years ago started working with me again.    Just wish them success, be helpful whenever you can, and continue to maintain a good working relationship with them.   You will never know what happens in the future.

If I were you I would think about it on the bright side. You have trained your student so successfully that another professor is happy to offer them a long-term postdoc position. This is nothing bad for all three parties: You get a testimonial for your education, your student gets a bright future, and your colleague gets a helping hand at their lab. I see no reason to confront anyone.
If you're worried about your postdoc funding, you can seek another candidate to support your projects. A postdoc candidate is nothing unreplaceable. It's completely reasonable to expect your "replacement" workforce to catch up with your project in a month or two.


text:
Is it possible to publish an erratum in another journal?
If an author published a paper that contains errors and decides to publish an erratum, but the journal where the article was published is inactive (but its website still exists). Could the author publish the erratum in another journal?
If so, what could the author do to make the article indicate the existence of the erratum?

Might be field dependent. In math, I'd post to the arXiv and to my personal university website. Is the arXiv, or something similar to it, widely used in your discipline?

Yes, arxiv is used in my discipline (Economics). And, I had thought about it, but my question is whether it is enough to publish the errata, or if it is necessary to add a notice in the original article (in the journal's website).

Here is an example. https://www.ams.org/journals/proc/2003-131-02/S0002-9939-02-06558-9/

What can be published in a journal is up to the editors. If the original was sufficiently important and the errors less than obvious to readers, then an editor might consider it. But they would rather, I surmise, publish a full paper with correct results, citing the old, than just an errata. If you can't make the new work seem significant, I doubt that editors would be interested.
But the editor decides, perhaps with advice from reviewers. You can possibly make a proposal to an editor before spending wasted effort.

Of course, it is important to find a place for the errata in this case. But my main doubt is whether or not it is necessary to include a notice in the original article, in the journal's website.

I thought you indicated it was impossible: inactive journal. But that, too, requires action from an editor.

Note that I as a reader much prefer an errata over a full paper with correct results because it is much clearer in an errata what is going on

@user111388, I agree, but the editor of a different journal has their own standards about what to publish. It is they who must be convinced. The original journal is a better venue for an erratum.

@Buffy: Yes, you are right.

Thanks for your answers. And yes, the best place to publish the errata would be the original journal. But, since it is impossible, according to what you tell me... it is possible to publish the errata in another journal. Doesn't it matter if there is no notice in the original journal?

Only the editor can give you the answer.

The vast majority of published works contain errors, most don't matter. You need to consider: Whether your errors matter. Supposing they do, is a erratum necessary, or would updating a technical report suffice. Supposing necessity, is the erratum significant. If it is, then you can publish in another journal. Otherwise (journals aren't likely to accept), you could perhaps rewrite the original work to add significance and publish as a revision.
Regarding, the original work pointing towards any new work, you could ask the original publisher, beyond that not much.


text:
Quitting physics master's degree for another physics MSc. degree due to family/financial-health reasons
I'm now enrolled in the first semester of my first year in Germany (ranked in the best 100 universities) and I haven't taken any exams yet, since there's still at least 2-3 weeks for it. I never had any problem with the assignments on the courses, on the contrary, I always get the highest marks.
I have a decent CV with teaching experiences, grants, internships and 2 years of research in my bachelor and bunch of other stuff too but now I have to choose another master's degree program because my mother recently got diagnosed with last stage cancer and I can not finance my education considering the living expenses in Germany and relatively low (but high) tuition fees of the university.
I've already applied for the universities (for physics msc) that offers full scholarships (no tuition fees+scholarship). I was just wondering how bad it would look to quit one msc program for another program in the same field? (taking into consideration that I have a very solid reason)

Can you ask the university for some sort of emergency funding so that you can continue?

@Buffy Unlikely, there's no funding for master students in Germany, with few exceptions (then not through university).

You should be able to pause your study due to health reasons as well as family reasons. Talk to the Studienberater, or whoever is in charge, and possibly there is some councelling service for students. They could be able to tell you about options.  (P.S.: What do you mean by "relatively low (but high) tuition fees"? I don't recall there are places asking for tuition fees for your first master study currently.)

Moving between different BSc/MSc programs, at least within Europe, shouldn't be seen as a problem: After all, one key point of the whole Bologna process (ECTS points etc.) was to make it easier to switch between different places in the course of your studies.  (Whether this worked is a different question, but at least, that's the philosophy behind.) So in fact, when you change programs you should not have to start all over again, but be able to (at least partly) use the credits you earned.  (This might speak in favor of trying to take the exams in the next weeks, or possibly postpone them due to the arguments given, rather than just dropping the courses altogether - given that many exams are online these days, this might be feasible.)


text:
Should I pursue physics or computer science?
I am currently a student at a German high school in my senior year. (In case you don't know the German education system: Students get to choose two subjects which they focus on. In my case those two subjects are math and computer science.)
I've always been fairly certain that I wanted to study physics. This was/is due to my deep love and admiration for the subject. To see whether I would actually like to pursue a degree in the subject, I decided to watch two lecture series which mostly covered classical physics (They were from TU Wien, by professor Wagner). I was immediately hooked and especially enjoyed the mathematical rigour.
However, during the last 2 1/2 years, I started to take computer science. This led to me developing a great interest in the subject. And as I did with physics, I started to watch some lecture series on the subject. (MIT 6.034 Artificial Intelligence, Fall 2010; MIT 6.S191: Introduction to Deep Learning) The thing which stood out to me was that unlike physics, computer science appeared to be a lot more applied and a lot less mathematical. None the less, I still appreciate computer science for its power as a tool and merit as a research subject.
As to my general aspirations, I eventually want to pursue a PhD in either CS or Physics and hope to end up working in R&D/academia.
So my question is which of the two degrees I should pursue. (As far as I know, it's quite hard to get a masters in a subject which you didn't get your bachelors in. This at least seems to be the case here in Germany.) On the one hand, I want to learn all about physics and enjoy the rigorous formal education that comes with it. On the other hand, CS seems to be a far more interesting field research-wise, developing far quicker than physics and showing more promise for emerging technologies.
All in all, I don't dislike physics research (topics), but it often seems either super high level or extremely narrow and inconsequential, to me. Contrary to this CS seems like a far more manageable field, which progresses quite quickly and also seems to offer quite a lot more open positions.
Lastly, I also don't know about my career opportunities. But it seems to me, that a degree/education in CS is more economically sensible.
(I hope I don't give you the impression, that I love physics and hate CS, it's really not that black and white to me, I just seem to have a slight preference for the physics curriculum. Nevertheless, I still greatly enjoy learning and doing pretty much every area of CS, which I have encountered so far.)
I greatly appreciate any of your input and am looking forward to it. However, I do recognize the vagueness of my question and know that there isn't a clear-cut answer to it, still, I'm eager to hear your perspective/tips on the matter and hope that you will inform me about any possible misconceptions I might have.
(I've also considered a degree in math, but seem to lack the enthusiasm for the subject.
In case some further elaboration is necessary: I'm afraid that I might be missing out on my chance to acquire a thorough understanding of physics. But also worry that, by choosing physics, I might hinder myself from getting into tech/CS-research later on and worsen my future career/job prospects.
P.s. The university I'm looking to study at is the TUM)
Best regards,
Justus
:)

At least from a US perspective, are you able to double major or minor in a subject, or maybe even get involved in departments outside of yours?  It may be worth checking with the universities you are considering attending their policies on such matters.

The question is probably not on topic here, but I think it is easier to move from physics into CS than the other way, at least with the scope of topics you describe.  As you get older, you will probably find it increasingly harder to acquire abstract topics from scratch, so start from the more abstract one. Also, physics involves a lot of applied CS (machine learning, AI, all this increasingly more and more.)  Or you could consider moving into quantum computing, where you can combine those topics.

Finally, it is completely legal to enrol in both physics and CS (and you can very likely save a few courses).  Of course, it is also more work, but you also learn much more, and that's why you want to go to university after all!  Oh, and: You shouldn't be worried about not getting a job as a physicist. In fact, many of them end up programming.

You can also enrol in both and, after a year or two, decide which to pursue.  Of course, this requires to take those first one/two years seriously in both subjects, otherwise you won't know better which one you like more.  And some of the more fun subjects might only start in the third year!

We cannot tell you what to do with your life, that's for you to decide.
However, note that there are mixed degrees and many programs for either Physics or Computer Science will require you to choose a minor subject, which then would be easy picking for you. I'd recommend to start either with a mixed variant or with one as the major and the other as the minor. If your university has both as fully fledged degrees, it should be easy to switch if you notice during your studies you like the minor more.
In addition, in most Physics degrees you get some basic programming exposure as well. It is typically not thaaat hard to switch and do the master in the other topic. I know quite a few Physicists that now work as software engineers. The other way around seems a bit more rare, but also possible (there is less automatic exposure however).
If you are really ambitious you can also try to study both, given that there is some overlap, that can arguably be easier than say computer science and History.
German examples for mixed degrees (from a quick-search, you would need to check what TUM specifically has to offer in that fashion):

https://www.zbh.uni-hamburg.de/studium/informationen-fuer-schueler/was-ist-physinf.html
https://www.merkur.de/leben/karriere/neuer-bachelor-kombiniert-informatik-mathe-und-physik-zr-12539261.html