Today being the last Monday of October, it’s a Bank Holiday here in Ireland – Lá Saoire i Mí Dheireadh Fómhair (literally, the Holiday at the End of the Month of October) so I had the morning off; I have a telecon this afternoon. This week is Study Week too so there are no lectures or tutorials until next Monday, when we resume for the seven remaing weeks of the Semester.
I’ll be travelling tomorrow to give a seminar at Queen’s University Belfast. My talk will have the title Open Access Publishing in Astrophysics and the Open Journal of Astrophysics, an updated version of a talk I’ve given in a number of places. over the past few years. I was looking at NASA/ADS just now to get the latest statistics and discovered that articles in the Open Journal of Astrophysics have now received over 10,000 citations at an average of 14.9 per paper. The average has been consistent since the first few years of publishing, which is interesting for the reason that our publishing rate is rising steadily so that most of our publications are very recent.
Anyway, I’m quite looking forward to the trip. The worst of the awful weather of the past few days seems to have passed and I hope I can make it to and from Belfast by train without the intervention of floods or fallen trees.
Another name for the present Bank Holiday is Lá Saoire Oíche Shamhna (Halloween Holiday), although Halloween itself does not occur until Saturday. I’ll be travelling again at the weekend, but this time purely for pleasure.
At this time of year many of the buildings of the historic South Campus are ablaze with Red Virginia Creeper:
It’s very pretty, but not good for the brickwork!
