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1.5 years later, how to make sure unprofessional behaviour by former mentor has consequences?
I was a post doc at a large US university for a year and after took another postdoc position in my home country. My mentor was a tenure track assistant professor. It pretty soon became clear that working together was going to be difficult due to different ideas on how to approach and manage projects. Furthermore, I might eventually not have been the best fit for that position given the somewhat different topic of my PhD work. This ended in a complicated work relationship, in which several requests on my side calling for meetings to discuss ways to improve the situation were ignored.
All the while, in my opinion, I was treated abusively: in group meetings in front of the whole lab, I felt humiliated by unconstructive discussions and was called out for the too little progress I made. In smaller meetings with up to two other lab members, I was shouted at by my mentor and told I didn't deserve my PhD etc. Sometimes, reasonable questions of mine were answered in a passive-aggressive way. Furthermore, the significant amount of time I spent in helping more junior lab members in their (very ambitious) projects was not appreciated.
At the time, I asked a university official in charge of postdoc affairs for advice. I was being told that a formal complaint at HR or the department head would most likely have no direct consequences. I furthermore feared retaliation, mostly because my J1 visa and housing depended on that position. For these reasons, I did not take any further action.
At one point, I decided to quit the lab after the initial agreed-upon one-year duration of my stay. Two and a half months before I wanted to inform my mentor in a one-to-one meeting about my decision, but two e-mail requests for that meeting ("to discuss the fact that my contract ends", which is how I worded it) were ignored. I eventually managed to get hold of my mentor after a group meeting and in the following conversation, after asking me why I think the whole thing didn't work out, they did not acknowledge any wrongdoing or unprofessional behavior on their part, even after I brought up several examples.
Other, more junior lab members (PhD and master students; I was the first and only postdoc) reported similar incidents of unprofessional behavior, but also didn't speak up. My guess is that they, too, were fearing retaliation and didn't want to jeopardize the relationship with their supervisor.
My question now is how to achieve the following (in decreasing order of importance):

have my former mentor improve their behavior so that they treat future students and employees better
if that doesn't happen, make sure their propensity for unprofessional behavior is known to the tenure committee
be sure the other professors in the department know that both sides are to blame for what happened; that is, restore my reputation
find closure: I'm going to leave academia for industry soon, but feel my academic career could have been more successful and my stay in the great city this lab is located in even greater had it not been for the terrible time at work (although this might possibly be hard to answer and / or worth of its own question)

While I am aware that there are several questions on this site about similar issues, I believe mine is different because I left that lab a year and a half ago. I fear that, after such a long time, simply contacting the department chair will come across as bitter and and as wanting to retaliate at the end of my academic career.
edit:
As per Dan Romik's suggestion: I'm not only interested in advice how to achieve the above goals, but also whether this is actually adviseable. Also, as the time span of 1.5 years indicates, this isn't a super urgent matter for me. But I've been thinking about this question for a long time and I really appreciate all of you answers, most of them taking very different point of views! I don't know which one to accept - a natural choice would be to follow the suggestions I find most promising and see how it works out. Although not being accepted, this wouldn't make the other answers less valuable.

Were you payed for this year? Have you produced any research outputs to account for the salary you received?

Yes, I got an average postdoc salary. I worked hard and produced research output, both from my project and from collaborating with my mentor's students. But none of that resulted in a publication, which was, of course, what my mentor was mostly after, given their early career status. I am aware that, in large parts because of the toxic work relationship, I might have underperformed.

Is it possible at all, that your former mentor would listen to reason? If you wrote them a mail, explaining how their unproffesional behaviour affected you, it could be he/she is just really incompetent, has realised this by now, and is open to suggestions.

It is common on this site that people writing answers will sometimes challenge the premises of the question and instead of (or in addition to) answering the actual question will try to tell the asker not to do the things they’re thinking of doing, when that’s not the kind of advice they asked for. (To be clear, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad practice, and sometimes do this myself.) You might want to clarify whether you only want specific advice about getting consequences for your mentor, or wouldn’t mind also getting more general thoughts about the advisability of the whole idea.

You simply cannot achieve those objectives (except of course the one regarding leaving academia). You should have made the complaint at the time. But again, you were advised correctly that as a postdoc, no power to damage a prof's career over such issues, was placed in your hands. But the complaint would help add to the pile of evidence against the person, for example, if they punch a student someday or something. Consider that you may have only got that opportunity because they drove away others before you, rather than being regretful about what might have been. So it was always doomed.

Are there websites to review professors?  If so, leave a review, encourage others to do the same and send a link for that professor to the university.  If they feel action is required, good, if not, so be it.

This is only tangentially related, but I raise a brow when I see mentor and postdoc in one sentence. In my view, a postdoc is already a mature, even if not too experienced scientist. To him a PI should be no more than a first among equals, certainly not someone to take crap from. If this view would be more widespread, yesterday's PhD students (or more junior) would be much less vulnerable to such abuse.

Isn't it worrying that most of the answers simply suggest to let it go? What about the future students and postdocs? This just made me realize how poorly  academia handles cases of abuse.

There are endemic problems/issues with academic research.  In the olden days (say, 50 or 60 years ago) there was much less grant money and fewer granting agencies/institutions, and much of the research was "unfunded" or simply supported by the budgets of the academic institution and departments therein.  (i.e. the professor had a salary, the graduate students sometimes had stipends, and there was some money to buy equipment). now it is much different and there are waaay too many PhDs, too many "research institutions" scrambling for grants, and governments cutting back.  that makes for stress.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this is a rant, not a question.

@DanRomik good point, especially since I have been pondering this question for one and a half years now. Please see my appended edit to the question.

@Ivana I was actually thinking about writing a letter (harder to ignore than an email and it's paper with more "evidence weight") to my PI and ask them for a reply. If I get one and they acknowledge and promise to improve on their behaviour, then this matter would be done for me. If not, I can still escalate the matter further, if I want to. You could probably even turn your comment into an answer? P.S.: since then, I had one chance encounter with my PI and they acted totally normal and as if nothing ever happened, doing small talk etc., asking about my career...

On "writing a letter" to your advisor, I think it would be better to write a letter for the administration. If this person is a truly aggressive player, (s)he will gladly "promise to improve on their behaviour" just to make sure you don't say anything around against them, while misconstruing this letter to peer against your reputation. Surely you will breach out on overly personal remarks on this letter -- better make a more professional, official notice. Acting normal and nice when they no longer have any power and/or interests over bullied victims is typical of someone playing selfish games.

Academia is built on professionalism and goodwill. In academia people are expected to be experts of highest possible calibre, excellent in both teaching and research, capable of managing both funds and people, communicate complex ideas to various audiences, predict and mitigate risks, meet and exceed expectations of colleagues and stakeholders, achieve impossible and remain calm and smile all the time. This is a glamoured picture of academia, produced by the success-centred culture of modern society.
Reality, of course, is somewhat different: academics are people, too. We have strengths in some areas, but we need time to pick up the other skills. Your PI was good in securing external funding but not so good in managing meetings. You were good in helping other students but not so good in achieving the goals set for you. From what I see, you both under-performed in your roles.
I understand that you are frustrated and want to make sure there are consequences for your former PI for not standing up to your expectations. I assure you, not meeting the publication goals of the first grant is going to result in quite real consequences for your PI. It will be very difficult for them to secure another grant, which very likely will result in not having a tenure. Your PI's actions were possibly explained (but not justified) by this pressure.
Some years later, this brief encounter with your former PI will be only a small insignificant episode for you. I am not sure what you want to achieve for yourself by going after your former PI in the way you described. You want to hurt their career? — arguably, you already did quite well in it.
I would suggest to reflect on this episode and think about your future career. What could've you done better to reduce the unprofessional criticism and tunnel it into a more constructive way? How would you respond if a similar situation happens in industry? What procedures does your future company have to help resolve such issues? What makes a better professional and how you can become one?
I wish you good luck in your future career.

Thanks for your honest answer, with which I partly agree. I admit some frustration on my part and agree that we likely both underperformed. I, however, strongly reject your notion that I'm looking to "go after my PI". I want them to have the career they work hard for, but most of all I'd like future employees and student to be treated appropriately by them. As for your last paragraph, I think this is an important point. I agree that there are quite a few lessons to be learned from this experience which will help me in my future career.

@user96212 Not only you want to change your PI's behaviour, but also inform PI's tenure panel and colleagues of his/her lack of professionalism. Tenure panel would not "improve" your PI, it will simply deny them tenure and kick them out of academia, what else do you expect? Seriously, if this is not retaliation, then what is?

Please read my bullet points again: if my former PI doesn't improve their behavior, then the tenure committee should know that. If they learned from that episode, then great! I'll be (in fact, am) happy in another job and they will be in theirs. But (repeatedly) treating one's subordinates in such a fashion is, IMHO, not a "weakness", but a disqualification for this (and any other) profession. I realize, though, that evaluating whether they improved their employee management skills is not my responsibility, probably rendering this specific bullet point moot.

I think the point is this: the PI is already suffering the natural consequences of his actions in that he was unable to get good work out of you. He may or may not have learn from this. It seems as if you were hoping there are additional bureaucratic consequences, but I don’t see how those would be more instructive.  Parenting analogy: When my kid does something stupid and breaks her arm, that is the consequence. I don’t also have to yell at her.

@Dawn the problem is that some abusive advisors manage to be successful despite (or in some cases because of) being abusive. There is no guarantee that any negative consequences the mentor will suffer are sufficiently negative to cause him to change his ways, or that they are anything on the same order of magnitude of negativity as what OP suffered. The more correct parenting analogy would be if your kid did something stupid and broke someone else’s arm (while possibly suffering a couple of minor scratches herself).

@Dan Romik I actually don’t think I agree with the point/this answer, I was just trying to clarify it.

This answer seems a bit arrogant in some of its assumptions. “Some years later, this encounter will only be a small insignificant episode for you.” How do you know that? You are not the OP. Furthermore, your answer suggests that the mentor has already suffered equal consequences in the form of not getting publications. Recall that we’re talking about abuse here. Relatively speaking, a few publications here and there do not necessarily constitute a punishment of comparable magnitude. Maybe the mentor really should lose the possibility of tenure, as it may help to prevent such incidents later.

Lack of performance should not justify an abuse

First, there is probably little that you can do to change anything. It has been too long. People won't remember, and as you say, it will sound like sour grapes.
Second, find a way to heal yourself and put the experience in the past. Seething anger, even when justified, will probably hurt you more than resolve the past abuse. Make sure that you go into future positions with open eyes, after exploring the environment before you dive in.
Third, while this doesn't excuse the behavior, your mentor was then very likely under a huge amount of stress and had no experience with the situation he was in. A tenure-track assistant professor is under a lot of pressure to produce for himself. That pressure alone, combined with inexperience might explain (not excuse) blow ups and inappropriate behavior. It may be that his own fear of failure was such that any provocation, no matter how slight, caused an overreaction. Perhaps he knows more now and is in a different place in which abuse of colleagues isn't his first response anymore. You can hope that is the case, but you can't affect it much. There are jerks (and worse) in academia.
There is no excuse for the situation you faced, of course. But if the institution isn't willing to address it, there is little you can do effectively and without blow-back on yourself.

Thank you for your answer. It is in line with my suspicion that there's little I can do. I agree that my mentor was (is) under a lot of pressure. Their complete lack of self-reflection in the exit conversation and other information I have gotten since make me doubt that they know better now. As for your last paragraph, I am not sure the institution knows, as also the official I talked to did, on my request, not take any action. It is well possible, though, that word about these and similar incidents spread in the department.

I do think that being under pressure does not excuse treating people badly.

@WolfgangBangerth it may not excuse it, but it can explain it. Since people aren't perfect.

@mathreadler -- I have no tolerance for faculty treating students poorly, pressure or not.

@WolfgangBangerth Are you saying you can't take the pressure of others pressure regulation?

@mathreadler -- come again? ;-)

@WolfgangBangerth I'm assuming you are in some managerial position. Part of your job would then be to shield your team from pressure which could make them perform poorly. My point would be that if you with "zero tolerance" would fire your professors every time they get some entitled brat as a student maybe you will be spending much time hiring and not so much time doing research or whatever it is you want to/should be doing.

I'm both a researcher and a manager. I don't have solutions for how to deal with either entitled students or with faculty abusing their authority. But I have no patience for excusing bad behavior as "someone just being under pressure". We need to call it what it is: abuse.

tl;dr: Don't waste your life on this but do take some action against the abuser. It will help you inside and also do a greater favor to the field.
As other answers stated, you faced a tutor pressured by a tenure track, and chances are your actions will result in little more than largely wasting precious time. However, I do believe something ought to be done about that.
What you describe is a typical situation in modern academia: staff abuses power and everyone else takes it, for fear of career & reputation retaliation, and the rotten ambiance keeps growing. The typical result is: almost everyone who was afraid of "having their careers ruined" by their abuser drop out anyway, leaving to the others staying a message that abusing others is totally cool.
I find this circle both irrational (i.e. why not stand for oneself if dropping out was a plan anyway) and pathetic (a system sustained by passive-aggressive fear of feeble workmates).
Mind that a fighter should be ready to getting hurt. If you expect to harm others without any consequences, you've just become like your abuser.
Provided you're willing to stand up and send the message to this person, think carefully what are your options. From your post, I think the shortest path to achieve your goals is to somehow neutralise this person. You cannot expect him/her to mend ways after so many having confirmed that abusing others is the sure way to the top. You should aim at having this person seriously exposed and if possibly sacked. If you're thinking of taking this affair merely lightly, just be bold enough to call and/or meet directly the maggot and spell out your best swearwords in the face.
There are several ways of exposing bad behaviour. Take a look, for instance into the following websites, tailored for academicians: (i) http://www.qcist.com; (ii) https://www.ratemypi.com. Contact his prior advisees, and gather their complaints, stories. Organise a meeting or online group to discuss these; ask them whether they'd like to speak out. Offer them help, blog about the joint experience. Tweet about it, give interviews, raise some drama! -- there's a lot of open support offered to harassed ex-academics nowadays. Do you think there might be any published misconduct in this person? Carefully read his/her publications and look for any glaring issues (plagiarism, data manipulation, apparent conflicts of interests). A scientific retraction is guaranteed to leave a permanent blemish, and attracts a lot of bad publicity. Suit up and go back to your institution, and formally complain to the administration; leave a written letter and rate the place online (e.g. Glassdoor.com ).
Take one thing for a fact: abusers are usually greater cowards than any fighter. In reality they should, as they have way more to lose than you. Test it out and you will find that. Also, what is the worst this person could feasibly do to you? Are you sure an academic has any actual power or relevant contacts outside of their department corridor? These people (and perhaps you) pretend to believe the world is contained inside their small ivory tower.
I am sure s/he will freeze to the bones when seeing you coming back from the past ready for a fight. On the other hand you will be feeling swell. If you will play this act, you will have to show your face.
Good luck.

Actually, I'm afraid that s/he will become enraged and use whatever power they possess to try and ruin your career, not "freeze to the bones". If they have such power, be aware of the possible consequences before you act. At some level of power imbalance it isn't about fairness, anymore, but safety. A "feel good" action that leaves you dead is less than optimal.

@Buffy I know, I am from inside the academia. Everyone is afraid that everyone else is some kind of political warlock. I will not dig into details but I have repeatedly fought abusers. I have had bad scientists exposed and sacked... already as a PhD student, against the dean. It was very hard, and I had no idea. I got my PhD and keep proceeding quite well. Almost everyone is such a coward in the corporate environment, really. Typically the worst they will do is trying to isolate opponents by amateurish gossip (call it LoR) and avoid eye contact. And OP is moving to industry, maybe abroad.

BTW a suggestion to anyone thinking of leaving academia: take a look into associations for PhDs and postdocs, such as e.g. cheekyscientist.com There will surely be some accounts from peers who got back on their abusers, as a reference.

While I appreciate your answer and agree that the circle of not speaking out leading to continued abuse of others should be interrupted, I honestly don't think I'm confident enough to take on a fight on that level. If instead I could say that I didn't do any mistakes in this episode, I would definitely consider it. It is a good point to check whether abuse (not only in my case, but in general!) is part of a larger pattern of unprofessional behaviour - there definitely was one instance when objections I raised about promising data were pretty much ignored. I'll definitely keep an eye out.

"a fight on that level" -- Mind I have proposed a number of lines of action, at different "levels". Certainly you don't need to take all of them, as that would probably cost you too much time and energy. Giving this person bad evaluations (in situ and/or online) and direct feedback (preferentially straight in the face) would probably already help a lot. A piece of advice for the future and to anyone else reading: always resist abusers, somehow. It will happen again, it is probably happening already, just don't let these guys comfortably thrive.

@Buffy is right. Someone with such tendencies to be ruthless is better to ignore, don't talk with, don't talk about, move on, find another place. The world is big. If you are any good, then people with money can't afford to have you not being put to good use.

I’m very sorry you were treated badly and wish you the best of luck with your career.
About your question, I don’t feel I can advise you on how (or whether) to proceed with your plan, but a couple of things I think you need to consider very carefully are:

You say part of your motivation is to “restore your reputation” among the professors in your former department. However I think the actions you are contemplating may carry a real risk of damaging your reputation, both in the department and potentially outside of it (especially if some sort of public scandal ensues as a result of your accusations). Unless your accusations are 100% based on facts rather than opinions and all the facts are impeccably documented, you will be exposing yourself to accusations of lying, exaggerating, making things up etc. Even if you tell the truth and have the evidence to back up all your claims, some people (in addition to the mentor, who obviously will become your enemy for life) may resent you for damaging the career of their colleague and think that your actions reflect poorly on you.
Another very real risk is that the mentor might sue you for defamation, and maybe even win. I suggest famialiarizing yourself with defamation law in the US (and any relevant local jurisdictions). Given how serious the topic is and how much is on the line, I would also recommend that you consult a lawyer before you take any actions that might expose you to a defamation claim.

Good luck!

I unfortunately do not have documentation of these instances - this is a lesson I learned: whenever something odd happens in the workplace, write it down with exact date & time, wording and list of witnesses. You never know; maybe it's just the first of many such events. As for 2.): also a really important point!

I'd just like to add something that stuck out to me:

I felt humiliated by unconstructive discussions and was called out for the too little progress I made. ... Furthermore, the significant amount of time I spent in helping more junior lab members in their (very ambitious) projects was not appreciated.

From a different perspective, this could be seen as spending a lot of time on something that wasn't your responsibility and that was taking time away from things that were your responsibility. Your priority is to fulfill your specified duties first, then help others as much as possible. If their work not getting done or not getting done correctly was causing you problems, you needed to communicate that to your colleagues so that a solution can be found. Perhaps it would have been that your duties would have been shifted to include what you were doing; perhaps some other solution would have been found. Maybe it was their hope to decrease everyone's workload by getting those students to narrow their project into something more manageable; if so, your enormous assistance may have torpedoed that goal. Regardless, by communicating about it, you wouldn't be unilaterally deciding your priorities are different than your explicitly stated ones.
To put it bluntly, perhaps this other person became frustrated and acted out because they perceived you as shirking your responsibilities and interfering with theirs. Combined with the difficulties you mention coming to agreement regarding project management, they may have decided you were a sort of "trouble maker," so to speak. And perhaps even more frustratingly, they didn't feel they had the authority to be the one to confront you about it. Of course, none of this would excuse any of their behavior (least of all ignoring meeting requests), and I do not wish to defend the behavior. However, it would make the behavior a little bit more understandable, even if it was a totally wrong view.
This is all speculative, of course. We're only outsiders with limited details. But there's more often than not two sides to a conflict, so it's worth considering if the other side might have a point. I get the impression that you know that no one was perfect in this situation, but perhaps there are still important lessons about working with others that you need to be more aware of. So maybe asking yourself the question, "What could I have done better?" is in order. Doing so doesn't mean believing the other person was in the right. It just means accepting the reality that you can only really control yourself and the responsibility of doing the right thing as much as you are able.

Well spotted! I do think, though, that the "significant effort" I was mentioning was somewhat of an overstatement. In total, I spent maybe two weeks helping the students. Supporting them (I believe, also to that extent) was by explicit direction of the PI. I worked with the students for a short period of time only, in which I wasn't able to work as much on my project as my PI wanted me to. Perhaps you are right that in this instance, expectations were not clearly communicated and my PI thus was disappointed.

@user96212 All fair. As I said, we have limited details. But the crux of the answer is to take a step back and ask the question, "How can I do better?" And even if the specific scenario I suggested isn't the case, you are in a position to ask that question and come up with answers about what might have frustrated your mentor.

I believe that this is a very general problem, and that there is little one can do. When the criticism comes from outside, there is no reason for anyone to take any action within the institution. When it comes from inside the institution, unless the behaviour is criminal, probably nothing will be done. It's a sad fact that there is almost no open criticism of tenured academics, especially once they have embedded themselves into the system.
I agree with you that we are propagating this system by not commenting, but I couldn't blame you if you don't. I think the chance of further harm coming from commenting is reason enough not to. And of course if you publish the name of the PI online, or reference them somehow, you could be sued for libel.
I like to think that eventually these people will be forced to "change their ways" when people decide that they can't work in these conditions. Unfortunately this is rarely the case, and so there are many PIs just like the one you described.

Most academic fields have at least ten people competing for each position. (PhD programs are notorious for accepting and training far more people than their fields can employ.)  This is an unfortunate system, because you, and your misbehaving supervisor (not yet tenured), are both without power. Both of you can be replaced at the whim of the department's leadership.
Why do I mention this? Becausse you propose to engage in a power struggle to make this supervisor face consequences. A power struggle is not going to work, because, unfortunately, you have no power. (In USA in a commercial workplace you might have some leverage: mistreating people gets companies, not just individuals, in big trouble.)
You know, other people, with more power than you and longer-term relationships with this person, have surely taken note of this kind of bad behavior. You were only there a year. By giving your input you may be bringing peat to Newcastle.
If someone asks you, "should I do a postdoc there?" you can certainly recount your experience, and advise against it. But don't do it by email or in writing.
Otherwise, you have more to lose than you have to gain by trying to bust this guy. Chalk it up to experience, don't look back, and resolve never to treat people who work for you that way.
You will most likely find commercial colleagues much easier to deal with than academic colleagues. There's a company somewhere that will benefit from your rigorous training and expertise.  All the best in your career.

I understand the OP is already on a job and moving to a completely different sphere. There would be no power struggle then. Typically a professor only has (some) influence among his peers and perhaps with a funding agency and/or publisher. These "don't exist" in the real world.


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Is a postdoc necessary for a tenure track position in China?
In math/CS and related fields, it is almost unheard of to obtain a tenure track position at a top US university without doing at least one postdoc. However, on mathjobs, a large proportion of the postings are from Chinese universities, and a substantial subset of such postings seem to always be active. From my understanding, it seems that many of these correspond to relatively new universities which are looking to rapidly expand and therefore are continuously hiring (e.g. SUSTech).
Is a postdoc necessary for such positions? I know that many of these universities have some postdoc positions, but the academic hierarchy/typical trajectory for academics in China is a bit unclear to me. There have been some very useful threads on postdocs in China here in the past, so I was hoping that someone would be able to shed some light on my query. At the moments I'm planning to apppy to postdocs in the US and China, but wonder if I should add TT positions to my list (or whether that would be essentially futile like in the US).
Since I suspect it may be somewhat relevant given that these universities are looking to establish reputations, I'm at a US R1 and my department and neighboring departments have strong reputations in their fields.
EDIT: Just wanted to clarify a few points based on comments/responses:

I'm mainly focused on research institutions, but more general response are also welcome as they might be of general interest now or down the line
I think the increased availability of positions extends beyond just new universities in China. Many of the oldest and best universities also seem to have persistent ads. New universities such as SUSTech mentioned above have also become quite respected.
In general, I'm not sure if my perception that Chinese universities have more ads is true, and even if it is, whether it's due to increased availability of positions or just different hiring practices.

Is there any reason to believe that these Chinese universities are all that different from the majority of (non-top) US universities that customarily hire people into TT positions without postdocs?

No idea, hence the question. I wasn't even really aware that most non-top US universities hired TT positions without postdocs.

You are aware that the vast majority of universities in the US are not research universities?

I guess I should have clarified for research position.

I've seen assistant professors at major Chinese universities who I believe got there right out of grad school so it's not strictly necessary. But most of them did do postdocs.

In China they only care about IF and number of publications. More is the better

For the record, I am no longer working in Chinese universities, and I'm not from the fields of math or CS. A few years ago, I was doing a tenure-track position in a university in one of the top 5 largest Chinese cities. I am merely writing this answer since no one else has come to the fore, but I am hoping that someone who has direct experience of doing a postdoc in China can come here to give more accurate info. All I can do is provide a rough outline and some words of advice.
In recent years, China has been implementing a new system of recruitment roughly known as the "pre-hired/long-term hired" system (预聘/长聘). Note however that depending on the university, you can see other variants of these names such as 准聘, 校聘, or 特聘, all of which have their own specificities. more information on these terms can be found in this Chinese website (use Google Translate, it should give you a good idea).
Basically speaking, "pre-hired" is the Chinese equivalent to being on the tenure-track system, and "long-term hired" means that one becomes officially tenured faculty.
Even though these recruitments are written in English, their main objective is to attract Chinese mainland students who graduated from top universities overseas, since they are likely to be more supportive of local politics and better-integrated into the country's culture. That said, you can apply and you will be certainly considered for a position.
The actual system of recruitment and its details vary somewhat from university to university, but for most universities there are usually two key periods throughout the year when the university is receiving CVs from Chinese and foreign candidates, and conducts interviews to decide who will be hired. Some universities appear to receive CVs all year long.
Each time, there is a limited quota of positions that can be filled. Universities in China are feverishly expanding their campuses into new locations, and are desperate to hire faculty members who can push the university up on the THE rankings or QS World Rankings. Key points are to publish as many papers as possible in SSCI journals, and attract foreign staff from top international institutions.
Regarding rank names, this "pre-hired/long-term hired" system has two variants: for the sake of convenience, let's call them the "old system" and "new system".
I do not recall the exact Chinese names of all the ranks, so I will just write the English ones.
Old system, from low to high rank:
(5) Adjunct Researcher/Post-doc
(4) Assistant Teacher (equivalent to lecturer/instructor in USA, adjunct position)
(3) Lecturer (roughly equivalent to an Assistant Professor in the USA)
(2) Associate Professor
(1) Full Professor
New system, low to high rank:
(5) Vice-Researcher (equivalent to postdoc)
(4) Associate Researcher (roughly equivalent to Lecturer, but usually with better salary, this is a tenure-track position)
(3) Assistant Professor (can be both tenure-track or a fully tenured position)
(2) Associate Professor (can be both tenure-track or a fully tenured position)
(1) Full Professor (can be both tenure-track or a fully tenured position)
In order for you to be accepted into a tenure-track position, you are required to have obtained a PhD from one of the top 200 institutions in the World University Rankings, and must have spent at least 2 years of research experience in a university or research institution. These two years can be spent either as a "Post-Doc", or as a position with a similar title such as "Researcher", "Assistant Researcher", "Lecturer", etc. This requirement is pretty strict, although with the right connections, it may be possible that some exceptions can be made.
What normally happens after you sign the contract as a post-doc or as a tenure-track faculty member, is that you are expected to publish as many papers as possible, etc., and at regular intervals, you will have to officially apply for a higher position. If your achievements are considered enough as a postdoc, you will get a tenure-track position, which will give you a maximum of 6 years to re-apply for a fully tenured position. If your performance is deemed insufficient, your contract will not be renewed, and you must head elsewhere.
Note that, after you sign your contract, your job title will only say something like "pre-hired teacher" or "pre-hired post-doc", which is a meaningless title. In many universities, after you sign the contract, you actually need to make a formal paper application in order to obtain an official job title such as "Assistant Professor".
Because the population of China is shrinking and money is dwindling, the whole application process is brutally competitive: in a single application season, I have seen as many as 600-650 applicants for approximately 10-15 tenure-track positions. 99% of these applicants are mainland Chinese, many of whom are quite well-prepared. If you do not have any papers published in Web of Science journals, you will have a very hard time being accepted in a top Chinese university, even as a post-doc.
Now, your mileage may vary, and I don't pretend to claim that my experience is valid for all the hundreds of universities in China, but here are some words of advice nevertheless.
If I were you, I would stay well clear of any up-and-coming university, and only focus on the top 5 universities of China in the cities of Beijing and Shanghai (especially since you mention you are from a R1 institution). There are numerous agents and representatives from up-and-coming universities very eager to hire you, but you will quickly find that many of their promises in terms of job conditions and salary treatment are empty or very misleading. The only exception I would make is if you already have a well-placed connection working in one of those universities, who can look after your back and fight to get you the proper conditions you were supposed to get. Representatives might show you nice photos of a clean university apartment, until you realize that place is in a newly-built campus in cheap land located in the middle of nowhere, and you actually need to take a crowded bus for 90 minutes (one way trip) to get to your actual workplace. It is these kind of things that you must take special care to watch out for.
My advice is for you to aim for a top institution that already has a few tenured foreign faculty in their ranks. Believe me, you do not want to be the first foreign hire of a given department. You will waste days and weeks running around various campuses and through the various administrative offices of the city, facing an army of clueless staff who have no clear idea how to process your paperwork as a foreigner. They will call lots of different people, and you might have to return to the same place 2 or 3 times because what a certain staff thought was the correct way to submit the application was actually incorrect, and you will need to rewrite the whole thing.
Since Chinese universities are leaner on administrative staff compared to the USA, you will likely be assisted in your paperwork by lots of different students who will go with you to the various offices around the city. They are wonderful, hard-working kids who are eager to work and learn from foreign faculty, but you will feel sorry for them taking so much time from their own studies to help get you registered, get a bank account, etc.
If you go to a large international city such as Shanghai, and if you choose a top university that already has foreign faculty, then it is much more likely that they already have some form of pipeline to handle your procedures, because practically none of the official paperwork you will have to do in China has any (decent) English translation. Until you master the Chinese language, you will be severely dependent on the aid of students and other faculty.
Another advice is to actually send an email to the foreign faculty in that department to get a clearer picture of the actual work/life conditions there. If you are lucky, one of these professors might offer some actual support for your candidacy, and look after your back while you are there. If you don't have friendly connections that you can trust, life in China can be very isolating and lonely.
Be sure to save as much money as possible before applying. In my case, because of the ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork involved, it happened that I had to make a "work" visa to go to China and sign a temporary contract, and then leave the country to reapply for an actual visa that gives you not just a work permit, but also an official residence permit. Once you return to China, then you will sign the actual final contract. Unless the country's rules have changed recently, the same situation is likely to happen to you (be sure to inform yourself about this in advance). Also, because the paperwork for opening a bank account and actually getting paid is so cumbersome, it can take as much as 3-4 months until you actually start receiving a salary.
Finally, you will have to navigate the politics of your new country. You will likely be expected to sign a declaration of ethics, which along with traditional promises of not engaging in falsified research, you will have to check a box where you state that you agree and comply with the Party Chairman's vision for education in the country. There are lots of unwritten rules about what kind of research is "safe" to do, or whether you need to ask special permission to publish a paper that uses a certain dataset, but for the most part your Chinese/foreign colleagues will help you to understand what is safe or not, and as long as you are cautious and follow their counsel, you will probably find that there is very little (if any) intrusion in your research/teaching activities.
If you use your time wisely in China, and spend it on:

working your ass off to get papers published in Web of Science
journals with high impact factors;
getting a basic, working understanding of the Chinese language;
applying for a successful government funding of your research;
helping your Chinese colleagues and students to get their papers
published as well in good venues;

Then you will find that you can rise in your career much faster than in the USA (at least twice the speed, if not more).
However, if you are the kind of person who gets homesick easily, or cannot adapt to the culture or food, or cannot deal with being by yourself for long periods, or tend to spend your time in parties with alcohol (you will probably get lots of invitations, be wise about avoiding them as much as possible), you will probably have a dreadful experience. It's all up to you.
I don't really wish to go any deeper than this, and I hope others can give advice that is specifically suited to your needs. Good luck in your career.

Thank you for the detailed response - this is extremely helpful.

Wonderful answer.  All the best with your career!

You point out the difference in your question: You are comparing top universities in the US with new and/or regional universities in China. I don't actually have anything to offer regarding the specifics of Chinese universities (though I'd be excited to work at one sometime!) but small/new/regional universities in the US also hire faculty without requiring them to have gone through postdoctoral training.

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How to reconcile desire to succeed in academia/willingness to prioritize research with ethical concerns about fair work practices?
I'm not 100% sure how to phrase my question, but I've been grappling with this for sometime and thought maybe the responses would provide me some insight.
I'm currently at PhD student soon to be on the market for postdocs with the goal of staying in academia. My dilemma is this: I am reasonably content spending a large amount of time/mental energy on research. However, I worry that this contributes to a culture of overwork and reinforces academia as a "ivory tower" inaccessible to those without the privilege of being able place such an emphasis on research.
To expand: Much of my life is spent directly or indirectly on research. I don't really subscribe to the idea of having to work "X hours a week" and regularly take day or week long breaks from my research when I'm not feeling like I'm making progress. I also regularly see a therapist and try to take care of my mental health as well as possible. However, even with this in mind, my desire to manage my mental health seems to be rooted in the desire to be more productive. When inspiration does strike, I'm happy to stop whatever I'm doing and follow up on the idea for as long as I'm captivated. Thus, even though I'm not always "doing" research, in the back of my mind I'm usually thinking of something related to research.
So far this seems to have worked reasonably well for me and feels sustainable long term.
However, one effect is that I spend more time on research than I'm paid for (honestly this is probably true of any PhD student). What I worry about is that my willingness to research in this way helps to reinforce a lot troublesome aspects of academia. In particular, I wonder about what the effect on the work-life balance of my fellow PhD students, both in the sense that it normalizes what may be an unhealthy work-life balance for many people and in also the sense that there are many people, for whatever reason, who cannot do this even if they wanted.
Unpaid internships/adjunct faculty positions are perhaps a similar and more self-contained example of a similar dilemma- they may be individually beneficial, but certainly reinforce societal barriers and limit who is able to succeed.

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I'm not sure that this is currently an appropriate question for our site, which is meant for targeted, generally answerable questions (see help center).  Do you have a specific, concrete question?  There isn't one in the text, and the title question seems to me to be about a personal decision, which again is not something people on the internet can answer for you.

I will avoid the discussion about "fair work practices", which I find problematic for the reasons explored in the comments. Instead, I will address two questions that I think are at the heart of your question.

Does the fact that you work long hours contribute to a "culture of overwork"?

Arguably, no. Investing a certain amount of time into your work is not an endorsement for others to follow your path. There are large individual difference in how much capacity a person is able and willing to commit to their research. You are responsible for keeping your own mental and physical health in check, but not for the health of others.

How can you avoid contributing to a "culture of overwork"?

This is mostly about how you interact with others. Fundamentally, adopt a mindset that acknowledges and embraces individual differences.

Don't glorify worked hours as a performance metric. Don't walk around telling people how busy you are.

If you're in a position where you supervise students, encourage them to work the number of hours that feels right for them. Encourage them to view their time as a valuable asset and use it in a productive way. Don't scold them for not putting in a certain number of hours (assuming that they don't clearly put in less hours than they are contractually obliged to - if so, first try to understand what's going on).

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Astronat made a great comment:

No one wants to be part of a system they dislike, but that's not a reason to opt out of the system. It's a reason to change the system.

Since people tend to have different working styles and personal lives, how could one expect a one-sized-fits-all approach to work-life balance? You can improve the system by working to encourage and normalize a personally-defined work-life balance wherever you can (e.g. in your own life). This is one of my advisor's greatest attributes -- she actively supports me approaching my work in a way that works best for me and my family. Advisors like her will make great strides in improving the system, one student at a time.
It seems like another one of your worries is as follows. You enjoy working longer hours than others may be able to sustain. If this puts your work ahead of theirs, then you have inadvertently disadvantaged them for not working as much as you.
My response is perhaps a bit idealistic, but life is not a race. Sure, competition is an inherent part of academia as the available resources and openings are finite. But your success does not preclude others from enjoying their work, just like the success of others should not prevent you from enjoying your work. There's a great discussion about this (for mathematics) on mathoverflow.
There is a constant flow of preprints and papers in my field. Rather than letting myself be jealous or feel like I am falling behind, I let myself enjoy learning about a beautiful and developing subject at my own pace.

It seems that one of your main concern is that you keep thinking about your research outside typical "business hours".
Just to give you a different perspective: not all jobs outside academia are the type of 9am-5pm, where you finish the work at specific time and immediately cut off mentally from it. Consider a few examples:

entrepreneurs - most (small) business owners work way more than 8 hours a day, and even when they finish their work for the day they keep thinking about their businesses, the same way you do think about your research;
professional athletes - most sportsmen, or sportswomen, be it footballers, tennis players, pole jumpers, etc., organize their entire lives and daily schedules around their career. Besides training and keeping fit, they have to strictly control their diets, often give up some pleasures (e.g. limit the use of alcohol, do not attend late night parties, etc), constantly monitor their performance and adjust their training techniques. Moreover, they have to remain in focus - it may seem strange to you, but they also keep thinking about their work, about opportunities to improve etc, all the time, also after training sessions;
artists - similarly as the two groups above, artists usually think about their work all the time, they are constantly "at work" searching for inspiration and contemplating ideas.

Yet we seldom discuss overwork culture among, e.g., sci-fi writers, painters, or professional body builders. Thus, there has to be something more to academia than the raw amount of time devoted to work, that provokes these discussions.
There are many competitive career paths, which are followed by passionates willing to devote to them much of their time, if not entire lives. This cannot, and arguably should not, be changed. On the other hand, there are things about academia, such as dishonest PIs manipulating students into performing unpaid work unrelated to their thesis, which are truly unethical and which can be fixed.

An interesting example for work-life balance issues in the arts with possible implications for academia can be seen in the movie "Whiplash".

I certainly see friends and acquaintances in industry working far more hours than people around me in academia (especially software and support). I'm sometimes puzzled why they put in so much effort for jobs they don't really like, but it seems like that's what you have to do to keep up, and certainly not limited to the fields listed here.

These comparators are often used, but I don't think they really apply. What you say about elite athletes is true, but an elite athlete are by definition elite. They make up a much smaller fraction of all athletes than postdocs do of the entire academic workforce. Artists might be thinking about their work at all times, but they are not doing their work at all times. Academia consists of hard slog as well as "thinking" about your work at all times. Outside perhaps math and philosophy research is 5% inspiration 95% perspiration.

Finally small business owners. The glaring difference here - entrepreneurs work for themselves, academics are employees. Either you are a student/postdoc, and you work for a professor, or your are a professor and 80% of your workload consists of teaching and admin, 15% of supervising the research of others and 5% of your own research. This distinction applies to all your comparators. The myth that we work for ourselves rather than our employers is what allows those employers to extract so much labour from their workforce.

@IanSudbery: all how you choose to look at it. Fortunately I myself live in a country where I can start my own company if I choose, or switch to an employer who treats me better, all at my own discretion. From experience lots of people say they want to work for themselves... until they find out what that entails.

I think that indeed one should not dismiss, as it has been in some answers, the fact that the overwork culture is perpetuated as much by the increasing pressures in academics as by the people actually overworking. It is important to keep this in mind not to misunderstand some fundamental equilibriums. For example, some user spoke about "scarce research funds" as a justification for overworking whereas it is arguably overworking that lets governments or private research agencies keep the research funds low.
Now back to your issue, it would be irrealistic for you not to work when you want to ; however you might want to reframe your conception of success as it most likely influences your willingness to work in a way that may be negative. As I see it and from my experience, it often switches the will to work out of curiosity, interest or pleasure toward the hypothetical pleasure or satisfaction that academic recognition would bring you.
Academic recognition is indeed the common (and in some ways natural) definition of success ; I would say it could be rather a consequence of success where "success" would be something closer to "a job well done". This latter definition has the inconvenient of being harder to (self-)evaluate which could explain in some way this shift. But the former definition has the issue of making people work, and sometime overwork, for a future and often illusory satisfaction while, indeed, degrading other people's working condition.
All this said, if you work now in a way commensurable to your will to work when your will is driven by this second definition of success, that is driven by the satisfaction of working itself, of solving something or having done a job well (as obviously not all academic pleasures are immediate, but they should be directly related to your work), I think that the bigger part of your moral dilemma disappears. As you enjoy your work, overworking (with respect to the normal standards, not to you) don't feel like your spoiling your field ; as much as throwing food would make you feel bad while eating and enjoying it wouldn't.
Note that a corollary of this view is that if working at this pace is not enough to keep working in academics, you should be OK with it as it would otherwise mean overworking (now with respect to your health and life balance) in order to stay in academics. This potential resignation or forbearance helps you further feel like you are doing an ethic choice.

Those that dedicate themselves to their career will do better than those that don't. This is beyond your control: You cannot meaningfully influence the masses dedicating themselves to their careers,* nor the masses that don't. You're just one person, I don't think:

[your] willingness to research in this way helps to reinforce a lot troublesome aspects of academia.

You can control your own career path and you can influence the careers of those you hire. You seem to have a good perspective. Use it to make the best decisions when influencing others.
*Unless, perhaps, you dedicate your life to changing the system (likely at the cost of not contributing to research).

"Those that have the freedom to, and then decide to, dedicate themselves to their career will have an edge over those that either cannot, or choose not, to do so", is how I would put it.

Professional boxers, even though they are in a physically very demanding and rough line of work, take great pains to care for their fists. Folklore says that traditional kettlebell athletes (who are generally the stereotypical 'tough' guys) have elaborate palm moisturizing routines. Its because they realize that hands are necessary for their sustenance.
For academics, the equivalent is our minds. Its just that simple, we need to care for them on the highest priority. This doesn't have to come at the cost of advancing a career, we have to figure out how. The 'how' is very person dependent, because some of us can happily work longer and some of us can't. The individual must find their balance and not wait for legislation (most likely that will follow once enough individuals work on themselves). Most of all, it may help to de-emphasize the mind and treat it like any other biological system.
Let's stop thinking that it can take care of itself and keep pushing it beyond recovery. Ethics, fair work practice and work-life balance are abstractions we create because we don't like to individually take a call and firmly accept our limits, mental and physical.

This makes sense in general, and I think is sort of part of my premise (see the 2nd paragraph). However, part of my point is that people from different backgrounds will have different limits due to societal factors. For instance, how can someone who is poor and needs to work another job to be able to support their family compete with someone who is willing to put that extra time into unpaid labor at work? I'm not sure they can, so the question is whether the second person putting in the extra time is ethical.

Well, the natural way would be to figure out something that can substitute for hours spent. In terms of research productivity this could mean better networking, better delegation, wiser selection of problems, seeing dead ends before you reach them, and so on.

I do like the notion that we need to take care of our minds just like athletes take care of the key parts of their bodies. I think one of the key aspects/problems (not the only) of the overwork culture in academia, though, is that there is no culture of taking care of one's mind/brain. It is more like a culture of sacrificing everything, mind, health, relationships, etc., for that next paper/grant if you want to eat tomorrow (i.e. get or keep any sort of pre-tenure position).

@overfullhbox Why do you think society would be better off if wasted its scarce research funds on people who could only work, say, 1 hour a day?

I don't see a "culture of overwork" unique to academia. Ask a small business owner, a salesperson, professionals in industry, and so forth. What you'll find is that, like academia, there's a natural selection process always in the works, selecting those who are successful. And in that competition there are always those who are willing to work harder, those whose concept of life-work balance is quite different from others'. What works for you might not work for me.
It might be illuminating to see what happens at businesses offering Unlimited Vacation as a benefit. Anecdotally people end up skipping vacations and time away. Humans are interestingly diverse critters.

The effects of unlimited vacation as currently implemented are not terribly meaningful I would argue, because of the cultural element of people believing there are unstated expectations (whether there are or not). If I could take 6 months of vacation every year and get paid for 12, I would, but I don't believe any workplace offering "unlimited vacation" wouldn't fire me if I tried it

Agreed @llama. And it goes deeper. Folks start seeing taking time off as a potential weakness in another person. On the other hand folks who like to work a lot are perfectly happy with taking no time off at all.

To add to your point, @llama, "unlimited vacation" even removes the classic excuse of 'I have to take vacation, I have two weeks expiring at the end of the year.' And reduces the financial incentive to encourage employees to take breaks--since there's no risk of a cash payout for unused vacation time when they leave.

So, while this might not apply as much to your position as a PhD student/postdoc, I want to chip in with a slightly different perspective for a bit of completeness.
Many answers compare doing research outside of the regular 9-5 to doing art, or practising a sport outside of regular working hours, and saying nobody is surprised when professional writers or boxers work/practice for more than 8 hours a day. So for research, which is something most of us got into because of an intrinsic motivation as well, it feels like it should be the same.
I will be the first one to admit, if I really get into trying out a new concept / constructing a new theory, I often won't want to stop. And I don't mind. However, I have noticed the "culture of overwork", in the negative sense that you describe present at permanent academic positions. Specifically, in positions which require some amount of teaching.
(Now, I understand that there are research-only positions in the US; I also know about very prestigious research-only positions in France. But in the UK system, you are typically expected to split your time 40-40-20, that is 40% of your time on research, 40% on teaching, 20% on admin. This balance might differ from country to country, but most EU entry level academic positions have some teaching requirements, anywhere between 20 and 50% on paper.)
And, while I definitely do understand the value of sharing our knowledge and teaching the next generation (which not all of my academic colleagues always seem to), my primary motivation to get such a position was to enable me to do research as a professional calling. I entered into a contract with the University, in which I promise a part of my time in services, and in return they promise I will be allowed to do research for a part of my time. And then reality sets in: on paper, the Uni "believes" that preparing a 2-hour lecture is just 2 hours of additional work. Marking student work is, again, not factored in realistically. If one spends 4 and a half working days dealing with teaching activities, it only leaves evenings and weekends for research. But really, is the problem in the research you did on Friday evening?
In this case, I think the question you ask has very much merit. In fact, the UK academia has been somewhat vocal about it. The core of the issue is exactly what you point out: does working after hours perpetuate these unhealthy expectations? There was a strike related to this issue in 2019, and a colleague of mine perfectly summarised the issue when I asked him what are they going to do while on strike. His answer was: while on strike about culture of overwork in academia, he would work on his own research and grant proposals.
And I agree with his sentiment. I am not doing research because somebody pays me to. In that sense, it is the same as producing art or training to master a physical activity: I do it for intrinsic value. An academic position, fortunately, allows me to support myself while I do something I am passionate about. I joke with my friends that I refuse to work for money -- if I did that I could sell y skills much better.
So in my opinion, there is nothing problematic with spending (a lot) of your time working on something you are passionate about. It is your time, your choice: if you prefer spending it doing research as opposed to e.g. playing a musical instrument, there is nothing wrong with that. The problematic component "perpetuating the culture of overwork" in academia is, I think, that many people do more "work" than they get paid for.

I believe that many of the problems you listed result from the demand exceeding the supply for faculty jobs. In a game-theoretical sense, this results in individuals choosing hardships that, when repeated over a large system, might seem unethical. Ultimately, I think you would have to change the incentives of the entire academic system to avoid these choices. Not even an university president likely has the influence to change the entire system.

I wonder about what the effect on the work-life balance of my fellow PhD students, both in the sense that it normalizes what may be an unhealthy work-life balance for many people and in also the sense that there are many people, for whatever reason, who cannot do this even if they wanted.

Many PhD students want a faculty job, and are willing to work extra hours to make themselves more competitive for one. For someone whose primary goal in life is to get a faculty job, working more hours to the point of having an "unhealthy work-life balance" is their optimal strategy.
In other words, you could choose to work less hours. That might make you less competitive for a faculty job, meaning the job would go to someone who had more research output (possibly due to their choice to work more hours).
You would have to change the hiring criteria to avoid this. However, school rankings are partially based on the research output of the school, so schools have an incentive to hire more productive faculty.

Unpaid internships/adjunct faculty positions are perhaps a similar and more self-contained example of a similar dilemma- they may be individually beneficial, but certainly reinforce societal barriers and limit who is able to succeed.

Such positions will exist as long as people are willing to take them. While an university president might be able to abolish such positions at their school, there are many other universities that would benefit (in terms of research output leading to higher rankings) from offering such positions.
Also, that's a very relevant username.

Its largely a byproduct of a vast oversupply of labor. If you greatly reduced immigration you would a significant drop in this type of competition.(In the US at least).

@FourierFlux You could also say you would have a drop in competition if you kicked out all the old people, too.

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Should I mention likelihood to accept an offer in my cover letter?
I am currently in the process of applying to postdocs. I'm wondering whether it would be beneficial to include language indicating a certain position is my top (or near top) choice and that I would almost certainly accept an offer.
On the one hand, I suppose this could demonstrate excitement about the program and help convey my likelihood of accepting an offer. On the other hand, it's not something which can be backed by any real evidence, so it might just add "fluff". I'm sure there are other considerations as well, so I'd be interested in hearing perspectives on this.

It's good to indicate interest, but this makes more difference for a tenure-track position than a postdoc.  An exception might be if you seem out of their league.  In any case, it would be better to indicate your interest by directly contacting a prospective facutly mentor--though I wouldn't directly say I'd be likely to accept, just am very interested because [academic reason + possibly non-academic reason].

I would advise against it. As you say, fluff. If you are applying at all, they realize you have interest. Focus on your fit for the position.
It would have no bearing on whether you are chosen. Save your words for things that do.

Indeed. For that matter, feeling a need to say such a thing could actually have a negative effect, as though you were privately not so interested, but wanted to keep that position as a back-up for failing to get better offers. That is, if your application is sincere, of_course you'd be happy to take the offer. Don't "protest too much", in the Shakespearean sense...

I guess I was thinking less about being happy to take an offer vs. intending to take this offer over any other offers. Since many people apply to essentially any program they would take an offer from given no other offers, I imagine there is some game theory about whether someone would accept an offer given other offers.

@overfullhbox, it's crazy: sometimes "we" prefer to make offers to people we know will accept, but/and other times there's a voting bloc that insists on making the worst-odds-possible offers, since... supposedly... those are the highest-prestige candidates. Something about not asking anyone to the prom who'd want to go with you... (in a U.S. idiom).

If you are applying at all, they realize you have interest. - With the advent of mathjobs, it's not totally clear anymore---it certainly seems like some applicants just do "apply all".  However, usually candidates that apply to our tenure-track positions, postdocs and our PhD positions can be immediately ruled out.


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Not credited in paper written by boss
I'm a contractor hired by a software engineering company that is branching out into research. For the last two years I have been working almost solo on a research project for the company. A number of other people have come to help out on the project at some point or another, but currently all code in the codebase is written 100% by me. All of the novelties developed throughout the project were also done solo.
My boss has just written a research paper about the project which has been accepted by a low-tier journal. I got to read the paper today and while a number of my coworkers are credited, I am not. The credits consist of every non-contractor that has touched the project, as well as a number of higher ups in the company.
Furthermore, I created a number of figures used in the paper and edited the abstract.
Is this standard practice? Would it be reasonable to ask to be included in the authors list?
Edit: Just to update, my boss said that he had me in the authors list on the first draft, but when he ran it by my contracting company they said to take it off. I'm following up with them now.

If the authors are not interested, then with all the evidence of your contribution contact the editor of the journal... That should get results - however one result may well be an end of future contracts...

@SolarMike Yeah, I like this job and I'd rather not get authorship than lose it.

The edit certainly changes things, thanks for adding that. Unfortunately it seems like this also makes it a bit off-topic for Academia.SE because this seems to be more of an issue with your employer than any academic norms.

Time to change contracting company - no respect for you or your capabilities.

As a contractor you may have explicitly or implicitly given over all of your intellectual product to the company. If that is the case then what they did is (minimally) acceptable. But in human terms it may not be proper. Certainly not "neighborly".
Since you indicate that there is a difference in how contractors and non-contractors were treated there may be some underlying justification, valid or not, for what was done.
I suspect that the practice is pretty common, but not universal.
However, it would be reasonable to ask for an acknowledgement at least, and maybe authorship. You can ask, at least. You might be refused and you might be given reasons why refusal is necessary, but you gain nothing from silence. At a minimum you will learn whether it is in your best interest to continue under such a relationship.

Intellectual property ownership is orthogonal to ethical authorship, IMHO. Most university staff also sign over IP ownership to their universities, yet nobody would claim that the top manager at the university should be the sole author on everything their institution produces.
Often companies publish something reports under the name of the company, rather than the authors - but if named individuals are being listed as authors, then the usual rules about authorship should apply.

@Flyto, yes, I agree. But what should be and what is aren't always properly aligned.

oh, absolutely, but that doesn't make what they did "minimally acceptable" ;-)

@Flyto,  unless you sign a contract. That was my point, actually. Be careful of what you sign. Always.

but that is also my point, that that would not make things OK. Owning the IP output of my work does not make it OK to deny me credit (except perhaps where the company gets credit - but that is clearly not the case here). The two are different things. I'm not sure what the legal situation is on the latter, but to my mind the ethical one - what is "acceptable" - is very clear.

I checked over my contract, and it doesn't say anything about intellectual property. Not sure about my country's laws specifically, though (Japan).

My personal view is that this is unethical, and that if there are named authors - rather than it being published under the name of the company - then it would be reasonable for you to ask to be included, probably as an author. Authorship does not come only from writing the text of a paper, but from the intellectual contribution to the work that it describes, and from what you have said it sounds as though you provided most of the innovation that is being written about.


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Contributing to the cause of biology (beyond research)
I've been studying microbiology for a while (undergrad sophomore). I've been finding something to do other than my regular academic work and projects.
Someone told me that Nature allows freelancers to edit some articles. Is it true ?
What are some other places where I can use my biology/writing/communication skills to help the cause of science and maybe even build my CV (last part is optional, I'm basically bored and will do anything if seems fun)

I'm not sure this question is on-topic here cause there is a specific freelancing SE and maybe people there could help you better with your question cause your question is pointing to freelancing more than the academia or an academic issue or question. So, I suggest to migrate this question maybe to freelancing SE.

I specifically wished to work on tracks of science so i didn't knew where to post it. Thanks though

This might be of interest to you: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/48886/10643

I'm not sure the edited title helps: You aren't a hobbyist, you're an academic. Maybe "Contributing to the cause of biology (beyond academic research)"

@Roland I’m not sure if OP takes your advice could reach his/her goal or not... particularly I don’t agree “Go and count bugs or whatever”! I mean of course freelancers don’t have salary but it doesn’t mean they should be hired for some activities like “counting bugs”! Which may not have any outcome at least in short term where the OP has concern to build his/her CV in near future. If these kind of advices are given to OP, I prefer to advise his/her to do some tutoring which may at least have some good impacts on his CV in comparison to “counting bugs or whatever”.

Wikipedia has a dedicated portal called Biotechnology, which has some promising content right now. A formal categorization of topics is available, also major keywords have a longer description. The problem is, that many specialized articles are missing right now. They are only available in a dedicated research encyclopedia which is sold as a commercial product for 2000 US$. That means, there is a knowledge gap between the content in Wikipedia and the content in encyclopedias used by researchers. So if somebody has too much time he can try to transfer the knowledge from Academia into the public domain and create some Wikipedia stubs. This would help to bring Open Science forward.

Commercial editorial services are available. You could volunteer to help or seek part-time employment.

Can you desribe the “Commercial editorial services” a bit more?

@AloneProgrammer Can you explain the question? I can only break down the words (there are editorial services that charge), which probably isn't what you want.


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Methods to track behind cheating on exams using on-line sites?
In the current state of the technologies, what ways can be used to track clear yet directly untraceable cases of academic misconduct specific to students who post questions from and view answers to a take-home exam using on-line (homework) sites?
My case is specific to Chegg, although answers related to other on-line sites would be certainly welcomed.
As a background, I have a list (from Chegg) of the email address, log-in times, university affiliation, and question posted / viewed. I can clearly correlate the posting information to being from my exam during my exam. I can directly correlate some cases because the email address is ... surprisingly ... the student's university email address or their personal email address. What I do not have in some cases is a) a valid or directly representative email address and b) a full name.
I have a roster list of students and have diligently checked their email addresses against the offending emails to no avail. I will pass the roster and list to our administration to review against their (larger) database of email accounts. However, I can only imagine that an email address could be from a neighbor or friend or roommate or ... someone entirely untraceable in the full university email database.
After a formal inquiry to obtain the above list, I have an email response (from Chegg) that tells me that I will get no further help to obtain any other information. I will be glad to hear about other levers that can be pulled to get better information.
I can accept that at some point I may have to conceed that I am simply out of luck to track the real perpetrator. But, before I do so, I have to wonder whether this community has insights to additional resources to help solve my problem.
To help also focus the discussion further, I am not interested to learn about the ways to avoid this problem in the future. I have my own insights and plans to move forward on this front. I am also not interested to spend time trashing Chegg or equivalent sites, deserving or not.
Finally, in addition to the specific question on additional effective methods, I am also interested in one other broader aspect of the problem. I am curious to hear from like-minded individuals who have initiated or are aware of actions being initiated for a larger academic community stand against the problem. I make this latter statement especially as we faculty are all most likely to have to face yet another round of on-line teaching for the coming Fall 2020 semester.
In summary, I hope to hear about approaches that others have used that could also help me solve my problem to track perpetrators of cheating who, up to this point, are essentially directly untraceable.

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

I can think of a few approaches that might help. I'm not sure pursuing the sites used will be very fruitful. There are always disposable emails they can sign up with, Tor exit nodes they can route traffic through etc. It's a fool's errand.
Oral interviews post-exam
Ask a random sample of students for an interview after they've submitted their answers. With the script in front of both of you, ask them about their thought process when answering the question and evaluate the extent to which they can confidently discuss the subject.
Cons: time-consuming, potential for false positives from students who forget most of the content after taking the exam/have other assessments to study for/don't cope well with the interview pressure.
Issue unique questions per student
If you have control over the online assessment platform, you may be able to issue unique questions per student to catch out blatant copy-pasting of the question text in order to publicly outsource an answer. I am not proposing that a paper is manually put together per student; this seems like something you'd want to automate.
Cons: the ability to do this well will vary from subject to subject. It might be easy to generate lots of linear programming problems of comparable difficulty if your exam e.g. assesses the student's ability to apply the Simplex algorithm. But, explanation questions may be more difficult and lead to a perception that some students unfairly get 'easier' or 'harder' papers.

I especially like your first suggestion. Would that this situation were not soo far out after the exams, your first idea would be a reasonably approach. It is especially nice to test those students who post an APPEAL after they are caught. I agree ... it could be a fools errand to track those who have made themselves untraceable. Let's see where it goes. Thanks.

@JeffreyJWeimer, just do as it says: Interview a "random" sample. That way, no one can blame you of accusing them unjustly of cheating. Announce you'll do it beforehand, though. (My reasoning in doing this: I'm really not interested in if they cheat or not, but in them understanding the material. This --given little time to prepare for the interview-- forces them to dig deeper. Win win. Don't tell my students I said the above!)

Be sure to check the rules if this kind of exam is allowed.

In further thought, I expect for various reasons that I am required to give notice to the students before the start of the course (in the course syllabus) that they may/will be subject to random oral interviews (e.g. after an on-line exam) and that I am also required to define the intent of the random interviews, or at least to define whether the outcomes of such oral interviews will or will not be part of the grading rubric.

My institution moved a number of physical exams over to become online exams and made it clear at the point of doing so that the oral interviews may take place (it wasn't previously a requirement or documented in the syllabus). I don't think there's been much fuss over it since, but students have the right to request deferral of the assessments until later on if they wish and not participate in online assessment.
Ideally yes, it would be made clear prior to the assessment taking place - but I don't think "start of course" should be a pre-requisite. These are extraordinary times.

I have marked this as the most helpful. Follow up oral Q&A sessions make a nice back end. I have also instituted a method to make different versions of the exam (yes, some care is needed to keep fair variations). Finally, Chegg.com has started a system where faculty can pre-submit exams. So, they still put the onus on faculty to do the work to find misconduct so that they can keep their spigot open with no real integrity on their part, but at least we have something. And we will soon be done with this on-line exam stuff anyway. Thanks all who responded!

Sounds like you've been doing a great job of trying to tackle the some of the challenges with trying to preserve academic integrity :) "we will soon be done with this on-line exam stuff anyway" I admire your optimism too!

To handle the current situation, I would have two suggestions:

Notify all students that you aware of cheating during the exam and that you are in the process of collating identifying evidence (be as specific or vague about the website, email address as you see fit). State the consequences for those who are found to have cheated but that these may be lessened if the students come forward on their own accord. This is unlikely to faze a determined cheat, but may bring forth others who made a critical mistake in the heat of the moment and importantly may know the owners of the email addresses you have been unable to identify.
Send an email to each of the addresses you have found along the lines of 1. letting them know that the address has been implicated. Again, this is really just a scare tactic but might bring a few of the unknowns to light.

I think if you have a well thought-out cheat who used a truly disposable email address and did not communicate their actions to any of their peers then you are unlikely to be able to catch them in retrospect. But, as you have already observed, not all students are that shrewd.

Since you are going to do this, you might as well add a "please get in touch with me to discuss your case" at the end of mail (2). Maybe someone takes the bait and answers.

I did inform the students that I am aware of cheating using Chegg. This is indeed a good step, and it did possibly expand one or two cases. Interestingly, I might also think that it caused one person to try to shift the blame to someone else. I have yet to explore the idea of sending an email to the untraceable addresses. I'm of two minds whether this will flush out the perpetrators or send them deeper into hiding as well as how best to avoid the latter while enhancing the former action. Thanks!

No problem. Yes I can see you need to be careful not to go to far in rewarding those who turn in others; that's a recipe for disaster. Seen as Clegg clearly won't provided any further details (e.g. IPs), it seems to me that the email addresses are the only connection you have with those hiding and hence 2. your only possible further action. Carefully worded, it might work - I think Federico's phrase is a good suggestion.

Invest your time in adapting your exam questions rather than searching for people cheating.
Searching for people who are cheating is bound to be a frustrating an time consuming endeavor. As you've already noted there are many methods which could be used (both online and offline), and I can guarantee you a devious student can out-cheat your sleuthing skills.
Think carefully about the purpose of the exam and what you are certifying with a pass/top-grade. For a minimum pass threshold, consider explaining your syllabus ("By the end of this course student should be able to... "), to the next teacher of your class and what you think they'd expect based on that. For a top grade you're probably assessing a more general skill, do they have good written communication, are they able to extract the core information effectively from text.
Depending on the size of your class, how well you know each student, and amount of time you're willing to invest you may want to pursue different exam strategies. In person interviews (via-video call) are often the gold standard, but they are time consuming, difficult to standardise and vulnerable to bias.
Consider 3 categories:

Minimum-knowledge questions, which you expect most students to get correct. You should probably be able to scrape a pass answering only these questions.
Long-form questions, where the best students can shine
Coursework, like an exam, but longer.

Final thought; be clear before the exam what the structure is, particularly if it has changed from previous years. Surprising students and testing exam technique is no fun for anyone involved.
EDIT: Writing good exams is a skill, but like any skill it's something you can get better at if you invest time in learning about it. There are plenty of resources, articles and books written on the topic and even reading a couple of articles will give you some good ideas. I included some examples below, but realised I was basically writing a book so I'll leave expanding this as an exercise to reader.
Some examples:
Statement questions e.g. state X's theorem, define Y
These questions are hard to cheat on, since it's usually just quicker/easier to know the answer. They can often be overlooked in open-book exams as 'you could just look it up in the notes', I would argue that that's fine. A good student will just write the answer down and move on, a poor student will spend time looking it up. In either case they will be able to do so in a real world situation.
Multiple choice
These are hard to cheat on for the same reasons and above, guessing is not a valid strategy in non-trivial exams, so no need to worry about that. You can use these questions to quickly test linked knowledge (they have to understand the terms in the question and how the options relate to it). I would avoid "trick" answers and follow-up with an "explain" question.
Short-essay questions
For small classes where you know the students these are hard to cheat on, because it should be obvious to you if the style is inconsistent. These are a chance for your best pupils to show their general written communication skills and their ability to apply the course knowledge to a specific problem. Be clear about how much text you expect (~X words) and keep them relatively brief, personally I believe long-essay questions are better suited to coursework.

People keep throwing around the "change your exams" mantra, but I don't see how this can work when there are websites where you can pay someone to solve the exercises for you. I can give the best questions in the world, but how does this prevent someone to buy the solutions online from a willing tutor?

@FedericoPoloni - It's impossible to stop cheating in all forms - a student could pay another person to turn up to a physical exam too. What I am trying to suggest is that there are methods for structuring exams that discourage cheating and reward learning the course material. By carefully considering your exam structure you can make your exams both more effective, harder to cheat and more rewarding for those who are committed.

The suggestions here are certainly worth a thread in their own right. As I've insisted though, they do not belong on this one.

@JeffreyJWeimer unfortunately I think you're out of luck in an arms race you're doomed to lose. Not only do you have less time and resource available than a dishonest student; you also have an asymmetry to overcome. You need to check every site, they need to find only one you don't know.

@JeffreyJWeimer in regards to the 'not relevant here' you asked specifically for ways to 'avoid this problem in future' and "the broader aspect of.the problem'.  My answer is on topic; you can't avoid cheating, so design an exam where it is less beneficial


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Using pictures of 16th–18th century paintings in PhD dissertation?
Can someone please help me get an insight into the use of images, specifically paintings from the 16th to 18th century that reside in churches, museums, etc., and how can one use them in a PhD dissertation without falling into copyright issues?
I am aware there are different options. For instance it is legal under German law to use a picture of a painting if it was taken by you and in a place that allowed it. However, I’m not sure about the following in German law:

Is it legal if I use an image from a book or catalogue?
Can one claim a “quotation” of a work?
Can one claim “fair use”, like in the US, since it is part of a critical/review/academic/research type of purpose?

Better to ask it on law.stackexchange.com I think

In Germany, there is a difference between "das Recht am eigenen Bild", i.e. photographing particular people, photographing panoramas (where people may be present, but are not the target of the photo), photographing art. It shows that the structure of IP law in Germany is not trivial (though mostly I found it more sensible than in the US). I am not a lawyer, and clearly you need proper law advice here.

Notice that apart from specific legal issues, you might probably better need a hi-res copy of that picture from the copyright owner.

@Roland It's not called exactly "fair use" in German law of course, but there's a lot of permissions codified in German copyright law that often even extend the US fair use permissions.

Better than law.stackexchange.com, this sounds like a job for your university's legal team (assuming it has one).

I begin with a ton of quotes from the German copyright law (Urheberrecht, original, English translation):

§ 15 Allgemeines
(1) Der Urheber hat das ausschließliche Recht, sein Werk in körperlicher Form zu verwerten; das Recht umfaßt insbesondere

das Vervielfältigungsrecht (§ 16),
das Verbreitungsrecht (§ 17),
das Ausstellungsrecht (§ 18).

(2) Der Urheber hat ferner das ausschließliche Recht, sein Werk in unkörperlicher Form öffentlich wiederzugeben (Recht der öffentlichen Wiedergabe). […]

Article 15 – General
(1) The author has the exclusive right to exploit his work in material form; this right shall in particular include

the right of reproduction (Article 16),
the right of distribution (Article 17),
the right of exhibition (Article 18).

(2) The author further has the exclusive right to communicate his work to the public in non-material form (right of communication to the public). […]

§ 51 Zitate
Zulässig ist die Vervielfältigung, Verbreitung und öffentliche Wiedergabe eines veröffentlichten Werkes zum Zweck des Zitats, sofern die Nutzung in ihrem Umfang durch den besonderen Zweck gerechtfertigt ist. Zulässig ist dies insbesondere, wenn

einzelne Werke nach der Veröffentlichung in ein selbständiges wissenschaftliches Werk zur Erläuterung des Inhalts aufgenommen werden,

[…]

Article 51 – Quotations
It shall be permissible to reproduce, distribute and communicate to the public a published work for the purpose of quotation so far as such exploitation is justified to that extent by the particular purpose. This shall be permissible in particular where

subsequent to publication individual works are included in an independent scientific work for the purpose of explaining the contents,

[…]

§ 64 Allgemeines
Das Urheberrecht erlischt siebzig Jahre nach dem Tode des Urhebers.

Article 64 – General
Copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death.

The questions relevant to your situation are:

Do you have to publish your thesis? If yes, copyright applies (§ 15) as you are reproducing and distributing the images or photographs thereof. If not, more lenient laws for private copies apply (§ 53).
Did the creators of the images die more than seventy years ago? If the images are from the 18th century or earlier, this should apply.
Did you take the photo of the image yourself? This is the most tricky question, as the photo may be a copyrightable work on its own.
Last year, a court rejected a lawsuit against Wikimedia Germany which was about using a photo of a public-domain image. The court argued that this would be an invalid prolongation of copyright that surpasses the public domain and also mentioned that a purely technical reproduction is generally not considered to be copyrightable. You can read about this here and here.
However, these links also mention lawsuits with other decisions and there is no general law about this situation.
Does § 51 (quotations) apply? – For the images, this is something that only you can decide. However, if the photograph is considered a work on its own, one may argue that you do not explain the photograph in the sense of § 51.

So, to summarise, there are several laws in your favour if you made the photographs yourself. Otherwise, you run a small risk of a copyright lawsuit, which I would consider rather low.
In general, I suggest asking the owners for their permission to be sure. Also, they may have high-quality photographs, which they can provide for you. After all, museums and similar places generally like if their exhibits are the subject of scientific works.

I don't know if this helps, but the following is from the Europeana Public Domain Charter:
What is in the Public Domain needs to remain in the Public Domain. Exclusive control over Public Domain works cannot be re-established by claiming exclusive rights in technical reproductions of the works, or by using technical and or contractual measures to limit access to technical reproductions of such works. Works that are in the Public Domain in analogue form continue to be in the Public Domain once they have been digitised.
http://www.europeana.eu/portal/rights/public-domain-charter.html

The charter is a policy statement by a private organization.  It has no legal force.

The charter is well respected within the cultural heritage sector. And if the desired material is available through the Europeana portal or the producing institution is a partner in Europeana, then these guiding principles would be understood. While there may be no legal force behind it, the user could be fairly certain that the institution that has partnered with Europeana and released material through them, would be less likely to try to bring legal action to exert their copyright claims.

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