As an undergraduate I'm relatively new to academia. I was wondering if publishing a paper on arXiv could potentially be an issue if I were to want to get the same paper in, say, Nature, for why would Nature be okay with their material being openly available online? Isn't there a copyright issue here?
16772
If I publish a pre-print paper on arXiv, how can I guarantee exclusive rights to the publisher afterwards? Am I unable to publish on non-open access journals after I publish a pre-print on arXiv ?
116569
I received a mail today from Academia.edu (a site I wasn't previously aware of), asking me to confirm that I co-authored a paper with a colleague.  Having looked into it a little it sounds like it might be a useful site - the idea of a "social network for scientists" is one I've seen the need for in the past. However, partly due to bad experiences with the seemingly similar ResearchGate, I'm also skeptical.* Without signing up for an academia.edu account the site doesn't offer much information, so I would like the following information:   What specific features does academia.edu offer to its users? Is it genuinely useful for any of the following purposes (each of which seems genuinely needed)   as a platform for networking with academics for discovering relevant research as an effective system for post-publication peer review for organising references among a small team of people working on a project  Will it send out mails to my colleagues without my express and explicit permission? (I.e. are the mails I received today the result of a deliberate action by my colleague, who is aware that I will be emailed and wishes me to join the site; or are they essentially spam from a social networking site aggressively trying to expand its user base?) It's clear from its  that it's a private, venture-capital funded company. What is its business model?   In short, is this a site that has some genuine utility for academics, or should I just ignore it?  *I've never signed up for ResearchGate but I regularly receive spam from it purporting to be from my colleagues, who aren't aware that it's being sent on their behalf. I would be mortified if my senior colleagues received such mails claiming to be from me, so I won't touch it with a barge pole.
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I am going to submit a paper in these days. I dedicated to it a lot of time, and a lot of effort to check that all the theoretical results in it are correct. Anyway, I am still afraid of having written something wrong without even realizing it, as the deadline is very sharp.  So my question is: how common is in the academia to find submitted papers with minor errors? If there is a minor error that is not invalidating the results, will the paper be rejected, even if the content is considered interesting?
43543
So, this guy has made . Making books of SE stuff is okay, but two rules need to be followed:   Attribution License the work under CC-BY-SA as well   This  claims that the books do attribute properly. I find it unlikely that he has properly licensed the books under CC-BY-SA though, given that he's selling them as eBooks. It's possible, but it's dubious (why do people buy them if they can get them for free?)  Could someone investigate. CC-BY-SA is important, it what keeps things open.  Again, I'm fine with him selling books, but not violating creative commons.  (P.S. The other problem I have with it is the covers are really bad.)
60168
I am trying to reproduce published results in a paper. Those results come from numerical simulations. The original authors and I do not use the same software, and theirs is proprietary (I don't have access to it). I have tried to reproduce their results, and it works qualitatively but not quantitatively: the differences between their results and mine on typical quantities of interest are between 2 and 5 times the expected accuracy of the method.  So far, I have communicated with the original authors, trying to clear out all possible sources of error I could think of (checked that I got the tricky parts of the algorithms right, checked that the “usual” parameters that were missing from their paper had the “usual” values, everything I could think of). They are forthcoming enough, and reply to my questions quickly, but it's clear they don't want to invest time in doing any serious follow-up on their side. And without access to their software, it appears I'm stuck.  Now, my question is on how to proceed. The “ideal case” for unreproducible results is to make a detailed analysis of how and why they cannot be reproduced, and possibly find out a source of failure (or at least plausible issues). This advances the field, and is probably publishable (not in a very high-profile journal). Here, this is not possible.  I have, however, nice results that I have obtained (extending their work far beyond what was already published), and if I didn't have these differences with their paper, it would make a very attractive paper. What can I do with those? Is it possible to publish them, merely noting the different with their paper without more comment? Or are my results simply unpublishable? I welcome any comment, especially from people who have found themselves in such an uncomfortable situation!
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I have recently submitted a paper to arXiv, but the arXiv moderators put my paper in status "on hold", because they have to make a decision on the right classification for the paper.   To those who have experienced a similar situation, how long did it take before they made a decision and published the paper on the arXiv? I just want to have an idea of how long I will have to wait.
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My colleague has just published a paper on which I am co-author. This is the first paper that has my name on so I am not familiar with the systems yet.   He has received an email from arXiv to confirm his submission and it gave a "paper password". It recommended he forward this to the co-authors so "They may use it to claim ownership."  What does this mean, why would I want to do it and how do I go about it?
42339
I am considering to create a wiki/blog for most of my study notes that I have made or taken digitally.  Also, for the handwritten and rough ones I am thinking about storing them in my GitHub repository.  Is this a good idea? How do professionals in academia and PhD students organise their notes?  Also, should I keep my notes publicly available?  Edit: The main purpose of keeping my notes public is to have them readily available and searchable of myself and my immediate peers in college. If that benefits someone else, I will be more than glad to have helped.   Update regarding having a blog/wiki: I was thinking about having stuff regarding my take on a certain topic or similar rather than just straightaway putting mugged up lecture notes. (as I mentioned in a comment)  So basically, as I go along a certain topic whatever interesting I find, I post  it. Also I will put in links to papers, books and other interesting literature on the topic that might be helpful while studying the topic. This seems easier to deal with and also serves as a way to track my current interests and/or workflow.
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On ResearchGate, if you upload something like a thesis, and then it says publish resources, does this mean the thesis becomes properly published in the sense of the usual requirements of journals that there be no prior publication of the submitted work?   I ask because I’m drafting thesis chapters into journal articles and did not choose to publish the thesis as a whole work in order to do so, so I want to make sure that by clicking publish resources I am not actually publishing the copy I’ve uploaded, I’m just making it publicly available? Does this mean it becomes published despite it not technically being a published work? (If so, I’ll just remove the copy I uploaded).
73167
I have been approached to submit an extended version of a research paper in a journal. The original paper is already published in a conference proceedings by publisher A.   What "degree of extension" do I have to provide so that publisher B will (legally?) be able to publish my work?  Also, does "extended version" in this case mean additional results, or purely textual extension?
23777
I'd like to know your opinion on citations in abstracts. At my university, there is no rule on that matter so it's basically a question of preference.  Do you think it's okay to have citations in an abstract or do you  personally prefer to have the abstract be a ``stand-alone'' piece of  work?
7836
My father wrote some papers on cosmology that remained unpublished at the time of his death.  I have been looking for a publisher for them. I contacted IOP publishing but they said that, while Dad’s writings were interesting, they were not ready for publishing in any of their journals. For example, they need a reference list citing other current published research on the same topic.  I am not a scientist and have no idea how to do this. Where can I get help with this? Would something like  be a good idea?
113479
I recently completed a part of my project and communicated a paper to a conference. Let's call the paper's title as "project x: for this and that". Now, I wish to open-source project x to facilitate reproducible research and to have more (at least some) people use it (and cite it!).   Are there any specific drawbacks or risks involved in open-sourcing project x on, say, Github or Sourceforge? Do note here that I would still be improving on project x, and possibly sending the extended version to a journal (my area of work being Computer Science).  I understand that if a conference/journal requires double-blind review and my project is searchable on the Internet, I am revealing my identity to the reviewers. This is bad, right?  Are there any other cons I should be considering? And are there any pros of open-sourcing before a making it into a publication?
113178
I was contacted by the Acquisition editor of Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP) to publish my bachelor's thesis as a printed book. Is LAP any good? I have no idea about it; I have just heard that it's a freelance publishing house.
69325
I did some research with some collaborators, and we have been writing an article ("paper A") describing the work.  A few days ago I received a request to review an article ("paper B") that covers most of our work. The authors of paper B have clearly worked independently on the same topic and beaten us to submission. (And fair play to them.)  This leads me to a number of related dilemmas:  The first, and I think easiest to resolve, is whether I have a conflict of interest in reviewing paper B. I think I can write a fair review, but I intend to tell the editor and allow them to decide whether I should proceed.  The other dilemmas arise mainly because I am bound by peer-review confidentiality. I should note that paper B is not available as a preprint.  Can tell my co-authors about paper B? I am convinced that confidentiality forbids me from showing paper B to them, but can I tell them that it exists and what it covers? My feeling is that the answer is 'no'.  But then, if I cannot tell my co-authors about paper B, then it seems I have to allow our paper A to proceed to submission even although I know of the overlap with paper B.  I am extremely uncomfortable with this, although one can take the view that since our work was independent, our paper A could still be published.  Furthermore, my first impression is that paper B is not suitable for the general journal to which it was submitted, but that I would recommend acceptance to a high-quality specialist journal, such as the one to which we intended to submit our paper A. This raises an unpleasant prospect: if our paper A proceeds to submission and publication, the authors of paper B might believe that I had rejected their paper and plagarized their work (a situation discussed in ). This situation could arise even if I turn down the review request. Naturally, I want to avoid this.  How should I proceed? Could I ask the editor for permission to inform my co-authors about paper B?
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I'm aware that some institutions offer something that is called 'Thesis by Publication' (sandwich thesis) but that's not available to me. I'm trying to work out what pitfalls there may be to simply copying from papers that I have previously published in order to form large sections of my thesis.  The papers that I've published were largely designed to solve major problems encountered within the larger frame of research, so altogether they should follow a single coherent line of thought.  Must one's own work be cited in a thesis? This would be standard when submitting a paper for publication, but there is a stipulation when publishing papers that that work has not been already published elsewhere, and the same sort of thing does not really crop up with a thesis, does it?  Are there any other potentially pitfalls in this course of action?
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Is it legal to upload a paper to arXiv when it is under double blind review for one of the IEEE journals? I am suspicious that it may violate the double blind review requirements and I couldn't find any thing in the journal's homepage specific to this issue. In general IEEE allows preprint versions to be uploaded to arXiv.