text:
Why don't academics bypass restrictions on the distribution of their papers the same way as an institutional open access policy seems to do?
I've learned that academics can ensure that their papers can be freely distributed, even when those papers are published at places that require transferring copyright, simply by granting a nonexclusive license to distribute the paper before signing anything with the publisher.  Why don't academics use this method to enable broader dissemination of their papers by evading the restrictions that publishers try to impose?

Premise: In the conventional (non-open-access) publishing model, the situation is as follows:

Researchers write papers.
Papers get published by publishing companies.
Publishing companies generate revenue by granting paid access to the papers they publish.

The last item works because ways to get access to a paper without the paid subscription with the publisher are sparse. To ensure this remains so, in return for publishing papers (item 2 in the above list), publishers usually restrict alternative ways of distribution for the paper. For instance, they require exclusive distribution rights, or they require authors to agree to limit redistribution of the paper (e.g., only via one's personal website or in direct communication with other researchers).
From the point of view of researchers, it is certainly counterproductive to restrict access to published works. In cases where this access restriction was coupled with significant subscription fees, this has given rise to initiatives such as Cost of Knowledge. Hence, it seems the publication model of allowing publishers to restrict access to papers is more of a "necessary evil" than an optimal situation.

In another question, it has transpired from an answer by ff524 that in the U.S., there seems to be an easy way to avoid the aforementioned "necessary evil" and evade publishers' restrictions:

there does seem to be a legal basis for the idea that a license granted to the university will persist even if an author later signs a conflicting copyright transfer agreement:
Section 205(e) of the Copyright Act provides that a prior nonexclusive license evidenced in a writing signed by the right holder prevails over a subsequent conflicting transfer of copyright ownership, so the answer appears to turn on whether permission mandates satisfy the requirements of § 205(e).

Concretely, Section 205(e) of the Copyright Act reads:

(e) Priority Between Conflicting Transfer of Ownership and Nonexclusive License.—A nonexclusive license, whether recorded or not, prevails over a conflicting transfer of copyright ownership if the license is evidenced by a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed or such owner’s duly authorized agent, and if—
(1) the license was taken before execution of the transfer; or
(2) the license was taken in good faith before recordation of the transfer and without notice of it.

This seems indeed like a simple enough way to circumvent the distribution restrictions imposed by the publisher.
Note that while that particular question referred to a university-wide open access policy, such an arrangement does not seem necessary to invoke § 205(e).  For example, a simple signed declaration such as "I hereby grant perpetual public and unrestricted access to this paper.", or even a printed and signed version of one of the common permissive open source licenses such as a BSD License, or one of the Creative Commons Licenses should suffice, if signed before agreeing to grant any rights to a publisher.
Restrictions by publishers on prior publications do not conflict with this, either, because authors can sign a non-exclusive license without making the work immediately available.

This leaves me with the following facets of what I perceive as one big question:
If it is so easy to "disable" distribution restrictions imposed by publishers,

what do authors gain from agreeing to transfer exclusive rights to publishers without preventing that rights transfer?
why hasn't everyone (at least everyone subject to the respective jurisdiction) preemptively disabled these exclusive licenses to publishers for years?
why hasn't the whole traditional publication market in the U.S. collapsed already?

As a bit of a clarification: This question is not asking why researchers publish in particular (e.g. highly reputable) venues. This question is asking why researchers accept the licensing restrictions imposed by such venues, even though there seems to be an easy way to avoid these restrictions without switching publication venues. Hence, while prestige or reputation of publication venues are valid answers to questions that deal with changing publication venues, they cannot possibly be an answer to this question.

"Because that's the way we've always done it"?

One word: prestige. Not only a matter of vanity, but also the fundamental way how scientists are being graded.

@Andrew: "They do not know it is so easy to get out of the restrictions." is a valid answer, so feel free to add it. I'm trying to get to the base of this here, by provoking an explicit answer rather than just having many puzzle pieces and lots of assumptions about how far what could be done and what is actually done diverge :)

@PiotrMigdal: I'm sorry, I do not understand how this answers the question. Scientists are graded by voluntarily excluding large parts of the general public from reading their works?

heh. I think a one-size-fits-all explanation probably won't work here - to be honest, you could write a book on this! For one thing, the proposed copyright solution probably only works in the US. There are also countervailing factors, such as academics who are keen not to kill off (society) journals, which in some cases are the main thing keeping those scholarly societies afloat. A lot of tensions there.

@Andrew: So, in the view of those academics, the UC System is, by their introduction of the university-wide open access policy, effectively helping to kill off the respective journals? True about the U.S.-specificity, I had already alluded to that in the text and now also added the appropriate tag.

@O.R.Mapper Publishing in a prestigious journal (Science and Nature being the top) is crucial for further career advancement (e.g. grants, fellowships, jobs). They require you to transfer copyright. So even is someone would prefer to release research openly, to advance one's career (or in the current market: even to stay in academia) one need to make such compromises.

@PiotrMigdal: Sorry, I think you misunderstood the question. The very point of the question is that at least under U.S. law, there seems to be an easy workaround that makes the copyright transfer ineffective, all else equal. Thus, authors would still be publishing in a prestigious journal.

@O.R.Mapper It's amazing how much some people like the status quo :-) See, for example, things like http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/jan/26/historians-warn-minister-over-academic-freedom - but it's not unknown in the sciences as well.

And on the 'collapse' point, consider arXiv. There are some fields where almost everything is freely available on arXiv before journal publication, and this has been accepted by everyone for years. And yet those journals continue to flourish... inertia is a really powerful factor.

@PiotrMigdal Given that we know that most if not all publication metrics are utter bogus, that's a very sad rationalisation. (But I know it's true, which makes it sad.)

FYI: Why do tenured professors still publish in pay-walled venues?. The answers there should also apply to your question.

@FranckDernoncourt: Thanks, but the answers do not really apply here. Most of the answers to the question you linked to focus on the benefits of publishing in highly reputable venues vs. non-pay-walled open access venues. In this question, I am specifically pointing out an apparent way to publish in highly reputable venues while avoiding the pay-wall, my question is why the pay-wall is accepted nonetheless.

highly reputable venues vs. non-pay-walled open access venues — No, that is a false dichotomy.  There are highly reputable non-pay-walled open access journals; moreover, in some fields, these are the norm rather than the exception.  Conversely, there are garbage pay-walled journals.

@JeffE: Very true, though I think your comment is more suitable for the question pointed out by Franck, which is where the contrast between pay-walled and non-pay-walled venues I referred to is suggested to be the crucial divide.

To answer to the question in your title: because dermatologists hate it

Why not?  Because weird tricks tend not to work in the real world, particularly if the tricks are numbered.

Please change the title back...

@Mark: According to an answer to the preceding question, this one does. It's why I am asking this question.

So, does the 205(e) option (1) means that I can license my paper to myself (my wife, my cat etc.), then publish it in a journal and distribute it freely anyway?

@DmitryGrigoryev: That's the question.

@O.R.Mapper That part of the question is barely addressed by the answers which revolve around the inertia and the lack of care.

Please take extended discussion to [chat].

The main reason is inertia and lack of information, I think.

Researchers are not really aware of the costs their institutions have to face to subscribe to journals. From their perspective, publishing and reading are mostly free. It is not always easy to tell whether you have access to a PDF file because of your university's subscriptions or because it is open access. As long as they can download the file, they are happy, regardless of its origin. So, when they publish articles, they sign the copyright transfer agreement form without reading it, as they do not consider the publishing industry as a problem.
Universities are unaware of the existence of rights retention policies (or even open access policies, in fact), or do not take the time to adopt them because they fear it will incur an unpopular burden on the faculty. Moreover, implementing such policies is complicated. To make sure researchers liberate their papers, you need a research information system keeping track of all the publications, their compliance with various policies. Shameless plug: we are building dissemin to solve that problem.
Publishers leverage this inertia and laziness to secure a steady stream of income. They lobby to convince stakeholders that open access necessarily implies high charges at publication time. They also polish their image, by sponsoring conferences and learned societies. They give free subscriptions to Wikipedia editors and Article Processing Charges waivers in poor countries.

To answer the OP's comment: if you, as a researcher, simply release your paper in CC-BY (say) before signing the copyright transfer agreement form, then you consciously sign a form granting exclusive rights you cannot grant anymore: it does not work. That's written in section 205(e) (emphasis added):

(2) the license was taken in good faith before recordation of the transfer and without notice of it.

That is why you need an institutional policy granting these rights automatically for the researcher. For instance, the University of California has contacted as many publishers they could to give them formal notice of their policy, which allows researchers to sign the CTA forms without amending them.

You might be right about the first point in that while working from within university, one can remain totally oblivious as to how little the outside world can access. On the other hand, everyone who has tried to read papers from their home computer should be painfully aware that many papers are not generally accessible to everyone. Maybe this is somewhat field-specific, as frequency of work from home might vary between fields?

But I agree with you that an information system is probably not required to implement such a policy from a legal perspective. But, granting rights is not enough if researchers do not use these rights to liberate their papers (in fact, green OA could be much more widespread given the self-archiving policies of the publishers).

I don't buy this.  It wasn't easy to get a pdf 15 years ago, when you had to physically be in a library to photocopy a paper.  Librarians and administrators are constantly chatting about this stuff, and university counsel is involved to assure compliance with NIH access policy.  There is a ton of discussion and policy tweaking, too much to assert ignorance and inertia as the reason

@ScottSeidman Librarians are concerned, yes. But the interaction between researchers and librarians is very weak. Librarians promote their institutional repositories, researchers use academic social networks instead.

@pintoch, that's not my experience.  Librarians talk to faculty when the issues come up.  When the US govt started demanding public access, librarians and faculty talked big time all over the country.  Librarians answer to deans, dean's talk to faculty and Provosts.  If the powers that be can find a copyright loophole that will save big money, we would all know about it.

"you consciously sign a form granting exclusive rights you cannot grant anymore: it does not work" - that was my suspicion in the original question, but it was countered directly with reference to that Section of the Copyright Act. Indeed, you are skipping one of the two preconditions stated in Section 205(e): "(1) the license was taken before execution of the transfer" Note that the two conditions are connected with an or.

@O.R.Mapper: I think the "it" that doesn't work is the copyright assignment to the journal, not the pre-existing and valid license.  And the journal is likely to respond the same way that they would to any other failure to execute the copyright agreement (such as the signature on the agreement being forged by someone other than the author).  I'm not sure what that response would be, but I suspect retraction and, if they determined the failure was intentionally deceptive, blacklisting.  Telling someone you assigned copyright when you haven't is not going to end well for the liar.

@BenVoigt: As I said, that is exactly what I thought. Please see my respective comment. However, according to the answer, it is not what happens.

Since you've plugged dissemin here, can I bother you with a couple of bug reports here?

@E.P. Sure, that's always useful! Or if it's a bit long, you can use hello@dissem.in.

@O.R.Mapper: In the sense that the copyright assignment wasn't voided by the pre-existing license, yes it "worked".  But it no longer conveys exclusive rights, so in that sense it didn't work, and the journal could still get very upset if they weren't informed about the existing licenses.

I don't agree that academics aren't aware of the problem. In mathematics at least the prices journals charge have been a big topic for several years. The problem is that the young can't always afford to avoid the top journals in their field, because those are the ones the bureaucracy rewards you for with a job/promotion.

The sections around the quote are the answer. The loophole isn't court-proof.

This "legal loophole" is trivial for journals to close.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if most journals hadn't, in effect, already pre-emptively closed it.
Basically, any publishing agreement vetted by a halfway competent lawyer will already have a clause requiring the author to assert that they in fact do have the authority to grant the journal the rights that the agreement says they do.  For exclusive copyright transfers, this is likely to include an explicit or at least implicit assertion that the author has not granted any prior conflicting licenses to the article.
For example, here's a quote from a sample publishing agreement I found on the first page of Google results:

Author Representations/Ethics and Disclosure
  I affirm [that...]

Except as expressly set out in this Journal Publishing Agreement, the Article is not subject to any prior rights or licenses and, if my or any
  of my co-authors’ institution has a policy that might restrict my ability to grant exclusive rights under this Journal Publishing Agreement, a written waiver of that policy has been obtained.

If it turns out that the author has, in fact, previously granted a non-exclusive license to the article to a third party, in a way that is not covered by the explicit permissions described in the publishing agreement, then the author will have violated the publishing agreement, and may be considered to have negotiated in bad faith (since they presumably knew about the previous license when they signed the publishing agreement).  What happens next may vary, but at least the journal has perfectly valid grounds to retract the paper if the publishing agreement is breached.

Of course, all this is negotiable.
If you do, in fact, want to both publish your paper in a traditional journal and also distribute it through alternative channels (like, say, arXiv, an institutional repository, your personal website, etc.), you can just tell the journal that you want to include an exception for that in the publishing agreement.  You may even, if you like, grant such an alternative distribution license already before submitting your paper to the journal, in which case it's basically a "take it or leave it" deal for the journal — they can't force you to cancel the earlier license, but they can just decide that they don't want your paper.
In fact, many journals do already expressly permit, or at least implicitly tolerate, various forms of third-party article distribution.  For example, the same publishing agreement I quoted above also explicitly permits "Scholarly Sharing", which is defined as:

Preprint: Sharing of Preprints by an author on any website or repository at any time. When the Article is accepted, the author is encouraged to include a link to the formal publication through the
  relevant DOI. The author can also update the preprint on arXiv or RePEc with the Accepted Manuscript.
Accepted Manuscript:
(i) immediately on acceptance: sharing of the Accepted Manuscript by an author:

via the author’s non-commercial personal homepage or blog
via the author’s research institute or institutional repository for Internal Institutional Use or as part of an invitation-only research
  collaboration work-group
directly by providing copies to the author’s students or to research collaborators for their personal use
for private scholarly sharing as part of an invitation-only work group on commercial sites with which the publisher has a hosting agreement

(ii) after the embargo period: an author may share the Accepted Manuscript via non-commercial hosting platforms (such as the author’s institutional repository) and via commercial sites with which the publisher has a hosting agreement.

While this is not a carte blanche to let you license your paper to just anybody under any terms, it does allow you to e.g. submit your paper to an institutional preprint repository, like the UC open access policy mandates.  After waiting out the embargo period, it even lets you submit the accepted version of your paper to such a repository, too.
Of course, journal publishers don't grant such generous permissions just because they feel kind and altruistic — they do so because authors have actively insisted on such permissions, and because they judge that any potential loss of income from such non-commercial paper distribution will cost them less than the loss of manuscripts from boycotting authors, and/or the PR cost of sending lawyers after respected academics who are just doing what they consider to be reasonable and customary sharing of scholarly information.  The publishers know that they can only go so far in demanding exclusive distribution rights without risking a major backlash, and they're generally smart enough to adapt and make the best of the situation by explicitly releasing those rights that they couldn't practically enforce anyway, and making it look like benevolence on their part.
So, in short, there is no legal trick to "disable" distribution restrictions by publishers — at least not one that would work more than once per publisher.  What does have a chance of working is politics, media and activism: publicizing the issue, exerting pressure on publishers, and voting with your feet.  A CC license grant in your back pocket, however, isn't going to be a silver bullet.

Addendum: So what is the point of an institutional Open Access policy, like the University of California has recently enacted, then, if it's not a legal trick to get around publishers' agreements?
The way I see it, this policy accomplishes several things:

Making free preprint distribution the default rather than an exception.  For a long time, many publishers have already permitted such distribution, but since it involves extra work for authors (both figuring out whether such distribution is permitted, and then actually uploading the papers), a lot of them may not have bothered.  By making preprint distribution the institutional default, and requiring authors to get an explicit waiver to opt out, submitting papers to the repository becomes the "path of least resistance" for authors.
Centralization: Even when authors do make their preprints available, it's often on their personal web pages, where they may be hard to find and which may or may not persist.  The UC policy requires all preprints to be submitted to a single centralized repository, where they can be reliably stored and indexed.
Building up a critical mass: If an individual author e-mails a journal that doesn't normally allow preprint sharing, and asks for an exception to their standard publishing agreement, the publisher may be tempted to just brush them off as not worth the trouble.  With an institutional policy, publishers with restrictive publishing agreements now face a choice between a) relaxing their terms to make them compatible with the policy, or b) requiring all authors from UC to obtain waivers.  As more and bigger institutions adopt such policies, option (a) starts looking more and more attractive to publishers.
Institutional support: At institutions and departments with no prior tradition of doing so, an author who wanted to upload their papers to a preprint server may have been essentially on their own — they'd need to figure out all the legal and technical details themselves, and if they needed to negotiate the matter with a publisher, they'd basically be one person wrangling with a big corporation.  If they asked for help from colleagues or admin staff, they might be met with shrugs and blank stares.
With the new policy, authors now have the whole university behind them, both in negotiations and simply in dealing with the technicalities.  They can also have confidence that, if they should happen to accidentally violate an ambiguous publishing agreement by uploading their paper to the institutional repository, the university will support them in negotiating a settlement with the publisher.
Establishing a presumption of preprint sharing.  Arguably, by setting up the open access policy and announcing it widely, the university is creating a presumption that publishers should know about the policy, and thus know that they need to ask authors from UC to submit a waiver if they don't want to allow institutional preprint distribution.  If the journal accepted a manuscript from a UC author, without clearly communicating the need for a waiver, they might be argued to have implicitly consented to the preprint distribution, especially if the situation was otherwise ambiguous.  This is a legal trick of sorts, but it's not really a loophole so much as simply stacking the playing field, and it's only possible because the university is big enough that publishers might be reasonably expected to be aware of their general policies.

Of course, all this is negotiable. — [citation needed] In principle, sure, but not necessarily in practice.  Some publishers have adopted "click-through" copyright-transfer agreements, for which there is no mechanism to negotiate.  Either you click the "accept" button, or you don't.

@JeffE: So you find a phone number / e-mail address for the publisher and contact them that way. (Or, possibly better yet, contact the journal editor(s) and have them take it up with the publisher's legal dept.) Of course, they can still refuse, but you won't know until you try.

So, based upon this answer, the university-wide open access policy discussed in the other question is, or will soon be, ineffective? If so, please consider also adding an answer to the other question.

@O.R.Mapper: Its effectiveness will depend on how many publishers will accept it, and how effectively the university can exert pressure on publishers to do so (e.g. through subscription policies, in private negotiations, via public opinion and/or by encouraging their researchers to choose publication options that do not require an OA policy waiver). [...]

[...]  Basically, they seem to be counting on the fact that a) most journals already allow institutional distribution of "author versions" (i.e. basically preprints), and b) those that don't may be willing to accept it rather than risk losing a lot of contributions from a major institution.

Also, for what it's worth: "I wouldn't be surprised if most journals hadn't, in effect, already pre-emptively closed it" - the UC FAQ claims those are "rare contract terms asking you to affirm (...) that you have not previously licensed any rights in your article to anyone besides your publisher" (emphasis by myself).

@O.R.Mapper: While I haven't conducted a thorough survey of different publishers' publishing agreements, I'd be surprised if terms like I quoted above were rare as such. That said, most publishing agreements I've seen do also include exemptions for preprint distribution that should be sufficient to allow compliance with the UC OA policy, so contract terms that actually require a waiver may, indeed, be relatively rare.

I think the addendum would make a good answer to the other question of its own.

"It even goes beyond that, and lets you submit the final, published version of your paper to such a repository, too, provided that you wait out the embargo period"... not with the wording you quoted, which covers the "Accepted Manuscript" and not the final published version.

@IlmariKaronen worth noting that the general consensus among repositories regarding embargo periods is that you can submit your paper to the repository whenever you choose (indeed some policies mandate/encourage doing so at the time of acceptance), so long as it's not publicly available until the end of the embargo period. You don't have to wait a year to submit it.

One important thing to bear in mind is that a policy like this is not a silver bullet. Simply solving the copyright question won't actually mean people then go on to make material available.
The proposed approach would allow authors to distribute the "original" (ie preprint, postprint, author's version) - text, formatted as they wish, without page numbers, journal copyediting, etc. Those pretty shiny journal PDFs would still be out of reach.
This is actually more or less the situation that exists in the UK right now - there is the important distinction that an embargo period is involved here, but otherwise, something like 95% of academic articles can be posted and redistributed by their authors in this way. To do this, we've used funder mandates (and pushing the publishers into agreeing embargos) rather than hacking at copyright transfers on an institutional level, and it's generally worked okay.
The problem is, the articles don't get made available. Or, at least, a lot of them don't. Many institutions are finding it difficult - even with someone paid to chase academics and hold their hand through the process - to get more than about 50% of eligible papers made available through a repository. Indeed, for some institutions, even identifying those papers to begin with is challenging.
In the event that every university in the US overnight made every researcher sign a pre-emptive copyright license like this, I suspect you'd have the same problem. Yes, it could technically happen. But inertia would limit what actually does happen.

In the US, too.  Pre-final copies are archived are archived and made available to the public, when public money paid for the research

What sort of shinyness does the journal add?

@TobiasKildetoft generally speaking, they look nicer thanks to the formatting & page numbers (plus probably a little copyediting, though I've rarely noticed much). Not incredibly substantial added value, but in practice people do prefer them...

You mean you don't put page numbers on your preprints? This may be field specific, but in math, the difference in appearance is minor.

@TobiasKildetoft yeah, generally in less-LaTeXified fields the differences are more noticeable :-). Pagination is usually the journal's pagination (eg pp. 765-783) rather than just normal page numbering.

Because they don't care.
The majority of their relevant readership has access to their work via institutional subscription and they value journal quality and prestige over the business model or copyright policy. Sometimes they upload preprints or send them to colleagues who ask politely.

what do authors gain from agreeing to transfer exclusive rights to publishers without preventing that rights transfer?

This administrative hurdle being done, the paper can be published and they can go back to science.

why hasn't the whole traditional publication market in the U.S. collapsed already?

Probably because the monetary incentive to curate for quality and impact (an incentive absent from OA models, and reversed for author-pay OA) results in journals that are more prestigious.

On a side note, I wouldn't worry too much about "traditional" publishers should subscription fall out of fashion, they already cater to authors who absolutely wish to spend research funding on article processing charges. Also I suspect they perfectly know that the potential monetary gain is huge, especially if editorial rejection gets less and less fashionable (infinite papers!).
Over the last 5 years, buying Elsevier stocks would have been a much better use for one's money than article processing charges:

Another reason not to care: frequently (at least in my field) researchers upload their published articles to ResearchGate or to their personal home pages, regardless of whether it's legal. I've never yet heard of anyone being sued by a publisher for doing this.

The previous comment is half write.  Yes, academics upload their papers all over the place.  But that shows they care, not that they don't care.

@JoannaBryson it show they don't care about the contracts they sign or about the publishers' exclusive rights, even when they're abusive.

The vast majority of young mathematicians with substantial publishing activity do indeed grant the arxiv such a license.  This was a slow cultural adaptation and took over a decade.  Some other disciplines are the same (it's even more universal in physics), but others aren't as far along in this process.  Finally, the big tabloids (Science, Nature, etc) have embargo policies, which can scare authors off from posting preprints in some fields. (As pointed out in comments, this is more due to confusion and fear than to the actual terms of the embargo policy.)

This is not true, at least for Nature. Posting preprints is OK (http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/confidentiality.html).

Academics, by and large, do bypass restrictions.  I hardly ever come across papers I can't find a PDF of just by googling their titles, and when once in a while that doesn't work I can always just email the contact author; every published paper specifies one.
This question strikes me as propaganda.  The gold open access policy discourages people from publishing by putting a price on publication, and it is enriching academic publishers more than ever.  For example, here are numbers about how much money is being spent by UCL on "gold open access" / bribing to publish.  https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-access/statistics

"Why don't they bypass restrictions?" ... well, they do. Lots of us/them do. We just make sure to distribute copies well enough before ever getting into any discussion about transfering rights. Then those publisher types can't fault anyone for continued dissemination of those copies.

How about access to appropriate peer reviewers and a credential that somebody has checked that the paper is not complete rubbish? It also allows better indexing so that papers are easier to find.
If researchers simply put up their results, how would other researchers be able to identify papers they should read? After all, anyone can draft and post something that looks like research. At the moment, almost all the junk (and unfortunately some of the quality) gets filtered out. I already have a large task keeping up with the relevant literature, if I also had to scan everything to assess its relevance, I would never get anything done.
Of course, journal publication is not a perfect indicator of quality but it's a bit like a medical test that is mostly correct.
UPDATE
Two commenters (including OP) have asked how this answers the question, so I appear to have been a little brief.
As an author - I gain access to a reviewer pool and a badge of credibility. That is, the editor and/or publisher maintain a database of contacts with a wide assortment of expertise who the editor can ask to review the paper and reasonably expect that the person will review the article in a professional way. Having gone through that process, publication confers credibility on the article that cannot be achieved by sticking it up on my personal website.
That badge of credibility combined with the various indexing processes (which only search through journals and potentially conferences etc) means that other relevant researchers can easily find my work. Compare the returns you get from google scholar against the returns from google using the same search terms. That indexing helps enormously.
In return for this, I sign over some rights and I don't try to break the publisher's business model.
This is not to say that I think journal publication is the only solution or that the current process could not be improved. But the question asked what authors get in return for signing over IP. This is what I get with my author's hat on.

I'm sorry, I think you misunderstood the question. At no point did I suggest to use different publication channels than the existing publishers.

Okay, more explicitly, I 'gain' access to the reviewers for my papers and search time savings for papers by others. In return, I agree to transfer rights to the publisher and I don't try to break the publisher business model.

@JenB: but, in science at least, journals are run by scholars, mostly for free. So the peer-reviewing you find useful is not provided by the publisher, but by your peers. There is no point in preserving an oligopoly siphoning research funding.

@JenB: Ok, just to get this straight: According to your reasoning, by introducing their Presidential Open Access Policy, the University of California System is actively trying to break the publishers' business model, and thereby harming researchers' ability to gain access to reviewers and quickly finding papers? (Not saying this is right or wrong, just trying to get some explicit conclusions from the different answers.)

This doesn't seem to answer the question that was asked.  Rather, it seems to represent a misunderstanding of what was being asked.  The question is not asking: why do authors publish in peer-reviewed journals?  Rather, it's asking: why don't authors use this legal trick before they publish in peer-reviewed journals?  I think the answer should be deleted as it is not relevant to the question that was asked.

I second that. The answer is not relevant for the question. It is still focused on the benefits from peer reviewed paywalled publication, when the question is about a tactic to allow for sharing of a paper after such publication.

No, @Kenji and others - the question is about why authors don't use that tactic. Specifically, the question states "This question is asking why researchers accept the licensing restrictions imposed by such venues, even though there seems to be an easy way to avoid these restrictions without switching publication venues." This "easy way" would break the publishers funding model and therefore eliminate publishers who provide the benefits I have described.

I see. So you argue that people don't use the loophole because they value these benefits and don't want to break the business model that provides them? I understand where you are coming from, but it is not very clear from your answer. I would undo my downvote if I could (it is locked), but I still don't agree with your theory. I don't know many researchers who are so concerned with keeping the publishing business going, but I do know a lot of people who would not bother going through the extra bureaucracy to use the loophole (or through the trouble of lobbying their institutions to do so).

Exactly. If I don't want to go along with the restrictions then I shouldn't sign the agreement in the first place. It seems wrong to me to both use the benefits that I obtain from that agreement, and simultaneously try and get out of the agreement. If I want to get the benefits but also want to provide access, I can always pay the open access fee (choosing a journal appropriately) instead of signing over some of my IP rights.

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


text:
Are postdocs students or staff when calculating staff/student ratios?
The ratio of staff/students is an important factor for university rankings. How are postdocs and non-faculty researchers considered in calculating this ratio?
I am referring to researchers who have an official contract with the university such as postdoc fellowships (which are competition based), higher level researchers like Senior Scientists (some universities give such titles) and even Research Professors?
To rephrase my question: Are research staff considered part of "staff" in staff/student ratio? They are not academic staff but they can do teaching jobs too!

This is a difficult question for a globally valid answer. For a start, I suspect even the concept of "academic staff" is not clearly enough defined world-wide to generally allow for the statement "[research staff/postdocs] are not academic staff". And of course, the same question can be asked about doctoral candidates, who are, depending on the place, officially registered only as students, officially registered only as employees, or sometimes even both at a time (with either one or both being obligatory).

Agree with @O.R.Mapper. Not every place uses staff/student ratio. Many locations use Faculty/Student  or Teachers/Students ratio..

@scaaahu: I think that points to a wider concern: While the meaning of "academic staff" may be clearly defined in some places, the "staff/student" ratio may well refer to the word "staff" in its general sense, as the entirety of people employed by the university, rather than the narrower definition of "academic staff"; or possibly anything in between (e.g. anyone employed by the university who has any connection to teaching).

This factor is used for the university ranking! If it cannot be calculated with a normalized system, how comparing universities ?

@user40951: That is one of the reasons why such rankings should be taken with caution.

@user40951: As an afterthought, note that if you find a "normalized system", you should still take the resulting ratio with caution. Depending on the university system and culture, the way e.g. a Bachelor student is taught differs extremely from the way e.g. a doctoral candidate is "taught".

@O.R.Mapper OK with caution! but how they are calculated? Based on each university system/claim? For example, they consider PhD students as staff in some countries? Or when somewhere staff/student ration is given, we never know who has been counted?

@user40951: there is really no general answer. In some countries, yes, PhD students are considered university employees, in others not. For example, in Italy where I live, PhD students and postdocs are not considered staff because these are not permanent positions. Permanent researchers are instead considered staff, and are considered in the student/staff ratio because researchers can (and somehow should) teach classes.

@MassimoOrtolano Then, you mean, Italian universities generally get worse ranking than similar universities in countries in which postdoc/PhD is counted as staff in ranking systems considering staff/student ratio?

@user40951: I really don't know, I never cared about rankings, so I never analysed which factors go into defining them.

For the US, there is actually a fairly standardized answer, though it's complicated.  The short version appears to be:

Postdocs who teach count as 1/3 of a staff member.  Postdocs who do not teach are not counted at all.

First, note that the number usually used in the US is student-faculty ratio. (Not "staff": in US academic parlance, "staff" typically refers to non-academic university employees: administrative assistants, accountants, gardeners, cooks, etc.)
We can pretty quickly eliminate the possibility of postdocs being counted as students - I've never heard of postdocs being considered students anywhere in US academia.  They don't enroll in classes nor work towards a degree.  (Even for PhD students working exclusively on research enroll in classes each term until they graduate, typically a 12-credit course called "Independent Research" or something similar.  Postdocs do not.)
So, are they counted as faculty?
There is an organization called the Common Data Set Initiative which sets forth standard definitions for university statistics like student-faculty ratio.  CDS doesn't actually gather data or publish survey instruments, but their set of standards and definitions is written in questionnaire form.
Item I-2, "Student to Faculty Ratio", says:

Report the Fall 2014 ratio of full-time equivalent students (full-time plus 1/3 part-time) to full-time equivalent instructional faculty (full-time plus 1/3 part-time). In the ratio calculations, exclude both faculty and students in stand-alone graduate or professional programs such as medicine, law, veterinary, dentistry, social work, business, or public health in which faculty teach virtually only graduate-level students. Do not count undergraduate or graduate student teaching assistants as faculty.

For the definition of "instructional faculty", we refer to Item I-1, which has a table explaining how various types of faculty members should be counted.  For

instructional faculty in preclinical and clinical medicine, faculty who are not paid (e.g., those who donate their services or are in the military), or research-only faculty, post-doctoral fellows, or pre-doctoral fellows

it says they should not count as full-time instructional faculty, and should be counted as part-time instructional faculty "only if they teach one or more non-clinical credit courses".
So this is the answer.  A postdoc or other researcher who does not teach any non-clinical credit-bearing courses should not be counted in the student-faculty ratio.  A postdoc who does teach at least one such course should be counted a part-time instructional faculty member, and contribute 1/3 of a person to the denominator of the ratio.
Of course, it should be kept in mind that this data is provided voluntarily by each institution, and it is ultimately up to the institution to decide how they classify each of their employees.
With regard to rankings, the best-known rankings in the US are the US News & World Report Best Colleges Rankings.  They explain that they generally follow the CDS definitions when collecting data from institutions.

And here I was thinking the three fifths compromise was a thing of the past... Thanks for the information.

In the UK post-doctoral researchers are staff, and their research is included in the REF (UK research rating table, which is bogus and biased due to oxbridge domination (separate issue)).
Technically if you are paying income tax then you are a member of staff not a student. Students get stipends or nothing.

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text:
TVöD pay scale for 1st year PhD in Bayern
In my contract, it says salary is according to "TVöD level 13". Can anyone tell me which table belongs to this category from all the tables in öffentlicher-dienst.info. There are many TVöD tables and I don't know which one is mine.
My tax class is 1 and working hours is full time and position is in Bayern.
Thanks for the help in advance!!

Here is the table.
You have to look at row E13, which is the standard monthly pay for PhD students with a full position in Germany. The first column is for the first year, then you advance to the second column at the beginning of the second year, and to the third column at the beginning of the fourth year.
Those are values before taxes. Clicking on the number leads you to an online calculator that estimates the value after taxes.
This amount is paid 12.5 times a year: one salary per month plus an additional half salary in November as Christmas money (Weihnachtsgeld/Sonderzahlung).
The above is valid for doctoral students with full positions, which are common in engineering. It is common in many other fields to have partial positions (50% or 65% of a position). In this case, the contract will specify a reduced number of hours per week (20.05 or 26.65 instead of 40.1 hours per week in Bayern) and the corresponding percentage will be applied to the salary before taxes. The percentage after taxes will be higher due to a reduced tax rate: there are online calculators such as this one that estimate this value.

But I believe that graduate students typically have 50% positions -- so only half of the full-time salary.

@Wolfgang Bangerth there are full positions for PhD students, especially in engineering. OP explicitly said they have a full position.

It is worth noting that the monthly salary is indeed payed 12 times per year (i.e. including the summer break) unlike the 9-month salaries sometimes payed at US universities.

@MKR actually, 12.5 times, because there is an extra half salary in November as Christmas money. I added all this to the answer (partial positions and extra salary).

@wimi -- damn! I was in the wrong field then when I got my PhD in Germany. A full time graduate student salary ain't so bad, apparently!

@WolfgangBangerth it isn't... No wonder that doctoral studies often take 5 years... If the student is good and the position is full, neither the student nor the professor are in a hurry to finish!

@wimi thank you for the well written answer. PhD student also gets Weihnachtsgeld during 6 month probation ?? I mean if November falls in the 6-month period ? There are usually some differences between employees in probation period and post- probation period, atleast in Industries. Is there such thing for PhD students as well?

@karthick on your first year, you will get the proportional part of the Weihnachtsgeld according to how many months you have worked until the end of November. For example, if you start on 1st October, at the end of November you will have worked 2 months, so you will get 2/12 of the standard half salary as Weihnachtsgeld.

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text:
Creativity of master students in developing new methods
I am doing my PhD in data mining / artificial intelligence and am at the beginning of my second year. I have had three master students so far, whose performance varies quite a bit. The worst (he already finished) got a very clear, cut and dry task for his thesis and still did not mange to do it as expected. The best so far (close to the end of his thesis) had a very vague task, and still got pretty nice results. The third is in the middle of his thesis.
In each each case, the really creative ideas, the innovation if you will, always came from me. Currently I have this third student in the middle of his thesis who has quite a few ideas how to use existing techniques, but I get the impression he is not really able to invent his own. Possibly I am not creating a good environment?
My students seem to lack quite a bit in technical know-how (pragmatic aspects of programming), mathematical understanding and knowledge of existing machine-learning methods. This is understandable – the end of your master is by far not the end of learning and I am happy to help them by explaining those things to them. Still, I struggle a little with that, since this is a road blocker. This is just learning, and not yet creating.
Now I have new task that I would like to have solved and which would make a fine master-thesis topic. However, no solution exists for the problem yet and it is pretty challenging, requiring quite a bit of creativity. A more or less completely new algorithm is required.
My questions are:

Is there a point giving this task to a student or should I forget it and solve it myself?
More general: What creativity can I expect from master students to create new methods? Am I expecting too much?
How can I foster creativity in my students?

I think you're definitely expecting too much from the average master's student.

@MassimoOrtolano: Well, I did something (more or less) completely new in my master thesis and my brother is as least as smart as I am. Though my understanding has grown, I am not sure my creativity as such has. So I would have hoped there are some students as capable. So what do you think regarding my questions 1 and 3?

In fact, you've undertaken a PhD afterward. But don't think just in terms of "smartness", there are many qualities that come into play in a successful work. For point 1, I think that you can give the task to a well motivated student if you know that you can provide some guidance toward the solution (if you don't have a clue, don't do it), and if you have a backup plan that would allow the student to graduate in a reasonable time. Maybe later on I'll try to expand everything in an answer if I can find the time.

Can you specify the timeframe of such a thesis at your institution and whether the students can exclusively devote their time to the thesis.

You've been supervising a trio of students who're just slightly junior to you?  How'd this come about?

@Nat: I have 4 years work experience in industry, mutliple years leadership experience, academic and professional teaching experience, so they are not slightly junior to me. Fun fact, my supervising professor is also just a couple of years older than I am and it is going well.

@Nat: Back to your question: I have topics I would like students to takel so I write 1-page thesis descriptions for the students which serve also as proposals to my supervisor. So far he approved everything and gave me student applications. I did the interviews and took them in if I liked them. Some of the topics I did not find students for that are good enough for the challenge, in some cases I came up with new topics more spontaneously. My supervisor gives a lot of freedom. I guess he recognizes me to be capable.

@Wrzlprmft: Yes, 6 months, full time on the thesis. However, they can start without registering the topic officially, so they can work longer on it. For most students it makes sense to start 1-2 months earlier so that they can check whether they feel comfortable with the topic.

I categorise potential thesis topics into high-stake and low-stake ones:

For low-stake topics, I have a clear plan what should be done in which order – unless some unexpected obstacle occurs or something new and exciting is found.
The student still needs to apply their skills and knowledge to solve smaller problems along the way, but I do not expect any obstacles that I cannot solve with a day’s thinking myself.
Thus, I can always keep the thesis work from stalling due to this reason.
Such a thesis may produce a publishable result, usually if the student works efficiently and thoroughly.
High-stake topics (like developing a new method) involve a considerable amount of trial and error or a considerable creative leap.
In particular, I do not have a good solution to the problem in mind (otherwise it wouldn’t be a high-stake topic).
However, I have at least a few approaches in mind to ensure that the student has sufficient work to do.
It may happen that the student will spend their entire thesis pursuing dead ends and their thesis will be a catalogue of what they tried and what didn’t work.
The student may still get the best grade for their thesis, but it may be a very frustrating experience, and there is likely no further useful by-product from this thesis, such as a publication.
On the other hand, if the student succeeds, this usually means that their work is really useful or interesting and likely to be publishable.
I would never give such a topic to a student without informing them about the above risk (there always are some low-stake topics lying around; so they always have a choice).
Also, I would only offer such a topic to a student who shows at least some promise in terms of enthusiasm, discipline, history, knowledge, and intelligence (though it is often not possible to assess all of these factors).

Note that, while there technically is a grey area between the two, few thesis topics actually fall into it (at least in my field).
Now, why am I telling you all this?
If you want to provoke your students’ creativity, you need to give them high-stake topics that force them to brood over it for some time.
However, this does not work for every student, and students should not be exposed to such topics only with prior warning.
The latter is not only to allow them make an informed choice but also to prepare them for what is to come, should they take the challenge.
A few further notes and answer to your specific questions:

Is there a point giving this task to a student or should I forget it and solve it myself?

Never rely on a thesis to produce anything.
Even promising students may turn out to be overconfident, lack discipline or stamina.
There simply is no feasible way to judge a student’s prospects for a thesis.
If this is important or promising, do it yourself.

More general: What creativity can I expect from master students to create new methods? Am I expecting too much?

That’s hard to answer as it depends on what makes for a new method in your field.
In general the best I would expect is combining existing and adapting existing methods, not developing something new from scratch.

How can I foster creativity in my students?

In my experience, to be creative about a given scientific problem requires:

Familiarity – give your students time and encourage them to familiarise themselves with the problem, investigate why established methods fail, etc.
At least in my field, this makes for a considerable portion of the thesis time.
Just writing down the problem and thinking very rarely works.
Inspiration – talk with them about the problem frequently; ask them questions about their approaches; encourage them to browse the literature.
Being open to failure – encourage your student to practice a lot of trial and error, and be clear that their is no shame in exploring dead ends.
Freedom and time – do not demand regular results from your students in a phase where they may need to reflect their results, failures, the literature, etc.
Make it clear to your students that their problems require such phases.

Some people are capable of coming up with new algorithms and ideas, and some people just won't be able to do it. It doesn't mean that they're not capable of being good researchers—it's just that developing a new method from scratch isn't what they're good at.
I don't think there's a way to "make" students creative in algorithm and method development. You can try to "screen" for it—give them a task and see what they do to solve it—but trying to force a student who isn't skilled enough to do method development to do so is asking for trouble.

In my research group the task of us researchers is to develop new methods. Of course this also entails a lot of grind work like making experiments on example datasets (and especially finding useful datasets for demonstration), but the goal of the publications is indeed to present new methods. In my job in industry I am also not able to always just pull algorithms from the shelf, but need to develop my own ideas.

So while I agree that not everyone is cut out to develop new methods, I have to ask what (mathematical) engineers do our universities create then? For my masters I study electrical engineering. I feel, in a way engineers are people "building cool stuff" - with an emphasis on the "building". I have to admit, I feel that my university did not properly teach me the art of creating. I only had one lecture on it and we were three students in it... I hoped I could do that a little differently with my students.

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text:
How to write a statement of purpose for a PhD project you do not understand?
I am trying to write a statement of purpose for a PhD position in physics in the UK. I have a master’s degree in physics which is the standard requirement for such a position.
I have been interested in this subfield for a long time, have read many papers about it, taken all of the relevant undergrad courses, and my dissertation was also in this general area.
I have mentioned all of this in my SOP, but the problem is that because the subfield is highly technical, I know basically nothing about the actual position I am applying to. I picked several of the (hundreds of) potentially relevant papers I could find, and spent the last week trying to work through them, but any one of these papers would probably take months for me to understand in any detail.
It is not that I lack the educational background for this position, rather that it is just a very specific project in an unfamiliar topic.
I’m concerned that if I just make vague comments about why the potential impact of the group’s research is exciting, it will look like I haven’t bothered to even try to understand their work. On the other hand, being overly specific seems risky given that I know almost nothing about their research.
A complication is that I applied for a (different) PhD project with the same group last year, and received an offer which I then turned down.
Based on the 10% of what I have read that I could actually understand, the topic of the position I am applying for seems exactly like something I would enjoy, and I want to try to make it clear that I am very serious about wanting to work with this group, and have at least made an effort to understand what the project entails. But I don't want to seem like I'm bluffing, or arrogantly overstating my level of knowledge.
It might even be possible to apply without saying anything specific about the project at all, but to compensate for weaker aspects of my application, and the fact that I previously decided against working with this group, I want to emphasise my interest in this specific position.
Is there any general guidance (preferably specifically for physics/mathematics) about how to discuss your motivation to work on a project you do not understand?
While I am in the UK, I would appreciate advice based on other countries as well.

Welcome to Academia SE. Please read: I accidentally created two accounts; how do I merge them?.


text:
As an Australian student with a UK citizenship, can I study in the UK?
Disclaimer: I wasn't sure where to post this but I thought this was as good a place as any so sorry if this is the wrong place.
I am a high school student in Queensland, Australia studying for a Queensland Certificate of Education. I've lived in Australia a large part of my life. However, I was born in the UK and have dual citizenship (AUS and UK).
Am I able to apply to study at a university in the UK and (if I can) am I an international student?

Well my major concern is whether I would have to pay international student fees or just normal tuition fees?

A quick look in some universities didn't define what they mean by international students, so you better ask directly if it is based on residence or citizenship. Note than in Scotland there are different prices for students from Scotland and from England.

Thinking back to a friend at school, I think residence in the UK for 3 years is the deciding feature of being a home student. You wouldn't have the visa issues others do, but you might not be eligible for government funding.

Then again, I might be wrong (or it may have changed): https://www.gov.uk/student-finance/who-qualifies

I did some looking around here, but it's difficult to find a specific solid answer because this is going to vary between the universities, to an extent. But what I've found points to this:
Even though you are a British citizen, you have not been 'ordinarily resident' in the UK, which means you would be considered an international student. It would appear that international status is determined by citizenship AND residence, a bit like US universities. However, universities may be hesitant to respond to your queries about this either way until you were offered a place to study.
Obviously you would not need a visa, but I'd imagine what you're worried about is whether you would have to pay international fees, which are very high.
I'm going to openly admit that one of my sources is Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt. You could potentially qualify as a 'home' student in spite of living in another country if you were from:

Anguilla
  Aruba
  Bermuda
  British Antarctic Territory
  British Indian Ocean Territory
  British Virgin Islands
  Cayman Islands
  Falkland Islands
  Faroe Islands
  French Polynesia
  French Southern and Antarctic Lands
  Greenland
  Montserrat
  New Caledonia
  Saint Pierre and Miquelon
  Turks and Caicos Islands
  Wallis and Futuna

However this is not the case for you, as you are in Australia.
Here is the list of requirements for British citizens to be considered a 'home student':

Be free from any immigration restrictions (e.g. British citizenship,
  exercising EU Freedom of Movement Rights, indefinite leave to
  enter/remain, right of abode, free from immigration control (as a
  diplomat or member of air crew))
Be ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom
Have been ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom, Channel Islands
  and/or Isle of Man for the whole period of the three years directly
  preceding the first day of the academic course
The main purpose for the three years' residence in the UK and Islands
  must not have been to receive full-time education during any part of
  it, unless the student is a European Union citizen (but not a British
  citizen) and immediately prior to the three-year period was ordinarily
  resident in the European Economic Area, Switzerland or qualifying
  overseas territories (see below).

You have not been ordinarily resident in the UK, ergo you would be an international student.
If you want to confirm this, you should get into contact with the international offices at your universities of interest. Only they can answer definitively.
Sources:
Wikipedia, use caution
UKCISA
UKCISA Fee Status Assessment
Complete University Guide

@NajibIdrissi It's not really a random website. It's pretty well recognised in the UK, enough that I'd consider it semi-official.

@JessicaB That was my thinking as well, having spent my undergrad in the UK as an undergrad, it's what the university pointed us toward for questions, and is generally seen as being reliable

The situation may be different if you were originally from Scotland. Eligible Scottish students pay no fees when studying at a Scottish University and there are differences in the way that the student loans scheme is administered. Again, you'll need to check with the particular university.

The amazing thing here is that because Scotland has free tuition for Scottish students, EU rules require them to offer the same deal to citizens of other EU countries.  So it's free if you are Scottish or French, but you pay if you're English.

@NoahSnyder really ? do you have any evidence to back up those claims?

BBC: "Because of European law, the Scottish government also has to provide free tuition at Scottish universities for students from other EU countries - but not for those from other parts of the UK."

There is no complete consistency in the UK and different universities may apply slightly different rules when they decide whether they charge home fees or international fees. As stiabhan mentioned, the rules may be different for students from Scotland, too.
However, it is very likely that you will be charged international fees if you have not resided in the UK during the recent years before making your application. You can find more information on UKCISA website.

You will be considered an international student for fees, and you'll be applying using international qualifications, but you will not require a visa.
Background:
I have taught a number of international students, some on Tier 4 visa and some not. Visa requirements are judged by nationality. Universities are required to check attendence of Tier 4 students, whereas those who have a right to be in the country are forgotten as easily as local students.
A schoolmate of mine delayed going to university by a year, because she had spent most of her childhood abroad. Fee status is determined by residency. As she had only been living in the UK for two consecutive years, heading straight to university would have resulted in her paying international fees. By waiting another year she reached the 3-year residency requirement, and so paid home fees.


text:
How is it perceived to withdraw an application to graduate school?
I applied to a program that I had been striving for in my undergrad, at a top school, but I've since felt overwhelmed with the thought of going this year. I think I should have waited until I was absolutely sure I could handle grad school emotionally and financially. I am so anxious now, thinking I've ruined my opportunity with this school if I don't go.
I am seriously considering withdrawing my application, but I'm very worried about how it might hurt me in the future when I reapply.
Otherwise I may have to decline if I am accepted and reapply.

The first thing you should ask yourself is why you are feeling so overwhelmed. Is this a rational reaction to life circumstances, or more of a fear of something new and unknown? If the latter, maybe withdrawing is the wrong approach should you get into this dream school. That said, if you still want out, one thing you could do if accepted is to ask for a deferral. Many schools will grant you one year. Some might grant you more. But if even if the deferral is denied, and they tell you you'll have to reapply, it's a reasonably graceful way out of the situation.

I would not perceive such a decision negatively from my point of view. Any gaps in education that are not clear are likely to come up in an interview, where you can present and defend your decision. Feeling that you are not ready mentally or financially for graduate school is, IMO, a mature decision should you choose to make it.

As an undergrad at a large, prestigious university, part of my work study job was sorting the department's PhD applications as they came in and went through various levels of review. There was absolutely no penalty to withdrawing. They received thousands of applications and the sheer number of those reviewed means that faculty are unlikely to remember your specific application (since you said this was a top school, I assume the same is true for yours). Also, most of the shifting around was done by me, an office assistant. If you've merely applied, there is really nothing to worry about. Now faculty might remember you if you had some kind of outstanding or unusual experience, or were interested in a VERY narrow program (one sub-program had only 3 applicants...). But again, no one is going to be very invested in you or your application until they have admitted you, so the time to withdraw, if that's what you're sure you want to do, is now. No one is going to take it personally given the number of applications involved.
If you have already been accepted, you can consider a deferral, as mentioned above, but even if you just withdraw there is unlikely to be a penalty. People have many reasons to decline--family, health, accepting elsewhere, unique opportunities. If you feel the need to explain and are very concerned about future chances, then perhaps consider a thoughtful letter to anyone you spoke with who accepted you (perhaps you applied to work on specific research in a field relevant to a faculty reviewer) saying that due to circumstances you cannot accept this year, but intend to reapply in the future and hope you will have the chance to work with them when you reapply. Honestly, being accepted in the past would be a great thing to put in your reapplication.

Thanks @anonymous for your comment, I really appreciate the insight. This program has about 400 applicants per year. I know the applications have been under review for a little over 2 weeks, with results coming out in April. I don't what that means for where they would be in review. what would you recommend saying?

It means they are unlikely to have even looked at your application. Just withdraw. You don't need any explanation whatsoever, especially at this point.


text:
Is it okay/common/good to mention the submitted papers in my phd thesis?
I have a couple of papers that I have submitted to some journals but no feedback is received yet. meanwhile i'm writing my phd thesis and the defense is in few months, surely before getting any feedback from the journals. I'm wondering if it is okay to mention those submitted journal papers in my thesis.

It's common – and sometimes even required – to mention the publication status of the parts of your thesis that have been, or are intended to be, published in a journal. Ask your supervisor to be sure.

Depends. I had to put in mine (France) but it is not that common in Brazil, for instance...

Yes. It is both OK and common to mention them as Articles Submitted, or as Manuscripts Under Review, or in case you have any (e.g. arXiv) preprint, Article Preprints (with the appropriate arXiv identifier).
It might be relevant for me to point out from personal experience, that the only instruction from my department in this regard was - "Everything mentioned in the list of publications in the thesis has to be either published, or submitted for publication. There shouldn't be anything in the articles to be submitted category, because that category could be inflated as much as a person desires". The last part may be field and institute-dependent, but I think this conveys the basic ideology. Articles submitted are safe in terms of inclusion.

If a paper does not exist (outside your computer), it is not a reference and should not be cited. You should at least make them available online. Publishing at ArXiv is one approach.

It's not obligatory to mention papers in your dissertation, except if you take a lot of text from them (particularly if they are multi-authored) then you really should cite them or even put a footnote at the beginning of the chapter (if a lot or all of the material from a chapter comes from one more more papers) with the title and author list, and where published if it is published.  But if you aren't the sole author, you should do this whether or not the paper is published.
So, it's obligatory to mention any help you've had with the material in your dissertation, and to cite yourself like anyone else if you reference your own work a great deal.  But your dissertation is not your CV.  If your examiners wonder about your papers, you can tell them.  When you apply for jobs, you will be expecting them to read a list of papers on your CV, and not your entire dissertation.  In general, you should expect people are looking at your Google Scholar page, academia.edu, home web page etc.  But (sad to say) next to no one who has power over you will read your dissertation all the way through.  Mostly that will be done by students who come after you.

I'd say, unless you have specific instructions from your university (or your committee, or your advisor), you should probably do the same thing as you would for published articles. If your thesis mentions the articles you've published, then it should also mention the articles you've submitted. Otherwise, it shouldn't.
Unless you're asking whether you should put those articles in a bibliography/list of cited references. In that case, follow the same rules you would follow for referencing an unpublished but submitted article which someone else had written.


text:
Any ethical problems with dating a former student?
Assume the student

recently graduated but works nearby;
has not been my student for over 1 year;
has never expressed any interest in dating until very recently;
has a father who is a coworker at my institution (different department).

I fail to see how 4 is relevant to the ethics of the titular question.

@kimball - I think it's relevant, as it shows there's a potential less-formal link between the two. ie there could be more to the relationship than strict "Professor-Student" ties. If they've met at a birthday party, etc...

I don't see a moral issue (IF the power unbalance is now gone - @vadim123's answer below is good), but thought I'd relate this: in my old school, a male teacher had a fling with a female student while she was still a student, and it was frowned upon but nothing more.  A female teacher had a relationship with a male ex-student after he graduated, and she was immediately fired.  Actual ethics often take a back-seat to any (often biased and unfair) cultural standards as defined by parents, other faculty, or outside pressure.

My bachelor advisor was in a similar situation. Although he is a CS professor while the student was a math major, so same department but different degree areas. I believe they started dating before she graduated, and got married a few years afterwards. I don't see any sign that this was frowned upon from other department professors.

I don't see any inherent ethical problems here: the key word is former student, so there is no present power dynamic, conflict of interest or anything like that.
However, you should be prepared for those in your department to find out that you are dating a former student, which could create a certain amount of push back.  For instance:

The one year gap between the student being in your course and your romantic relationship will not be apparent to all who know about the relationship.  Even if you tell them, they may not believe it.  Even if neither of you expressed an interest in dating until recently, people may still suspect that you had romantic feelings for one of your students while they were your student.
There is presumably some age differential.  If it is small enough, people will probably ignore it.  If it is large enough, a lot of people will try to figure out "Why is s/he dating him/her?" This will motivate them to find out that your romantic partner is your former student.
If you date more than one former student, people may view you as using your classroom as a hunting ground for future romance.  If this sentiment is held widely, it could make your future students uncomfortable.

I hasten to add that none of these point to any clear ethical lapse or mistake on your part.  In particular, the idea that it is disturbing for a much older (adult) to date a much younger (adult) may be more of a societal taboo/hangup than anything that can be rationally justified.  It is also true that most romantic relationships come with a certain amount of push back, and some kinds of romantic relationships still get a lot of push back for things that many/most of us feel strongly are absolutely unproblematic: e.g. inter-racial relationships, same sex relationships.  (In fact, I am very sorry to say that if your relationship is not inter-racial or same sex, any push back you get will probably be mild compared to that, and if it is, that will increase the push back considerably.)  I recommend weighing the possible costs of such a relationship against the possible benefits.

Point 3 is important. I know people who started dating their student, or even getting into marriage with them, and that's fine here. And then I know people who've been dating almost 10 students in the past years, and that's not fine to anybody (but the students who get good grades and easy work...)

Possible perception of conflict of interest if it came to e.g. writing reference letters (but then I think this should be admitted right at the start, or alternative recommendations sought)

@Yemon: I agree.  I was reading the situation as saying that the potential datee is really out of academia entirely...and I forgot that we sometimes write nonacademic recommendation letters.  It seems clear that in this situation the best solution is simply not to write letters for someone you have dated.  If you taught that person one course, that really should not be a problem.

I don't think age difference is such a taboo, at least not in my experience. Both my grandmothers married guys 10+ years older when they were 19 (19, 31 one pair and 19, 36 the other).

The professor-student relationship does not end when the course ends, and indeed might not end a year later.  Professors are asked to write letters of recommendation for former students.  Sometimes they publish papers with their former students as coauthors, based on work they previously did together.  Further, if "student" means that this student completed a thesis under OP's direction (and not just took a class from OP), then this relationship is a lifelong one.
So long as the professor-student relationship continues to exist, a potential power imbalance exists, and an ethical problem arises.  Whether your colleagues consider this a serious ethical problem is addressed by Pete Clark's answer.

-1 for misleadingly implying that the (supposedly) "lifelong" student-teacher relationship of a thesis advisor and their former advisee has any relevance whatsoever to the question of dating. There are other inaccuracies in your answer, but this one is simply nonsense.

@DanRomik, would you be willing to write a strong letter of recommendation for an ex-girlfriend who cheated on you and broke your heart?

no, and even if she didn't break my heart it would be unethical for me to write her a LOR after dating her. But that doesn't mean it would be unethical for me to date her, which is what you implied in your answer.

I don't understand why this is so highly upvoted (and barely downvoted). It feels tangential at best and quite misleading at worst.

Assuming you are on the receiving end (it's also possible to read (3) as "despite my prior attempts") I think this may be unethical only if you are accepting the relation knowing (or having reasons to suspect) that the datee has other than romantic motivations for it (or that the datee mistakes student-teacher bonds for romantic bonds, which I guess (3) is supposed to rule out).
Otherwise you may consider social implications as other answers suggest, but behaving in accordance with social conventions has nothing to do with ethics.

No.  This is not unethical.  Consider the alternative.
If I am single, I reserve the right to pick off a member of society to be my mate.  The very notion that I must temporarily restrain myself from choosing such a relationship with the people whom I actively have direct authority over... is an idea that makes some sense.  The idea that anyone is permanently blacklisted from being a potential candidate, just because I have ever encountered that person in a class which I taught, is way too unfairly exclusionary.  Such a requirement would be unethical.
I remember a college class which was required for all students in the college.  Would it be a sensible expectation that a college professor should be required to seek a mate from among the less educated, or from a remote town?
When I signed up to be a college professor, I never agreed to limit my long-term life options in such a way.  Once I am done with the short-term scenario where I have influence over a person, such an expectation would impose notable cost/harm without really providing significant benefit.

How does this address the ethical implications? Just because it seems unfair to you not to do it doesn't mean its ethical to do it. There are many situations in life where one has to step back and put ethics above the personal gain.

@Polygnome : There's a difference between morality (right/wrong) and ethics (which has more to do with the expectations of society/culture).  In this case, society would not be right to expect a professor abide by this particular proposed restriction.  The protection gained is minimal to non-existent, and individual personal burden inflicted is significant.  Demanding that a person doesn't date would be undue Tyranny of the majority.  If society disfavors undue oppression, and doesn't restrict, then the professor is left with the right.

@Polygome If a restriction placed on individuals is unfair, and society pursues that restriction anyway, then that is unethical.

So in effect you're saying that even if it's considered unethical by "society" then you're entitled to go ahead anyway, because you believe that to be an unreasonable conclusion. While true so far as personal ethics are concerned, this outlook on life is liable to get you arrested when your sense of morals and/or ethics is at odds with that of your society. So just be sure that the rewards of the behaviour justify, to you, the costs of being seen (incorrectly in your view)
as unethical by others. The love of your life might be worth more to you than a idle few dates.

(That said, personally I think the important issue here is that most people in a position to judge this kind of thing, don't judge this unethical, rather than the issue that even if they do it needn't matter. TOOGAM isn't unduly relying on a personal opinion that it's unfair, as Polygnome read into it. Rather, the whole basis of the restriction on dating students is indeed what is stated here, to do with temporary authority, and so that's why generally it's a temporary restriction)

I guess it shouldn't be a problem, a famous example can be found here and here :). Both are highly respected in their field.

This comment does not address the question; it is impossible to answer the question of whether something is ethical by simply providing an example where that thing has happened.
For example, a similar method could "prove" that it is ethical for a professor to date students currently enrolled in their class; or to retaliate against students for rejecting their advances; or to sexually assault students, etc.

@TomChurch, Just to pay some justice, Usernegativetwo didn't simply stated that it had happened before, but also said that that wasn't considered unethical by society.  Your counter examples do not pass this test.

@TomChurch: This comment does not address the question – I disagree; this answer tries to address and answer the question; it just does so with bad reasoning. This answer should arguably be downvoted, but not converted to a comment. (I agree with the rest of your comment.)


text:
Is a MOOC "degree" worth putting on your resume?
I've read an article about a Chemist who completed another bachelor's degree in Philosophy by finishing free MOOC courses. His new "degree' may not be academically accredited in any Graduate School of Philosophy. But is it still worth mentioning in your curriculum vitae/resume as a new "degree"?

I would note that this was asked three years ago, here; I'm not sure if the answer hasn't changed a small (very small) amount since 2012 though, particularly as several MOOCs move closer to a kind of accreditation.

I don't disagree (hence why I linked :), though the addition of 'degree' makes it slightly different to me (given the answer on the other question largely related to single courses) - wasn't sure if different enough.

I (a professional in the field of computer programming) would treat a MOOC "degree" as equivalent to "Continuing Education", but not equivalent to a degree or other accredited education.  If it is:

Relevant to the position/grant applied for or the paper being submitted
Substantial; not an introductory course, but sufficient work to suggest meaningful learning
Recent; in the last few years at least
The only education/experience you have in that area

Then I would consider putting it on a resume, but not directly along with education.  I would put it in a separate section, after the education, something like:
Additional Relevant Endeavors

Completed certificate in Machine Learning, [MOOC], [Date]; explored different methods related to Machine Learning, such as k-means clustering, Neural Networks, and applied logistic regression, using Matlab and R.

That provides enough information to give the reader an idea of what you did (so they don't have to look up the class) and an idea of why you put it on there (let's say, you're applying for a grant using Neural Network Algorithms to find a cure for cancer).  You include it to show you have some concept of Neural Networks, which is not otherwise shown by your experience or education.
I would generally not include MOOC certificates, though, unless it was truly important to the application (ie, filled a significant and relevant hole in your education and experience).  Certainly in professional circles this isn't going to buy you much, and I suspect in academic circles it will buy you less.


text:
How to legally re-use images in paper and still continue to use and distribute them in slides?
I have created several figures that are a part of presentation slides. As usual for presentation slides, those were not published in any official proceedings (just the underlying paper, that didn't contain the same figures, was), and no copyright for the presentation slides or any parts thereof was transferred to any other party.
I have made the presentation slides available on my website and I would like to keep it that way. More generally spoken, I would like to continue being able to provide these slides whereever I wish, including allowing other people to redistribute them on their websites.
Now, I would like to re-use some of the figures from the slides in an upcoming paper, which will be published by Springer. Consequently, I will have to transfer copyright for the paper to Springer.
How do I safely re-use my graphics?

As suggested by DCTLib's answer, publisher may wish that I cite the paper in all works that share a graphic with the paper. However, this does not seem feasible in cases where the final form of the presentation slides was created and distributed before the paper was even planned.
Do I have to transfer copyright of these graphics, as they form a part of my paper, which means I am forced to remove the presentation slides, which would - after the transfer - constitute a possible copyright infringement?
Do I have to somehow explicitly mark the respective graphics (in the paper and/or elsewhere - is there another place where I need to indicate that toward Springer?) as cited with permission (albeit I granted that permission myself) rather than original works first published in the paper?

Bonus sub-question: In this latter case, it seems that regularly publishing all created graphics on my website and then marking all graphics that I use in papers as cited from that website would save me and others lots of possible trouble when it comes to the future re-use of graphics that were already shown in papers whose copyright has been transferred to a publisher. It just cannot be so easy, as otherwise, everyone would be doing it, so there must be some catch in this plan (?)

Maybe more generally, the question could be put as: How can I re-use a graphic in a publication, if I have to transfer the copyright for the publication to a publisher, without changing the previously valid copyright/licensing status of the graphic?
I feel this must be related to the case when I want to use images that are already subject to a different license, e.g. a CC-SA license, and thus I cannot grant any publisher the exclusive right to publish these images, as that would conflict with the way the images are already in use and circulating.
Related Work
I have found various related questions, but they either deal with special permissions for re-use in theses, or with re-using images already published in copyright-transferred papers. Moreover, copyright laws in my country do not have a concept of fair use, so questions related to fair use are not applicable to the described scenario, either.
Background
I am asking this question in response to an urgent university-wide e-mail sent by university administration that asked us to take great care when it comes to copyright issues with respect to what we publish on university websites, or in the name of the university. Apparently, there has been a recent copyright-based legal issue for the university based on what some employees put on their websites, which did not end well for the university. While I do not know any specifics other than that the university had to deal with the receipt of one or more Abmahnungen, the tone of the e-mail made it clear that "acting in a way that will probably not create any problems" is not good enough.
EDIT: To be clear, I am not asking how to re-use a graphic that has already been published by one of the usual publishers and that is thus subject to the copyright restrictions of that publisher. I am asking about the opposite direction; how to have one of the usual publishers re-use a graphic I have already distributed before under less restrictive terms than what the publisher would allow, without the publisher assuming copyright ownership of the graphic.

Moreover, copyright laws in my country do not have a concept of fair use - what country would that be, if you don't mind sharing?

@ff524: Germany.

@O.R.Mapper It should be added that Germany has a special law that explicitly allows quotes of moderate size in scientific works. However, I remember that there was a case where it was argued that figures are works on their own and thus replicating a figure does not constitute a quotation.

If you want to go that way you could in the future put the images under an open license before submitting the paper and informing the publisher of that. There may be negative consequences of course.

Did you have a look at the Springer copyright agreement?
For example, the one for the "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" series by Springer says:

Author also retains the right to use, without having to pay a fee and without having to inform, the publisher, parts of the Contribution (eg. illustrations) for including in future work, and to [....], provided that the original Springer Contribution is properly cited.

So updating your old slide set to include a citation should do the trick. It may be debatable whether this makes the slide set "future work", although it does change when addition the quotation.
However, I think that you overthink the issue. Springer journals allow to publish extended versions of already published papers, even if the previous version was not published by Springer. If no usage of previously published material at all would be allowed due the to copyright transfer that you mention, there couldn't be any extended versions unless all figures are drawn from scratch.

That's a part of the issue - the fact that Springer considers the paper whose copyright was transferred as the "original [source]", despite the fact that it was written and made accessible after the presentation slides, is a problem in my opinion: The presentation slides were distributed before writing the Springer paper had even started, so obviously, they do not cite the Springer paper.

"unless all figures are drawn from scratch" - as a matter of fact, that is exactly what a lawyer I once talked to about these issue suggested to do when it comes to re-using graphics that were already included in works whose copyright had been transferred to a publisher.

It's worth noting that most major STM publishers have a general agreement to reuse each others illustrations etc in papers - see http://www.stm-assoc.org/copyright-legal-affairs/permissions/permissions-guidelines/ I ran through these for a colleague recently and while it was a bit silly for him to have to ask to reuse his own work, it was a pretty smooth & painless process to get approval.

Publish the figures first under a Creative Commons license on Figshare or a similar site. Licensing them in advance preempts the publisher agreement.   If you license them CC, you won't be required to reference.
I know at least one person who does this regularly; she discusses it on slide 4 of this presentation.

I hope it's that easy, but IMHO it does beg the question: Why isn't everyone routinely doing that already? Seeing the questions about reusing published figures on this site, or just thinking of the possible future hassle of obtaining a permission (which is cumbersome even with some "regular scientific publishers") and/or proving the right of redistribution to the new publisher, I find it surprising publishing figures first to keep them available for future reuse is not a somewhat widespread practice.

Perhaps re-drawing the figures, slightly modifying the style and the form, can help avoiding these copyright issues ? That's what we do, in my field and country (geography/maps, France).

That can work (+1), although to me, it feels a bit like a "worst of both worlds" approach: (a) The copyright claim on the figure as the "intellectual product" remains as it is, but is basically circumvented by what could be called a technicality, (b) readers have more effort because they may have to decode (understand) essentially the same graphic twice, and (c) the effort that goes into the creation of the papers that feature the variants of the figure is maximized for all involved. Lastly, "slightly modifying the style and the form" may not be an option when the point of the figure is ...

... to show a particular visual notation with a particular style and form.