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Are programmers usually included as co-authors in psychology?
I work as a programmer supporting a psychology lab.
Most of my work is translating some paper-based or physical assessment into a computer-based equivalent or I create programs for novel assessments along with associated databases and support programs for data retrieval and basic cleaning.
Recently, a colleague included me as a co-author on a paper.
Are they are being overly nice or should I be a co-author on other papers?

I can't speak for the traditions of psychology, but my general read as a scientist is that if you are making intellectual contributions, you can be included as an author, and being a programmer working closely with the study designers, you are likely to be doing so.

Well, if without your work the study wouldn't be completed, I don't see why you shouldn't be included as a co-author.

@Nobody That's a terrible way to judge whether coauthorship is deserved. The bar for intellectual contribution should be higher than that. I don't think there's anything wrong with a programmer being included in almost any field, but it shouldn't necessarily be by default.

In addition to opinions, it would be good to have some actual references for this.

@RogerFan, I'm not saying that he should be included by default, I'm saying that if he had real participation in the project, he should be then included as a co-author.

@nobody without my RA who schedules, starts the experiment program, by double clicking the icon, and pays my subjects, very little research would get done in my lab. None of that, however, is worthy of authorship.

@StrongBad, that's another case, again. The OP is not copying a code that his superior is giving to him, nor just executing instructions from someone. He is designing a method to evaluate a set of data (probably a large one). But yeah, it still depends on the case. As I said, this condition is directly related to how his contributions made the study succeed.

@Nobody you said the OP should be an author if the study wouldn't be completed without the work. I am not sure what you mean by how the OP's contributions made the study succeed, but to me the success of the study is independent of who should be authors.

By "success of the study" I mean the completion of it. Also, I am not sure as well, since I am not part of his work. If he gave substantial contributions with his algorithms, I understand that there should be at least a little of judgement about the conjecture of adding him as an author or not.

Related, although about statisticians, not programmers, but also in psychology: When does a statistical consultant become a co-author or collaborator?

In general, only researchers are included as authors. In some cases, the person doing the programming makes a critical intellectual contribution and becomes a researcher. In Psychology, specialist help is often brought in for programming, statistics, modelling, animal care, data acquisition, drug administration, and subject treatment. These support staff are often just turning a "crank". The crank is not necessarily easy to turn and the project would not be completed without it being turned, but turning the crank is not research.
Support staff tend to be mentioned in the acknowledgements. Programmers tend to get the short end of the stick in that they get acknowledge only the first time the software is used while other support staff get mention on every paper they are involved with. Support staff only become authors if they do something novel (for example, develop novel testing software). In these cases, they would be an author on the paper (often a methods paper) describing that novel contribution.

Summary:

Programming a task to a specification is one of many procedural tasks that typically does not lead to authorship in psychology.
Authorship is typically justified where the programming task involves a substantive intellectual contribution particularly in terms of both academic insight required and contributing to the design in a way that relates to the overall contribution of the resulting paper.
Programmers can try to negotiate authorship. This is often done by either amplifying the programmer's overall intellectual contribution or when the lead author requires the programmer's input for financial or other reasons.

More details
Putting aside the issue of what is reasonable, I can share some observations from my experience working in a psychology department for many years.
Professional staff with technical expertise in programming are often used on psychological projects. They might be used to program an experiment, set up a data collection tool (e.g., a survey), set up a website and so on.
Typically, programming a task does not give rise to authorship. The logic is that more procedural contributions are insufficient to justify authorship.
As a casual observation, I have noticed that some psychology researchers undervalue the creative contribution that is often required to effectively implement a programming task.
Support staff versus academic programmers: I also note that there is a difference between professional support staff and academics (students and faculty) that provide the same technical support. Support staff are typically not on an academic career track, typically do not have domain specific training in the substantive discipline of the paper, and are not assessed particularly on their publication output. In contrast if a technically minded collaborator programs an experimental task, they are more likely to be motivated by co-authorship, they will also more likely be able to contribute to other intellectual aspects of the paper (e.g., task design decisions; write-up; project conception; etc.).
I also have seen cases where authorship is negotiated. In particular, where the lead author does not have money to pay the programmer or the programmer is particularly motivated by authorship, authorship can be offered as an incentive to be involved. As @strongbad implies in the comments, this can get into mirky ethical territory where the contribution clearly falls short of ethically recognised criteria for authorship. And as @strongbad notes in the comments, a more appropriate way to navigate this is to ensure that the programmer does make the requisite intellectual contribution (e.g., through contribution to design, write-up, etc.).

I like to think that when authorship is "given" instead of money that it is more along the lines of: I cannot pay you for the programming, but if you do it, I will allow you to make an intellectual contribution so you can be an author.

@StrongBad excellent point. I've made a few edits in response.

This is an old question, but I'll add a quick link and discussion of APA authorship standards.
The guidelines: http://www.apa.org/research/responsible/publication/
According to this:

Authorship credit should reflect the individual's contribution to the study. An author is considered anyone involved with initial research design, data collection and analysis, manuscript drafting, and final approval.

On the website, this is directly contrasted with: funding, mentorship, and not participating in the actual publication. The last one is tricky.
So, where does programming fall in? How I interpret the last exception above is: if you aren't using analysis that I ran/interpreted, my statistical tables, any graphics I made, or any of my writing (obviously), then I'm not contributing. From my perspective, though, if you use even one of those things in the manuscript/presentation, I have contributed to the manuscript in a tangible way, and should be included as an author. I feel obligated to mention (as this has happened) that, from my perspective, if you take my code and change the color of the plot and include it, you're still presenting a product of someone else (and need to provide credit for that). Now, if I write code for a data collection procedure, that doesn't necessarily relate to a tangible contribution to the manuscript, and may or may not qualify for authorship (see below about creating a new data collection program for the project).
I believe the need to provide credit is the primary consideration. If you have a published software, you shouldn't be given authorship as credit for its use (as a citation to the software is sufficient). If you have a paper on a unique data collection method, you shouldn't be given authorship as credit for its use (again, citation). Now, if you designed a unique program/statistic/data collection method, you probably should be given authorship, as there isn't another appropriate way to provide credit for that contribution (an acknowledgement isn't enough for that level of contribution, in my opinion).
Overall, though, I believe the best way to approach this is through mutual agreement at the beginning of the project. This involves a clear definition of the scope of work and compensation for that work (even if the compensation is zero), and revisiting these agreements if the scope changes. Note that there is no exception about authorship for being paid or not, so if you are a paid consultant and are contributing you should still be listed as an author. If you agree to do X, Y, and Z for money but no authorship, fair enough. If you agree to do it for no money but authorship, also fair game. In my experience, such agreements help to keep things friendly in terms of mutual expectations moving forward: if the scope of work was completed, the agreed upon terms should be respected (that doesn't mean that's all you can do on the project, just that the terms should be met whether or not you chose to continue). Note that, as circumstances change, these SOWs are often updated, if only informally, to address the new condition (deadline got moved up, so we need that tangible a week earlier than expected).
Regarding your situation, it seems a bit unclear from your post. If you are typing questions into SurveyMonkey, you probably don't deserve authorship. If you have created an innovative data collection method/statistic/program specifically for this application (and haven't/aren't publishing it elsewhere), you probably do. Finally, if you are contributing tables/analyses/graphics/text to the final manuscript/presentation, I believe that you certainly deserve authorship credit for your work (as you will have contributed, tangibly, to the written product).

Authorship of a scientific publication can sometimes be a difficult discussion as the requirements, reasons and justification of the author list are not always consistent, clear and well communicated.
Some researchers, labs and universities therefore employ the so called Vancouver Protocol [1, 2], that poses a number of requirements for authorship:

conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data; and
drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
final approval of the version to be published.

This protocol is of course merely a suggestions, but (based on my limited experience) it seems to capture the sentiment and approach taken in several labs that I worked in. Note that in some universities, authors are required to complete a signed co-author statement, that describes their contribution to the paper as minor, proportional or major.
So coming back to your question:

Are they are being overly nice or should I be a co-author on other
  papers?

Based on the information in your question and taken the requirements of the Vancouver protocol, I would say that they are overly nice to add you to the paper.
Of course, there is absolutely no problem in you being a co-author on the paper,
if the main authors value your contribution and propose to add you. But, it would be, e.g., hard for you to claim co-authorship on that paper if you did not work on the manuscript.
Note, however, as pointed out by StrongBad in the comment that:

The criteria are not intended for use as a means to disqualify
  colleagues from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by
  denying them the opportunity to meet criterion #s 2 or 3. Therefore,
  all individuals who meet the first criterion should have the
  opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval
  of the manuscript.

See http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/42177/if-you-make-a-substantial-contribution-should-you-be-given-the-opportunity-to-sa in regards to if not working in the manuscript should be a reason to deny authorship. The rules, which I misread, essentially state that if you make an intellectual contribution you should be allowed to work on the manuscript.

An author should be involved in many stages of the study; from involvement in design of the study, to involvement in analysis and writing. Someone who is merely programming is not an author, although this is a valuable contribution

Well, a programmer who is not just blindly implementing is involved in both design and analysis.  They can always be involved in writing if the primary authors permit it (and they should if the person meets the other criteria).

hens "merely programming"

The problem is who defines "mere" - lots of non-programmers denigrate the intellectual labor involved, thinking of it as equivalent to e.g., running a mouse colony or prepping samples for mass spec.

@jakebeal Honestly, as a computational researcher and former software engineer, it often is equivalent to running a mouse colony or prepping samples if there is adequate specification from a project manager.


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Is it acceptable for paid online course to use quizzes and materials from elsewhere on the internet?
This question is specifically about a high school course, but it should be applicable to any online course in general.
I was taking a physics course online to skip it in school, those courses are really expensive, so I took the cheapest one that my school was allowing me to take, and it was understandably low quality. This much was ok and expected.
What wasn't ok however, was that all the questions on the quizzes and exams were stolen from the internet. Every single question was taken from some school's "Ch 3 Review Sheet" or "2008 XYZ High School Physics Final Exam" etc. that was made public online.
My parents paid $500 for this course and the people didn't actually write anything themselves, and I'm pretty angry.
So my question is twofold:

Is it ok for a course to do this?
If not, is there any official organization I can complain to.

See How widespread is sharing of slides/assignments among educators?

@QPaysTaxes not in the least.

Also Is it considered plagiarism for a professor to use uncited sources in teaching materials?

@ff524 I'm not getting taught off a textbook here that comes with a set of slides and test questions, I'm supposed to be paying them to write their own material.

@QPaysTaxes I don't see any difference. Many times these questions are developed by a publisher specifically to share with instructors, so it's natural that instructors using the same book have the same exam/assignment questions.

@QPaysTaxes For all we know, all of those review sheets and final exams the OP found online really come from the publisher's bank of exam questions.

If there was an expectation of originality of content, 99% of my grade school and college teachers would have committed plagiarism.  For that matter, I've had classes in college where 100% of the assessment (homework, quizzes, and tests) were administered by a 3rd party company that we had to shell out another $150 to have access to. All the professor did was "open" the assignments to us at annoyingly sparse intervals.

@Maltysen If you don't think the course is doing anything, why don't you source the necessary resources and teach yourself?

I guess I'm just a glass half full kinda guy, because finding exactly worded questions and answers as my exams online was a god send for me.

Is it ok for a course to do this?

It is common for instructors to use teaching materials from outside sources. There is generally no expectation of originality when it comes to teaching materials, including lecture slides, assignments and exam questions (which may be provided by the publisher, especially at the high school and undergrad level). See this answer for details.
This is similar to the way we don't consider politicians to have plagiarised when they give a speech that was written by a speechwriter - in that scenario, too, there is no expectation that the material was written by the politician who delivers it. (In that situation, we only seem to mind if the speechwriter lifts parts of the speech from another source...) But if a student submits a homework assignment that was written for him by someone else, or an advisor puts chunks of her student's thesis in a paper without proper attribution, we would consider that plagiarism, because there is an expectation of originality.
You wrote

I'm not getting taught off a textbook here that comes with a set of slides and test questions, I'm supposed to be paying them to write their own material.

I'm not sure why you think so. You're not paying anyone to develop course materials. It is common for instructors to use prepared material, including slides, test bank questions, etc. that might come with the textbook. It's also common for instructors to share material between themselves.
What you are paying for is for them to deliver an effective educational experience to you. If they have been educating you effectively, it shouldn't matter whether the materials are original, or whether they came from a test bank or other outside source. If they haven't been educating you effectively, you can complain on those grounds - not because you expect them to develop original materials.

If not, is there any official organization I can complain to.

If you believe you have been treated to a sub-par educational experience, you can complain to whomever is responsible for the course.

So... plagiarism is OK if I make money off of it to teach others?

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ Plagiarism occurs when there is an expectation of originality and you pass off other's work as your own. In teaching materials, there is no expectation of originality.

+1 excellent and transparent response, including follow-up!

@ff524: The post you link to is specifically about unpublished lecture slides.  If it's online, I wouldn't consider that unpublished..

@BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft  When I said "unpublished teaching materials" in this answer, my intent was to say that an instructor can't write and publish a textbook based on other people's materials without attributing them, not to say that an instructor can't teach with other people's published materials. Is that what you're referring to? If not, I'm not sure what post you're asking about.

@ff524: I have the impression, that the OP is more referring to copyright than to plagiarism - but possibly also mixing the two.

@Gerhard perhaps - if so, we can't possibly ascertain the copyright status of the material. (For all we know, all the instructors - the OP's teacher and the instructors who posted the materials the OP found online - got these questions from the publisher's test bank.)

I'd just like to point out that the expectation of originality is culture-specific. I'm from Serbia and there, in general, there is expectation of originality for test/exam questions. While it is in general acceptable to take bits of inspiration from problems in practice books, it is highly unusual to use ready made question banks provided by publishers. "Borrowing" exam questions from colleagues too much usually leads to a slightly negative label of a person who can't make up his own exam questions.  On the other hand, universities here are much more teaching-focused.

I somehow disagree with this answer: though teachers might have no expectation of originality on teaching materials, in my experience students do not appreciate this, and really they expect a significant effort in this sense from the teacher. In other words, my experience is that students become willing to put effort into an exam if they have first seen the teacher doing their "homework". See also @AndrejaKo 's remark.

To comment at length on issues addressed well by @ff524's answer:
First, as a fact, in all my observations, at all levels of education, from k12 through advanced PhD-program stuff, at most 1/100 people create their own course material. That is, yes, 99/100 use something published by traditional publishers, etc. For that matter, probably an exact zero percent of high school teachers use anything other than what is mandated by their school board, which was not created by them... and they would not have been paid or compensated for creating anything anyway, so, ...
At undergrad level, a similar dynamic is in play: most universities, colleges, and even community colleges do prefer "tried and true" texts to anything that their own people might create. (See "prophet in their own land"...) So, actually, it's all the more certification of conformity that they don't use their own in-house material...
Returning to the literal question(s). Low level math is so intensely cliched that no one can claim much originality to anything at all... Ok, given that, can you complain that anyone's not original? No. They aren't original, and they know that, and everyone else does... and how many ways can we ask basic calculus questions? Or can we copyright "2+2=4"? Hopefully not. Nor need we compose original narratives about arithmetic algorithms using Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Nevertheless, a too-literal copy-and-paste of stuff off the internet is cheesy, cheap, etc.
Double-nevertheless, there isn't much room for "original" questions about 350-year-old, or 1,500-year-old, ... math. The fact that your "teachers" didn't create their own content is completely unsurprising, given the realities.
(I note that, due to my luxury of having a low teaching load, blah-blah, I can create more true-to-reality notes on many mathematical topics... But many people do not have a light-enough load to do this, and so on...)

Indeed, given everything you've written, it's probably better for K-12 students if their teacher spends more time interacting with them and preparing to teach them more effectively, etc. and less time making up homework problems.

@ff524, indeed, no doubt. I'm not even a fan of "homework", especially in "math", because this creates/portrays it as yet-another "challenge-response" game, rather than as a mercifully-saving resolution of seemingly-chaotic problems. Tsk. (Sadly, indeed, all, yes, note, all... my prior experience with future k12 teachers of math discloses very unhappy attitudes toward ... math. Yikes.)

In my limited experience, most community college math departments that I've dealt with seem to have written their own, custom, in-house basic algebra textbook. It's a little bit of a mystery to me why that is, but the top thing I get back when I ask is that mass-market books are physically too big/overwhelming to students/has too much material they don't want to cover.

@DanielR.Collins, I'm happy to hear that people do that! In addition to having a text that is harmonious with the actual course given, this surely saves the students a lot of money!

Unfortunately, the quality (mathematical content) tends to be low, and the text is still pricey. Other than that, I would agree with the motivation; I'm still waiting for a high-quality open textbook we can all use for this. OpenStax has gotten pretty close recently.

@DanielR.Collins, hm, so they don't just make PDFs available? Or printed-out for the cost of printing? Someone's making money on the text? Tsk...

Currently at our school, yes.

source: Stack Exchange

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

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How to tell whether email seeking paid peer-reviewers for grant scheme is legitimate? How to respond?
I am not sure if this question should be asked in the academia.SE. But, I don't have a clue either for other forums.
Today, I received an e-mail(in my academic id) from Kazakhstan saying that they would pay me USD250 per review of the research projects submitted to National Center of Science and Technology Evaluation (NCSTE) in Kazakhstan.
The e-mail reads as below:

Dear Sir/Madam,
The National Center of Science and Technology Evaluation (NCSTE) in Kazakhstan regularly organizes peer-review of research proposals from Kazakhstan’s scientific community. The center was founded in 2011 according to Decree of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
NCSTE invites you to participate in peer-reviewing process of technical and scientific projects. The payment for assessing a research proposal is $250 (USD). One expert may assess up to 10 research proposals per call. The calls are expected to be announced throughout the year.
If you are interested in cooperation and would like to be a member of our peer-review expertise, please let us know by filling in the “Form for international experts” (see in the attachment).Please, send to corporate@ncste.kz
Please note, that NCSTE expects your H-index to be 5 or above according to Scopus or Web of Science databases for a particular period 2012-2017. Links are provided below:
https://www.scopus.com/
https://webofknowledge.com/
In case your H-index is lower than 5, we still include you into our database, however won’t be able to use your service until it reaches 5.
All expenses (postage and bank transfers) will be covered by NCSTE.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
P.S.: For more information, please visit our official web site at http://www.ncste.kz/en

I am hesistant to click any link provided or to visit any link provided here because of the latest Ransomware attack (WannaCry).
For answer to my worries, I went through a forum like discussion in Cronicle page where few persons claim that it is legit.
I have the following questions:

Should it be legit?
Why will some agency pay this much money for a review of 10-15 page report?
For the first time I am experiencing this, how should I respond? Should I respond at all?
Can it be a spam or a scam? (There is a doc attachment, which I have not clicked till now.)

Disclaimer: Please avoid yourself from clicking any link here if you think it could be a s[c/p]am even from my side.

I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole (or a 3.x meter pole).

Have you or your colleagues ever heard of NCSTE before? If that organization exists, they should have a physical office, a phone and an email address. Try to contact them to ask about the email.

From the homepage in the link:
Контакты
The Republic of Kazakhstan,
050026, Almaty, st. Bogenbai Batyr, 221,
E-mail: info@ncste.kz
Reception: +7 (727) 378-05-09
Department of Public Relations +7 (727) 378-05-72
(Sorry for formating, no idea how to put a line  break in a comment...)

It seems that organization is a part of Kazakhstan's government. They probably are trying to gather foreign scholars to review their local grants and have a bit of money to do so.

On the topic: http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/kazakhstan-taps-scholars-to-change-how-research-grants-are-awarded/2012/07/10

@CapeCode Thanks for the baltimore link. It helps in some way.

@CapeCode I am not sure about the quality of the Baltimore Post Examiner. That said, if this is a scam, it is an elaborate one.

I admit I hade never heard of that website before and have no reason to believe it has anything to do with the city of Baltimore. Also, just because the government is doing it doesn't mean it isn't a scam.

Same reaction as @CapeCode ... the article could be legit but it doesn't mean someone wouldn't use news of this to phish.

"Why would they pay this much money?" Because the amount of time and expertise it takes to properly review a grant application makes 250 USD actually a bargain for them.

It is kind of common that some countries and even EU recruit external reviewers. And since an external reviewer has zero incentive to do the job, which actually takes time to do if one wants to do it properly, many if not most of these requests are paying some minimal fee.

Please, if you do not trust the links, do not make them clickable and put a disclaimer in the end...

This is most likely genuine, in particular if the proposal to be reviewed fall broadly into your area.
Just check the actual web address of the links given (rather than what they say they are) and/or search the respective institutions online. I did once a similar job for the Polish science foundation.
Actually, if you click the link http://www.ncste.kz/en provided, you will learn that they are attempting to boost their science standing and one way to do that is to get international reviewers.
Don't be too paranoid about viruses, just don't do stupid things (like typing your password into some unknown/new website), or opening mail attachments of unknown origin, etc..

(+1) Being a computer science guy, I am handling it with care. Yes, I viewed the mail in original version, and to me it looked legit. But then, I was surprised by the offer they give i.e. 250 bucks for one review. Yes, their website looks legitimate.

$250 per review is not that much, if you work for a good fraction of a day on it, then this is fully justified (in terms of the salary of most senior scientists in the west).

@Coder Bulgarian Ministry give from 500 to 850 euros per review, Check Nature jobs

@Coder It's a terrible sign for academia that the fact that they are paying you the modest sum of 250 USD is already a red flag for you.

I performed 8 reviews for them back in November of 2017. While the grants were quite low quality in terms of the science, everything seemed legit in terms of the process, paperwork and contracts. While payment was promised by December 2017 I have yet to be compensated, initially it was just a constant string of excuses and delays but now stopped answering my e-mails. I will update if I ever receive payment.
UPDATE: Payment received. While it was delayed by many months, I did end up receiving full payment for my efforts.

Well, the telltale sign of a scam is when payment time comes.  There are basically four possibilities:

no payment: you have been scammed into doing a service gratis.  However, the service you are doing here is unlikely to be useful for scammers.
payment "forthcoming" once you forward some processing fee/administrative fee that is small in comparison to the expected payment.  Of course you never here anything once you pay.  "small in comparison to the expected payment": the expected payment appears too small to make this scam worthwhile for this case.
You'll get the agreed fee.
You'll be paid quite more than you are supposed to receive, some flimsy excuse is given for that and are asked to move the excess payment back or onward to other reviewers.  This is money laundering or fraud, depending on whether the owner of the original account is aware of the payment happening.  In the former case, the police will eventually catch up with you.  In the latter case, the money paid to your account will get retracted eventually and the money you "handed on" is gone irretrievably out of your own pockets.

So the real danger is case 4): if anything like that happens, notify the authorities and refuse to handle any money outside of your own pay.
Outside of that specific scenario, there does not seem much of a point in using this basic setup with the mentioned sums for fraud.

It is plausible that it is genuine. However, it is also plausible that, even if it is genuine, the information security there is lax. In particular, do not give them your bank account or routing number for "electronic transfer". If you want to do the work for free, just say so. If you do want the fee, (try to) insist on having a paper/physical check mailed to you, rather than electronic transfer. Even then, if they send you a check, it may take forever to clear, or bounce... eventually... and you pay a fee and get no money.
I've done a few of these referee jobs for far-away places, just to be a good sport, and attempting to decline payment. In one or two cases, they did send me a physical/paper check anyway, and it did clear. I absolutely did not give out any personal info in the process! Again, no bank account, no social security number, no date-of-birth. The risk is not worth it.

I have already reviewed 4 projects for them and send them everything by November 2017, but they didn't pay me yet. I am an associate professor and they found me with similar way as you described earlier.

TL;DR: it is quite possible that this is legitimate, but it just may be a well-disguised scam. Apply your usual cautionary procedures.
I have reviewed for internationally less visible research councils before; there may be some reasons why they invite international reviewers - for instance, some ambitious science minister wants to raise the scientific profile and quality of the research and thus invites well-known and -respected scientists to the panel to improve decision quality and visibility.
Without prejudicing your further investigations, there is a possibility that this is legit. Depending how the expense is paid (per report or in total) you would not have to read just a single 10-15 page report, but 10 of them; that can be tiresome (although some comments say payment may be per report, which would, in turn be very generous). It still might be legitimate to pay for that, and some research councils pay a compensation for reviews. Are you well suited for reviewing the call? That would indicate that they did some research and they are well informed.
Still, it might be a spearfishing attack, so tread with care.

If he would be well suited and they did some research, they would address him by name and even title. The "dear sir/madam" makes it look more like a scam or at least like people desperately looking for reviewers and simply contacting everybody, suited or not.

I read it as 250 per proposal and you can "earn" up to 2500.

@StrongBad If that is the case, it is very generous. Still, they may try to get some visibility. The more prestigious the research council is, the less they (need to) pay :-)

@CaptainEmacs I agree. Consider them getting 100 proposals from the whole conuntry. Each proposal will have 2 reviewers. Each total amount of money to be paid 250 x 2 x 100 = 50000 USD. (all in lower bound). That is huge. (as per Google: equivalent is 15636500.00 Kazakhstani Tenge)

@Coder 50k is chump change in a government budget, even in Kazakhstan, if someone has decided they want this to happen.  It costs the NSF roughly 2k to have someone attend a panel, and the panels I have been on have had 3 proposals per reviewer, so about $700 or so per proposal reviewed.  That's a much more thorough process than this would get you, but I think you see my point.

I sent my evaluations at the end of August the required documentation for the payment, but I am still waiting a reply from that email. No reply, no payment. I I sent many e-mails to Mr. Dusmanbetov and info@ncste.kz lot of times. More than eight months without an answer. This is not serious.

Simply look at the domain where the email came from. Go  to their official website then to check. Don't respond if it is from other than official domain. I don't trust emails from yahoo, Hotmail, gmail etc. Recently I did review a grant application from a middle eastern university and I got paid USD500 already. That one was also came suddenly by email but from the university's domain. So there is nothing to worry about. Many times we don't understand what is fake and what is genuine which is very simple. Do one application first and see whether they pay or not. If not, don't do again. Ask your payment by a check if you don't want to give your bank details. At the end of the day you are not loosing anything except some of your valuable time. Good luck.

Thanks for the answer. Nice to see that you have already experienced the peer review and got paid.

I will respond in general terms.

Check the quality of the English.  The worse it is, the higher the likelihood that it's bogus.  Here, I saw one weird sentence: "If you are interested in cooperation" -- not too bad, could be legit.
Try responding to the email but without your signature, or with a throwaway account.  The response you get will probably be more illuminating than the first, unsolicited one.
And, obviously, try googling them.  When I come across something suspicious, it is sometimes helpful to type the normal search words that you would normally use, and then type "scam" as well.  Or "complaint".

You can set yourself up to receive payments via PayPal without divulging personal information.  However, it is best to link PayPal to a separate bank account than the one you normally use.  Once in a blue moon PayPal freezes the bank account, sometimes due to a misunderstanding; and then you can't get any funds out of it.
Alternatively, although I haven't tried this, you can create an account at a freelancers' website, and then the payment would go through that organization.

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

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


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Resources for students designing surveys?
Somewhat similar to this question, but looking for resources (books/articles, etc) for undergrad students who are not very familiar with designing effective surveys, (for example, one student is creating a survey in SurveyMonkey to evaluate nurses' attitudes toward their work). I'm looking for a resource to help my students develop survey questions that will return meaningful, non-biases responses.
Note: this is in the social sciences, but would welcome resources that will be helpful to undergrads in any field.

By "develop," do you mean "build and deploy" (such as SurveyMonkey will do)? Or do you mean "develop good questions," i.e., questions that don't inadvertently introduce bias?

@J.R., I meant 'develop good questions' which do not inadvertently introduce bias. 'Building and deploying the survey' would be another question...

just a tool, qualtrics is popular

I have found several resources that are helpful for introducing motivated undergrads to the concepts of survey design and analysis. My own favorites are

Survey Questions: Handcrafting the Standardized Questionnaire
Methods in Psychological Research

These books provide a good overview, and are accessible to beginners.

What they need is proper training in survey design and analysis. Let's say, around 80 hours of teaching and then a lot of practical work, assuming they've already got a basic stats grounding.
It's a serious technical skill, and you won't do them any favours if you don't treat it as seriously as any other tool they might use.
One option might be to work with a colleague who does teach survey design and analysis. They may well have students who are looking for some material on which to practice their new skills. Perhaps your colleague can set for them, as homework, the task of working with one of your students on the survey design. That way, your students get to introduce their students to their subject (learning by teaching), and they get to see survey science done reasonably well (assuming your colleague has taught them well).
Just because survey design looks easy and online tools enable any fool to do it, doesn't mean that any fool should do it.
A complaint about "giving them a well when they only need a drink", doesn't hold water. How could any teacher encourage their students to do bad science, or cultivate a contempt for other experts' fields?
(are they physicists?)

That would be giving them the well when they only need a drink!...unfortunately neither they nor I have the time and resources for 80 hrs of teaching w/ lots of practical work. So its a good answer, except that I am looking for something I can point them toward and let them learn on their own; pithy advice that's accessible even to a neophyte!

I want to give my students (undergrads at a junior college) exposure to survey design & analysis, without overwhelming them--hence the comment about the well versus a drink. Ideally, the intro I can give will inspire them to learn more, and more deeply, later in their career. Survey design isn't officially part of these courses, so my ultimate goal in including it is to inspire students to explore it on their own after my introduction. I am NOT trying to "encourage [my] students to do bad science, or cultivate a contempt for other experts' fields"!

@J.Zimmerman in that case, get them working with other students who have been taught this stuff: that gives them the exposure, without having them do bad science.

@EnergyNumbers, you would be unpleasantly surprised to find out that the fraction of universities (even research level ones) that have a decent survey methodologist somewhere in the academic staff is probably single to low double digits. Here's an exhaustive list of programs granting degrees or certificates in survey methodology (which usually means there are 3+ people who can teach alternating courses): http://www.amstat.org/sections/srms/college.html. If the OP is a local of any of the cities, trying to connect to these folks, even if they are in a different school, might work.

+1 for finding areas of mutual benefits through collaboration for students

Zimmerman I think I can help you out. I have a resource where students can create and deploy surveys. It also has a tutorial that helps you create a survey from beginning to end including tips on creating neutral non biased questions.
Check out SurveySidekick.com
The site should be especially useful for beginner survey designers. It was created by Teachers College Columbia University and meant for any higher-ed students so I think this is appropriate for your students.
Hope this helps!

Sounds good, but I don't like that it requires an access code for access to the site. +1 for the tutorial--that's the kind of resource I was looking for.

Everybody can design a good question, right? Just like everybody can build a car engine. Or everybody can cook Boeuf Bourguignonne a la Julia Child. Or everybody can write a speech for a candidate in a state governor election. Instrument design is a professional work that requires understanding how people respond to questions, which in turn requires some psychology on the respondent's end, some statistics on the data user's end, some computer graphics on the GUI end, etc. As a professional survey statistician, my professional duty is to discourage your creating a false sense of "doability" here. Rectifying the user-written instruments is an unpleasant part of the job that a team of survey methodologists in my company has to perform more often than we would have liked to.
Having said that, I would encourage you to lookup something like "questionnaire design class syllabus". The JPSM/UNC class looks good, and refers to right books. The reading list of the UIC course is very comprehensive, if not intimidating. If you don't have the time to read any books, the minimum self-check list is available through the RTI's Question Appraisal System.

+1. Good resources, @StasK. Since I am looking to pique my students' curiosity and appreciation for survey design, I appreciate having a way to introduce rigorous methods without giving these students a huge reading list.

I know an answer has already been accepted but I will add this for future searchers.
Coursera has a module called Questionnaire Design for Social Surveys. Since it's free and you can pick and choose which video lectures to watch, your students might find it quite helpful.
One example of the lectures included is "Measurement Error: Bias and Variance" but there are also plenty of others to not just measure bias but also reduce it.

Some advice, but not a resource.

As something that you want to happen quickly, EnergyNumbers' advice to
find a colleague who does this or teaches a class on it is
appropriate. Ask this individual if they would be willing to come to
your class for one or two sessions to give the students an overview
of the process, including examples of good and bad survey questions.
A whole lot of success can be achieved by mimicking the successful
behavior of others, even if you do not have time to get into the
underlying theory (cf. memorizing basic arithmetic facts instead of teaching children to construct them a priori).
As an exercise, have each student write two or three survey questions independently and test them on the rest of the class.
Depending on the number of students in the class, extreme biases
should emerge under review by the class.
Strive for a neutral tone in the questions. If you are asking an opinion question, do not ask how strongly they agree/disagree with one opinion on the issue. Give them a range of opinions and let them pick the one they agree with most. Let the respondents provide the bias (otherwise, what are you looking for). Let's go with the nurse example proposed in the question. Let's look at two questions about shift length:

To what degree do you agree or disagree to the following statement: "My shifts are usually longer than I would prefer."

Strongly agree.
Somewhat agree.
Neither agree nor disagree.
Somewhat disagree.
Strongly disagree.

Please select the response that most closely matches your opinion regarding the lengths of your shifts.

Most of my shifts are too short. I could work longer shifts if it was needed.
I sometimes have shifts that atr shorter than I would like, but most of my shifts are of an acceptable length.
I like the lengths of my shifts. They are neither too long nor too short.
I sometimes have shifts that are longer than I would like, but most of my shifts are of an acceptable length.
Most of my shifts are too long. I would prefer to work shorter shifts if possible.
Other (provide a spot for written comments).

Both questions are after the same info - how nurses feel about the length of their shifts. The first question is biased - it is asking nurses whether they agree with just one (negative) opinion about shift length. You have given them just one opinion to agree with about an issue instead of a range of opinions to agree with. The second one is not as biased. It goes after the same information, but in a different way - by providing a list of five opinions about shift length running the gamut from too short to too long and asking each respondent to pick which one they like most.

Provide an other option. Notice that my second question has this option. That way you can capture the few of the more unusual opinions without railroading the respondents into just the choices you provided.
Use simple language. Do not use flowery language or more complex wording than necessary. Notice that my second question did not read:

Please meditate on the durations of your shifts and select the
   response that most closely matches the harmonious resonances of your
   soul.

Avoid technical jargon unless that technical jargon is understood by all of your respondents (and then think twice about it) or if the survey is about technical aspects of the respondents' work. Jargon related to the nursing field would be appropriate, but be careful. Jargon used by a geriatric nurse might not be understandable to a nurse anesthetist. Since you student probably does not know much nursing jargon, such jargon should be avoided.


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How to put multiple affiliations on a paper as the author?
I work for a large company, I am also a student at a big school. My employer is supportive in terms of funding required for my studies. Although the research paper has more to do with my academic studies. What is a reasonable way to put both affiliations in the research paper? My primary affiliation is my employer and second affiliation is my school. Is it ok to put in the Author section both affiliations? And give a footnote with the details?

You should be able to put both affiliations on. I assume you are permanently employed, in which case that is more permanent than the academic address. However, if your published work is done as part of your schooling you should put that affiliation first, perhaps listing your job affiliation/address as "permanent" or something describing your employment.
The reason for putting your academic affiliation first is that it is within that you have done the work and probably received intellectual coaching and support (if you receive similar input also from work then that affiliation might be equally valid as first). Listing two affiliations is common and the reason is typically when people move between institutes and it is important to keep readers aware of one whereabouts in such circumstances. In your case you will likely be found at your company in the future (my assumption) and it therefore makes sense to list also that.

Thanks Peters , i more or less received intellectual coaching from both work and school .

If both institutions contributed to the work you are reporting in your article, you should list them both as affiliations. It is not unusual at all, and in most (all?) journals there is no concept of “primary” or “secondary” affiliation: whichever order you list them in is fine.
For example, see the penultimate author in the list below:

or this other example (which I consider over-the-top):

Good to find your answer. The neat one indeed!


text:
How beneficial is speaking at non-academic conferences to future computer science career?
How beneficial is speaking (or holding a workshop) at non-academic software development conferences (like PyCon, Strange Loop or LambdaConf) to future computer science career (applying to PhD and further)?

Practice at giving a good presentation will help for many career paths, including an academic one.

That really depends what you mean with "beneficial". One of my junior PhD students recently went (partially self-funded) to a relevant developer conference, and he felt he benefited greatly (probably much more than from an average scientific conference).

He was able to establish great contacts to industry. This included potential partners for studies and interviews (lately a big part of our research), as well as potential internship opportunities. (as a sidenote, this mainly happened because this specific student is an excellent networker - you can't just go to a developer conference and hope that useful contacts will spring up automagically)
He got a lot of perspective on how industry sees the current challenges of our field (as opposed to other researchers). This gave him interesting ideas for his PhD, and also tremendously boosted his motivation, as he saw that many of the things we are working on are actually quite interesting to big industrial players (such as, in our case, Facebook).
He was able to give a presentation about our ideas, and they were perceived really well (much better than he expected, truth be told). This gave him presentation practice, forced him to collect and structure our early ideas, and further strengthened his commitment to the topic.

Now, since you specifically ask whether attending such a conference will be valuable for:

(applying to PhD and further)

I think you can safely ignore this aspect. In pretty much any career phase, nobody is going to read your CV and think "that guy attended this conference, he must be great". I don't even list attended conferences (of any type) on my CV anymore, simply because it seems so irrelevant to a recruiter.
Edit:
@ff524 correctly notes that you were specifically asking about speaking at an industry conference, not just attending. I am not entirely sure about this, but I would assume that this may be a small positive factor for applications on a junior level (say master of PhD student), depending on the conference:

Nowaydays, many of the industry conferences in my field are organized like un-conferences. That is, everybody can speak if they want to (maybe pending some light review for on-topicness et cetera). In that case, you are back to square one - speaking at a conference where everybody is allowed to speak does not count for much. It maybe speaks to your motivation, but really that seems like a very small and insignificant factor.
If the conference is more like a traditional conference, where speakers are typically either invited or you need to apply in some way for the honour of speaking, presenting may be perceived as a sign towards your esteem, but this really requires that the reviewing professors know this specific industry conference, think highly of it, and know that speakers are competitively selected. I would not count on this to happen, but it surely won't hurt.

For any application after graduate student level, your research credentials are so much more important than any talks at industry conferences that you can safely ignore them for future applications.

you specifically ask whether attending such a conference will be valuable - Actually, OP asks about giving a talk or holding a workshop, not just attending.

@ff524 True. Not sure to what extend this changes my answer, to be honest.

Well, attending a conference doesn't mean much, but speaking at (an important) one shows you are held in some esteem by the community. I have no experience in PhD admissions, but I do hire MS research assistants; I would definitely be more interested in a student who has achieved that kind of recognition.


text:
Is supporting Sci-Hub illegal/unacademic?
In the classroom, one of the students asked me about Sci-Hub. I answered that I like the idea as I am against the tyranny of publishers. As a fun fact, I added that I have even donated to Sci-Hub.
Then, I received a notice from our department head referring the case to the disciplinary committee since Sci-Hub is illegal and any direct and indirect support of an illegal activity is against the university policy.
Is supporting Sci-Hub illegal / unacademic?

To clarify, your department head referred you to the disciplinary committee?  Also, could you please elaborate on your position (e.g. tenured faculty, tenure track, non tenure track, adjunct, etc).

@RichardErickson No, it does not depend on my university's policies if it is illegal or not to support Sci-hub. Universities do not make laws. At most I can break a contractual clause or an ethics code by supporting it, but that's not the same thing as being illegal.

By the way: which country are you in, OP? That might change the answer.

It may still be disallowed by the uni via contract with the publisher, no matter how sympathies may run.

@RichardErickson The main source of confusion is that this question could be stated better. The question in the title is "is supporting Sci-Hub illegal / unacademic", but the implied question that everyone has in their mind when they finish reading this post is "Is the university right? what should I do now?". But the university never claimed that it is illegal/unacademic, just that it is against their policy. We can't answer this because we don't know what this policy is (nor which university OP works in).

What kind of answer are you looking for? Sci-Hub is pretty clearly illegal, and donating money to it is pretty clearly supporting it. Whether supporting an illegal activity is legal is something outside the scope of Academia.SE. Besides, in your case it's already against the university policy, which you presumably agreed to abide to when you took up your job. I am not sure what else there is to answer.

You should perhaps rethink your question. How would it help you in your situation if the majority of users here opined that supporting scihub was neither unacademic nor illegal?

Depending on your jurisdiction, there may be an important distinction between illegal and unlawful. This is yet another reason for editing the question to state the relevant jurisdiction.

You could consider clarifying what you mean by "donated".  There is a big difference between giving your own money to Sci-Hub and downloading a paper using your institutions account and uploading this to Sci-Hub.  My guess an assumption of the latter has caused the issue.

@Allure "Sci-Hub is pretty clearly illegal" is a pretty strong statement. Individual uploaders may have broken their personal contract with a specific publisher, but that does not necessarily make using it illegal. Definitely not "clearly".

@pipe from what I've seen, laws across the world are tightening around that loophole. See https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/86414/is-it-legal-to-use-sci-hub-cc-in-germany/112475#112475. Besides, the OP wasn't using the service, he was donating to it.

@Allure "Sci-Hub is pretty clearly illegal," is it? What law has Sci-Hub broken?

@user2768 it acquires the material illegally?

@Allure What exactly is illegal about the way material is acquired?

@user2768 if you aren't familiar with how SciHub acquires its papers, I recommend reading articles like this one. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone

@Allure I'm familiar, I'm just questioning which aspect you are asserting is "clearly illegal."

@user2768 Tell me how SciHub acquires its papers in your own words, otherwise I have no idea how to answer your question.

@Allure It seems you have no evidence to support your claim: The law is nuanced and whether Sci-Hub is operating illegally is complex to ascertain. Your claim that "Sci-Hub is pretty clearly illegal" is without evidence and I believe false.

@user2768 it seems you don't understand how SciHub acquires its papers; as long as that is the case I don't see any point responding to you.

@Allure That doesn't help your argument. I'll leave it there from my side.

Just curious: how did the disciplinary proceedings turn out?

In my view it is foolish to describe Sci-Hub itself as illegal. Acts can be illegal, but not "things" or groups of people. Only activities. While it is true that they may engage in illegal activities, that is not the same thing.
However, if what they do is copyright infringement (very possibly) then you can't participate in that.
However, if you want to upload things for which you hold copyright to Sci-Hub or a similar site then you aren't engaging in any illegal activity, nor is any downloader, provided that you grant an appropriate license.
Countries and other jurisdictions make laws. People (and organizations) can break those laws, but the people themselves, and the organizations do not themselves become illegal.
I think your university is right to open a disciplinary hearing only if you advocate breaking laws to students.
I agree with you that publishers have put a lock on science and culture that is very unfortunate. Especially when copyright no longer seems to expire after a reasonable period, and fair use is losing ground. Publishers are transferring what should be a common good into a private profit making enterprise. They are, IMO, stealing from the public. If you can afford not to give them copyright on things then I encourage it, but the whole system has made it hard for academics to build a reputation otherwise. Long term this tends to make us dumber, not smarter. As they say: Sad.

I'll add an historical note. There was once a valid reason for publishers to want to hold copyright on articles they published. There was a lot of friction (read cost) between an author and a potential reader. As such, since the publisher bore a lot of the cost (not the creation cost, of course), they needed assurance that they could recoup what they spent in making scientific articles available - especially since the material itself had value, but the number of potential readers was small (relatively speaking).
But that world is now long past. Publishing is nearly frictionless now. Publishers can still provide a useful review (done by volunteers) and editing (done by paid professionals) function, but the distribution cost is near zero and borne partly by users in any case (internet fees). Most of the real cost of the creation of publishable material today is borne by the author, by universities and scientific organizations, and by government. Publishers in the old model are an anachronism if not an oxymoron.

I think your university is right to open a disciplinary hearing only if you advocate breaking laws to students. In many jurisdictions, copyright infringement is not breaking criminal law, which is what is usually meant by "against the law". Further, they act of downloading a paper from Sci-Hub is, in most jurisdictions, not copyright infringement. Rather, Sci-Hub is committing copyright infringement (and possibly other crimes depending on how the paper was obtained).

The question isn't "is Sci-hub illegal". It's "is giving money to Sci-hub illegal".

@FedericoPoloni, I doubt that there is any law that could be construed that way, but I'm just an academic, not an international lawyer. There are lots of laws. There might be policies against it, and likely are, but contributing money is likely not illegal. In the US, some organizations (the MOB) are designated as Criminal Enterprises, meaning that their whole purpose is to break the law. There might be laws against contributing to such organizations. I think (hope) the bar is set high for creating such a designation. But it is local laws that apply, of course.

I think your university is right to open a disciplinary hearing only if you advocate breaking laws to students. That's exactly what you do if you say you 'like the idea' of and even donate money to an illegal endeavor. (Having said that, I have mixed feelings, including sympathy, toward scihub although it's activities are clearly illegal in most jurisdictions.)

What Sci-Hub itself does is illegal in most jurisdictions.
Whether it is illegal to download from Sci-Hub, and whether it is illegal to donate money to Sci-Hub, will vary from place to place, and is really a question for experts in law, not an Academia Q&A site.
Whether it is ethical to download from Sci-Hub, or donate to Sci-Hub, is a different question, which some would argue is unrelated to the legal situation.
A third question is perhaps whether what you have done, as a private individual, is any of the university's business (I assume that the donations were personal ones and not from university funds?). A fourth question is, if not, whether it becomes their business when you tell a student about it.
It will probably be worth being very clear in your own mind about these distinctions; but pragmatically, it may also be a good time to apologise, and not make a fuss.

Depending on the legal details, it might be important to differentiate between an apology and an admission of guilt. The latter might bring more trouble.

What Sci-Hub itself does is illegal in most jurisdictions Why?

@user2768 it distributes copyrighted material without the permission of the owners.

@Flyto Whether that is illegal depends on the jurisdiction. I suppose that's why you opted for "most jurisdictions."

@Flyto: Distributing individual scientific articles to people interested in them is not, to my knowledge, illegal in "most jurisdictions".

@einpoklum but copyright infringement is. Not every case of distributing scientific literature is copyright infringement, but Scihub doesn't discriminate.

The discussion on Sci-Hub has been flattened: On the one hand some people say it is really useful and fills a need (and they are right), and on the other hand people say that this is illegal and the project relies on the sharing of credentials and the violation of Terms of Service.
These sides only cover part of the question!
In truth, academia is the victim of the large publishing industry — Elsevier, Springer, etc. — who extract value without creating any. In the last thirty years, they have been unable to pivot their models, and we have been humoring them because academics and academia are overall terrible at negotiation.
While Sci-Hub may seem like the solution, it is not: At best it is a short-cut to the solution. However, the real problem Sci-Hub introduces is that we abdicate the traceability of these articles. While right now we seem to be getting more or less the published version of these articles, this resource introduces the possibility for a third-party actor to pollute and corrupt some proportion of the content it serves.
For instance, a foreign actor could modify the data in a sufficiently large number of publications related to vaccinations, to change perception of vaccine efficacy through manipulation of scientific publishing.
The idea of "polluting the science" is vividly described as a weapon in the sci-fi series the Three Body Problem.
Sci-Hub cannot be a substitute for us advocating and obtaining a better science dissemination infrastructure, especially since current structures exploit our labor at multiple junctions (reviewer, author, editor, etc.) and provide little in return (for instance, it seems these structures are really bad at enforcing fairness rules, as recent work by Talal Rahwan highlighted).
Sci-Hub is a temporary solution. Perhaps it's useful right now. But the risk of relying on it is that it could be a Trojan horse, and it shouldn't stop us from pushing for change from the academic publishing industry.
In the meantime, one small contribution we can all make, is to be supportive of efforts to instill DPI (Digital Persistent Identifiers), for instance ORCID for researchers and DOI for articles. These identifiers help create some layer of traceability even if materials are published through untrusted channels, such as Sci-Hub. This is why the US has been strongly pushing towards adoption of ORCID/DPIs (with NIH in 2019, NSF in 2023, and every agency by 2027).

"and on the other hand people say that this is illegal and the project relies on the sharing of credentials and the violation of Terms of Service."  Isn't this right too??  perhaps you might consider saying so.

If you think Sci-Hub is a knight in shining armor fighting against the tyranny of publishers, your view of Sci-Hub is incorrect. Sci-Hub is generally illegal, does illegal things, and is a scourge of law-abiding academics & institutions everywhere.
I'm going to skip all the "publishers are/are not tyrants" arguments because I assume you are familiar with them and have already decided publishers are tyrants, and trying to change your mind is futile. However Sci-Hub does illegal things in other ways: it embodies the dark side of the online world by phishing, hacking passwords, stealing as much information as possible, etc. Check this article out.

Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions.
...
We know that, at one UK University, Sci-Hub managed to get six passwords through a 48-hour dictionary attack on their system. Then, over a weekend (when spikes in usage are less likely to come to the attention of publishers or library technical departments) they accessed 350 publisher websites and made 45,092 PDF requests. In another attack, the hackers not only broke into their database; they changed the names and passwords of profiles. Another institution told us an intruder changed the cell phone numbers linked to the user accounts and also planted malware, meaning that all their computers needed to be completely wiped. In addition, we have evidence that Sci-Hub is bombarding university IT systems, often for days on end, without the knowledge of compromised users.

If you distrust both publishers and IT experts, try talking to your institution's librarians. It might surprise you that they dislike Sci-Hub too. The article cites several reasons, such as how Sci-Hub stifles innovation in publishing, is parasitic on libraries, puts the library at legal risk, and has no regard for copyright law. Some quotes:

It can be argued that, far from being disruptive or publishing’s “Napster moment”, by providing access to such material Sci-Hub is stifling the impetus needed to innovate in publishing.
...
Again, it is ironic that access to the site is provided by the very mechanism it means to subvert. This argument becomes even more extreme when it is taken to its logical conclusion (which all three of us have heard) that we should cancel library subscriptions and rely on Sci-Hub: a major reason Sci-Hub exists is because of the subscriptions we pay for. It is unashamedly illegal and it is parasitic on library subscriptions.
...
In terms of library access and users donating subscriptions, such action puts access to all our users at risk ... Moreover, university libraries can become liable for breach of their contractual terms if services are misused, or credentials passed on by library users. Typically, contractual terms specify that “Authorised Users must not provide access and/or allow use of the Licensed Material by anyone other than Authorised Users” (or words to that effect). Thus, if a subscribing institution knowingly lets an Authorised User do this, or turns a blind eye to the problem if it is drawn to their attention, then the subscriber is in breach of its contract with the publisher and will be cut off.
...
Our final objection to Sci-Hub is its utter contempt for copyright law – and this is an important point. Ownership of copyright in a work gives the owner the exclusive right to certain “restricted acts” in respect of that work, and a copyright owner may authorise others to do those acts by licence. Elbakyan is scathing in her blog posts “about so-called copyright law” that was “created to make to taboo free distribution of information”. The fact is Sci-Hub is engaged in large-scale, blatant, and very public copyright infringement, and from an ethical standpoint librarians should support publishers’ efforts to get its services closed down, but not without arguing effectively and advocating for the alternatives at the same time.

This is the website you're supporting.
In the end it's up to you to decide what values you believe in, but if you believe that supporting Sci-Hub is academic, I'll venture that you're in the minority among people who have a clear picture of what Sci-Hub actually does.

"In another attack, the hackers not only broke into their database; they changed the names and passwords of profiles. Another institution told us an intruder changed the cell phone numbers linked to the user accounts and also planted malware, meaning that all their computers needed to be completely wiped." Nowhere in these sentences is it said that these attacks originate from Sci-Hub. If this was from a source I trust, I'd glance over it, but this is from Scholarly Kitchen and the author is pushing anti-piracy tools. Color me unimpressed. Stealing creds to use as a proxy, this I ...

... assume Sci-Hub is doing. Wanton destruction, nope. There is no incentive for Sci-Hub to bite the hand that is feeding them. I agree with the idea that Sci-Hub may be counterproductive to proper liberalization of academic publishing, but it would take much more than closing sci-hub to force academics to switch to open publishing. After all, there is still the arXiv, personal websites, twitter hashtags for sharing files, private collections walking around and more. Academics don't generally believe in the existence of knights in shining armor.

@darijgrinberg suggest reading the whole article, I cannot quote every relevant part of it. If you choose not to trust it because it's from Scholarly Kitchen and the author is pushing anti-piracy tools, that's up to you, but I'd be curious what kind of evidence you'd accept.

@darijgrinberg Another example if you dislike this one: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Librarians-Find-Themselves/235353 Edward Sanchez, head of library information technology at Marquette University ... says that many colleges have been targeted by Sci-Hub. In one case at Marquette, a professor received an email stating that he or she needed to update his or her university user name and password by following a link. Once on the site, which was actually in New Zealand, the faculty member typed in new credentials, which were then captured by what the publisher later linked to Sci-Hub.

@darijgrinberg as for what academics can do, read the other link which gives concrete suggestions. It's at the very end of the article.

It's the implicature that stinks about the ScholarlyKitchen post, not the literal claims they are making. The post quotes cases of Sci-Hub illicitly gaining university credentials, and cases of university credentials being heavily abused (for malware and password change), leaving it to the reader to add 1+1. But nowhere is it made clear that Sci-Hub are sharing the creds they have obtained with miscreants; they could just as well be gaining them from the latter's forums -- and furthermore, some of the heaviest claims state no connection to Sci-Hub at all. The Mabna hackers have never ...

... been connected to Sci-Hub to my knowledge, yet the post drags them in by their heads and shoulders.

@darijgrinberg I'm concluding that it's impossible to convince you, so I'm not going to bother. Suggest you speak to your institution's librarians about Sci-Hub and see what they say, that's all.

No, I'm not going to attack your motte. Sure, librarians have good reasons to pursue higher-horse approaches, such as cancellations of subscriptions, and academics have their own set of weapons, such as editorial board flips. Pretty much everyone who sympathizes with Sci-Hub also does what they can to make these happen; but most academics on lower rungs of the ladder can only negligibly contribute in these ways, and either way, it does not address immediate problems like "how can I get this paper this referee is asking me to cite?".

@darijgrinberg "how can I get this paper this referee is asking me to cite?" That's easy. Ask your librarian. Librarians exist to solve problems like this. I can practically guarantee that your librarian will be able to get you the paper legally. Of course, you can also do the easy thing and use Sci-Hub, which is sort of analogous to "I have the immediate problem of how to cross the road. I could jaywalk, or I could walk 50 meters down the road and use the zebra crossing." Decisions, decisions.

For the curious: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/93341/if-i-request-a-paper-through-my-university-library-must-they-pay-a-substantial

"Sci-Hub is generally illegal," why?

@user2768 I consider it pretty self-evident that Sci-Hub is illegal. If you don't, please explain what is unclear about it because otherwise I don't know where to start answering your question.

@Allure Sci-Hub may partake in illegal activities (hosting copyrighted material), but that does not "make them illegal". An entity cannot be illegal by virtue of its existence. There are plenty of out-of-copyright or copyleft documents on Sci-Hub that are legal for them to serve and legal for you to access.

@forest if you consider an entity cannot be illegal by virtue of its existence, can you name any entity that is illegal?

@Allure No. An entity may partake in illegal activity, but it cannot itself "be" illegal.

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