If I have one gripe to make about the otherwise excellent train service between Barcelona and Paris (and back) , it’s that the Wi-Fi connection was very unreliable and at times unusable. That mean that I couldn’t do some of the fairly complicated things I needed to do online because of frequent disconnections. The upside of being disconnected is that I have a good excuse for not attending telecons!
I did manage to publish one paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics yesterday, because I did the necessary before leaving my hotel in Paris. Unfortunately, I had to wait until I got back to Barcelona to check that everything had been correctly registered with Crossref. Only then could I promote the paper on social media. I’ll probably do a post here tomorrow about it.
These connectivity problems yesterday resulted in me spending most of my first day back in Barcelona catching up with such things as writing Google Docs and editing things via Overleaf but mainly dealing with new OJAp submissions.
There have been three four new submissions today alone, adding to the little backlog that developed over the short periods I was offline. These days we’re getting an average of one paper per day so if I can’t afford to miss many days as then it is difficult to catch up.
The two talks I gave while I was away were both about Open Access publishing in general, and the Open Journal of Astrophysics in particular, but I don’t think today’s little surge in submissions is a direct consequence of me touting for trade as I don’t think any of the authors concerned attended either talk even virtually.
It’s gratifying to see the number of submissions steadily increasing. I am sometimes frustrated – as I’m sure the authors are – by the slowness of the refereeing process but at least that’s no different from other journals I suppose.
Anyway, that’s enough reflections. Hopefully I’ll be able to spend this evening and tomorrow doing some writing of my own. Apart from tomorrow afternoon, when I’ll have yet another telecon…
In the Dark 