Latest Comments on Science and Academia
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Springer Verlag adding insult to injury
Springer Verlag by way of its incompetence to properly edit manuscripts has been a royal pain in my butt for a long-time. In the most egregious example, one of their editors changed the title of what was a crowning paper of many years of research work. He turned “open source” into “open course”, completely altering…
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Response to Moshe @Vardi’s CACM editorial on open access
In the most recent CACM editor’s letter, Moshe Vardi, the CACM’s editor-in-chief, addresses the question of open access from the perspective of the ACM [1]. The ACM is a non-profit organization for (mostly) computer scientists, and a publisher of conference proceedings and journals. I find the editorial rather disconcerting. Vardi views “the open access movement”…
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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…