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Pay-to-Publish Academic Vanity Publishing

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on December 22, 2024 by telescoper

I’m not very good at keeping New Year’s resolutions, which is why I tend not to make many. I have however decided to make one for 2025. In future I will refer to any form of publishing in which the authors pay a fee as the ‘Pay-to-Publish’ model. This is much more descriptive of the reality of this form of the academic journal racket than terms such as “Gold Open Access”.

Many academic journals have switched to ‘Pay-to-Publish’ mode to maintain profit margines in response to demands that research outputs should be made freely available to read. This usually involves the payment of an Article Processing Charge, which is typically a four-figure sum in euros, pounds or dollars for each article.

Apart from the obvious danger with this model that the pressure to increase income by publishing more and more papers will lower editorial standards., the term ‘Open Access’ is inappropriate because, although the papers are free for anyone to read, authors are excluded if they cannot pay the fee. It seems to me that APC-driven publishers are therefore indistinguishable from what is usually called the Vanity Press. According to the Wikipedia page I just linked to,

[Vanity Publication]… has been described as a scam,[2] though, as the book does get printed, it does not necessarily rise to the level of fraud.[4] 

I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether it is fraudulent to charge an “Article Processing Charge” has nothing to do with the real cost of processing an article. I couldn’t possibly comment on that. It is, however, beyond question that it is a scam. I’m not the only person to think this. It is, without doubt, unethical.

I would argue that academic vanity is one of the main reasons for the very perpetuation of a publishing system that is so palpably absurd. There is among many academics and, especially, managers an unjustified reliance on journal brand-name or even impact factor as a proxy for the quality of a paper. This is despite the fact that we can easily measure impact for individual articles so there’s no need to rely on such things.

In any case I do think that it would be quite reasonable to warn potential readers of an article that its authors paid to have it published. How would you react if you saw the statement ‘The authors of this article paid to have it published’ at the start of an article? At least it might make you think about the reliability of the accompanying hype.

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Five New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 21, 2024 by telescoper

Time for the usual Saturday summary of papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. We have published five more papers since the last update a week ago. The count in Volume 7 (2024) is now up to 119 and the total altogether to 234. As I mentioned in a post last week this means we have published more papers this year (2024) than in all previous years put together.

In chronological order, the five papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.

First one up, published on Wednesday 18th December 2024 is “The picasso gas model: Painting intracluster gas on gravity-only simulations” byby Florian Kéruzoré, L. E. Bleem, N. Frontiere, N. Krishnan, M. Buehlmann, J. D. Emberson, S. Habib, and P. Larsen all of the Argonne National Laboratory, USA.  The paper, which is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics describes a method using machine learning based on an analytical gas model to predict properties of the intracluster medium.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:

 

 

You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

The second paper to announce, and the first of four published on Wednesday 19th December 2024, “maria: A novel simulator for forecasting (sub-)mm observations” by J. van Marrewijk (ESO, Garching, Germany) and 10 others based in Germany, USA, Norway, France and Italy. This paper describes a multi-purpose telescope simulator that optimizes scanning strategies and instrument designs, produces synthetic time-ordered data, time streams, and maps from hydrodynamical simulations, thereby enabling comparison between theory and observations. This one is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.

You can see the overlay here:

The accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The third paper  is “Detached Circumstellar Matter as an Explanation for Slowly-Rising Interacting Type Ibc Supernovae” by Yuki Takei (Kyoto U., Japan) & Daichi Tsuna (Caltech, USA). This one was also published on 19th December and is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The overlay is here:

 

 

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here.

The fourth paper, also published on 19th December 2024, is called “On the dark matter content of ultra-diffuse galaxies” and was written by Andrey Kravtsov (U. Chicago, USA).  The article discusses the implications of measured velocity dispersions of ultra-diffuse galaxies for models of galaxy formation and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here

 

You can find the officially accepted version of this paper here.

The fifth paper in this batch is “Estimating Exoplanet Mass using Machine Learning on Incomplete Datasets” by Florian Lalande (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology), Elizabeth Tasker (Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Kanagawa) and Kenji Doya (Okinawa); all based in Japan. This one was published on 10th October 2024 in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. It compares different methods for inferring exoplanet masses in catalogues with missing data

 

You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.

Finally for this week we have “A new non-parametric method to infer galaxy cluster masses from weak lensing” by Tobias Mistele (Case Western Reserve University, USA) and Amel Durakovic (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia). This one was also published on 19th December and is in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.  The overlay is here

 

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here.

That’s in for this week. I will do another update next Saturday only if we have any new papers on Monday. I will be taking a break over Christmas and also preparing Volume 8 (2025) for the new year, so publishing will be suspended from 24th December until 2nd January (inclusive). If you want your paper to be published in 2024 the final version must be on arXiv by Monday 23rd December at the latest, otherwise it will be held over until 2025.

 

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Extrapolation of the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on December 18, 2024 by telescoper

This morning I published another paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, taking the total number of publications for this year to 115 and the total altogether to 230. This means that we have now published as many papers this year as we have in all previous years combined. Here’s a table showing the sequence of papers published over the last six years and the series formed from the aforementioned sequence:

Year201920202021202220232024
Papers1215171750115*
Total16314865115230

(*=not out)

We’ll probably publish a few more by the end of the year – there seems to be a bit of a rush right now of people submitting papers before the break – so the final column may change. Anyway, the bigger question is I wonder what will happen next year? Extrapolating from the last two years using a simple model, we will publish about 230 papers next year, 460 the year after that, then 920, 1820, etc. Even at that optimistic rate it will take us several years to catch up to the big astronomical publishers, who publish thousands of papers per year.

As Niels Bohr once said “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” but I wonder if anyone would like to make a guess as to how many papers we will publish in 2025. This time next year we’ll see who was closest. The prize will be a year’s free subscription to the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

Still, after a slow start it’s very gratifying to be accelerating. I’m certainly glad that I managed to use some of my sabbatical time automating the publishing side of the OJAp operation otherwise I’d definitely be struggling to keep up!

Anyway, this gives me the opportunity to make a small announcement about the forthcoming Christmas break. The site will remain open for submissions throughout the festive season, but please be aware that our volunteer Editors all deserve a bit of rest – as do referees – so progress may be slow at this time.

You may or may not know that the Scholastica platform we use is actually two distinct websites: one for peer review (used by all editors and authors); and the other for publishing (to which I, as Managing Editor, have sole access). I will be taking a break over Christmas and also preparing Volume 8 (2025) for the new year, so publishing will be suspended from 24th December until 2nd January (inclusive). If you want your paper to be published in 2024 the final version must be on arXiv by Monday 23rd December at the latest, otherwise it will be held over until 2025.

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Qeios and the Nature of a Journal

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on December 15, 2024 by telescoper

Last week I encountered, for the first time, a website called Qeios.com. This is a platform that does peer review of preprints and then posts those approved with Open Access. It also issues a DOI for approved articles. Qeios is also a member of Crossref so presumably the metadata for these articles is deposited there too.

You might think this is the same as what the Open Journal of Astrophysics does, but it is a bit different. For one thing, it is not an arXiv overlay journal so the preprints actually appear on the Qeios platform, though I suppose there’s nothing to stop authors posting on arXiv either before or after Qeios. Since most astrophysicists find their research on arXiv, the overlay concept seems more efficient than the Qeios one.

Anyway, my attention was drawn to Qeios by an astrophysicist who had been asked to review an article for Qeios that is already under consideration by OJAp. In our For Authors page there is this:

No paper should be submitted to The Open Journal of Astrophysics that is already published elsewhere or is being considered for publication by another journal.

This rule is adopted by many journals and has in the past led to authors being banned for breaking it. Apart from anything else it means that the community is not bombarded with multiple review requests for the same paper (as in the case above). There is an issue of research misconduct, the definition of which varies from one institution to another. For reference here is what it says in Maynooth University’s Research Integrity Policy statement:

Publication of multiplier papers based on the same set(s) or sub-set(s) of data is not acceptable, except where there is full cross-referencing within the papers. An author who submits substantially similar work to more than one publisher must disclose this to the publishers at the time of submission.

The document also specifically refers to “artificially proliferating publications” as an example of research misconduct. Authors whose papers do end up in multiple journals could thus find themselves in very hot water with their employers as a consequence.

Getting back to the specifics of Qeios and OJAp, however, there two questions about whether this rule applicable in this situation. One is that the preprint may have been submitted to Qeios after submission to OJAp, which means the rule as written is not violated. Authors of papers published by OJAp retain full copyright of their work so we can’t control what they do after publication, but if they try to publish it again in another journal they will fall foul of the rule there.

The other is whether Qeios counts as a “another journal” in the first place. Instead of going into the definition of what a journal is, I’ll refer you to an old post of mine in which I wrote this:

I’d say that, at least in my discipline, traditional journals are simply no longer necessary for communicating scientific research. I find all the  papers I need to do my research on the arXiv and most of my colleagues do the same. We simply don’t need old-fashioned journals anymore.  Yet we keep paying for them. It’s time for those of us who believe that  we should spend as much of our funding as we can on research instead of throwing it away on expensive and outdated methods of publication to put an end to this absurd system. We academics need to get the academic publishing industry off our backs.

The point that I have made many times is that the only thing that journals do of any importance is to organize peer-review. The publishing side of the business is simply unnecessary. Journals do not add value to an article, they just add cost. The one thing they do – peer review – is not done by them but by members of the academic community.

There is a thread on Bluesky by Ethan Vishniac (Editor-in-Chief of the Astrophysical Journal) about Qeios. There are six parts so please bear with me if I include them all to show context:

This thread is for authors of scientific papers, and particularly astronomers. I struggled a bit with how explicit I had to be, but I think including a name is important. We (meaning all the major journals) have rules against submitting a manuscript to more than one journal at a time. 1/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.368Z

People who ignore this rule can find themselves banned from submitting papers for years. Recently we had a case where a potential referee noted that he had just been asked to review the same paper by someone else. 2/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.369Z

I wrote the author, who was startled and explained that he had been asked to allow his preprint to be posted at Qeios.com and that he had agreed – the issue of peer review was never raised and posting a preprint is not an ethical violation. It’s a normal part of the process. 3/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.370Z

He cc'd me the emails and I would have read it the same way. Qeios.com takes the position that they are not a journal, but a website that vets papers through peer review. The AAS journals (and as far as I know, all other professional journals) does not regard this as a meaningful distinction. 4/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.371Z


We ban this kind of simultaneous submission in order to avoid over-burdening the community with review requests and because we do not want to encourage people to shop for a referee who will not give significant feedback. The task of reviewing a paper is time-consuming but important service. 5/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.372Z

There is no point in participating in a process which makes this work meaningless. TDLR submit to the AAS journals, or submit to Qeios.com , or any other journal of your choice, but remember that it is a choice. Also, you can post to the ArXiv as well. It's fine. 6/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.373Z

This thread repeats much of what I’ve said already, but I’d like to draw your attention to the 4th of these messages, which contains

Qeios.com takes the position that they are not a journal, but a website that vets papers through peer review. The AAS journals (and as far as I know, all other professional journals) does not regard this as a meaningful distinction.

I’m not sure what a journal actually is, as I think it is an outmoded concept, but I agree with Ethan Vishniac that to all intents and purposes Qeios is a journal. It has an ISSN that says as much too. On the other hand, this quote seems to me to contain a tacit acceptance that the only thing that defines a journal is that it vets papers by peer review, which is the point I made above.

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Four New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 14, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning once again so here’s another quick update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update a week ago we have published  four papers, which takes the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 114 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 229. If we publish just one more paper between now and the end of the year, we will have published as many papers in 2024 as we have in all previous years.

Anyway, in chronological order of publication, the four papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.

First one up is “Star formation beyond galaxies: widespread in-situ formation of intra-cluster stars” by Niusha Ahvazi & Laura V. Sales (UC Riverside, USA), Julio F. Navarro (U. Victoria, Canada), Andrew Benson (Carnegie Obs. USA), Alessandro Boselli (Aix Marseille U., France) and Richard D’Souza (Vatican Obs.). The paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, The paper presents a simulation-based analysis of a diffuse star forming component in galaxy clusters extending for hundreds of kiloparsecs and tracing the distribution of neutral gas in the cluster host halo.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:

You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

The second paper to announce, published on 10th December 2024 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is “Cosmological Constraints from Combining Photometric Galaxy Surveys and Gravitational Wave Observatories” by E.L. Gagnon, D. Anbajagane, J. Prat, C. Chang, and J. Frieman (all of U. Chicago, USA). This article quantifies the expected cosmological information gain from combining the forecast LSST 3x2pt analysis with the large-scale auto-correlation of GW sources from proposed next-generation GW experiments.

You can see the overlay here:

The accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The third paper, also published on 10th December 2024, but in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, has the title “A potential exomoon from the predicted planet obliquity of β Pictoris b” and is written by Michael Poon, Hanno Rein, and Dang Pham all of the University of Toronto, Canada. It presents discussion, based on the β Pictoris system, of the idea that the presence of exomoons can excite misalignment between the spin and orbit axis (obliquity) in exoplanet systems

Here is the overlay

The final version accepted on arXiv is here.

Last of this quartet, published on 11th December 2024, and in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics is “Map-level baryonification: Efficient modelling of higher-order correlations in the weak lensing and thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich fields” and is by Dhayaa Anbajagane & Shivam Pandey (U. Chicago) and Chihway Chang (Columbia U.), all based in the USA.

The paper proposes an extension of the semi-analytic formalism to weak lensing and thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) fields directly on the full-sky, with an emphasis on higher-order correlations. The overlay is here:

You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.

That’s all for this week. I’ll do another update next Saturday, and that will probably be the last one of the year. If we publish just one more paper between now and 31st December, we will have published as many papers in 2024 as we have in all previous years put together!

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The Journal of Universal Rejection

Posted in Open Access on December 10, 2024 by telescoper

As (both) my regular readers know I have a strong interest in innovative publication methods, I thought I would share a very intriguing one I have just found out about:

I think this approach might help us at the Open Journal of Astrophysics cut our running costs still further. Gold Open Access journals have an incentive to publish as many papers as possible to increase revenue from Article Processing Charges, whereas we Diamond journals have an incentive in the opposite direction. This journal would appear to take that to its logical conclusion.

I think I’ll apply to be on the Editorial Board. It must be a very prestigious to bea member of the Editorial Board of a journal with such a high rejection rate!

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Four New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on December 7, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Satuday morning once again so here’s another quick update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update a week ago we have published  four papers, which takes the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 110 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 225.

In chronological order of publication, the four papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.

First one up is “The impact of feedback on the evolution of gas density profiles from galaxies to clusters: a universal fitting formula from the Simba suite of simulations” by Daniele Sorini & Sownak Bose (Durham University, UK), Romeel Davé (University of Edinburgh, UK), and Daniel Anglés-Alcázar (University of Connecticut, USA). The paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, presents a study of the effects of stellar and/or AGN feedback on the shape and evolution of gas density profiles in galaxy haloes using the SIMBA simulations. It was published on Tuesday 3rd December 2024.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:

 

You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

The second paper to announce, also published on 3rd December 2024, and is also the folder “Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Self-regulated growth of galaxy sizes along the star-forming main sequence” by Shweta Jain (U. Kentucky, USA), Sandro Tacchella (U. Cambridge, UK) and Moein Mosleh (Shiraz University, Iran).  This paper suggestes an identification of a possible self-regulating mechanism in galaxy size growth involving the interplay between feedback from star formation and newly accreted gas.

You can see the overlay here:

 

The accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The third paper, published on Thursday 6th December 2024 in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is called  “BLAST: Beyond Limber Angular power Spectra Toolkit. A fast and efficient algorithm for 3×2 pt analysis” by Sofia Chiarenza, Marco Bonici & Will Percival (Waterloo, Canada) and Martin White (Berkeley, USA). It presents BLAST, an efficient algorithm for calculating angular power spectra without employing the Limber approximation or assuming a scale-dependent growth rate, based on the use of Chebyshev polynomials. The code is written in Julia.

Here is the overlay

 

 

The final version accepted on arXiv is here.

Last in this batch, published on 6th December 2024, and in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “On the universality of star formation efficiency in galaxies” by Ava Polzin & Andrey V. Kravtsov (U. Chicago) and Vadim A. Semenov & Nickolay Y. Gnedin (CfA Harvard), all based in the USA. The paper presents an argument that the universality of observational estimates of star formation efficiency per free-fall time can be plausibly explained by the turbulence-driven and feedback-regulated properties of star-forming regions.

You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.

We seem to have recovered from a small Thanksgiving lull and, looking at the OJAp workflow, I think we’ll have a similar number of publications next week. I’ll do another update next weekend!

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in Maynooth, OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on November 30, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning once again so it’s time for the usual weekly update of publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This week’s report will be short because, like last week, there is only one paper to report this week, being  the 106th paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 221st  altogether. It was published on Thursday 28th November 2024. We have some more papers in the publishing pipeline, which I thought might appear, but they didn’t come out this week possibily because of the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA.

Anyway, The title of the latest paper is “Growth of Light-Seed Black Holes in Gas-Rich Galaxies at High Redshift” by Daxal Mehta, John Regan and Lewis Prole (all of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth*. This paper presents a discussion of the rate of growth of black holes in the early Universe on the basis of simulations run using the Arepo code.

Here is the overlay of the paper containing the abstract:

 

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can also find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

That’s all for this week – tune in next Saturday for next week’s update!

*The authors being from Maynooth, I of course recused myself from the editorial process for this article.

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on November 23, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning so it’s time for the usual weekly update of publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This week’s report will be short because there is only one paper to report this week, being  the 105th paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 220th  altogether. It was published on Wednesday 19th November 2024.

The title of the latest paper is”Early Bright Galaxies from Helium Enhancements in High-Redshift Star Clusters” and the authors are Harley Katz (U. Chicago), Alexander P. Ji (U. Chicago), Grace Telford (Princeton) & Peter Senchyna (Carnegie Observatories), all based in the USA. This paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, discusses chemical abundance – specfically Helium enhancement – as a factor in the luminosity of high-redshift galaxies

Here is the overlay of the paper containing the abstract:

 

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can also find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

That’s all for this week – tune in next Saturday for next week’s update!

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Galactic Outflows

Posted in Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on November 22, 2024 by telescoper

We have a visiting speaker for a colloquium this afternoon in the form of Dr Martin Rey, formerly of Oxford University and now a lecturer at the University of Bath. Last night at dinner I learned that he has a YouTube channel called Cosmic Rey (geddit?) so I thought I’d share one of the videos here.

The paper relating to this video can be found on the arXiv here.

P.S. Martin has now joined the Editorial Board of the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

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