Archive for Maynooth Academic Publishing

10 Years of the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth, OJAp Papers, Open Access with tags , , on February 8, 2026 by telescoper

The visit of my former PhD student Mateja Gosenca to Maynooth last year reminded me that she was co-author of the very first paper published by the Open Journal of Astrophysics. The date of publication for that paper was 8th February 2016, i.e. excactly10 years ago today.

Here is the overlay:

In those days OJAp was very much an experiment, and we used a protoptype platform which I had paid a developer to set up but it never really progressed beyond a “beta” version owing to stability and other issues. I was a Head of School at Sussex then and had very little time to work on the project and it stalled. I came to Maynooth in late 2017 and discussed the idea of OJAp with staff at the Library who were enthusiastic about it. We abandoned the prototype and switched to the Scholastica platform, imported the papers we had previously published into the new site and restarted. It was slow going at first and then we had the Covid-19 lockdown tand I had to conted with a workload that went through the roof. Several times I thought it was never going to take off and wondered about closing it to new submissions. With a bit of pig-headed obstinacy and a refusal to look facts in the face, however, we carried on.

The journal has grown steadily since the end of the pandemuic: from just 17 papers in 2022, 50 in 2023, 120 in 2024, to 213 last year (including our first Supplement). I expect we’ll publish over 250 this year. I think a large part of the growth has been due to the decision of the Royal Astronomical Society to adopt a pay-to-publish model. I expected it to take a while to establish a reputation, but perhaps not as long as it did. We’re still quite small compared to other journals, but I’m pleased with the progress. I think in the long run the slow start helped, as it gave us more time to iron out various issues and recruit more editors.

This brings me to the fact that I will be retiring in a couple of years, if not sooner, and someone else will have to take over as Editor-in-Chief when that happens. At present, OJAp is published by Maynooth Academic Publishing and it’s not obvious that arrangement can continue when I am no longer employed at Maynooth. It would not be technically difficult to transfer everything to a new owner, but the handover would have to be planned to avoid disruption.

P.S. As I mentioned last month, we are always on the lookout for new Editors. Please contact me if you’re interesed!

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Changes at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in Maynooth, Open Access with tags , , , , , , , on April 1, 2024 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog – both of them – will have noticed that I haven’t posted any new publications from the Open Journal of Astrophysics for a couple of weeks. The reason for this is that we are switching to a new system of publishing that automatically integrates the Scholastica platform with Crossref, the system that (among many other things) keeps track of citations to published articles.

Up to now, I have had to prepare manually an XML file containing the metadata for each paper for upload, then send it to a colleague to register with Crossref. There are two problems with this. One is that transcribing the information from each overlay is prone to errors (made by me), especially if there is a long author list. The other problem is that it is rather slow and inefficient, which wasn’t such a problem when we were only publishing a few papers, but now that we are handling much more it is taking up too much time.

The obvious solution is to cut out the middle man (i.e. me) and register everything with Crossref directly from our platform. That will ensure that what goes to Crossref will be exactly the same as on our website and it will go there much faster. Another advantage is that if there is an error on the platform, such as a spelling mistake in an author name, correcting it there will automatically update the metadata on Crossref. You have no idea how much time and frustration this will save. Up to now we have to raise a ticket with Crossref for their staff to make the change, which can take a while to complete.

Scholastica offers a way to do this integration, but it doesn’t work with our existing Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), which have the format 10.21105/astro.1234.56789, because it doesn’t allow us to include the “astro” which we need it to do because we share the prefix (10.21105) with another journal, the Journal of Open Source Software and we need to keep the two separate; they use 10.21105/joss at the start of their DOIs. After much to-ing and fro-ing we were unable to persuade Scholastica to change their policy, so to use their integration we have been forced to change prefix. Fortunately, Maynooth University (which runs Maynooth Academic Publishing, the official publisher of OJAp) is registered to mint its own DOIs so we can switch to a new prefix (10.33232) and avoid potential problems with the old one.

This change seems straightforward but it requires Crossref to switch the “ownership” of the journal and give us permission to add new papers with the same journal title “The Open Journal of Astrophysics” from what is effect a new publisher. This is a straightforward process, but has been a bit slower than expected because of the Easter break. I expect it to be completed in a week or so, at the latest.

It is important to stress that this change only affects the DOIs and registration of new papers. Existing papers are not affected at all: they continue with the old DOIs. The DOI is meant to be a persistent identifier so this is as it should be. The name of our website domain (astro.theoj.org) remains unchanged too. In other words, nothing visible to authors will change except for the format of the DOIs and the fact we go from acceptance to publication even faster.

If al this seems rather boring, that’s because it is. But please bear with us while we complete this change. It’s definitely going to be worth it in the long run, for me if nobody else!

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Another Day, Another Open Access Talk..

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth, Open Access with tags , , on October 26, 2018 by telescoper

So having exercised my franchise earlier this morning, I found myself in Maynooth University Library giving yet another talk about Open Access publishing as part of Open Access Week.

I’ve got a lecture at noon, which will be the last one I give before the half-term `Study Week’ which begins with a bank holiday on Monday 29th October (Lá Saoire i mí Dheireadh Fómhair). It’s very nice to have a break before Christmas like this. Also the University study week is timed to be the same as School half-term holidays, which is good for those members of staff who have kids of school age.

Well, that’s enough blogging. I need to get my vector calculus notes together. I’m doing line integrals today, by the way

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The Open Journal Launch Event

Posted in Maynooth with tags , , , , on October 9, 2018 by telescoper

Tuesday afternoons are usually quite busy for me, with teaching sessions from 12-2 and 3-4 this term, but today turned into almost four consecutive hours of activity as I gave a talk on Open Science at a lunchtime event as part of Maynooth University’s Library `Publication Festival’ which, in turn, is part of `Research Week’. I talked about Open Science generally from the point of view of astrophysics for a bit, but the main purpose of the event was to launch the Open Journal of Astrophysics which also marks the debut of Maynooth Academic Publishing as an OA publisher. Fortunately I’d managed to get everything up and running before the talk so I was able to show the assembled throng the actual journal with actual papers.

Anyway, here are my slides if you’re interested.

P.S. The gentleman at the left of the picture is Professor Philip Nolan, the President of Maynooth University, who launched today’s event.

P.P.S. I’d like to point out that I did not mock the UK Prime Minister Theresa May by dancing at the podium prior to my presentation.

 

 

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