Latest Comments on Science and Academia
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The economics of financing Ph.D. students as company contractors
Occasionally companies approach me with the following proposal: If I’m willing to supervise one of their employees for an external Ph.D. thesis, they’ll pay into my University budget an annual lump sum, typically something like EUR 10000. I almost always reject such proposals, unless I can change some of the critical terms, because these proposals…
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Appropriate reviewer remuneration
As an academic, I perform a fair number of reviews. Usually, that’s part of the system, i.e. it is a give and take and fair exchange between colleagues and publishers without any monetary remuneration changing hands at all. Then my university library complained about Elsevier’s predatory pricing and I decided to stop reviewing papers for…
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How I write reviews
As a professor of computer science I get to write a lot of reviews: For Bachelor and Master theses, for dissertations, for grant proposals, and for conference and journal paper submissions. I’d like to explain the logic of the reviews I write, using conference and journal submissions as the example. It is pretty simple: The…
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Research, teaching, and startup concept of my professorship (in German)
Over on my research group’s blog at Friedrich-Alexander University I finished summarizing the underlying concepts for the three cornerstones of my professorship: The research concept The teaching concept The start-up concept I wrote it in German, as this is reaches the target group best; as always, Google Translate is your friend, and if you are…
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Elsevier the unpublisher
The battle on the web over academic publishing is heating up, and Elsevier is apparently sending take-down notices to competitor Academia.edu. If there is a publisher loathed by researchers, it is probably Elsevier. (Not so much by me, as I never published with them, but by many others whose papers they keep hostage.) I have…
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Upcoming talk: Open source in university projects (in German)
I’ll be giving a talk on open source strategies for university projects: How to set-up student projects for start-ups and how to organize research projects using open source for the common good. The talk is in German and will be held at the Johannes Kepler Universität (of Linz, Austria). The talk will take place on…