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Generally speaking, when are the deadlines applying for PHD's in Europe?
29 year old male, considering applying for PHD programs that begin 2021 or else 2022.
Have I left it too late to apply for a PHD that begins in 2021? I know this question is fairly general, but it seems that in the U.S, deadlines for most PHD programs have passed. I'm curious if it's the same in Europe.

The answer to this general question has to take too many variables into account. You should be much more specific (country, field) if you want to increase your chances for a fitting answer. I voted to close.

Europe being a continent rather than a country, the rules and customs are varying from one country to the next, including the duration of the PhD support. For instance, in France, PhD grants often cover the first two years and the third year has to be supported by another grant or a teaching assistantship (ATER). Concerning the date of administrative registration, it is possible to register as a new PhD till early December. Concerning the PhD grants, some are already closed, others will close in July, and a few more remain open the whole year.

No idea where lighthouse_keeper gets the idea that this is uniform. It is not! The only thing that might be sort of universal is that there is not much predictability in when PhD applications open up and what their deadlines are across Europe. Quite often the deadlines are throughout the whole preceding year. For some specific fields in specific countries things are more organized and there is a real PhD window. PhD's usually start either around September/October or around January/Feburary however even this is definitely not set in stone across Europe.

To answer "Have I left it too late to apply for a PHD that begins in 2021?" That probably depends on the field. There are definitely still many country and field combinations where it is not yet too late! (You should really at the very least add the field you want to do a PhD in to get a useful answer.)

I have voted to reopen this question because I think the argument for closing "strongly depends on individual factors" is unfounded. Yes, academia in Europe is diverse, but for this particular question, one can give a general answer that applies to most cases.

Unlike in the US, there are no "application seasons" in Europe. PhD positions are announced throughout the year, and every vacancy has its own deadline.

Any explanations for the downvote?

I did not downvote, but your answer may be a little too general. In my opinion, also a definition is needed when talking about "Europe". The whole continent? Seriously, there is probably no general answer covering the whole of Europe, no matter what the question is.

@Snijderfrey Fair enough. I interpret the OP's words "generally speaking" as "in most cases". For that I believe that my answer is correct.

@lighthousekeeper My apologies, I seemed to have accidentally clicked the downvote button without noticing. I cannot change it anymore since too much time has passed. Your answer is true for many countries in Europe, with the caveat that more structured programmes do often have deadlines (see DCTLib's answer and the comment of Ian under there).

Academia in Europe is very diverse. This answer is for the case of Germany.
There are two ways of doing a PhD in Germany. You can either join a coordinated program, or you find a PhD advisor under which supervision you will work outside of such a program.
Coordinated programs all have their own deadlines. For joining them in October (fall), deadlines between March and July appear to be common.
However, doing a PhD outside of a coordinated program is the norm in Germany. There are no seasons for the deadlines for them, and the application you will write is for the funding - getting into the PhD program is then normally the easy part. Scholarships may have deadlines, but more common is the case that you are employed by your future university in the research group of your PhD supervisor while doing a PhD at the same time, and each suitable position has a different deadline.

I would say that the UK is similar to this with a couple of exceptions: 1) Programs are becoming more and more common. 2) PhD students are hardly ever employed by the uni, but rather the supervisor will have secured a scholarship before advertising. 2) Because programs want to recruit the best students, they try to recruit early before students have accepted a different position. Often the more prestigious the program, the earlier it tries to recruit. However, in reaction many supervisors with studentships to advertise are trying to do it earlier and earlier each year.

Answer valid for France only. PhD programs in France require to already have a master's degree (or equivalent); filling the position is controlled by the PhD advisor(s); funding is usually secured by the advisor before advertising the position (*). This means you have more time to apply because your clock starts after funding was obtained.
There is no official PhD season, but in practice most PhD start between September and ~February, based on the previous year graduation of master's students. In my case I applied to the position in early October and started the PhD work and getting paid in December. However, I was officially enrolled in the "doctoral school" only in late February. You should probably assume a 4-month delay in case your advisor is less versed at playing the bureaucracy than mine were.
Hence, February is not late for France gor a start in autumn. I would even guess most open positions are not published yet.
(*) funding sources that I know of officially grant PhD positions based on the strength of the research project that the advisor submits (alternatively, more general project funds allow for PhDs/postdocs). However, I do know unofficially of one case where funding went to a project based on the CV of the candidate that would fill the position. I do not know is that is common or not.

authors: Xi'an ні війні


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Should PhD students pay out of pocket for their PhD expenses?
Say a PhD student has a salary paid through a RA/TA or a fellowships but said student has no money for conferences, lab experiments, or to visit another lab for a few months to develop an important part of the thesis.
Should the student pay for these expenses out of his personal money? Is this acceptable, or should the student cut down on the project or change project to accommodate with the budget restrictions?
EDIT: Think of students from small departments and from countries where research money is little to non existent

Are you talking about CS? Because in CS conferences are the main publishing venue. On the other hand, where I was (Europe) there was no money for attending conferences unless you had a paper accepted there (or the conference was in your city and you had to either volunteer or you only had to pay the registration - which they may cover since it was relatively cheap). So, if money for conferences you mean that someone pays your trip to a conference without you having an accepted paper, then perhaps this setting is not that common.

"Should" is a deeply subjective question, and subjective questions often aren't a great fit for this site's format.  You don't give us much in the way of criteria.  Please see http://academia.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask and the pages linked there, and think about how to use the guidelines there to improve your question so it is a better fit for the Stack Exchange format.

Does the student want to pay for the expenses out of his own funds?
It is a fact of life that resources are tight, but dissemination of research and networking are important components of a PhD program, and any supervisor worth his/her salt will build some travel into the budget. (I would expect that there should be at least two regional conferences and one major international conference over the course of the project.) Beyond that, you'd have to be pretty sure that the expense will be worth it, before you incur it. There usually is money to be found, internally, externally, even through a visiting position at the off-site lab you mentioned. Be creative, negotiate, but be selective also.

"Should" is a hard word here. I certainly never paid for these things, but my supervisor was well funded, and so I didn't have to worry about it. At the other end, I think a student certainly "can" pay for these things out of their own pocket. My recommendation for travel would be to avoid this by pursuing departmental, university, and conference-specific travel funds.
I can't imagine it being reasonable for a student to purchase lab equipment. It's often expected that you'll have your own laptop, but workstations, servers, and compute clusters should be provided by someone else. Same for microscopes, reagents, glassware, and everything in between.

Remember that some people fund their entire PhD out of their own pocket so there is no 'should' answer. If someone is in this situation, they should first discuss this with their supervisor who will have the best advice on whether there is any available money.
There are no rules against students funding this themselves but many simply wouldn't apply for programs without that kind of support or would not be able to afford that.

There are plenty of grants available to grad students, especially for conference travel. Have a look at the societies in your field. If they offer grants for travel or research expenses then join them. I'd say my ROI for the money I've paid to join societies as a grad student is > 2000%. These are rarely competitive from my experience. Often the society running the conference will offer funding for students to attend the conference. Sometimes funding is only available to those from low GDP countries, so being from a low GDP country can actually help.
Then there are plenty of other organisations that offer grants without having to join or pay to join. Some offer money for research expenses and short trips to visit other institutions. You should be able to find most of these by searching online.
It also looks good on your CV when you have a long list of (small) grants as a grad student.

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Stay in academia or become professor without overworking, is it possible?
I am referring more to young scientists after the PhD than professors, although I am also wondering about people with a stable position.
I see many people overworking themselves, burning-out, being overworked and with pressure to work well, fast, and produce a lot (publications). I am discussing an average person who has completed a PhD that has all the skills for the job. Let's leave the top professors 5-10% of the field that are super-productive for whatever reason, those are exceptions. I also assume that there is passion for research, but that work balance is also important.
Is it possible to survive/remain in academia by working normal hours (8-9 hours per day) without working evenings, weekends, holidays, without feeling guilty about taking a 2-3 weeks vacation? I imagine to become professor would include many of the above sacrifices. Some professors (tenured) have told me they work 50-60-70 hours per week.
Is overworking basically the rule/working culture in academia?
Is it unusual to reach/maintain a stable position in academia without regularly overworking?
Consider mentioning the cultural, country, institution type of your answer, as there are variations in different contexts.

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/86769/19607 (my answer to that question is more on the yes side to your question than dan's answer below)

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

Sure - stay out of research institutions/universities.  Plenty of community/junior/libarts colleges need instructors.  Of course, the availability of work depends on what fields your degrees are in.... where I am a full time instructor is expected to be on-campus and either teaching or doing office hours for only 25 hours per week (5 3credit classes+2 hours office hours per class), and then serving on committees etc for 5-10 hours per week (hiring groups, college senage, etc - and this only sometimes), and only during fall and spring terms.

I think this is the real misconception. In the most research institution that I know academic work less.

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/8542/1033

It is possible to do a job share.

@SSimon could you provide some examples?

@ivanivan maybe that's true in the US, in Europe the concept of community/Junior college does not exist, although there are vo-tech schools and some kind of university preparation schools.

@HermanToothrot - indeed. But with no location info in the OP.... :)

@HermanToothrot well, one you got on email. another one is colleagues, technical school, higher education specialist diplomas... than there are institutes, I don't think people in academia work more!!! I am referring to science, but I heard that in humanities, you only need 7 references to become full time professor.

This is a bit opinion-based, but I'll offer my own personal take on an answer in the hopes that it might be useful; at least parts of what I wrote below seem pretty generally applicable to me.

Is it possible to survive/remain in academia by working normal hours (8-9 hours per day) without working evenings, weekends, holidays, without feeling guilty about taking a 2-3 weeks vacation?

Short answer: no (except for the part about feeling guilty for taking a vacation, which is something I never had a problem with).

Medium-length answer: this question is based on a false premise, and simply doesn't make sense to most professors. "No" is an approximate answer, but a full answer requires a longer discussion to explain why neither "no" nor "yes" really make sense as answers, and why even though "no" is an approximate answer, it doesn't really have the negative meaning that you think it has.

Long answer: people in academia do work hard, sometimes very hard, but in my experience, the thing that many people looking into academia from the outside often fail to see is that what you call "working", we call "living" (and what you call "overworking" we might call "living a bit more intensely than usual, but still generally having a good time"). What you call "making sacrifices" we call "finding our work so fulfilling that we pay less attention to some other aspects of life than most other people do".
In other words, for a professor the "work/life" dichotomy is a lot more blurry than it is for people in (some) other professions, to the extent that it is often a completely nonexistent or nonsensical distinction. If I'm at the beach on a weekend and I'm reading a math paper or thinking about a research problem, am I doing "work"? If I'm traveling to a conference in an exotic city and using some of the time to explore the local sights and culture, am I "working", or am I on "vacation"? I don't know, and honestly after doing this for a while you start to realize that these questions simply make no sense. Most professors simply don't make the distinction between "life" and "work" that much of our culture obsesses about. They don't ask themselves these questions about how to "survive in academia" while only "working normal hours", since most of the time they are just too busy doing something they enjoy. Yes, they probably do end up doing what other people would regard as "work" for more than the usual 8-9 hours a day, five days a week and during times (holidays and weekends) when other people might regard it as abhorrent to do "work". But by and large, they don't perceive this as a negative thing (or at least, not as negatively as your question makes it out to be; I'll admit it can be a mild annoyance at times).
Coming back to my short, approximate answer of "no": basically it seems to me that you're asking the wrong question. If you are the kind of person who really wants to punch in at 9 a.m., punch out at 5 p.m. every weekday and go home to do other things and not even think about work until the next day, I'm pretty confident that academia is not for you. But most people who are smart enough to make it in academia are not wired that way.* The real question you should be asking is "can I be in academia and have a fulfilled life in which I'm happy to get out of bed each morning, get to do really exciting stuff a large chunk of the time, and in which I work hard (sometimes very hard) but still have a reasonable amount of time left over for other things that matter to me?"
The answer to that question is, quite definitely, Yes.
* (Added on edit:) to clarify, with this comment I am not expressing an opinion that a decision to leave academia says anything about how smart (or how anything else) someone is. I most certainly do not hold such an opinion. See the discussion in the comments.
———
Second edit: The comments, along with a few negative votes on my answer, are making me strongly suspect that I’ve given offense to some people who are perceiving my “smart enough ... not wired that way” comment as an elitist sentiment to the effect that if you are a person who is “wired that way” — that is, cares about having free time, work-life balance, raising a family etc — then you are “not smart enough”. Let me emphasize again that that’s not what I believe and not what I meant to imply. I actually care about all of those things myself, and don’t think caring about them is inconsistent with working hard (even sometimes very hard) or with being very passionate about your work. Nor do I think academia is the only place where one can have a fulfilled career; there are in fact many workplaces and professions with quite similar characteristics, and obviously there are many extremely smart people pursuing careers in such places and professions.
Finally, as I said at the beginning of my answer, it represents my own opinion and my own personal take on OP’s question. I make no claims that this represents anything near a universal truth.

Two minor quibbles: I don't think "smart enough" is the phrase you want - maybe ambitious instead? Also, my impression is that there are some very successful people who work regular 9 to 5-type schedules in academia. It's not the norm, but they do exist.

@ZachH thanks for quibbling :-). I stand by my claim that “most people who are smart enough to make it in academia are not wired that way.” And that’s not inconsistent with your second quibble, although I’m not at all convinced your claim about successful 9-5 academia people is true.

@DanRomik I know a few of them: maybe it's not really 9-5, but rather 8-5 or 9-6, but, yes, they do exist. And, actually, I could be one of them, if only could I resist temptations :-)

@DanRomik I think you're assuming a lot of the people who've left academia weren't smart enough, rather than weren't "XXX" enough where XXX could be one of {ambitious, well-positioned, lucky, supported, selfish} or many other things. A lot of ex-academics on the outside do keep roughly 9-to-5 hours and seem very content with that.

I think you're mostly right. But I have worked at 4 different schools and at each one I've had colleagues who didn't do a damn thing.  They taught the same classes every semester and used the same notes and the same exams.  They slid into tenure and never lifted an unnecessary finger after that.  I had one who was running his AmWay business out of his office.  I know this is not what the OP means, but it IS possible to work very little in academia, if you're a sleazy scumbag.

@ZachH to clarify, I don’t think someone leaving academia says anything at all about how smart they are, nor do I think that working 9-5 necessarily says much about how ambitious one is. What I meant was that I think most sufficiently smart people look for much more in their choice of career than maximizing their leisure time. In other words, they are optimizing a different function that gives a high weight to personal fulfillment and cares less about hours. Some do it by staying in academia, some by leaving, but almost all of them look for much more than “work-life balance”.

I used to think similarly.  Now I have kids.  I am glad I am not in academia - where I would apparently be forced to short change my kids.

I would like to remark that the above answer applies equally well to any job "outside" Academia too, and that one should stop the temptation to always subdivide people in two classes: the ones who stay versus the ones who leave. I have done research in Academia and I have done research outside: I always hear people claiming Academia is X, real jobs are Y. Truth is, you may work hard or slack off equally well in either: eventually it all comes down to your work ethic and what goals you want to achieve (in either).

I think you really can't over-emphasize the difference between the "punch in/punch out" mentality and academia (or FTM self-employment).  As a grad student, I might work until midnight or later on a project, but I could also take afternoons off for hiking or skiing (and come up with some of my best ideas while doing so...)  Same with the professors I worked with: they had to show up for classes & office hours, but otherwise their time was their own, and they could choose whether to e.g. spend their evenings watching TV or reading papers...

@emory, academia does not necessarily entail short-changing kids. It may be arrangeable so that one's time is flexible enough so that one can spend more time with kids than 9-to-5 job people could. By shuffling my teaching schedule years ago (and of course doing more research-oriented work on weekends) I could spend week-day mornings with my young daughter, for example.

Got any evidence for these blatant personal anecdotes?

@curiousdannii: What sort of evidence would you like? And what sort of evidence do you think there could be, that wasn't essentially a bunch of personal anecdotes?

I'm a (retired) math professor. When my daughter was young (about 10) she said that when she grew up she wanted to be a professor - she didn't know what she wanted to be a professor of but it looked like a good life to her. I worked hard, but doing something I loved. Flexible hours meant I could go on class trips. Both my  daughter and my son are (hard working) professors with full lives.

@EthanBolker yes, “I worked hard, but doing something I loved” pretty much sums up the sentiment I was trying to express in my answer. Thank you!

What about people who are "smart enough" to make it into academia, but have never done so nor attempted? Are you making the claim that smart people in other fields aren't inclined towards the "punch-in/punch-out" lifestyle? Interestingly, I don't necessarily disagree, but that is certainly a bold statement.

@Clay07g yes, that’s approximately a correct reading of my statement, except note that I said it applies to most smart people, which makes it less bold of a statement than it might be otherwise.

You really need to modify the wording of your "smart enough" sentence, because the message that sentence conveys does not match at all what you've spent two edits trying to detail as a clarification.

@Joshua thanks, I did consider modifying the wording, but decided against it. The edits represent my best attempt to make my meaning clear. Hopefully that will be good enough for most readers.

I think your answer is quite reasonable but applies to people whose first interest and passion is research and the other interests are far below. I do not see how to pursue other interests if my time outside research is reduced to a few hours per week.

Superb answer, as always!

While Dan Romik's answer applies to lots of people in academia, there are also the "others". I do know concrete examples of successful scientists that regularly work 9-5 (or similar). This is possible, with a few caveats:

works only for extremely disciplined people
may not apply to the Ph.D./postdoc stage, where there is time-sensitive pressure to build a cv and get a job
assumes that during the Ph.D./postdoc stage enough knowledge and contacts were built.

As I said, I know people who does this and is very successful on all fronts (at the same time!): as teachers, as researchers, and as administrators.
As with anything in academia, it is not easy to distinguish raw talent from concerted effort. Some of the people I'm thinking that pull the above off, are definitely not geniuses (although they are obviously competent).

+1 for an interesting take on the question that complements mine. Btw I’m curious to learn more about these successful scientists you’re referring to. Specifically, can you share which countries they’re working in, and what are their disciplines?

Yes, the people I was talking about are physicists and mathematicians in Argentina and USA, and mathematicians in Canada.

I agree with this, and would like to add that if you really work (does not include coffee breaks, lunch breaks, gossiping, procrastinating, waiting for computer to boot etc) 8 hours a day that's certainly enough. What should be stressed though that normal people (myself included) need to spend 10 hours at the uni to really do 8 hours of hard work.

Maybe a bit on the anecdotal side, but last year, at a conference, I heard an nice talk from Dr. Bastian Epp from the DTU in Denmark. Amidst his talk about whether to consider a PhD a good idea, he told about his own experience. He was super enthusiastic, always the first at the institute, always the last to leave. But there was a colleague, some years older, who came in not exceedingly early, quietly worked his 8-hour shift, and left early in the afternoon. And even by not "living" at the university, he finished his PhD in time. After a bit of tinkering, Bastian came behind his colleagues secret: Efficiency. By not getting carried away, not procrastinating, not doing hour-long coffee breaks, and just doing what has to be done, you can get very far. But this needs some discipline and self-optimization.
The talk was very nice to follow, and, of course, was a bit on the moral story side, but it's a nice thing to have heard.
By no means I want to express that an overworked professor should just stop procrastinating and everything is fine. There is a lot of pressure on academic staff and personally I know two research groups which recently had a bad year with canceled or not-received fundings. Being a professor with four PhD candidates and no further money for them is not fun.
The thing I want to point out is that there indeed is such a thing as a "non-overworked academic", and with some self-discipline you may improve your academic experience.

Interesting.  When I lived in Denmark I certainly noticed that everyone there had their head screwed on right, when it came to work-life balance.  So if anyone were to be the poster child for an 8 to 5, get 'er done style PhD, it would be a Dane!

@aparente001 Hm, that fits. Dr. Epp is german, but I believe the guy he was talking about is danish :-)

Yes, it is quite possible but this is highly dependent on a number of factors. Mainly local culture, nature of pursued line of study, and quality of personal efficiency.
First of all let me make a main point clear: there is a big gap between what is officially declared about numbers of hours worked and reality. Particularly in (i) modern times of 24h-long-internet-connected-smartphones and when overworking is considered "hype"; (ii) in the academia where there are so many facades and overworking attracts respect. Probably the amount of hours worked you mention come from polls like the one below:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/09/research-shows-professors-work-long-hours-and-spend-much-day-meetings
From my experience since decades dealing with the academia (I am no professor, but have met many) a lot of what is declared is questionable, and almost everyone is evasive over duties exposure. So a 60h official journey is too often way less intermingled with a lot of posing, minions, undeclared absences, ghost meetings.
Now, for the final points.

There are so many small campuses where work life is incredibly dull & slow;
There are fields of study which are more automated, less competitive or pressed for speed, and with a high "impact factor" ration over hours invested, typically returning more funding in less time;
There are many places which do not count working hours by the clock on physical presence, and cultures where one does not feel pressured to pose all day as busy and important in front of some empty paper or screen;
If you happen to be highly efficient and connected with smart-minded collaborators and student, you are able produce higher quality output in less hours than the majority;
Living close to work is a major asset here.

I agree hours are difficult to report accurately when one does not have to for billing or wages, and that there are status incentives to reporting overwork.  In addition to time in the office, though, many academics take work home, and pervasive stress where home time does not feel like it is off-the-clock. (For many people, this then means in-the-office time may be interspersed with personal errands. It seems like that path is best avoided to increase efficiency.)

Totally agreed on this, and this is a big challenge in the academia, in internet times.

No
I did my PhD in a Max Planck Institute (summa cum laude) and was on a good track to become a professor. After spending an amount of time thinking about my future, I now work in a consultancy firm. Here are my findings:

F1: If I overwork in science, I get the opportunity to have a position in science
F2: If I overwork in industry, I get the opportunity to choose the position I want for my future

In my field (Physics), there are two causes for F1:

C1: The supply of researchers strongly outnumbers the number of available positions.
C2: The quality of scientific work is extremely difficult to quantify (**)

C2 leads to performance be often quantified by another metric, quantity (even if not the fairest or most useful). This metric promotes, by definition, overworking. Another important metric of performance is the scientific impact (think the number of citations, impact of scientific journals, etc.). This metric depends strongly on your PI, institution, hotness of the field, luck (on your results, peer reviewers, etc) and therefore should not be relevant to your decision to overwork or not.
The above conclusion combined with C1 makes any person that overwork have an advantage, and therefore the best strategy for each individual is to overwork the most they can. In other words, regardless of the individual motives, the downsides of not overworking are far greater than the advantages of not overworking.
The above is applicable to the subject I was in and may not apply to your subject. Do your own research and plan your career!
(**) See e.g. this paper and respective rebutal, and note that this was only done for citations, which is a measure of impact, not quality. Quality is even more difficult to quantify.

I think this might apply for people who either need long hours or cannot be efficient, assuming that hours of work correlate with output (number of papers). But yes, it's somewhat a race to the bottom. F2 I am not sure what you mean with that statement, that you can stay in industry without overworking?

@HermanToothrot, I think that this applies not only to those people because, on this race, you will be competing even with the efficient people that overwork. F2, yes, good point: I edited the answer to clarify the statement :)

I'm still not sure what F2 means. What is the position you want for your future?

@henning I think the point of F2 is that while in academia you would completely lose your job, in industry you would still have a pretty good job, just not your first choice.

it's more clear to have "overwork vs overwork" or not overwork vs not overwork.

I agree that it is more clear, but that is not the conclusion I reached. In particular, I haven't reached any conclusion regarding "If I overwork in industry, ..." because overworking is not a sufficient condition get an ideal position. The statement F2 is that overworking is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to get your ideal position. Would this phrasing help?

In my experience, the need to work more than 40-50 hours a week often comes from a poor balance of day-to-day duties (e.g. teaching, service, taking classes) and long-term commitments (e.g. research, writing a book/thesis, applying for funding).
The day-to-day duties obviously take priority. If you have too many of them, you may not have enough time for the long-term commitments, or your calendar may be too fragmented to use the remaining time efficiently. If you then decide to increase your working hours, you enter the realm of diminishing (and ultimately negative) returns. You work more, but your productivity per hour decreases.
I am not particularly disciplined myself. In order to get research done, I need to feel relaxed and have enough time without interruptions. If I have a meeting, it destroys my productivity for the entire morning/afternoon. The only way to avoid this is having the meeting as the first thing in the morning or the last thing in the afternoon, or combining it with the lunch break. Yet because I have a research position (first as a postdoc and now as a research scientist) with little other duties, I have not felt overworked since finishing my PhD. On a typical week, I spend maybe 30 hours on campus and work another 10-20 hours from home.

You make it sound like the 'day-to-day duties' are ones you might have control over, rather than (as in practice) imposed on you by the institution.

@JessicaB There is always some degree of control. Don't volunteer too much. Consider who is really entitled to a response within 48 hours. Don't let yourself be interrupted when you are working on something. Prioritize. If your employer consistently demands too much, let them tell you what to prioritize. Be open to changing jobs if necessary.

Hahahahahahahaha

Yes it's possible, with some caveats
I have known people, from graduate students to tenured faculty, who manage an 8 to 5 schedule, don't work on weekends, etc.
There are a couple things about them I've noticed:

No job is always this. There are times when you will have to work more. This is true for retail positions, IT positions, academic positions, etc. So if you consider "Going to a conference" to be working on the weekends for example, this becomes a much bigger problem.
They are fanatically disciplined. When they are at work, they are working. There is no checking Facebook, or Academia StackExchange. They plan grant deadlines well in advance to avoid long overnight marathons near deadlines, etc.
They have to defend it. The desire and need to work more will encroach if they let it.
It has consequences. Sometimes, you will have to say no to things, and those things might impact your career, though not always in a bad way.

I am referring more to young scientists after the PhD than professors, although I am also wondering about people with a stable position.

Some professors (tenured) have told me they work 50-60-70 hours per
  week.

One should also note that self-reported working hours are notoriously unreliable.

The second point is very important. When I was a PhD student, around twenty years ago, the group culture was that of submitting across the deadlines (and sometimes post-deadline), with scant planning. I had to frequently work overnight. Now, my group and I tend to carefully plan submissions, and we usually submit even 2-3 months in advance, and everything is much more relaxed (and with less risk of rejections).

However, I'm not so disciplined for what concerns distractions. Instead, when I visited some labs in other European countries they had a very tight schedule from 8 am to 5-6 pm, with no distractions apart a short break in the morning and one in the afternoon.

@MassimoOrtolano Yeah - personally, I know in myself that I'm not disciplined enough.

This answer explores cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional factors, and so it is a community wiki. Please add links or details as you can. It would be especially helpful to flesh out discussion of other academic roles or of "field" considerations beyond theory vs. lab. The original answer is based on U.S. experience; for cross-national differences, you might consider adding another numbered section.

What type of institution would you be employed at or eventually aiming for?

In the U.S., the Carnegie Classification system describes colleges and universities by highest degree offered and level of research activity. This taxonomy is where terms like "R1" come from.
Top-ranked research institutions will place more emphasis on the publication process than liberal arts colleges and community colleges (some of which offer tenure).

That said, I have heard that even some lower-ranked research universities that largely focus on teaching (e.g. California State Universities) still require a very high research standard for receiving tenure, because of the competition in the academic job market.

I have experienced that professors I trained with at a highly ranked research university (in an empirical field) seemed to make extreme time sacrifices for their work, and one confided his extreme stress about whether it would be enough to get tenure.

In contrast, as a postdoc at a good state research university (not at the top of the ranks in many fields), I see that professors are still working a lot of time but seem to be less stressed.

In a comment below: "I work at an R2, where tenure and teaching obligations are both relatively reasonable. There is an institutional sweet spot where are enough resources to support your work and the amount of work required is reasonable."
Especially at liberal arts colleges, you may be able to focus on teaching (which has its commitments required to excel) and spend less time trying to push through immediate results. Some colleges and universities may have teaching-centered positions: Can I be a lecturer without doing research?

What field are you in?

Theoretical fields may require people to limit their productive time. If the key output is coherent thought, that cannot sustainably be done at all hours of the day and night. (This seems to be reflected in Dan Romick's answer.)
Research involving lab work is notorious for often requiring extreme hours. Executing and supervising the work requires (at least somewhat) skilled time put in, and results presumably correlate with the amount of time.

What role within academia are you considering?

The role of a tenure-track professor seems to be the natural thing to discuss.
Research-only roles, especially working at research labs or centers led by a star faculty member, exist in many places.
Again, teaching-focused roles sometimes exist.
At some campuses, librarians are also tenured and may be considered part of the faculty.
Student support roles, administrative roles, etc., are part of academia (and often require/reward serious research credentials, so that professors are more likely to respect you).

+1 for the "Type of institution" comment. I work at an R2, where tenure and teaching obligations are both relatively reasonable. There is an institutional sweet spot where are enough resources to support your work and the amount of work required is reasonable.

I'm curious to know why you posted this as a community wiki.

@MassimoOrtolano bcs this is cross disciplinary and crooss culture answer.

@MassimoOrtolano yes, I encourage anyone to add additional links or details. For instance, I lumped together the very different areas of "student support roles" and "administrative roles," and anyone with direct knowledge of these, or of other roles not listed, should feel free to add details. Similarly, the "field" division between theory and lab leaves out a lot and would be great for others to flesh out or add to.

@cactus_pardner Nice, I think it would be useful to add your last remark to the beginning of your answer, to make it clear your encouragement to anyone.

@Dawn Could you please edit your comment into the main answer? That comment is exactly the kind of evidence this answer would benefit from as a wiki.

What does this answer mean "As a postdoc at a good state research university (not at the top of the ranks in many fields), professors are still working a lot of time but seem to be less stressed." not sure if it's about postdocs or professors or both.

@HermanToothrot I am referring to my perception of professors, but thanks for pointing out that it's grammatically unclear, not to mention that the implied comparison is unclear. I'll edit.

I think it's possible but needs extreme self discipline. An example that I know of is Professor Calvin Newport, a TCS professor at Georgetown university. He wrote about his working schedule as a phd student at MIT some years ago.
http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/02/15/fixed-schedule-productivity-how-i-accomplish-a-large-amount-of-work-in-a-small-number-of-work-hours/

In my experience, in Irish and French Academia, it’s definitely possible to be successful without “overworking” (depends what we call overworking but let’s say it’s working out of general office hours) and not working much at home (except reading stuffs and writing down some notes and todo lists but, if you are passionate about your research—and I would advice you to choose a topic that you are genuinely fond of—we cannot really call that “work”).
It’s possible if you are not the over-procrastinating kind of person, if you are well organized and self disciplined, if you can control your various Internet wandering, if you fix yourself some reasonable goals and are not too much perfectionist.
You don’t even have to be a genius (but must have good culture in your domain, sure).
Many people in various domain I’ve met (both sciences and humanities), who are not specifically geniuses have a pretty good work-life balance compare to some engineers, managers or even workers I know, plus sometimes enjoy the pluses of academia lifestyle (travels, in some countries extended holidays and benefits, decent working environment and smart people all around etc).
I don’t say it’s not stressing or it’s easy, I say it’s totally possible.
Personally I didn’t succeed at that because I lack a few of those characteristics.
Of course it depends on many other factors like your department leader expectations, competition in your field, and so forth.

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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Why do universities/research agencies allow their employees to do free peer reviewing which financially benefits a third party?
Following up with this question Has there ever been a strike of peer reviewers? and this Why don't researchers request payment for refereeing?
I understand that peer reviewing probably started when there were relatively fewer article submissions than today and when the academic system was going at a slower pace and was less cluttered with people.
But given how the system has evolved, I am wondering why do employers let their employee work for free for the monetary benefit of a third party?
As far I as know no employer pays its employees to make someone else rich. It seems against any economics principle. Wouldn't it be more efficient to pay reviewers so they would be more motivated, quicker to review, and universities/grants/governments would not pay someone to work for free for the economic benefit of someone else? This might also offset the cost of salary of professors. Any economic return to the employer seems very low considering the working hours devoted to reviewing.

Who should pay for it? The publishers are poor (well, that's what they said), and the authors would basically pay themselves, or each other - not changing anything.

These are two separate questions. One is about individual incentives in a given institutional setting (paragraph 3). The other is about whether the institutional setting produces collectively efficient outcomes and should be changed (paragraph 4). I thinks they're better asked separately to avoid confusion.

The first question's been asked before: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/68191/why-dont-researchers-request-payment-for-refereeing/. The other was briefly touched on here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/100923/how-are-junior-professors-evaluated-for-promotion (last part).

@Mark The publishers are poor — citation needed

@Mark Publishers make tons of money - German universities even started a boycott of some because of this.

This is a very legit and interesting question: one reason why many journals have poor papers is exactly because they don't pay reviewers (namely, most reviewers in those case are PhD/PostDocs who have little to no understanding of what they're doing). Science would benefit a lot by introducing a more professional way of quality measures.

This is the answer. Academics are generally OK with doing it for free, its a peer process, and you expect others to do it too. Its a quid pro quo. The bad part is that someone else is gaining a lot of money from this, not that researchers are not getting paid.

It could be quite simple: to submit an article to a journal you pay $600 so that each of the three reviewers gets $200. But, $200 is perhaps 1 hour of fully-loaded salary for a professor, so it really comes off as being, well, cheap. The benefit of reviewing for the peer review process is that your articles get reviewed too. And, not all publishers are out for the money.

Do you all suggest that I should change my question so that I just focus on the question on paragraph 4?

@AnderBiguri I have changed the question and I think it's not a duplicate anymore.

@HermanToothrot The answer doesn't change though. Its a peer process that is fundamental to the way science works, and you do it for the other person, not because someone is making money. The problem is that someone is making money.  Ideally journals would be non-profit organizations , in my opinion.

@AnderBiguri there are many non-profit organizations, people who are employed somewhere else might work for them in their free time, unless their employer agrees to give free time to the employee. As I have mentioned, it's against any economic principle. I don't see why universities would give away all this time/money for free to publishers.

@AnderBiguri: "The answer doesn't change though." - I disagree, because "Its a peer process that is fundamental to the way science works, and you do it for the other person" is in direct contradiction to the (basically true, although it does IMHO not necessarily apply to universities in particular) OP's statement: "As far I as know no employer pays its employees to make someone else rich."

Publishers charge for the publishing not for content. Peer review is something academics do to try to increase the quality of their output, it benefits them primarily.

@O.R.Mapper as you say, it does not apply to universities. Perhaps in the USA where universities can be considered for profit organizations, but not in the rest of the world.

"As far I as know no employer pays its employees to make someone else rich. It seems against any economics principle." Employers pay their employees to do things which benefit the employer.  In this case, reviewing does benefit the employer - it helps their mission of improving academic knowledge, and is also valuable experience for the employee. Whether some third party also benefits, as a side effect, is irrelevant.


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Block-quoting a list: where to put the citation?
Suppose I write something like this

Jones categorises things as follows:

little things
big things
medium-size things

... where the entire list is a verbatim quotation from Jones. The list is block-quoted (i.e., it is indented, but there are no quotation marks). How can I make it clear that the entire list comes from Jones's paper? If I put the citation on the last item of the list, it might look like the citation is only for the last item.
The best solution I can think of is to clarify the situation in the surrounding text, something like the example below. Is this reasonable?

Jones categorises things as shown below. (Entire list is from Jones, 2015.)

little things
big things
medium-size things

Is the list a verbatim quote or just repeating Jones’ categories with your own words?

@Wrzlprmft In this case t's a verbatim quote. But I've also encountered this problem with lists that I have paraphrased, so it would be good to have answers for each scenario.

btw, if you decide to keep the sentence, add the article the, as in: The entire list...

No matter whether you quote the list verbatim or paraphrase it, I'm quite sure you don't need to make it a big deal. Quoting a list of bullets isn't really quoting long pieces of text that would need a note about being a verbatim quote; I would say it's more like quoting a theorem in maths. I would therefore go for one of the following:

Jones [Jon15] categorizes things as follows: LIST
Jones categorizes things as follows [Jon15]: LIST
(Jones, 2015) categorizes things as follows: LIST
etc.

Use the one that is consistent with your citation habits.


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How can I approach my professor when he is sending me indirect messages with another person?
After achieving my masters degree, i applied for a phd program at the same university i was graduated from. In Germany, a person has to find 2 advisors to be registered as a phd student and thats it for the begining.
I approached a professor whose area is related to my research.I told my intention and research idea to him and he said he would like to be my advisor but he officially cannot be the first advisor due to the number of students he already has. Instead, he suggested that he can be my second advisor and i should find another professor as my first advisor, in this way we can continue working anyway.
I decided to approach another professor (who is also a colleague of 2.advisor) and I asked him if he could be my first advisor and he accepted. We have exchanged more than 10 e-mails, talking about my proposal. When he came to my city, we met and everything looked fine. I continued to work on my proposal and sent him after a while. I needed to get a reference letter from him, as I am applying for potential scholarships. Some of these scholarships demand the reference letter to be sent directly by the professors. He has written the reference letter and wrote me an e-mail saying that he has sent the letter to the grant givers i asked him to send. I have asked him to send the letter also to me as a pdf, since i need to upload it personally as well. He has not send it to me and since weeks he is not replying my e-mails.
Instead, he has sent me an indirect message with a friend of mine (also a student of his), saying that I should work more on my proposal and it would be difficult to get a scholarship with such inaccurate proposal. He told her that I have been rushing to finish it and I should stop and reconsider my steps. He also added that, due to the inner conflicts he has with the faculty, he will be resigning in two years so maybe i should consider to find another first advisor as well.
I found this indirect communication unusual, disturbing and i must say, unprofessional. I decided to send him another e-mail, asking him if he can approve what I heard from my friend so that I can begin to search for another first advisor. Because if he officialy does not write it, i'm still registered as his student and it would be awkward to search for another one while I still have one. He is not replying to this e-mail as well. I have been applying for another scholarship meanwhile (only with one reference letter which is from my second advisor) and today i recieved a note from this scholarship, saying that my file has been taken under consideration but i should send the other reference letter as soon as possible.
My professor is literally blocking me from applying further. I have understood what he meant by taking more time to focus on my proposal but for now I need this reference letter from him. It just doesn't make sense that I cannot have the letter when it is already written for me. My question would be, shall I contact and ask my second advisor about his opinion on this situation or shall I take a step back and wait for my first advisor's conflicts to be cleared and hopefully he writes back to me?

Find a new advisor who is seriously interested and who is able to communicate better with you. You will have a hard time otherwise...

Question to other Europeans--is it common that a scholarship application would want the person applying to upload reference letters or would they normally be sent straight from the references? I mean, could the OP have upset the advisor by asking for the letter directly.

@mkennedy I've thought about it as well, and I haven't personally seen recommendation letters for PhD scholarships required to be sent by the applicant. However, I've seen this for smaller projects (short-time personal grants, industry stages and similar).

@mkennedy it is common that applicants upload their recommendation letters online. not only short time grants but also full time phd grants. at least thats the case i experienced in germany.

Have you contacted the second supervisor about this problem? If yes what does he think about this problem? Is he able to contact the first supervisor?
If you haven't contacted the second supervisor about this problem I would do so ASAP

I haven't. My concern is to create a chaos by talking about this with my second advisor, before the first one officially states that his decision is certain. I'm afraid to put myself (and my first advisor) in a bad situation by spreading a second hand information.

I understand. How long has your first supervisor been ignoring you? Could it be he is at a conference, vacationing, ill or otherwise out of reach?

@Marteen van Wesel I know for a fact that he is very busy due to his responsibilities in two different countries. He was/is quite famous with being successful in disappearing. Still, in this situation, i would have preferred to be directly informed with a short e-mail, i cannot understand how/why he chose such unusual way of communication.

Are you sure the message the other student has given you is a message coming from the supervisor?

yes, do you mean if she has misunderstood?

That could be the case. But maybe, but this is pure speculation, she has a reason to 'scare' you away...

i literally never thought of this... she is a close friend, so i can't imagine she would make this up... even if she would, the result is that he is not answering me, so all signs point to the same direction.

If she is a close friend then lets not assume this.
Maybe you can try to phone the supervisor. Or make an appointment to visit, preferably via his/her (departments)secretary, this way you do not have to wait for an answer

arranging an appointmnt would be an option but he is currently in another country he lives. which is why it is getting kind of impossible to reach him.

Unfortunately this limits your possibilities beyond my 'consulting skills'
You seem to be 'closer' to your second supervisor. Whilst your first supervisor is both electronically and geographically out of reach you could work on making your proposal even better with your second supervisor. Maybe also start working on the first paper/chapter by doing all literature research, thinging about data collection etc etc.

yes. it is sort of a complicated situation. thanks a lot for your input!!

If it's weeks passing and the Advisor One is not communicating, I would consider the case with him as closed. I would contact Advisor Two, explain him the situation, and after seeing that he is interested in advising you, send an e-mail to Advisor One clearly stating that you decided to reject to cooperate with him. You don't need to make it long, but you have to make it precise.
Unless you can reach the people in person, there's hardly anything else you can do. Well, one thing still: Do you know anybody well who knows Advisor One well? Can you reach such person directly and confirm that this could have happened? Can you consult someone else who's close to the situation like your master advisor?

I'm not sure whether i should talk about this with people before he gives me a confirmation. I'm hesitating because as i mentioned above in the comments, my concern is to create a chaos by talking about this with my second advisor, before the first one officially states that his decision is certain. I'm afraid to put myself (and my first advisor) in a bad situation by spreading a second hand information

@stuck We can't see so deep inside. From what I see, it's finished with your Advisor One. That's why you have to make it clear to him. I would only contact the second advisor before to make sure that at least something is sure.

the thing is, i'm not sure that it is finished with the advisor one. He did not state such thing to me directly. Can one take a second hand information for real and act on it? Especially if it will effect my future largely? Moreover, I want him to remain as my first advisor because he is very successful and well known in my area.


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How long to wait for an optimal/good PhD thesis/program, should settle for less exciting topics?
When I started applying for Phd programs I had big dreams and goals on working on certain topics and spending lots of time in the field. I also had in mind some location and universities but I was flexible to some degrees on the university/location. It took me about 1 year to find a program I was (am) excited about and got accepted (top 10 US institution). Along the way I turned down possibilities with good funding because it was not my focus topic of interested.
Now after a year at my current program there are no funds in place and I am considering moving to programs that have already funding in place but in topics that are not my main interest because there is generally more money in these other topics. I am wondering at this point if I should settle for any topic that fits my skills and falls somewhat in my interests or stay in this roulette situation not knowing when I can really start the research I am interested in. I want to get started on a project and work on my thesis but I also am concerned of doing something that might set me on the wrong track or compromise too much (less interesting research field, worse PhD program, less known university, no fieldwork).
Given the current funding situation especially for certain fields, do PhD students these days have to lower their expectations on pursuing their topic of main interest? . I mean these days people struggle to find a regular job. I would like to add that I am also flexible on the questions I want to pursue within my field, I have flexibility but the funded projects are rare.

I find it rather surprising that you can have entered a PhD program and only be told after 1 year that they don't have funding for you. At US institutions you can often get paid through research assistantships or teaching assistantships, so are you referring to lack of specific funding for the research that you want to do? If you are open to changing research directions, why must you change programs? Can you not find another research group from the same department?

I currently have funding only through a teaching assistantship. This is a very limiting situation because I have no money for fieldwork or lab experiments, and I cannot take time off to go to the field during the semester nor I can visit any other lab in another place. It also takes a lot of time off doing research. Even if I might find funding for the research itself I would also find funding for my salary so there are 2 layers of funding to be achieved.

Personally, I decided that I would only do a PhD if the topic itself really interested me. It is really hard to motivate yourself to continue if you aren't that interested in what you are doing. I know for a fact that I would have left my PhD program in UK a couple of years ago had I not found the topic really interesting (mainly due to my relationship with my supervisor).

..."it also takes a lot of time off doing research". But in most universities, when doing a PHD you will required to do some work that is partially unrelated to your research (supervising undergraduate theses, preparing deliverables for the grant that funds you, working on a project).

@emmalgale but if you don't find a topic of interest what would you do? Find any job and keep applying to programs until you get the topic you want? How many years could that take?

I actually had a job for 6 months before I started my PhD. If nothing of interest came along, I would have just continued working where I was/looking for other jobs of interest. I have never dreamed of working in academia my whole life, and I probably won't work in academia when I finish my PhD. I don't know what I will be doing instead though, and I am due to finish in less than a year's time. I guess I was just lucky that the right PhD came along at the right time.

If you know precisely what you want to do, I am impressed---but not as impressed as the person who will want to hire you! Instead of applying for programmes near what you are want, why don't you write to people in the appropriate discipline and sound them out. Funding can often be found for a bright, enthusiastic student. That isn't to say you are likely to get a big grant, a corner office and be left to your own devices. But with the right supervisor you might be able to get support to design your project.
However you should not really expect things to pan out as you plan them. otherwise it wouldn't be research.
Finally it is not unusual to have a period of "meh" or "second year blues" as we used to call it. So think very carefully before jumping ship.


text:
Where can I find free drawings or artwork to use for an article?
These days I see more and more nice pictures in articles, particularly in reviews or articles covering global patterns.
I want to insert a nice drawing of a forest for example, to show ecological processes between different parts of the ecosystem. I don't have money to pay for an artist. Are there some websites with free drawings or clip art, etc., that might fit scientific publishing?
I have looked on deviantart for a while and google but couldn't find anything that fits and that is copyright free.
EDIT: specifically I am not looking for photos but more cartoon kind of art

For lecture notes and presentations I use Pixabay and openclipart. See also this question on Graphics Design SE.

I've found https://www.iconfinder.com/ to be invaluable for simple on the-fly icons/graphics in my professional/academic works. For generic (but professional looking) stock photos I've also gone with Pixabay!

Did you try searching via google images and choosing "labeled for reuse" option?

@MassimoOrtolano Wow!  Thanks for the pointer to Pixabay.

@MassimoOrtolano thank you that was really useful.

I want to insert a nice drawing of a forest for example, to show
  ecological processes between different parts of the ecosystem.

If this is the level of complexity you're looking at, I'd say it is best handled by an illustrator. First, it'd be hard to find a set of cliparts that feature ecological processes; and if you put a bunch of cliparts with different styles together it's going to look like an 8th grade science poster project. (Which is fine if that's the level you are happy with.)
I know that you said you don't have money, but have you checked out some alternative way to hire artists? There are artists that draw a logo for a couple hundred thousands dollars, and there are many more artists who charge much, must less than that. One possible place to look is the Hungry Artist sub-Reddit. And here what the local community consider a "good and clear" posting. You can also mention to the artist that it's likely to be featured in a publication, which can help them strengthen their portfolio.

I have looked on deviantart for a while and google but couldn't find
  anything that fits and that is copyright free.

I'd suggest by all means e-mail the owners of the work you like and see what would be the process of using their work.
And lastly, have you considered drawing them yourself? Free software like Inkscape can do a lot of amazing things. Ecological drawings are also very suitable for a particular style known as isometric projection. They can be drawn using modules and you can paste a single module to form a landscape... the process is quite fun.
Even you're not planning to become a self-trained illustrator, It'd still be good to get familiar with a graphical software. Let's say if you have a background and a set of cliparts from different sources, sometimes little tricks can make them more artistically coherent. For example, unify the hue of the cliparts (e.g. turn them to sepia), passing through the same filter (e.g. through pen sketch filter), or frame them uniformly before placing them on the big forest (e.g. frame them all in circles) may help improve the quality of the art work.
Sorry, I know this is not what you're asking for. I feel that it may be nice to think outside the frame of the constraints once a while.

thanks for the feedback, not exactly what I was looking for so I can't vote for an answer.


text:
Is the arXiv a good way to get feedback on one's work?
I have developed a method to process images I use for my research. It's nothing revolutionary but I think it might be useful to others than me, and why not, be worthy of being published somewhere (at least for me to cite when I use it).
As it is outside my primary field of research, nobody in my direct lab vicinity can help evaluating its scientific value or novelty (I did a bit of literature research and didn't find any obvious precedent). Normally I would just put it as an appendix in the first article where I use it, but this one is quite long to describe and completely out of my field. It would thus be off-topic in the journals in which I usually publish.
I though of seeking collaboration from someone in my university who works in signal/image processing, I don't know anyone personally and I foresee possible political issues, authorship quarrels, etc. I would nonetheless like to get some sort of evaluation before submitting to a journal. As an outsider, I wouldn't like to waste an editor's time and make a fool of myself.
I have zero experience submitting to the arXiv, by looking at the website it's not clear how/if there is an active system of feedback, even informal.
Is it advisable to submit my methods paper there and expect a feedback?

I have seen a few papers on the arXiv that explicitly stated "Comments are welcome" or the like in the "Comments" section, but I have no idea whether this actually attracts feedback from people you don't usually work with; I would be very interested to know.

I've no idea and I'm very interested as well in the answers, solutions and outcomes. I'd personally put the paper on arxiv and ask for feedback in stackexchange. Maybe here: http://dsp.stackexchange.com/

@Trylks my experience with the dsp site is that it does not yet have a particularly active users community, and a post do discuss a paper isn't the appropriate format. I could ask specific questions though.

FYI Why doesn't arXiv have a comment section?

I, for one, have given people unsolicited feedback on their arXiv articles.

There is not much of a "formal feedback" system associated with the arxiv.  I say "not much" instead of "none" because the arxiv apparently does do some degree of automatic tracking of citations to its papers.  For instance this arxiv submission contains a link to a MO post in which my paper is (briefly) mentioned.  I had not seen that post before, so that was somewhat interesting.  However, I don't know how this system works and it seems to be much less systematic than, say, what google scholar does.  In particular, I have 25 arxiv preprints and the arxiv itself lists this kind of citation for very few of them, whereas google scholar lists much more.
In terms of an informal feedback system: yes, the arxiv works very well for that, in the following organic way: for many academic fields and subfields it is by far the one place to put your preprint in order to get the most (and the most interested) people to read it.  This includes publication in most journals and the implications this has had on some academic fields are immense.  E.g. I hear that in theoretical physics -- a fast-moving field in which it is apparently rare to look up a paper written much more than ten years ago -- pretty much everyone who is anyone uploads their preprints to the arxiv, and as a result theoretical physicists almost never go to the library anymore or look through actual journal papers: they don't need to.  My field -- mathematics -- seems to be converging to this kind of phenomenon rather more slowly.
On the other hand, to expect feedback may be putting it a bit strongly.  The volume of papers uploaded to the arxiv is fast and rapidly increasing.  I just looked at the math.NT arxiv submissions, and last night 15 papers were uploaded.  I am a number theorist with broad interests, and if these papers came at a rate of one a day or less, I would probably peruse about half of them.  But the current volume forces me to be much more selective.  The arxiv is great advertising, but all the advertising in the world doesn't guarantee that people will engage with your product rather than the sea of competing products (competing for their attention, anyway; they need not be competing with you in the academic sense).
In my experience, I most definitely get enough feedback from my arxiv submissions in order to justify uploading them (although there are arguments to be made for doing so even if you never hear directly from anyone about them).  It happens that in the last three weeks or so I have uploaded four arxiv submissions.  (Since I have 25 altogether, this is obviously a spike in the upload rate.  Some other people do this too.  Now that I think about it, from an advertising perspective it would probably be better not to do this.)  Since then I have received comments on two of the four papers.  The two papers that I haven't heard from yet are I think perfectly solid and interesting -- in fact, one of the two concerns the Combinatorial Nullstellensatz so probably has broader appeal than most papers I have written, and the other is a really substantial project that I did jointly with my PhD student -- so the fact that I've gotten no feedback about them seems to be mostly random.
In summary: yes, posting your papers on the arxiv is a great way to get feedback.  Will it guarantee feedback?  No, guaranteed feedback is exactly what you're buying (so to speak) when you submit to a journal.  Other than that it seems impossible to guarantee. I would definitely submit to the arxiv and see what happens.  If you hear nothing, then you might try sending a few emails to suspected experts which just point to your arxiv preprint.  Having an arxiv preprint versus just enclosing a file adds a certain veneer of legitimacy.

When you did get feedback on your articles, was it from people you had already had contact with? Do you think someone who still has to make a name in the field (this seems to be the OP's case) will get as much attention?

@Ri49: Both of the emails I received recently about my arxiv preprints were "first contacts".  In one case, I was somewhat familiar with the person who contacted me.  In the other, I had not heard of him before.  Both people were, I believe, unfamiliar with me and my work until they saw these arxiv preprints.  (Just because you've "made a name in the field" doesn't mean that everyone in the field will know that name: the world is a big place.)

I would guess that truly famous people (say Terry Tao) get more feedback on their arxiv preprints.  On the other hand, the arxiv preprints of Terry Tao are more worthy of feedback than average.  At the other extreme, when I see a work that makes me think that someone is just getting started -- e.g., it is rough around the edges or has some other inessential flaws -- I am often more inspired to drop them a line, because I think they could benefit from some pointers.  Some random veteran researcher does not want or need my help so probably gets less feedback.

Part of whether to "expect" feedback depends on the field. Long papers in pure mathematics: sometimes even if you send copies to people personally by e-mail they don't give you feedback. Short papers in high energy physics: boy oh boy can you expect feedback.

The arXiv is a tool for establishing a presence, but it does not market or disseminate your results.  It merely places them in a certain category and presents title, author, and sometimes abstract in a summary fashion, depending on how one uses it.  Some researchers get RSS and email updates in their favorite areas about new arXiv submissions, but that should be considered small in number, and not likely to generate interest in your paper.
If you want feedback, you need to advertise your own work, on your webpage, at conferences, at society meetings, and other appropriate venues.  You can prepare a short version (abstract or highlight only) and include the URL of the arXiv abstract.  Use of arXiv does not indicate peer review, but as there is some endorsement system involved in arXiv submissions, there is also some cachet associated with having the URL.
When you have gotten some people interested in your work, they too can refer to the URL, and this can lead to more publicizing and hopefully direct feedback on your work.  It can also lead to others posting their opinions on their blogs or elsewhere, which can be harder to track.

You need to find a way to advertise your work so that people find it on arXiv, use it, then eventually cite it and criticize it.
The main advantages of arXiv are:

the publication timing. When you submit to some closed review journal or conference, you are months before an official decision. During this time (that can get long), you need a way to disclose properly your work;
getting a larger audience. Everybody is not on her university's network, or some universities won't have access to all the journals. If your work is on the editor's site only, then more people than you might think will be blocked by the paywall. Furthermore, some people (I know some in Image Processing) will make monthly explorations of arXiv and publish some reading lists on-line, tghus giving you a larger audience.

There are some more direct ways that are more effective than waiting for a passenger feedback and they help you gain more confidence in general in the outside field.

find the journals in the field of this paper, contact one of their editors
in chief with the same question and disclaimer you have here to seek their
opinion about submitting or otherwise. You get the best feedback from the journal reviewers. They know most people, they are quick in reading and they love reviewing a wide range of work rather than a single topic. generally more open-minded than an average researcher.
Look at review board members of those journals who are in
your university and contact them, you can pick up the phone and ask them for this quick favor to direct you to the right direction(area of literature) to look for precedence of the work. Talking over the phone brings them less liability and they can be more frank, open and less political about the work. It also takes less time than drafting a careful email to a stranger.
Look up the name of professors who teach this topic in your school or any school nearby and send them the paper for opinion, you can even use their office hours to sit and discuss the relevancy of this "outside" work. Office hours are boring and wasted anyway, it will be a refreshing task if it is not close to exam time(busy time).
You can also ask it as a favor (or even paid consulting) from a PhD students of these journal editors/reviewers. PhD students in their later years can be of huge help as they know a lot and they are less committed to non-scientific duties than their professors.

Other questions are more on topic, but let me add that social media and open access, used wisely, are good tools for increase your audience and get more downloads, and (hopefully) more feedback.
Think about:

creating a blog, maybe dedicated to your research
upload your papers in arxiv: this will give us a timestamp, a permalink, and will preserve your paper digitally
use social media to spread the links
Use the blog (or the arXiv itself) as a place to discuss your research (maybe, in more laymen terms), receive comments and discuss with interested people.

Social media (used wisely) do have an impact, and also Altmetrics are developing. Also, please read this question and related answers.


text:
How many people read an individual journal article?
General background
Some time ago, I was reading a blog post, where there was some discussion about how many people read journal articles.
I think that such an estimate is important when trying to assess the impact of research on society.
However, whereas internet sites readily track usage. Such information seems a little more difficult to come by when it comes to readership for a particular journal article.
Initial Ideas

Articles vary: Obviously journal articles vary in many ways and just as with citation counts, readership is likely to be highly skewed, perhaps something like a power function. In addition to academic impact, presumably articles that are available for free on the internet are read more.
Time since publication: The number of reads increases over time, but the rate of readership presumably varies over time (perhaps a spike on initial release, and then gradual decline as relevance dissipates).
Definitions of reading vary: Read counts would also increase or decrease based on how reading is defined. At the low end is a glance at an abstract. At the high end is carefully reading the entire article. I'd be happy with a working definition that involved reading at least two pages.

Initial Data

PlosOne article statistics: As a very rough guide, it suggests that mean views per article is around 800 per year.
Journal of Vision: this article reports some download statistics: "In the most recent accounting in July, 2008, the top five articles were each downloaded between 1,993 and 3,478 times."
Some journals list subscription counts

Initial Guess
I find it useful to have a ball park estimate of these things.
My own initial guess, based on minimal data, is that readership is between 50 and 1000 times the citation count for the article. Linking the estimate to citation count makes it easier to estimate for a given article and should incorporate effects like time and journal prestige.
Question

What is a good estimate of how many people read a given journal article?
What data and sources of information justify this estimate?
Is there any established literature that can inform such an estimate?

I'd love to know a good answer to this (with variations based on different definitions of reading, etc.).  I think the estimate of 50 to 1000 times the citation count is way off, certainly at least once you get more than a few citations.  For example, there are plenty of 200-citation papers in fields that just don't have 10,000 plausible readers.  For PLoS journals it seems to be a decent approximation if you count each page view as a separate reader, but that overcounts readers and is an exceptionally permissive way of counting reading.

One argument for my rough estimate: say the mean reads for a 6 year old plos one article is 5000 and mean citation counts is 10, this leads to an estimate of 500 reads per citation. I know it's just a back of the envelope estimate, but it seems plausible to me. I agree that PlosOne is permissive, but it also presumably leaves out many counts (e.g., informal sharing of journal articles, accessing from academic's webpage, syndication, sharing in student reading packs, etc.)

I know some springer published journals publish article downloads for past few weeks/months, see JQC for an example. A potentially more up to date measure but difficult to incorporate into other metrics you mentioned. The top article download in the past 3 months (as of righting this comment) has 885 downloads, and has been cited 30 times (the article is over 3 years old though).

Page views should overestimate readership: many people bring up a page without doing more than glancing at it while web searching, and each actual reader probably views it several times.  The PLoS data may be the best we have, and it's certainly interesting, but I'm having trouble reconciling it with my own papers.  At 500 readers per citation, there just wouldn't be enough possible readers in the world to account for the citations.  For example, the total number of research-active mathematicians worldwide is probably in the low tens of thousands, and only a small fraction have read my papers.

One key question is what the ratio is between the number of papers you read and the number you cite.  It's clearly not 500 (unless you read constantly and hardly cite at all), and even 50 seems implausibly high: if you cite just 20 papers total per year, which is not very many, you would be reading 1000 papers per year.  So the only realistic way to achieve average ratios of 50+ is if they include huge numbers of readers who aren't doing any citing, and those don't seem likely to be legitimate readers who understand the article.

@AnonymousMathematician I can think of many undergraduates, graduates, and people outside academia who have read 50, 100, 500, or more articles but who have never published anything, except maybe a thesis. As you go up the chain of academic expertise, the population gets smaller and the number of articles read gets larger, but I imagine those lower in academic expertise would still add a lot to readership counts. I agree that it would be useful to have different counts based on type of reader.

The standard joke is that most journal papers are read at most twice: at most once by the author, and at most once by the three referees.

@JeffE, then the paper would have been read four times? :)

No, just twice.  (That's part of the joke.)

Re "Time since publication": There must be a course using one of my papers, since every year around the same time, the number of full-text downloads goes up around 10-fold.

Sounds like a Fermi Problem :)
A question I asked myself recently, based on the many cases of plagiarism by top-politicians in Germany in humanities, was, are in humanities more articles/texts published than scholars can actually read completly. The amount of copied text in single phd thesis showed by plagiarism-detection communities in Germany like Vroniplag or Guttenplag is shocking to me. Often 50% of text is not marked correctly as citation. Even the supervisors at the local universities look like they never read some of these thesis completly. I really hope this is not representative, but fear it might be the tip of the iceberg in humanities (in Germany).
Personally, coming and working in a STEM field, I did a very specialized thesis, there are often less than a dozen groups worldwide working on such a narrow-specialized topic (matter of scientific competition/finding a niche, time, expertise and lab hardware in such fields). So there will be articles in peer-reviewed journals that are not really interesting to more than 20-50 researcher and probably a similar number of industry-researchers worldwide in STEM (competition between companies and research groups being not that different due to economic contraints). Without modern search engines, most non-scholars/private men would have a hard time to find such articles. This is another point in your estimation. The reader count for nature/sciene vs. very specialized journals varies a lot, I don't think any average number really helps you a lot or is that interesting. If you know your specialized field, you should notice pretty fast studying some journals, how many scholars have really a interest in that field.
Your PlosOne link is interesting. I can back this up a bit to give you at least a rough magnitude of order, what the reader count of top, specialized, ... journals is. I think it's quite normal, to read articles not completely (even if you cite them), but I take a close look on articles I downloaded, often due to the fact that I use many keywords and google operators to really filter out the stuff I'm looking for. This is something that varies also a lot between different scholars/students. I'm often shocked how students make use of search engines, if it is laziness or ignorance of search operators. This can save you so much reading time. Therefore, I think the extrapolated reader count based on citation factor might be more representative and reliable than using site views/downloads due to scholars, private people, laymen often downloading articles with information they didn't look for because of bad search engine use. Growing redundancy/plagiarism is a further factor here.
Some possible heuristics:

comparison of published aricles per month and web site/interface visitors per month on download platforms like PlosOne, arxiv, nature.

arxiv has around 6000 published articels per month, unique visits 100000, 12,4 million downloads by academic institutions, 50 million overall vs. 12x6000 articles 2011 means downloads/view of abstract of around 170 (I used 12,4 million here), of course, that doesnt count articles not published in that year, so the average read count of a single arxiv article is probably lower than 170 and more touching the 20-50 mark I explained above. But here you have IMO a reasonable and quite objective minimum and maximum limit for a scientific article other scholars are really interested in, 50-170
nature has 900000 unique visits per month, around 200 articles per month, so you see why having an article published in nature is probably more worth than 10 articles on arxiv, PlosOne or many other specialized journals in a distinct branch, even if they are peer reviewed ;)

looking up bibliographies of a some phd thesis in your field at your local university, the number of cited articles is in STEM often in the range of 50-200 (You see even here it varies a lot what a single phd student will/has to read). Of course you do not cite all articles you read, but the factor shouldn't be higher than 2 between (or your search engine use is imho suboptimal) cited and read articles. Considering the phd student will publish 3-5 (in STEM reasonable number or 1 nature article :) ) articles during his phd work and multiplying 3-5*20-50 (average read count by institutional scholars) you also get the number of articles in a phd thesis bibliography of 50-200. Pure Chance?! Looks like a strange calculation, but there is a link between how much article input a average scholar needs and how much output he creates (thats why I multiply both values) and it strengthens my experience/analysis above that 10-100 readers is a reasonable magnitude of order for people being really interested in an single average article. To me it doesn't look like pure chance, but that's the main problem with Fermi questions and answers :)

PS: notice this analysis is focused on STEM, I believe the average read count is much lower in humanities and side-effects like different languages and plagiarism seem to play a bigger role to make a really objective guesstimate

Smithsonian.com recently noted that there are about 1.8 million scholarly articles and scientific papers published each year in 28,000 journals.  About half of these are not read by anyone other than the author, a journal editor, and a couple of reviewers.  They report that 90 percent are never cited by other papers.

@RGardner Is there a reference to this article. I'd be curious to know what methods were employed to estimate readership. I also think that citations is mostly a "zero-sum-game". Finally, I imagine that readership is related to the reputability of the journal. For example, in general, when estimating average readership, I'd be more interested in  filtering, for example, by journals above a certain threshold (e.g., impact factor above 0.5 or 1.0).

@JeromyAnglim I added the link. Please let me know if you have problem reading that page.

Thanks for the link.The claim seems to come from Meho "the rise and rise of citation analysis" which states "Indeed, as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors. We know this thanks to citation analysis, a branch of information science in which researchers study the way articles in a scholarly field are accessed and referenced by others." However, I fail to see how the lack of citations shows that an article has not been read by others.

As mentioned by @JeromyAnglim, the claim was made in an article by Lokman Meho, although Meho himself did not really write this; it was added by an editor without, so it seems, a lot of evidence: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/academic-papers-citation-rates-remler/


text:
Is experience teaching college statistics sufficient to apply for a non-research stats professor jobs?
I am a mathematics professor with a PhD and 12 years of math teaching experience, including 6 years post-PhD.
For the last two years, I have taught statistics every semester. It was a big change from math at first, but now I feel much more confident.
I know several people on this site have served on hiring committees. At a university with low research expectations hiring for a stats position, would an application such as mine be competitive with newly-graduated statistics PhDs?
To generalize, when applying for teaching positions in areas adjacent to your PhD, what evidence can you provide that you are able to competently teach in this area?

Define "university with low research expectations." At a CC, teaching experience only would be fine, but that's probably not what you mean.

A large number of schools don't require yearly research publications. That's what I'm talking about here. I've published 6 research papers in mid-level journals, and I could continue that pace, but not in statistics directly. I guess I'd be looking at schools that ask you to only do some research, but not be a leader in your field. As far as I can tell, that is what most schools not in the top 200 look for, as well as many liberal arts colleges (including 2 I've taught at).

It sounds like what you're actually asking is: If you have a PhD and some research output in A and teaching experience in B, is it possible to be hired as a tenure-track professor of B where you teach B but continue to only do research in A? I'm guessing the answer is no. If they wanted PhDs in A, they would have said so.

Welll, that answers that. If you post that as an answer, I could accept it!

@BrianRushton: Post it yourself and accept your answer. That's fine.

Reach out to your friends and ask them. Also, I would apply because statistics professors can be harder to fill because of the strong demand from industry.

As long as you are still at the assistant professor level, I think your application should be competitive at many schools, provided you have evidence of good teaching.  Many mathematicians have gone over to statistics, and at a school that is primarily teaching oriented, what they typically look for is someone who teach well, provide good service and be a good colleague.  They probably won't care much about your actual area of research, just that you can cover well the courses they have in mind for that position.  If you've taught several similar courses, and have good letters about them, then this is sufficient evidence of teaching capability to me.
In fact, your position would be viewed as advantageous by many, as you should have more experience in both teaching---in fact, possibly more experience teaching statistics---and service than a fresh statistics PhD.  Also, presumably you've shown that you can sustain your research on your own.


text:
Should I list on my CV research assistantship positions under grants&awards?
Background of person is: first year Phd student, no publications, no research grants, but I have received a fellowship for my first semester that paid my stipend and tuition, so should I list the total amount with stipend and tuition?
Also during my MS I was hired as an RA and received stipend+tuition? Can I list that as a total amount per year, or total amount for the two years, or should I separate the different amounts (tuition/stipend). Isn't this a fellowship/scholarship/grant of some sort since rarely do master students get this kind of RAship?
edit: while RA's are common in the US and the fact that they pay stipend/tuition is well known, in other countries people might think that if I list it only as a job they might not realize it also paid my tuition, which for foreign students in the US can be quite high. I want to convey the importance of this achievement and monetary importance to a crowd outside the USA.

No. Standard assistantships are not "awards." (If it's a "merit award" assistantship of some kind, that's a different matter!)

list your fellowships under honors and awards and your research assistantship under work/job experience or positions.

Although merit is certainly a factor in the hiring of research assistants,   most people don't consider assistantships as "grants or awards". They are jobs. List them under "Positions Held" or "Academic Appointments" or the equivalent heading on your CV. Do not list your salary or the amount of your stipend - that's not anybody's business except you and your department.
Some fellowships might be considered awards. They would usually be explicitly competitive in nature, and given by outside agencies. "Named" fellowships from endowed funds might also count, even if awarded by your department. But a research assistantship is not a fellowship.

I understand the argument about the stipend, but a regular job doesn't pay your $20,000 tuition bill, and considering RA's are competitive I want to list this somewhere.

@user4050: Regular jobs don't, but research assistantships pretty much always do. Academics know this, and you can be confident that for academic purposes, someone who sees it under "Positions" will understand that it says something about your accomplishments. (For industry, the situation may be different, and in that case Workplace.se may be a better place to ask.)

should I list the total amount with stipend and tuition?

No, don't list this because it's irrelevant and sooner or later you'll remove it as your CV grows. You can just add it in the Honors and Awards section of your CV, but don't put numbers.

Also during my MS I was hired as an RA and received stipend+tuition? Can I list that as a total amount per year, or total amount for the two years, or should I separate the different amounts (tuition/stipend).

Same as before.

Isn't this a fellowship/scholarship/grant of some sort since rarely do master students get this kind of RAship?

In this case I would just put it under Research Experience.

In general, one can include anything in a CV as long as the "target" of the CV would be interested in it. This raises the question why exactly you are now compiling a CV in the first place.
Are you looking to change programs? Apply for a grant? Just wanting to show off on your web page?
Whatever the answer to this is, ask yourself the question whether whoever is supposed to read the CV would really care about your funding sources. In most cases, I would assume that the answer to this is no, unless the funding sources are particularly competitive and known outside your university.
Finally:

Isn't this a fellowship/scholarship/grant of some sort since rarely do master students get this kind of RAship?

Nope. If it's a RAship it's a RAship. That you got it earlier than others does not "upgrade" the prize in any way. Generally, resist the temptation to upsell your various prizes / grants / fellowships.

One should probably compile one's CV continuously so that one doesn't forget to put stuff on it. I wish I'd gotten in the habit when I was a student.

I disagree with the other answers. At least in fields where a substantial number of students self fund their PhD, having any funding is a big deal. I think you should put the fellowships and their amounts, under "grants and awards", although it might be reasonable to change the title to something like "funding" or "fellowships, grants, and awards".
While a departmental fellowship (or funding from someone else's grant) is not particularly prestigious, it is important. For example, a student with guaranteed money from his/her department or advisor has little incentive to apply for external money (and in many cases might even be ineligible). In evaluating students as potential post docs, I look at students who have had to self fund their studies very differently from those who have had funding. That said, it is important that you do not make too much of a departmental fellowship as it is generally the least prestigious type of funding you can get.

I look at students who have had to self fund their studies very differently from those who have had funding. - Interesting, do you usually even know, given that many (most?) people don't put departmental fellowships in their CV?

@ff524 If I don't see any source of external funding on a CV, I ask potential post docs if they applied for any funding. If they haven't, I ask why and the answer is often "I already had funding".

I was not referring to a fellowship but to a research assistantship, in this case a professor received a grant and then hired someone as an RA. I agree that fellowships should go under grants/awards.

@user4050 the first sentence of your question says "fellowship". It doesn't matter what it is called, it is the funding that matters.

@StrongBad sorry you are right, I am asking two separate questions.

@StrongBad I look at students who have had to self fund their studies very differently [...] How do you evaluate self-funding researchers' profile?

@EnthusiasticStudent I get very excited about potential post docs who have gone out and secured their own funding in the past. I get a lot less excited about potential post docs who have needed funding and either are unable to get it or have not tried.

@StrongBad I always think that professors are pessimistic about self-funding scholars; because it may come to mind that because these people have money, they can hide their low research potential and ease their way to an academic position.