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Any reason not to apply for funding as a grad student?
The question is hypothetical, but it came up in a conversation and I'd like to see if we can come up with a logical analysis and conclusion. For various reasons, graduate students might not be inclined to apply for funding.
By funding I mean grants or scholarships intended to support graduate students directly in the form of money given directly to the student. That is, I am not talking about applying for research scholarships intended to fund an experiment, buy equipment, etc. Here are a few (made up) examples.
Case 1 (Differential). I get 20000 of internal departmental funding but be encouraged by the department to apply for external funding. If I then get 5000 scholarship, then the departmental policy might be to drop the internal funding to 15000, so I don't apply for it.
Case 2 (Rich Student). I am very wealthy and I have no need for funding. I am a brilliant student and could probably get many different scholarships but I chose not to because I feel other students with less money need the money more.
The "Rich Student" scenario is slightly different than the "Differential" scenario. If I am rich then for sure some other poorer student could have gotten the money, whereas in the "Differential" scenario, I am now only getting 15000 so another student will get the 5000 anyway.
The problem with not applying for scholarships is that I don't get scholarships, and in many fields winning scholarships is good for your academic career. Perhaps in some fields this is more important than others.
Overwhelmingly I've heard that one should always apply for scholarships regardless of circumstances because of this. Of course theoretically, I could bypass my "rich student morality" by using it to do something useful for the community.
Personally, although I am not in these situations, I feel that it is most beneficial to always apply for scholarships, I would just like to have some kind of evidence that support this.
So to put this in a definitive question: for graduate students, is there ever a reason not to apply for at least a few available scholarships?

Reward to ratio of the application. If you already have some funding, and the additional funding is small compared to the time required to apply for it. For example, you have an NSF fellowship at ~$30k/yr, so it might not be worth applying to $2k scholarships which take a week or two of time.
Reward to ratio of the work. You don't want to take on a new project.
The project isn't relevant to your line of work.
You aren't qualified (GPA, citizenship, or status limitations)

Beyond @mankoff's answer of it not being worth it (I've chosen not to apply for fellowships with a poor reward:effort ratio), you might not be allowed to. For example, many fellowships, NIH training grants etc. have rules about what other funding you can get (especially for the same project).

I read the question as operating under the assumption that one is an incoming graduate student, rather than in a situation where funding may already be in place.

@aeismail I had read it as generally more "Why would you not do this?". Though it could indeed be for incoming grad students - some of them slide directly into training grants for example, and some of those are quite strict.

I probably should have said "applying" rather than "incoming." but even if one is on a training grant, I would think a student could give it up to take a fellowship, right?

As an incoming graduate student I was not allowed to obtain outside employment (I had to be a research assistant essentially for my first year), so this situation at least in some circumstances generalizes to incoming graduate students.

@aeismail You could give it up to take a fellowship, but that has costs associated with it as well. For example, in the OP's $5,000 fellowship scenario, one might be both lot allowed to take it due to the grants rules and not able to give up the grant due to $5,000 really not being enough to cover living, insurance and tuition.

@AndyW: I view this situation as fundamentally different—a fellowship is not normally construed as "outside employment."

@EpiGrad: Again, I would consider a $5,000 award to be a scholarship rather than a fellowship. (It may be a "fellowship," but in name only. A fellowship, in my view, should provide what essentially amounts to a full stipend.)

@aeismail Choose whatever wording you wish. It could be a scholarship, a modest grant, etc. Many funding agreements have clauses preventing you from committing to other things - this bit me last year.

Why didn't I apply to the NSF pre-doctoral scholarship during my second year of grad school?

Time - I didn't have any. And since I was doing a different project from what I proposed when I applied my previous year, I would have had to write my application over from scratch.
Feedback from previous year - my subject GRE score was not high enough. Even though I could have re-taken the exam for free, I didn't have time to study for it all over again.
I had a stipend - Even though  the award would have increased my yearly stipend by about $6k, the chances seemed slim and I felt my time was better spent being on top of my course work, studying for my qualifying exam, and getting a good start on my thesis project.

(Full disclosure: after passing my quals I opted to leave grad school with a MS instead of finishing the PhD. I've been employed full-time at academic or industry labs since.)

I refuse to abide by the rich student frame of thought. If the rich student has funding and works for a PI, then that PI is then able to fund another student. Graduate Fellowships should not always be considered a zero-sum game.
However, certain fellowships like SMART involve military service. Others like the NIH NRSA prevent you from taking summer internships. I see both as pretty valid reasons for not bothering to apply.

The "Differential" argument doesn't really even hold as much weight as you'd think, because many departments will reward you with a bonus for bringing in an outside fellowship. Then it becomes even more of an incentive to obtain an outside fellowship.
In addition to this, external awards make you more attractive to potential advisors, since you don't cost them as much in the long run to support you. In some cases, this even makes the difference between being able to work on a project of one's own choosing, versus a project for which the advisor has funding.
So, the only reasons I can think of why one wouldn't want to apply for at least some sort of fellowship support are:

Being a fantastically rich student, who can pay his own tuition and stipend support for the full duration of the program, or
Being a student of extremely limited means, who can't afford the costs of reporting GRE or scores or transcripts to the various funding agencies. (In many cases, though, "hardship waivers" are available that renders even this point moot.)

Define 'fantastically rich'; I work full-time in industry and pay my expenses (tuition, books) out of my own pocket.  Not only do I not have time to work on scholarship applications, many of them are need-based which pretty much disqualifies me. I'm not sure that makes me 'fantastically rich'.

@KellyFrench: Given that PhD studies are largely incompatible with a full-time industrial position, I mean someone who could afford to spend $250K over five or six years without batting an eye. However, if you're a master's student, the whole argument changes, because funding for master's and PhD programs are completely different mechanisms.


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How to fruitfully utilize faculty-student orientation sessions at institutes you don't want to attend?
More than once, I have had (graduate school admissions) orientation sessions where the faculty of the institute introduce their fields, their research and what they expect from potential students (Among other things).
At places I am interested in, this is a useful exercise. However, there are often places which I don't wish to study at but have a few good professors doing some really good work with great knowledge of the field and awesome intuition.
How does one fully exploit an opportunity to interact with good professors from institutes you are not interested in attending?
This is very different from a research conference for obvious reasons.
Further,

If I am not interested in that institute but wanted the opinion of one of the professors about another institute/lab (the ones I am interested in attending), is that a taboo?
How does one stay in touch with such contacts where your only excuse to mail is to ask a question? I really want to be on email terms. I have read and understood their work but what is it that should be the content of mails written to them? It doesn't make sense to simply send them emails saying that I read your paper or I attended your talk.

(Please feel free to edit this question in any amount if necessary)

I don't think you can expect to get the opinion of a professor about another institute/lab. You can probably get some facts (like this other institute has more/less money, they are more/less active in this area), but nothing subjective. Academia is pretty small world, and people try as much as possible not to say anything negative publicly (and since everything said is positive, it can be hard to distinguish the real positive from the fake one).
You need to have a real interest in their work. As mentioned here, it's already pretty hard to maintain collaboration between people interested, so if there is no clear interest, it will very hard to be on email terms. But, the question is: why do you want to be on email terms?
See the previous point. You need to really interested, meaning you've read and understood their papers, and are able to ask questions that go beyond "what are the possible usage of your approach?".

As a general remark, professors are usually already very busy dealing with their own research/teaching/students. Of course, they usually are open to new collaborations, but they might lack the time to work with a student who is not theirs. A good solution could to try to visit them, academically speaking, for a month or so, to work on a very specific topic.

From your stated question, you need to tread carefully. The nature of the environment at those presentations is one where the professors are looking for potential graduate students, not collaborators. Even more so, if you're a potential graduate student, you likely haven't done any real research yet, so you can't work out "collaborations" or anything.
That being said, it's perfectly acceptable to simply walk over to them and ask to hear more about their research and interests. They know that you're looking at many labs and many not choose theirs. Just make sure your request to remain in contact comes across as a "Do you mind if I contact you later to discuss your research?" and not "Can we talk later even though I have no interest in joining your lab?" Now is not the setting for that; wait until after having joined a lab to initiate that conversation.

Take the long view. Don't try to go fishing for collaborations for now, or even in the near future. Faculty-student sessions, meet-and-greets, etc. aren't completely a waste of time in places you don't think you want to attend however. A few reasons:

You will have met them. Yes, by the time you're actually something resembling a peer it will have been some time, but being able to say "We spoke once when I was looking at University X" is never a bad thing.
You get a feel for them as people. This isn't just "would I like to collaborate with this person?" The academic landscape is made up of people, and if this is your field, these people will come up. Paper reviewers, journal editors, session chairs at conferences. All of those things are impacted by personality - something you can start to get a feel for while you're there.
You get the birds-eye-view of some of the cutting edge research in your field. That can suggest things like where the field is headed.

It's essentially an excuse to meet some people years before you need to meet them. I also had some of the best shrimp-and-grits I've ever eaten at one, so there's that.

Why are you visiting programs that you know you don't want to attend? (I want to go further and ask, why even apply to programs you know you don't want to attend?)
If I am not interested in that institute but wanted the opinion of one of the professors about another institute/lab (the ones I am interested in attending), is that a taboo?
Yes. For a handful of reasons - the most critical being that you are basically telling the professor that the department wasted their money bringing you out there. You are also wasting that professor's time by talking about another university when she's there to talk about her lab and her institution.
And it's also worth saying that most professors don't bother to get to know or remember most students who actually enter the program! This is not the time to get on "email terms," she's not going to remember you. The time to do that is once you are established in a lab and have your own project to talk about.

"..Why are you visiting programs that you know you don't want to attend? (I want to go further and ask, why even apply to programs you know you don't want to attend?).." Its more like getting accepted by your top choice and hence all others are places you don't want to attend.

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Is there an international taxonomy of academic titles/ranks?
Looking at the list of academic ranks on Wikipedia shows that the same academic rank/title can mean quite different things in different countries. For instant, a "research assistant" in the US can stand for an undergrad student doing an internship, while in the UK it can stand for a postdoc. Similarly, the term "lecturer" might stand for a permanent position (e.g. in the UK) or for a teaching assistant position, open to graduate students.
However, when thinking about it, there are not so many kind of possible positions (permanent or not, with teaching or not, with research or not, with PhD supervision or not, with team responsibility or not, etc), and having a clear title could help a lot (for instance, in my case, I've been working in four different countries, with a different job title each time!).

Is there some kind of official taxonomy that one could refer to?
If not, who could be in charge to create it? (the EU, if only for intra-Europe mobility?)

An ontology would be even nicer than a taxonomy. The domain seems to be complex enough to need an ontology.

C. S. Lewis was for several decades a "tutor" in English literature at Oxford, where that title was considered to belong to persons who had permanent positions. In English universities the title of "professor" seems to be more exalted than that of respected academics who have permanent positions, and Lewis got that title by leaving Oxford for Cambridge. Understanding the word "tutor" is not unrelated to understanding the word "tuition". In the U.S., it seems as if it may have been a century or more ago that the word "tuition" came to mean money paid by a student to a university in....

.....consideration for the privilege of being a student. (I use the word "consideration" in the lawyers' sense of that word).

But I have the impression that the older meaning of "tuition" persists in some parts of the English-speaking world.

. . . . . . . and what sort of academic position does "Lehrkraft für besondere Aufgaben" refer to?

'Similarly, the term "lecturer" might stand for a permanent position (e.g. in the UK) or for a teaching assistant position, open to graduate students.'  However, a handful of British institutions, in addition to having the permanent post "lecturer", have positions called "lector" or "lectrice/lecteur" which are more like those teaching-assistant positions for graduate students.

In general, the answer is negative.
Not only there are different systems in different countries (and same-spelled degrees may have different requirements), but even if a degree seems to be the same, it is not necessary  considered equivalent.
Often universities and institutes have some freedom in the interpretation of degrees earned in other countries. Common sense can be a good guide but in case of doubt you need to check if university (or institute) X accepts a foreign academic title Y instead of their Z.
For example, when I obtained degrees licencjat (3 years undergraduate, 180ECTS) and magister (5 years undergraduate, 300ECTS) from a Polish university, they refused to translate it into anything else (stating explicitly that it is not equivalent to anything else). However, some other Polish universities do translate it into Bachelor of Science and Master of Science, respectively. Nevertheless, my new institute didn't have problem to find them qualifying me for their PhD program.

If I'm not mistaken, your answer seems to be more on academic degrees rather than "job" title or ranks. But that's a very good example actually, since there has been in Europe a real effort to standardize all the degrees, for instance to follow the Bachelor/Master/PhD structure. So, even if it doesn't translate, at least you have the ECTS, which are enough if you want to move around.

I understood your question. However, I've shown even that in the beginning the titles are not completely equivalent (and in the EU it may be matter of naming/bureaucracy, but UE->US and even in (UE->UK) sometimes different instituted do have different translations). In the later stages it gets even more complicated, as often there are positions, or titles, which have no direct counterpart in other country.

One should note that in the EU there is now the Bologna Process which precisely aims to eliminate the distinctions. The success and the reception of that process, however, is a completely different matter of discussion.

@WillieWong I know, so I was even more surprised. However, I am not into law/regulations and there may be between degrees being equivalent and degrees being sufficient to continue education in other countries.

WRT the example, it is a sensible issue. E.g. Titles in Spain were Licenciado and Diplomado for 5 and 3 years respectively. With Bologna, Bachelor is 4 years, and Master is 1 more year, at first they equated Licenciado with Bachelor, and after 5 years of "consideration" they decided to equate Licenciado with Bachelor + Master.

As the answer of Piotr Migdal says, there is not really a generally accepted consensus on this.
However, the OECD defines certain grades to rank academic positions/titles in their 2015 Frascati Manual (on page 275). They give some examples of titles that fit in these grades. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics apparently also recommended these grades to be used and added some additional examples of titles, these I've italicized below.

Category A:  The  single  highest  grade/post  at  which  research  is  normally  conducted.
Examples: “Full professor” or “Director of research”
Category B: Researchers working in positions not as senior as top position (A) but more senior than newly qualified doctoral graduates.
Examples: “Senior researcher” or “Associate professor” or “Principal investigator”
Category C: The first grade/post into which a newly qualified doctoral graduate would normally be recruited.
Examples: "Assistant professor” or “Post-doctoral fellow” or “Researcher” or “Investigator”
Category D: Either doctoral students who are engaged as researchers,  or  researchers  working  in  posts  that  do  not  normally  require  a  doctorate degree.
Examples: “PhD students” or “junior researchers”

Obviously, these are not very widely used (at least in my experience), but at least it gives you some feeling of the relative levels and something to fall back on in case someone questions the seniority grade you claim.
It also clearly shows the large discrepancy between the U.S., where even a post-doctoral level could have a title with "professor" in it, and Europe, where "professor" is usually the highest or almost highest academic title you can have.

Why the downvote?

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How good are "For Dummies" books in Academic Study?
I am often faced with questions in areas which cross my boundaries of knowledge. For instance, as an engineer, sometimes I am needed to study the basics of Anatomy or something like that.
This might be a temporary interest or might be permanent (There is no way of telling beforehand)
During such times, there is an option:

Go for the "proper" textbooks used by the students in that field. (Say this one :: 960 pages) and study them well.
Get a Schaum's series, Demystified or For Dummies sort of book and get over with it. (Say this one :: 450 pages). Alternately, use this as an entry point for the "better" books.

My professors have always suggested against such books because they provide no motivation for the development of a certain concept but I see that as a valid point only it is your primary field of interest. If an engineer wants to know Statistics or Anatomy, I am slightly skeptical whether such grinding is necessary.
Are such books a good resource/entry point for a new subject?
Note: All of this is under the assumption that the student is within the confines of academia.

I think it really depends. I had a look at the book "R for dummies" (it is too basic for me) but it would be good and thorough introduction. Also "Excel for dummies" looks like a good introduction (I think about buying it). But for me as a bioinformatician "Bioinformatics for dummies" is really not an option and I would also not recommend it for beginners. I agree with Ivar Persson on the paragraph about wikipedia. I think also for some topics there are quite good video instructions on youtube or similar websites.

I have also a lot background and biology and don't think it is necessary to buy such an expensive book unless you are a medical student.

I would advise against the use of "for dummies" books, firstly because they are not of academic quality, second they are too big.
There are 2 strategies that I myself use for rapid acquisition of quality knowledge:

a) Start with Wikipedia, identify the basic strands, but most importantly the correct terms for what you want to learn about. So for instance, you probably don't need to study all of anatomy, but from Wikipedia, you would discover that what you need to brush up on, is anatomy of tissues- histology.
b) Now that you have the correct term and a narrow focus, put it into google scholar, and read the abstracts of the top 10 cited journal articles. The oldest articles with 3000 citations are the classics, the newest ones with 500 are the review articles with ideas for further reading and useful summaries. You can read more than the abstracts if it seems relevant, otherwise go with the basics.
An even quicker way of cramming in quality information is to use the Annual review series of journals, provided you have institutional access to the journals. These are a comprehensive set of journals in all major fields which have reviews by invited experts on those topics. Not only do you get high quality disciplinary summaries, but also excellent interdisciplinary articles.

The benefit of either of these strategies is focused and quick acquisition of relevant knowledge without having to run around trying to figure out what you need to know in a non-academic book that wasn't written for this purpose. We're talking 50 pages of in-depth reading versus 500 pages of broad but shallow references of minor interest.
Disciplinary dictionaries, like this one,are also a good place to start, provided they have been around for at least 2 editions,

While I agree with this for learning new research topics, I would not recommend this technique for learning how to use new tools, which is what I had in mind when writing my answer.

Those books are not only very useful, I would argue they are the best option in many cases, as they represent the best use of your time. You will find that, throughout your graduate studies, you will have to learn aspects of many different fields. In most cases, while it would be possible for you to embark on a thorough study I some other discipline, that would take weeks, if not months. These books allow you to quickly learn the basics, giving you a solid foundation of knowledge that you can expand with further study if necessary.
Edit: this applies to topics only ancillary to your main field of research; you should not use this book on your research topic itself, for the reasons outlined by your professor.

Why is there such a big stigma attached to such books? One literally has to hide the book when professors/colleagues step in. Again, this is for a book in a field different from that of primary research.

I would venture that's because there's a focus more on doing "hard work" than "intelligent work" in the field. As a PhD student, you're expected to research the heck out of everything. However, you have to manage your time well, and in many cases this it's a better idea to learn what you need and go in-depth if it turns out to be necessary later on.

@nunoxic In my experience,  the Schaums books are widely appreciated and recommended by faculty, eg when a student needs some math background.

They're a decent starting point. They are aimed at folks who are newbies to the subject and are good at an overview of the subject. From this starting point, you'll get a better idea of where to look.
In one rare case, the author of Google SketchUp For Dummies is also the author of most of the other books on the same product, and the dummies book is the one that covers the lastest version of the product.

If an engineer wants to know Statistics

Probablistic methods were an important part of electrical engineering when I studied it. Several courses in statistics/probability were part of the required curriculum. In such a case, the "for dummies" series would only be useful as something to read before starting the semester, so that the first week wouldn't be a total surprise/shock.


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How does making notes of what you read help you in research/teaching?
I have always refrained from making notes from my childhood. But now, my adviser wants me to make notes of what I study saying that it would be very beneficial for me in future. So, following his advice, I started making notes. But it turns out that it is quite boring and time consuming. And I feel that even if I want to look into something later, I can look it directly from a book. So, my questions are:

How does making notes help you in your research or possibly teaching?
What other pros/cons are there?

Concerning the warning your saw, I don't know where it comes from. I know that on Meta we were talking of having one concerning "assignments", but I don't recall any discussion about having a warning for subjective question. Your question seems like a good fit, maybe the double usage of "you" made the automatic check think it was a subjective question.

I associate being ordered to take notes with pre-college work.  By the time one is in college, let alone graduate school, you ought to have figured out for yourself what the best way for you to absorb information is, and have the discipline to do it.  If that involves notes, that's great, but if it doesn't (and there are plenty of people for whom taking notes isn't a useful studying tool) then it doesn't.

As an advisor, I actually support his viewpoint, in the sense that your notes on what you read can become a part of your research record (which, as a researcher, you must create and maintain). However, the "notes" could be: "Read paper X. Good points: A, B, and C. Weak points: Q, R, and S."

It's an old adage that "You don't truly understand something unless you can explain it completely to someone else". Writing notes effectively forces you to explain the topic to yourself. Oftentimes, when writing over notes from a class or from what you've read, the simple process of re-explaining it to yourself will clarify points that may have been confusing earlier.
For this purpose, I try not to write notes as I'm reading, but rather I'll read a section and them summarize that in my notes. Having read the full picture, I can then ensure that my understanding of the topic is more complete, and my notes should reflect that.
On a different note entirely, repetition enhances retention, and writing notes is at the very least doubles the number of times you'll see it (once in the book, and once as you write it), which should help your remember it that much better.

I take lots of notes — when I'm reading papers, listening to presentations, preparing for class, writing a paper, preparing a presentation, attending committee meetings, etc.  I rarely look at the notes later (in fact, I often take notes on papers I'm reading on a whiteboard), but the act writing them forces a certain kind of organization in my brain that reading/watching/listening/thinking alone doesn't.
(As a graduate student, I was religious about keeping the notes I took in class.  20 years later, I still consult those notes occasionally when I teach the same material.)

I'm not sure what kind of answer you are expecting, but it should not be surprising for you to learn that people assimilate information in different ways.
Myself, I have a good visual memory and remember a lot by looking at the board/presentation when at a lecture. When the presenter is only speaking without showing anything, I have much harder time remembering everything, and am distracted easier. Note-taking definitely helps, but only when I know I won't be getting any other study materials, or the materials themselves are deficient.
Later on, when I study and read on my own, I can recreate mentally how the board looked like and quickly relate terms and phenomena that I'm reading about with what I heard earlier. This speeds up learning significantly for me.
This is what works for me -- other people have completely different ways of studying. I'd suggest you do it in a way that's comfortable for you. If you don't see the value of taking notes, just don't do it, period. Present your case to your supervisor and explain that you have your own way of organizing information, and you should be able to do so in a way that's comfortable to you. The supervisor should be trusting you enough to let you do so -- in graduate studies, students should have much more freedom to explore their ideas and work on their own without much hand-holding. Otherwise you have a much more important problem to solve -- how to avoid being micromanaged by your superiors.

As others have mentioned, notes help some individuals remember things even if they never reference them again. So I won't stress that point anymore, although I agree with it, especially for class notes.
As for notes on your reading, notes on papers are extremely useful. Depending on your field, you might end up reading lots of papers from which the details of methodology don't matter, but the key results do. If you make note of the results, then you can reference them without having to reread the papers.
Sometimes, when I am doing modeling work and doing background reading on experimental results I will take this to the extreme. As I read the paper, I will takes notes (in Mendeley or a personal wiki) and at the end include a section called "cite this paper in the following contexts" in which I will proceed to write down contexts where I expect these results to matter in my future work.
When I am writing my own paper, I might remember "there was something I read about the involvement of this in the amygdala". I do a quick search on my wiki, and from my notes have access to the relevant papers in a much faster way than going through the countless papers I might have read looking for the result.
Note taking makes my research (especially writing) more time efficient down the road

Taking notes helps me focus attention on a talk or paper.  I seldom go back to notes, but when I do it's very important, and you can't guess in advance when something you'll need to remember will come up.
I currently keep notes in three different ways:

Written notes in chronological order.  This was my original mechanism (lab notebooks) and was very useful for me as a graduate student.  Currently I do this rarely, mostly at meetings, but have found binding the notes in order is still useful and helps me remember and organise my thoughts.
My bibliography file.  At meetings & talks where possible I have my laptop out and download citations in real time as they are mentioned & write down keywords & ideas & who recommended what paper.  I also do this when browsing social media.  I use bibtex so including annotations is easy, and getting the full citation only has to be done once.
Electronic notes on my laptop.  This lets me search for the notes if I can remember a few key phrases.  It also lets me edit papers directly when I have ideas.  I have a lot of paper & grant outlines filed neatly on my hard disk in folders with papers related to them.  This can be very handy.  Again I use latex and make comments cross-referencing between note files, papers/grants under construction & citations.

I keep notebooks with short notes and references so that I am not stuck saying "umm, I remember reading something close to that several months ago". Instead, I've got them in notebooks with a brief summary of what the article was about. These notebooks are more of my own index of research, yes, you can always look up in "the book" or "the article", but what you need is a memory aid that helps you remember where to look them up. You could probably use something like delicious or mandelay; I'll probably set up my own wiki.


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Open versus Blind reviewing process
A question I have been wondering for a while is if there exists an actual proof that a blind reviewing process (i.e. where the reviewers are anonymous, and the reviews not published) is better than an open one (i.e. where the reviewers are not anonymous and/or the reviews are published along with the accepted papers).
Basically, whenever I question the fact that having a blind reviewing process does not guarantee any quality (which, somehow, usually coincides with receiving a poor review for a paper ...), I'm told that anonymity is crucial for the reviewing process. But is there any proof of that? I don't believe there exists any perfect system, but I'm just not sure why does the blind (or even double-blind) one is considered as the best (or the "least worst").

"Better"?  What does "better" mean?

@JeffE: good question, I'd say improving the quality, on the short and long term, of the scientific output.

An interesting question especially given that posting andcommenting in AcademicSE are not blind, while up and down votes are.

Related question about why such reviews are necessary: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/101400/will-a-conference-paper-submission-have-greater-credibility-if-a-teacher-is-a-co

The 2008 study entitled Peer Review in Scholarly Journals - Perspective of the Scholarly Community:  An International Study aimed "to measure the attitudes and behaviour of the academic community with regard to peer review."  Some quotes from the summary:

Double-blind review was preferred. Although the normal experience of researchers in most fields was of single-blind review, when asked which was their preferred option, there was a preference for double-blind review, with 56% selecting this, followed by 25% for single-blind, 13% for open and 5% for post-publication review. Open peer review was an active discouragement for many reviewers, with 49% saying that disclosing their name to the author would make them less likely to review.

and

Double-blind review was seen as the most effective. Double-blind review had the most respondents (71%) who perceived it to be effective, followed (in declining order) by single-blind (52%), post-publication (37%) and open peer review (27%).

A 2008 article in Nature (and a correction) discusses the above study but the article is about double-blind review versus single-blind review, and not about blind review versus open review.

This article seems good, but it seems to  address the problem of blind review versus double blind, which is a bit different than blind versus open. (I actually can't access the link right now, nature.com is not responding, so I'll try to read it later).

You might also want to check out http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/index.html.
According to the source mentioned in my previous comment, "During 2006, the journal Nature conducted a trial of open peer review; it was not a success – despite interest in the trial, only a small proportion of authors chose to participate, and only a few comments were received, many
of which were not substantive. Feedback suggested ‘that there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments’."

Thanks, the second link (publishresearch.net) addresses the question I'm interested in. Could you please reformulate your answer to include it in?

Additionally, I'll note that they don't prove that open review decreases the quality, but just that reviewers are more reluctant to review when it's open. First, if we had a model where reviewers were paid to review, they would be also reluctant to do it for free, but that doesn't mean that the free model is worst. Second, I'd be really interested in knowing how this attitude changes w.r.t. to being in post or pre-Internet generation of researcher.

I've edited my answer twice to incorporate your two comments above.  I've also deleted my two earlier comments because I've transferred their contents to my answer.
I suggest that you not erase your comments, as it leaves a record of your "open review" of my "article." :)

Thanks for the editing, I accept the answer as I guess that's the most "objective" I can get :) But I maintain my comment that it's not shown that open reviewing decreases the quality itself, but only that people are reluctant (but I also acknowledge that it would be very hard to measure the difference of quality).

This answers the question "Do authors prefer blind reviewing to open reviewing?"  But the original question asked whether blind reviewing is actually better than open reviewing — Is there published evidence that blind reviewing actually leads to higher-quality publications?

@JeffE, regarding your first sentence, you are correct.  This was already noted twice by Charles Morisset.  As for your second sentence, I currently do not know of any.

The more is revealed about the identity of authors and reviewers, the less honest the review process may be. Such openness may favour already-established scientists over newcomers.
In the ideal world a reviewer would raise the same concerns when reviewing papers from a Nobel-prize winner or from an undergraduate student. But as people are even afraid of asking possibly dumb questions in public, I would be really surprised if they could apply the same scrutiny regardless of who they are reviewing.
Even with the standard (single)-blind process, I heard that an already-famous scientist submitted papers under made-up names to receive honest reviews (just can't recall who).
An example from Herbert S. Wilf on a birthday speech for  Donald E. Knuth (pointed out by Joel Reyes Noche):

In the 1980's, in the early days of the Journal of Algorithms, I was an Editor-in-Chief, and Don [Donald Knuth] submitted a paper to me, authored by himself under the pseudonym of Ursula N. Owens, ostensibly from some small college in some small nonexistent town in Kansas. The reason was that he really wanted to get a tough and substantive referee's report on the paper, and he had been finding that sometimes referees had pulled their punches because of his name at the top of a paper.

Double-blind process may be even more beneficial, but at the same time illusory (as topic, references and style may reveal the author). Moreover, the identity of the author may sometimes be beneficial (e.g., to compare if the new submission has something new).
None of it is a proof.
But instead of counting of lines of reviews, one can try to compare how softly (or harshly) are treated contributors, depending on their status (academic title, university name, fame/recognizability).

I understand the intuition behind "the more is revealed ...", but at the same time, providing anonymity for the reviewers allow some people to write bad reviews (i.e. not reading the papers, making sloppy comments, etc), and I'd like to understand whether the pro arguments of anonymity overtake the cons ones.

Yes, I am aware that signing with ones own name is good for quality. However, for reviewing the bias and the quality are two different factors. And it is very likely that by tuning the level of 'blindness' one can trade the unbiasedness for the quality. So the issue may be harder than just the optimization of one parameter.

I'm not claiming it's an easy problem :) But I just don't like the argument "blindness is good, because otherwise there might be a bias. Why? Because.". As a scientist, I want hard proofs, not just intuition :)

According to a comment in http://mathoverflow.net/questions/45185/pseudonyms-of-famous-mathematicians, "Donald Knuth used the pseudonym Ursula N. Owens when submitting a paper to get more honest reviews. (As described by Wilf on page 3 of http://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/website/dek.pdf)"

The funny thing is that on this issue, most people mention immediately the "honesty" side of the problem, not the "quality" side.
For the latter, I think that this not blind/open reviews which is the pertinent question, but rather the public/private question. If reviews are always public, then my guess is that the quality will increase, because the general chair/editor in chief will push that way to ensure its conference/journal to have excellent reputation.
Personally, I don't want/need to know who is reviewing my papers, but I want AND need quality reviews, and they are unusual those days. We all know why : too many papers, too many reviews to make, not that much time...

That's a very good point, and that could be an effective solution. Plus, there is often valuable information in a review (such as potential related work, or different interpretations) that could be helpful for the reader.

Another potential set up this brings up, the reviewers could be blinded to the authors (to prevent dis-honesty, gender bias whatever) at the onset, but it need not be the other way around. Essentially single-blind but in the opposite way single-blind is traditionally done!

One ofhe most convincing argument I have heard in favour of blind reviewing is that it prevents people whose paper has been rejected from taking "revenge" on the reviewer (conciously or unconciously). Consider for example a senior academic who has a paper rejected because of the review of a junior academic. It would be quite easy for the senior academic to hinder the progress of the junior one.
This is similar to the point that Piotr raised about it being a more "honest" process.
I don't know of any specific examples of this though.

Yes, and consider the case of a senior academic who kills a submission with a poor review either because he does not have time, or even worse, because the submission is coming from concurrents (double blinding is not that efficient), and who knows that nobody in the PC will complain about his poor review because he's senior. How is that better?

Just to be clear, I'm not claiming that the case I described is better or worse. I just don't know. I understand the arguments why blind review is good, I'd like to understand why it's the best.

I would argue that this problem would not be solved by open reviews. If you're senior enough not to care about the opinion of the leading experts in your field (i.e. the PC members), then you probably don't care about the opinion of other people either.

That's a good point, but I think it's a bit different to be in a situation where only the PC chair knows that your review is not good, and might not even notice, and to publicly criticise a paper, especially when they are concurrent.

I see your point. On your previous comment, I'm not saying that blind reviewing is the best process and I think an icreasing number of people are of that opinion, too. I certainly would be happy with an open reviewing process.

@Charles: In my experience, most PCs have more spine than that.  PC members don't always notice when a review is bad, but when they do, they complain no matter how senior/famous the reviewer is.

I don't have any proof either way, but for one data point, you might look at the HotNets workshop.
At several of the early workshops, the program committee published public reviews of the papers.  During the reviewing process, program committee members wrote blind reviews, as is the usual process (the reviewers were anonymous).  But also, for each published paper, a member of the program committee wrote a fresh review intended for public consumption summarizing the program committee's view on the paper.  Many of the public reviews were quite frank, both in identifying reservations about the paper as well as aspects of the paper that the program committee enjoyed.
I don't think HotNets still does that, but you could try to research more about what the HotNets community's experience with public reviews was (public? negative?).  Also I think there have been some other computer science workshops and conferences that have also written public reviews, so you could look at them as well.

I can only share some of my experience.
Once a friend got a paper review request from a top journal. His boss knew that and asked him to reject it because the authors were doing what he and his boss were doing.


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How to efficiently read mathematically and theoretically dense books in STEM fields?
When it comes to reading, there are literally thousands of methods from Speed Reading to SQ3R to Sequential(Word by Word till the end). My question is regarding reading mathematically/theoretically dense books as a graduate student. My question is primarily targeted to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields.
I have read the other question on SE and this is designed to act as a question on similar lines but for books (> 400 pages) typically found on Reading Lists for Quals. I believe how one reads a book differs significantly from how one reads a paper.
(This could be a question as well but IMO, the length, intention and structure are sufficient to cause the difference)
In order to make this an objective question rather than a vague and open ended one, I wish to concentrate on the following:

Should a book be read from start to finish word by word or through iterations (Skim, Analyse, Summarize)?
If I am interested in a particular chapter with a lot of dependencies, is it in my interest to read everything till that chapter or read that chapter > google unknown terms > read chapter again and loop?
If one gets stuck for over a certain threshold at something is it wise to continue assuming it as true or to persevere till the end and figure it out. This is true for research papers, is it true for books?
How much time per (mathematically dense) page is ideal? This will vary a lot with field but not so much with person as it would with fiction (IMO).

I have never (as far as I can remember) read a technical book cover to cover from start to end.  Most of the time, I have a problem in mind that I want to solve, and I'm looking for tools to solve it; more often than not, if I'm trying to learn out of a book, I'm actually reading three or four books at once.  I dive into the middle of a book that seems most relevant; if I don't understand something, I'll back up, and if I don't understand that, I'll back up again, and if I get really stuck I'll put the first book down and pick up a more elementary book, and so on until I'm on firm ground again.  ("Getting really stuck" only happens after relying to work through/reconstruct details on my own, in addition to trying to understand them from the book's presentation.  I have taken months to read through one page, always feeling just close enough to understanding that I never felt "really stuck".)  Whenever possible I pop back up the reading stack with my target problem in mind, skipping entire chapters if they don't seem relevant (but backtracking if I discover later than I'm wrong), working forward again until I either find the tool that I'm looking for, conclude that I've been on a wild goose chase, or give up on the book.
Yes, I miss a lot this way.  Yes, I get a lot of weird ideas that I later have to kill off.  But I just don't have the patience to read large volumes of technical material that doesn't seem at least remotely relevant to some problem at hand, and prioritizing often leads me fairly quickly to tools that work.
Your mileage may vary.  Caveat lector.

Just out of curiosity, do you think it is OK to replace "book" by "Wikipedia/Internet". I mean, Wiki up something you need and keep Wiki-ing things you don't understand in that article till you are able to read it completely?
I might lose a lot and have a shaky foundation but is this not as shaky as reading a book the same way?

Replace?  No.  Augment?  Yes!  Why limit yourself to the Internet when you can just walk into a library?

I have to second this one strongly.  Nobody reads most technical volumes cover-to-cover.  Many such volumes (i.e., Russell & Norvig; Feller) aren't even really intended to be read that way anyway.  Chapters (or even sections) of such books are often standalone tidbits of reference.  Besides, the only way to learn many technical skills is to also apply them at the same time.

The types of books you refer to are unlike publications, in that they typically detail the results of research that occurred 5+ years ago. As such, if you're reading such a book, it's typically for one of two reasons:

To be brought up to speed on a topic with which you're unfamiliar
To learn a specific technique which is discussed in the book

In either case, you'll want to typically be interested in only a subset of the book. I would recommend reading through that section slowly, section by section, as you would a paper. It will probably take a while. I have never read an academic book cover-to-cover. Do note that your speed-reading skills will likely be less useful here, as STEM literature typically does not lend itself to speed reading. There is no "ideal time" that can be stated. When you begin, a single page may take you hours. There was one paper I read where a single equation took my lab mate four months to work through. As you get more experience, you'll speed up. Time is a commodity, but information is a more precious one. Spend the time necessary to learn the topic, and especially at the beginning, measure your progress over days, not hours.

If I am interested in a particular chapter with a lot of dependencies, is it in my interest to read everything till that chapter or read that chapter > google unknown terms > read chapter again and loop?

There are two approaches here. The one you mention - google unfamiliar concepts - can work well. However, oftentimes the author of the book will mention exactly where the dependency is (e.g., "As we discussed in the previous chapter, ..."), so you can identify which parts of the book you need to read through. That may be more useful, as any terminology will be consistent within the same book. For some topics (math & engineering in particular), other papers will often use different terminology, needlessly complicating the learning process.

If one gets stuck for over a certain threshold at something is it wise to continue assuming it as true or to persevere till the end and figure it out. This is true for research papers, is it true for books?

This is simply a function of how necessary the topic is. When you get stuck, figure out what concept is confusing you, read up on that topic, and then continue. This process can take weeks, or even months. If you really want to learn the topic, persevere. If you can continue without that bit of clarity, move on to something more productive.

How you read an academic book depends heavily on what you want from it, but one thing that I think is almost universally true is that you generally don't want to bog down on one page/argument/theorem/definition/whatever on a first read.  Later content often adds context and motivation to something that may seem mysterious, so if you get stuck for a while on something, it's a good idea to move on and then come back to it later.
My usual experience reading mathematically dense content, which I think is relatively typical, is that as I go along, the level of my understanding steadily decreases, and eventually it gets to the point that I'm learning very little, so I go back to the parts I understood well and start reading again from there, this time understanding a bit more, and I iterate this until I've learned what I set out to learn.


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Can I publish the reviews I write?
This is a follow-up question to Open versus Blind reviewing process, and is somehow related to What happens to the reviews that people write for journal articles after they're sent back to the author?
However, my question does not concern the reviews I receive for the papers I submit, but concerns the reviews I write for papers I have been assigned. Since the whole process is done under confidentiality, it is not clear who owns the copyright on a review I wrote, and what does the review include.
For instance, let us assume that X is member of a PC of a conference Y, and assigns to me a review of a paper Z, written by A and B (assuming it's not a double-blind). Can I publish on my blog: "Here is my review for Y, asked by X, on the paper Z, written by A and B"?
I think that there are two points here:

Is it legal? (for instance, publishing the camera-ready version of a paper might be illegal due to the copyright transfer, would it be also the care here?).
Is it ethical? (who should I ask in order to do so? X? Y? A and B? everybody?).

EDIT: There is been several comments/answer wondering why I would like to publish a review I wrote. To give a bit of background of this question, I believe that the current reviewing system, created when the academic community was small and there was no Internet (i.e. no easy access to information), might not be the best, although clearly working. This is for me a very interesting debate, but somehow out of the scope the Q&A format of Academia SE, which is why I tried to focus on my question on whether it was possible to do so, not if it was the best thing to do in the current system (and just to be clear, I don't plan to do it, but I just like to know what are my options). Anyway, thanks for the answers bringing a different light on this debate.
EDIT 2: After seeing the update in Jeff's answer, I just realised that I didn't make it explicit that I was talking about reviews after the reviewing process. Jeff says that it's ok if the paper is accepted, and although I clearly understand the argument of why I shouldn't publish a review of a rejected paper, the question still holds: by publishing a review of a rejected paper, I publish the information that these authors submitted this paper to this conf/journal, which is supposed to be confidential between the authors and the editors. Would I break any rule by doing so?

Yes.  Publishing confidential information breaks Wheaton's Rule.

Another thought: if you want more credit for public reviews, why not review books? William Gasarch, for instance, maintains a list of books he needs reviewed for SIGACT News -- a great way to get free books, by the way ;-) A similar option surely exists for other (sub)fields.

@JeffE Well, I wouldn't want to break Wheaton's rule, I guess I would be banned from Reddit then! :)

@AnthonyLabarre thanks for the link, that's indeed a very interesting way to have public reviews. I didn't see in the list a book I would have enough expertise to review it properly, but I like the idea (and I didn't know there were such lists of "awaiting reviews").

my counter-question would be: Can I publish the sloppy reviews that I receive? That would attract a large audience of frustrated academics :)

@ElCid You can make papers out of them: Friston (2012) Ten ironic rules for non-statistical reviewers. Neuroimage, 61, 1300-10.

The standard rule in my community is that once I finish reviewing a paper, I'm supposed to pretend that I don't know the paper exists.  In particular, I am not supposed to use any insights I gained by reading that paper in my own research.  I am not supposed to reveal the results to my colleagues.  Some venues ask that I destroy any copies of the paper I'm reviewing, along with any programs or data I used to verify the paper's results.  This embargo lifts only when the paper is finally published, but I am never supposed to reveal my identity to the authors, even indirectly.
Under those rules, publishing reviews is completely unethical.  Maybe it would be okay if I had the explicit permission of both the authors and the editor, but I would expect most authors and reviewers to vehemently object.  I would feel weird even asking.
But even under less stringent reviewing rules, I think posting reviews is a very bad idea.  Criticism is best given privately.  One of the purposes of anonymous reviewing is to give authors brutally honest feedback on their work.  Referees can offer direct criticism without worrying that it will harm the authors, and authors are more willing to hear that criticism because they know it will never be public.
Yes, that means authors sometimes get credit for ideas that I suggest in referee reports.  (Most authors are nice and thank the anonymous referee.)  On the other hand, several referees have offered suggestions that have significantly improved my papers, so it all comes out in the wash.
Update: I should add that these ethical constraints attach only to reviews of unpublished papers being considered for publication.  Once a paper is actually published, everyone is free, if not encouraged, to publish their own reviews of the published version.

Thanks for your answer, and to be honest, I wouldn't think about publishing very negative reviews, and ideally, I'd rather like the authors to publish my review with their papers if they think it can bring something. For instance, a reviewer once found a very tricky bug in a complex program I attached to a paper. Founding this bug probably took him a lot of time, and it improved a lot my program. The only credit I can give him, is to thank the "anonymous referee". I personally don't think it's fair, but I don't want to impose my view over everybody :)

You can't reveal you identity even after the paper was published?

Officially, no.  In practice, if I know the authors well, I sometimes let my identity slip, but only well after the reviewing/publishing process has ended.  (On the other hand, I have colleagues who actually sign their reviews.)

@CharlesMorisset Why isn't it "fair"?  Just pay it forward.

@JeffE I perfectly understand the idea that it works globally because of "today you, tomorrow me", but ideologically speaking, I disagree with it, I don't think anonymity improves the system, on the contrary. And I'm not saying it's not fair, just that I don't think it's fair, and if I could, I would like to incude the name of this reviewer in the paper.

@JeffE I just saw your update, and actually, this was exactly the context of my question: assuming that a paper is accepted and published, can I publish my review of that paper? My bad, I should have made it explicit in the question. Thanks for the answer, do you have some support for it? (like a conf/journal encouraging to publish reviews?).

@JeffE Also, there seems to be a contradiction in your answer: at the end of the 1st paragraph you say: "but I am never supposed to reveal my identity to the authors", but in the update, you say: "Once a paper is actually published, everyone is free, if not encouraged, to publish their own reviews of the published version."
However, clearly, if you publish your own review, you will then reveal your identity to the authors.

No, you misunderstand me.  Once the paper is published, you are free to write a fresh review of the published version, just like anyone else seeing the paper for the first time.  You are still not free to yell out "I was the anonymous referee that they thanked!"

I disagree that criticism is best given privately. On the contrary, bona fide, non-ad-hominem criticism of published academic work is better given publicly IMNSHO. Of course this would not be what one had written as a peer review, but something different and independent.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no copyright issues related to reviews you write, and I don't see who would own rights on them save you should those be applicable. To be fair though, I would ask at least X and Y whether they have a problem with you making the review public.
That said, I fail to see the point of making them public. Those reviews are of extremely restricted scope; if the paper was rejected, no need to rub it in by letting the rest of the world know how bad it was. Otherwise, as pointed out by Lars, your comments may not be valid anymore if they were addressed by the authors, but even if they weren't, I don't see the point in publishing the review.
... unless you want as many people as possible to know how thorough a reviewer you are so that they can send you more papers to referee?

Yes, on a more personal aspect, one of the motivations would be to take the full credit for some work I do. I mean, reviewing a 40 pages journal paper takes a lot of time, and when I write a good review, I would like this to be taken into account. On a more general aspect, I also think that reviews can be useful, and it happened to me several times to have a better understanding of a paper I reviewed after reading other reviews of it. So, I'm not saying that I plan to publish every review I write, but I was just wondering about the legal/ethical aspects of doing so.

Add a line to your CV saying "Reviewed for [journal/conference]".  Under most circumstances, that's all the public credit you get.  Don't worry, the editor will really appreciate your efforts, and may even be willing to say so in a recommendation letter.

@CharlesMorisset "take the full credit for some work I do." okay, but who cares? I'm not sure who are you trying to impress. Editors? Other scientists? You'll impress them infinitely more by writing good articles of your own. And isn't reviewing journal articles part of the job of an academic? It's assumed that you're putting good work into it. This kind of strikes me as wanting special credit for showing up to work on time every day even though everyone else is too.

@JeffE Yes, that's what I already do. I wouldn't go as far as asking a recommendation letter from the editor though. But it's not only about just bragging about reviewing, but also bringing the content of the review to the community. For me, a journal review can be several pages long, and can help understanding a paper. I wouldn't buy a book or a movie without reading a review first, why can't I have this information for reading a paper, especially when I know that this information exists?

@Amy, I would appreciate if you go a bit lighter on the judgmental tone :) That being said, yes, it's part of academic work. So is writing papers, so why don't we publish all papers anonymously? That would remove any bias, and since academics are already paid for that, why should they care of the reputation gained by authorship? And maybe we should also anonymise PCs, since organising conferences and reviewing is part of the academic job. So I'm not trying to "impress" anyone, I'm just thinking about a more open system, where more work can be made public.

Your comment on my tone is fair. But if you publish/release your reviews, that will be judged by your peers, and I think you should expect some people to have reactions like mine.

I was trying to ask who your target audience would be by publishing your reviews. (and in practice, is there a difference between "taking full credit for work" and "impressing someone"?)

@Amy Yes, you're right that publishing a review has a strong taste of "look at me and my cool reviews", and clearly, apart from the more open system I'm talking about above, this is intended for potential recruiters, as another way to evaluate a candidate. This reflexion of mine (publishing reviews) somehow takes place in a growing feeling in the CS community to stop publishing to closed journals, to embrace more open/unrestricted publication supports (e.g. arXiv), which might also mean that evaluating an academic might require more factors than just publications.

@Amy But I agree that in the current system, publishing a review as it is just looks like showing off. I just like to think about what could be possible, and what are the existing constraints that can prevent an evolution of the system :)

@CharlesMorisset I agree wholeheartedly with your overall sentiment, but I think using the review process (closed or otherwise) is not the way to get to a more open community. especially in more hierarchical fields like bio, chem, theoretical physics/engineering where reputation is everything and you can't afford to insult someone who might review one of your papers later. ooh but a good discussion would be, how can we change the attitude in those fields??

@Amy That would be indeed a very interesting discussion, but that can only be subjective, so I don't think it would fit Academia SE. Maybe a useful question would be where to find a place to have such a discussion :)

"why can't I have this information for reading a paper, especially when I know that this information exists?" — But it doesn't exist.  Your review refers to a version of the paper that is not published, which by definition means the authors have not made it public.  By publishing your review, you are releasing information about the author's previous version that they may prefer to keep quiet.  ("for potential recruiters, as another way to evaluate a candidate") Speaking as someone who has served many years on faculty recruiting committees, I would view this VERY negatively.

Also, I don't think @Amy needs to apologize for her tone.

@JeffE I don't think I ever said that I want to publish the review as it is, especially for an unpublished work. Actually, I don't think I ever said that I want to publish anything, I'm just wondering about the existing framework, what is possible and what is not, which I why I would prefer to keep the discussion on a light tone, as an intellectual exercise. Again, I perfectly understand why I shouldn't do it right now, which probably why I haven't done it yet, and won't. I really appreciate all your comments, and I'd be happy to have a proper discussion about this, but it's not the place.

@JeffE notice that I didn't actually apologize :)

@Amy And I wouldn't expect you to do so, there was clearly nothing offending or anything :)

@Amy I do agree with the comment and the tone [on MetaStackOverflow yours is actually a lightweight in comparison, let's see "if" and "when" the tone in Academia SO goes down ...] The academic effort in peer-reviewing works only on the basis of future dividends: "I will do a lot of work in this review in the hope that my work will receive feedback quite as accurate". On the contrary, I would rephrase the original question as in: should we publish the sloppy reviews we receive?

Some conferences/journals say on their website that reviews should be treated confidentially, although I'm not sure if you're legally obliged to follow this. I would certainly ask everybody involved (i.e. PC and the authors of the paper) before publishing the review.
It's also possible that (part of) the review isn't valid anymore if you're raised concerns that the authors have addressed in the final version.

But when they say that reviews should be treated confidentially, do they mean that authors should treat the reviews they received confidentially, or reviewers should? I know that some people publish the reviews they receive for papers as some kind of public token of the quality of the conference (I once found the website of a person explaining why he was doing it, but I can't remember it :(), so I can understand the warning for the authors, but does it hold for the reviewers too? Do you some examples of the conf/journals, so that we could check what they say exactly?

Legally obliged?  Probably not.  But if someone asks you to keep something confidential and you don't, you're a jerk.

@CharlesMorisset, a quick search brought up Maney and PLoS as two publishers who say that. Note that neither refers to the reviews themselves explicitly, but I would certainly assume that they mean them as well. I would also assume that the confidentiality extends to everybody involved in the process.

I feel that everyone is entitled to their opinions and their right to share them, and I agree that openly discussing published work is good for the scientific community. But I would tread lightly when it comes to papers you have personally reviewed.
If you have a serious issue with a publication, or have important comments to make after publication, the venue to do that is in letters directly to the journal, which they may choose to publish.
If you're thinking about publishing comments on your blog, consider what the goal of your blog is and who your audience is. Are you trying to open up a dialog about the work? Keep a collection of everything you've done? Advertise your expertise as a reviewer to editors?
If the goal of your blog is discussion of current work in your field, consider writing about papers that you have no connection to (groups you don't collaborate with, papers you haven't reviewed). Then you'll avoid any sense of bias or potential liability/ethical issues.
If the goal is to keep a collection of your work, you can do so privately and share in instances when you are trying to demonstrate your critical thinking skills (editors, job applications, maybe elsewhere?).
I think that overall the review process exists mainly, if not solely, for the benefit of the authors - not for the benefit of the reviewer or the scientific community at large. In the end, everyone gets the benefit of (hopefully) a better paper.

I would never publish a review as a review. I agree with other the other comments that the ethical standard is that you are meant to flush your brain of any insight resulting from what you have reviewed until / if it is published.  However, this is certainly not what happens in the real world.

I've certainly seen and heard about people who actually published on the topic of a paper they reviewed before that paper was accepted anywhere.  Some people just cheat.
Brains are not something you can flush.  In fact, your mind is an academic's primary asset.

Personally, I think that if you have learned something or realised something as the result of the reviewing process, you should probably put it in the bottom drawer for a little while to give the author a chance to get it out and for you to be able to cite them, but ultimately it's an academic duty for ideas to be shared, not lost.
There are actually some famous stories of established academics reaching out to bright newbies and helping them publish ideas after seeing a paper in review, e.g. John Maynard Smith and George Price.  These are sometimes seen as scandals, but provided that the original paper wasn't rejected specifically for the purpose of bagging an authorship, I think that is actually a lot more ethical than going away and doing the work without the author who inspired you, which sadly I think is more common.

I know answering my own question is a bit weird, but I just came across the website http://www.reviews.com/, and since I wasn't aware such sites existed, I thought it would be good to mention it for future references.
I haven't gone through the entire website, but it seems that anybody can register and submit reviews to papers (including conference/journal papers, and not only books), and these reviews are then available. I've just noticed (it's probably not new though) that for instance the ACM Digital Library has a tab "reviews", which references the corresponding reviews.
So, if I try to sum up the other answers, technically, it seems to be legal to publish a review, unless the editor made clear that all reviews must be treated as confidential, but as long as the article is under submission, it's clearly non-ethical, and would be quite damageable. However, once the paper is published, it's perfectly possible to publish a non-anonymous review (for instance using the website I mention above, but I'm sure other solutions must exist), that can of course be based on the actual reviewing process, but it should not be stated that the author of the review was an anonymous reviewer.
Note that it's possible to publish "negative" reviews (for instance: this one, which might be behind a paywall).
Thanks for to all the answers and comments!

I'd add that you shouldn't say anything about the pre-publication version you saw, only the published version.  (The exception would be if there was evidence of fraud, and I'd recommend going to the editor first.)

This is certainly reviews of published works, not reviews done as part of the evaluation for publication.

Given recent movements towards open peer review, and that I broadly disagree with previous answers, I thought it worth adding another answer to this question.
Firstly, regarding the legality, you will likely find it completely within your rights to share the review as you please. Most journals mention 'confidentiality' in some respect, but are usually very unclear about what this means. The question of who 'owns' the review is currently being discussed by COPE, but I would suggest that the answer is obviously the reviewer.
Secondly, regarding the ethics, I think you have a duty to share your reviews wherever possible. There is a trade-off between Wheaton's Rule and your duty to the scientific process (particularly if you are a publicly-funded researcher), and this hasn't previously been raised in this discussion. Where you find the balance will for now be subjective, as no clear consensus has developed. Personally, I believe:

Researchers have a duty to expedite the scientific process.
A publicly-funded scientific process should be transparent.
Authors, reviewers and editors should all be accountable for their actions.
Reviewers deserve recognition for their contributions.

These points are particularly relevant if a reviewer makes suggestions that are not heeded by the author, in which case important insights might be buried. The COPE guidelines for peer reviewers suggest the maintenance of confidentiality. However, my interpretation is that this should only apply until the pre-publication peer review process is complete (i.e. until publication).
There are now more formal options for sharing your reviews; for example via Publons. This is my preferred option for sharing because reviews are not visible until the article is published (which I think ensures fairness to authors) and publishers have the option to hide the content of your review (which I think ensures fairness to publishers/editors).

Like elaborated by @ChrisSampson87 in another answer, I totally support the sharing of provided peer reviews after publication. I believe transparency can only add to speed and quality of scientific research, and most of the major flaws in peer review rely on the fact that it is kept secret behind curtains by most of the community. Likewise I am in favor of signing my reviews -- this is not always easy, and often leads to a backlash, which is halfway gone towards sharing it later.
When one signs a review and plans on sharing it later, immediately a greater sense of responsibility is created. There are websites allowing for this practice which implies that any member journals include editors who are OK with the practice, and authors submitting papers to those journals should be aware of the possibility of greater exposure after their publication.
Minor personal conflicts and egoistic feelings aside, I strongly believe bringing in more light to peer reviews, even of rejected papers, would do far greater good than damage to the working conditions of scientists everywhere.


text:
How do I create a workshop/conference?
I have noticed that there is no real workshop or conference in my particular field of research, that tends to be across different fields (for instance, security and risk). There are of course general conferences where I can submit a paper, but they are very general (i.e. either security, or risk), and somehow, I'd sometimes rather gather at the same place and the same time the small community who is working on this particular topic.
So, my question is: how do I create a workshop/conference? In particular, how to define the steering committee/general chair/PC chair/PC Committee? Is it better to be attached with a major conference? (I know some conferences have "call for workshops").
I'm interested both in technical answers and in useful advices (for instance, I guess that technically, you could create PC with only postdocs, but I can imagine that in practice, you need a good ratio of established researchers).

PS I used security and risk just as an example, there are actually conferences specifically interested in security and risk.

Two points to watch out for with scheduling: (1) Avoid conflicts with other conferences that people in your field might want to attend. (2) Avoid times when some other major event is happening in your town, because hotel rooms may be much more expensive or entirely unavailable (and driving into town may be impossible). For example, at the University of Michigan, we have to avoid the weekends of home football games. (Our stadium seats slightly over 100,000, and that very nearly equals the population of Ann Arbor.)

Creating a conference is a very worthwhile activity—however, even organizing a two-day workshop can be a logistical nightmare that requires a dedicated support staff to pull off efficiently. If you don't have it, you can still get it done, but it still requires a lot of planning and a lot of effort.
I was invited to participate in the scientific committee for a workshop to be held here on campus and hosted by my institute. Even though we had the administrative staff taking care of organizing room reservations, hotel blocks, catering, name badges, preparation of the formal program, and so on, there's still a lot of work involved, particularly if you're the chair. You'll need to contact (and sometimes harass) speakers, look for funding, recruit attendees, advertise like crazy, and so much more.
However, if you can make your workshop a part of someone else's existing conference, then you can remedy many of these problems—the existing conference's infrastructure goes a long way in supporting your workshop and its goals. Frankly, if I was going to try to start a new workshop that would take on its own independent existence, that's the route I'd choose. If the workshop inside of another conference received good feedback, only then would I try to make it an independent event in the future. In that time, you'd also have figured out who the other "major players" are who could serve on future scientific committees.

The conference we started was created by our institute, so dividing up the responsibilities was relatively natural: the head of the institute was the head of the conference, and we divided up the work of programming the sessions among the members of the committee.
If you don't have that option available—if, for instance, you're the primary mover and shaker behind the workshop—that puts more work on your plate.
If you're doing a workshop under the aegis of a larger program, then I would think you would be the chair of the program. You could select other people to be on the organizing committee, but as the person doing the recruiting, you're going to be the one the others look to for guidance and decision-making—at least at first.
So I think the "founder" is going to be the general chair or the organizational chair, at least the first time around. Should the conference survive to have a second iteration, then at that point establishing some sort of successorship makes a lot of sense, because nobody really wants to go through the process of organizing all of those details every other year; it's too much work.
But, if you want to know, the order did go something like this:

Steering committee of institute decided to hold conference
Steering committee appointed emeritus faculty member as program committee leader.
Steering committee appointed junior faculty as committee members.
Program committee came up with several tentative plans.
Steering committee decided on final overall structure.
Program committee scrambled to find speakers to fit new structure decided on by SC.
Program committee puts together advertising, recruits speakers, organizes poster session, organizes conference structure, and performs other duties as needed.
Organizing team handles payments, attendance and registration issues, travel and accommodation issues, operation of conference, and so on.

The other thing to consider is that the planning for something like this typically requires on the order of 12 to 18 months, even if you're just doing an event locally hosted at your university (like ours was). For something more complicated, you may need even more lead time.

Thanks for your answer, I indeed had the feeling that it would be easier to create a workshop co-located with a conference. However, I'd be curious, even in this case, to know what's the step-by-step process? I have a vague idea, but it would be helpful (and I guess not only for me :)) to have a precise process, if you have one, of course :)

Depending on your field, sources of funding and/or professional organisations can provide a lot of logistic support to organising a workshop. In mathematics for example, the mathematics institute of Oberwolfach runs workshops and miniworkshops in all subfields. The organiser propose a workshop, and if it gets approved, the institute takes care of most of the logistics. Other similar opportunities in mathematics include the Mathematical research communities program of American Mathematical Society, and the SQuaRes program of the American Institute of Mathematics, as well as workshops organised by the Clay Mathematical Institute or the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley CA.

I'd like to add some info to the above provided answers, that are, IMHO, very well-explained and helpful.
If your research field is not very mature yet, you could also think about organizing a "summer school", in which you could invite some well-recognized researchers to serve as lecturers, especially with some practical experience (not only from the research env.), for you (and your attendance, as well) to have a broader view on the field.
The environment provided by a summer school is really nice (I've got the experience of organizing a series of summer schools in my research field, for a couple of years), and you may provide your attendance with an opportunity to "keep in touch" with good "names" in the specific research field, most of them that we usually reference in our papers.
Regarding the organization, a summer school is usually not paper-driven, i.e., you don't have to care about steering and program committees, so it may save you some effort. In addition, you don't have to care about proceedings (usually expensive to prepare, and to print... even if you think about publishing it online only, you will have some effort and costs to deal with).
Indeed, you must care about funding, in order to pay for the hotels/airline tickets/food, etc, that, sometimes only counting on the money from registrations is not enough.

Here's some insight on the behind-the-scenes at NIPS:
Inverse Probability. 'NIPS: Decision Time'. Last modified 2014. Accessed September 27, 2014. http://inverseprobability.com/2014/09/13/nips-decision-time/.

So the decisions have been out for a few days now, and of course we have had some queries about our processes. Every one has been pretty reasonable, and their frustration is understandable when three reviewers have argued for accept but the final decision is to reject. This is an issue with ‘space-constrained’ conferences. Whether a paper gets through in the end can depend on subjective judgements about the paper’s qualities. In particular, we’ve been looking for three components to this: novelty, clarity and utility. Papers with borderline scores (and borderline here might be that the average score is in the weak accept range) are examined closely. The decision about whether the paper is accepted at this point necessarily must come down to judgement, because for a paper to get scores this high the reviewers won’t have identified a particular problem with the paper. The things that come through are how novel the paper is, how useful the idea is, and how clearly it’s presented. Several authors seem to think that the latter should be downplayed. As program chairs, we don’t necessarily agree. It’s true that it is a great shame when a great idea is buried in poor presentation, but it’s also true that the objective of a conference is communication, and therefore clarity of presentation definitely plays a role. However, it’s clear that all these three criteria are a matter of academic judgement: that of the reviewers, the area chair and the quad groups in the teleconferences. All the evidence we’ve seen is that reviewers and area chairs did weigh these aspects carefully, but that doesn’t mean that all their decisions can be shown to be right, because they are often a matter of perspective. Naturally authors are upset when what feels like a perfectly good paper is rejected on more subjective grounds. Most of the queries are on papers where this is felt to be the case.

Also has some other articles that are relevant, such as on NIPS Reviewer Recruitment.

Usually, it's better to avoid link-only answers: in case the link is broken, the content is lost. It would be better to quote the useful content and to use the link as a reference.

@CharlesMorisset In general, I'd agree, but I'd end up quoting the entire post. Hopefully the excerpt I added is enough to satiate the reader.


text:
How to prevent plagiarism of my papers?
I have recently discovered that several of my papers have been plagiarized in order to create one paper, and that this paper has been published at a conference. I informed the organizers of the conference and the editor, and there is now notice of violation attached to the online version of this paper, so this problem has been solved.
However, I came to know this paper only by accident (someone contacted my co-author, and told him that this paper looked a lot like ours), and potentially, we could have missed it. So my question is: are there some techniques I could use to detect such cases?
I don't think that it's possible to detect all cases in general (because sometimes, it can be hard to distinguish between inspiration and plagiarism, and I would actually be quite glad with being a source of inspiration) but can I at least detect the most blatant ones? (in this particular example, 3/4 of the paper was actually a copy/paste from ours, and they were citing some of our other papers).
Note that as a completely childish and probably useless reaction, I've actually stopped putting my papers on my webpage. I doubt it can solve the problem though, but at least I felt like doing something :)

Don't shoot yourself in the foot because someone else was dishonest.  If you want your work to be cited, or if you eventually want a faculty job, you must put your papers on the web.

Choose some key terms that can only be found in your paper and use a search engine to look for them.  Try not to use words in the title or in the abstract of your paper.  But, as eykanal mentioned, this will not find papers behind paywalls.

Actually when I am asked to review a paper, I am always given some sort of reviewer's tool that finds the similarities with existing papers. I think this takes into account the papers behind paywalls.

@JeffE Yes, you're right, I'm now realising it was not only useless, but also probably harmful! (although I was considering that most papers are available through the editor website). I'm going to put them back (and actually, I guess it will be my next question: what kind of tool exist to manage a bibliography online :)).

@JoelReyesNoche The idea of keywords is good, and at least, if there are in the abstract or title of a paper (which are available through the paywall), that might be worth having a look at it!

@Gopi Would you have by chance some references about the tool you're mentioning? I've never seen one when reviewing.

http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/
Actually a lot of tools on the web can perform web-based plagiarism checks. However, it might detect your own article as a copy. I did write about this at the article at: http://nareshrajendra.com/peer-grading/
Someone else who had been evaluating my work, used an online tool for plagiarism, found it at my webpage and suspected me of plagiarizing my own work for the course, which of course wasn't true.
However, these tools won't be too bad under non-anonymous conditions. Reversing the process might help you find those who have copied your work.

By restricting access to your own papers, you make it harder for third parties to detect any future plagiarism of them! The more people know your work, the harder it is for somebody else to pass it off as their own without somebody noticing. How would your co-author have got that tip-off without your work being well-distributed?

I'd argue that you shouldn't worry too much about preventing plagiarism of your papers.  At least in the areas I'm familiar with (math and theoretical CS), it's extremely unlikely to do you much harm.
To be clear, I'm talking about wholesale plagiarism of written text.  There can be much trickier situations - for example, if your rival learns an idea from you in a private conversation and then claims you learned it from him - but that's a subject for another question.
Plagiarism happens all the time, on a massive scale, but you don't see it very often because it takes place at the margins: usually in junk journals or conferences, and occasionally in solid but low-prestige venues.  This is by design, since plagiarists know that if they attract too much attention, they'll get caught.  Nobody submits a plagiarized paper hoping to get lots of citations.  Instead, they just want credit for having published something, usually because of some external pressure.
One fear people sometimes have is of being caught in an ambiguous situation, where it's not completely clear who the plagiarist is.  In the areas I'm familiar with, this never happens.  The community is always quite sure of who is to blame, and as far as I can tell they are always right.  This is a valid worry in principle, but it's not worth losing sleep over.
Another fear is that the plagiarist will attract attention and citations that should have gone to your paper.  As I mentioned above, that's not likely.  These papers are typically almost unnoticed, and if they do get noticed, then that's just a prelude to getting caught.
Plagiarism is still a serious problem, and plagiarists are cheating the system, but in the fields I'm talking about, they are generally not specifically hurting the authors they are copying from.
Putting your papers online makes it slightly easier to plagiarize them, but it's not really contributing much to the problem, since there are so many possible sources.  (There has even been a paper plagiarized from an advertisement for a consulting firm!  See http://www.siam.org/journals/plagiary/index.php.  It's amazing how much garbage there is out there, and how unscrupulous some authors are.)
Instead, making your papers as visible and accessible as possible makes it more likely that plagiarists will be caught.  And, of course, this is in addition to all the other benefits of making it easy to read your papers.
Vanity googling can also help: I periodically do searches for topics I care about, or to see who is citing my papers, and I've caught several plagiarists that way.
The arXiv flags papers whose text overlaps nontrivially with a previous paper.  This means in fields where arXiv use is widespread, plagiarists can't get away with using the arXiv, so they are further marginalized.
Unfortunately, after plagiarism is discovered, there is little or nothing you can do to ensure that the plagiarist is punished.  Reputable conferences or journals will investigate the situation and flag or withdraw the paper; less reputable ones will ignore you and hope you quit asking about it, although they will sometimes act if you publicize it enough.  The plagiarist's employer probably won't do anything, no matter how serious the case is.  What I'd recommend is that you try to correct the literature, and report the incident to the plagiarist's employer (assuming the paper was published as part of their job), but not worry too much about getting any action from the employer.  If pursuing the case further would give you some satisfaction, then that's a good reason to do it, but don't do it with the expectation of concrete results.  If you're lucky, you'll get a letter explaining that something awkward might or might not have happened, that everyone involved is very sorry for any hurt feelings, that whatever did happen wasn't really anyone's fault, but that it won't happen again.  (Sadly, it often does.)

Thanks for the detailed answer! I guess you're right when saying that the impact is actually quite limited (it's even a bit positive, as it shows that my work was interesting enough to be plagiarized! :)).

Yup, someone is being hurt (for example, people competing against the plagiarist for jobs or status), but it generally isn't the author of the original paper.  And it can also be a badge of honor: when people are discussing plagiarism, you can chime in with "Yeah, I hate it when people plagiarize my papers" and someone is sure to wonder enviously why nobody plagiarizes their papers.  :-)

You've handled the conference plagiarism very well.
But then you say you've stopped putting your papers on your website: and I'm afraid that that is completely counter-productive.
It would be far more helpful for editors, reviewers and publishers to have your papers on your website, indexed by all the usual search bots, and clearly copyrighted and time-stamped. That makes it easier for them to spot duplicate content, early on.
The point of publishing your work is to get it disseminated. Very many journals allow authors to host preprints or similar on their own university web pages: do so. Get your stuff circulated as widely as possible. That gives you the best chance of other plagiarism of your work being spotted early on, in the future.

Thanks, you're making a fair point, that joins Jeff and Ran's answers. So I guess I'm putting back my papers on my webpage (they were available through paywalls and old webpages anyway)

I would even say post your work on some kind of arXiv as soon as you can. My reasons are:

You might be lucky, and the reviewer will actually find it, and catch the dishonesty early (I always try to google related works when I get a review request).
if your work is there for a while, it has more chance that people saw it and affiliate  that result with you, thus recognizing the plagiarizing work as such.
You have a date-stamp. With such a time-stamp it'd be easier to claim that your work (publicly) appeared before the time that the other work was submitted/conceived.

The interesting question is, whether you should cite the other work in your "related work" segment, and claim it to be plagiarism?!  (:

Thanks for the answer! Well, in this case, the plagiarized work was already published, so somehow I already had the visibility/date-stamp point. But it's clear that I should ease the process for reviewers/editor to detect a plagiarism (and that joins Jeff & EnergyNumbers point).

Unfortunately, this is not really a problem you can solve yourself. There are simply too many journals behind individual paywalls (sometimes even in different languages) for you to be able to monitor this sort of thing by yourself.
On more of a philosophical note, I would argue that it's the responsibility of the journal editors to ensure that the papers they choose to publish are not plagarized from other works. They are the only ones who can really prevent it, as they are the ones who actually publish the papers; you, the author, reader, and sometimes reviewer, are just a consumer of their publication. Teachers and professors have access to resources such as TurnItIn.com; I'm not familiar with such a resource for academics, but I would definitely argue that it is the responsibility of the journals to ensure that every paper they publish is genuinely novel research. (This is not to say that the author has no responsibility; of course every researcher should publish ethically.)

Yes, I agree with you that it should be the responsibility of the editors, and that there is not so much I can do myself, but I was wondering if there at least something I could try :) But it would definitely be great for reviewers to have an equivalent of the feature "Questions with similar titles" of SE :)

I would add that expensive publishers like Elsevier claim that they do check for plagiarism of the papers they publish, and that this is one of the reasons they are expensive and they claim copyright. @Charles Morisset: where your plagiarized paper published by a big publisher? It would be interesting to see how supported the above claims are.

@BenoîtKloeckner It was published by IEEE, which is pretty big in CS.

When reviewing a paper via the EDAS portal, you can always look at the similarity score with other papers. in order to compute this similarity score, the use the iThenticate software.
I have also seen the CrossCheck software, but I cannot remember where or when (note that it is also powered by iThenticate).
I guess all these softwares can be used for individuals. As long as you pay...

Are there any free alternatives?