In the Dark

Tomorrow I’ll be travelling to the fine city of Cork, where I shall be for most of next week, attending the 2025 Annual Meeting of the European Astronomical Society I was planing to travel today, but I have some things to attend to at home tomorrow morning so I won’t get to Cork until late afternoon.

The EAS Annual Meeting is a very large meeting with well over a thousand participants expected. It is held each year in a different European city but, according to tradition, never a capital. Last year it was in Padova (Italy) and the year before that in Kraków (Poland).

I usually enjoy smaller-scale meetings and workshops over these mega-conferences, but I’m looking forward to this one. There will be a strong Maynooth contingent there but I also hope to see some old friends from elsewhere, as well as catching up on some exciting science results.

Talking of science, I am on the Scientific Organizing Committee for this meeting. The programme is very large and diverse and there were a few headaches on the way, but nothing compared to the logistical challenges facing the local organizers; they will probably reach peak stress levels ahead of the opening of the meeting, but I’m sure everything will go well. The Irish National Astronomy Meeting (INAM) was actually held in Cork in 2023. Although a much smaller meeting than EAS, the experience of running that will probably have helped the organizers.

I’m not actually giving a talk at EAS but I will be participating in a panel discussion in a special session on The Future of Scientific Publishing: Strategies and Challenges for Astronomy on Tuesday 24th June. When I saw the initial announcement for this special session, I was was concerned that it would be entirely dominated by representatives of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and their publisher EDP Sciences. The first session (9.00 to 10.30) titled “SCIENCE PUBLISHING TODAY AND TOMORROW” is still like that, but the panel discussion in the second session (13.15 to 14.45) “SCIENCE PUBLISHING: A COMMUNITY’S VIEW” is a bit more balanced than that, with a representatives of NASA/ADS and the European Southern Observatory (among others). If I’m given an opportunity to get a word in, I’ll be arguing that traditional journals are unnecessary and obsolete.

This entry was posted on June 22, 2025 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Biographical, Open Access with tags Cork, EAS 2025, European Astronomical Society, Open Journal of Astrophysics, The Open Journal of Astrophysics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.