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Three New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 10, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday so it’s time once again for another roundup of business at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics. After last week’s summer lull, this week I have three papers to announce, which brings the total we have published so far this year (Vol. 7) to 67 and the total published by OJAp to 182.

First one up, published on 7th August 2024, is “Brightest Cluster Galaxy Offsets in Cold Dark Matter” by Jonathan Katz of Washington University (St Louis, Missouri, USA),  a simulation-based study of the distribution of the position of brightest cluster galaxies relative to the dark matter distribution and its possible use as a cosmological probe.  The authors are Cian Roche (MIT), Michael McDonald (MIT), Josh Borrow (MIT), Mark Vogelsberger (MIT), Xuejian Shen (MIT), Volker Springel (MPA Garching), Lars Hernquist (Harvard), Ruediger Pakmor (Harvard), Sownak Bose (Durham, UK) and Rahul Kannan (York U., Canada). This paper is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

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

 

 

You can read the paper directly on arXiv here.

The second paper to present is “LAMOST J1010+2358 is not a Pair-Instability Supernova Relic” by five authors based in the USA: Pierre Thibodeaux (Chicago), Alexander P. Ji (Chicago), William Cerny (Yale), Evan N. Kirby (Notre Dame) and Joshua D. Simon (Carnegie Observatories) .  As the title makes clear, the paper presents arguments against previous claims that a particular star is not a pair-instability supernova relic. This paper is in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It was published on Friday August 9th 2024.

The overlay looks like this:

 

 

 

You can read this paper directly on the arXiv here.

Last, but by no means least, comes  “A Pilot Search for Gravitational Self-Lensing Binaries with the Zwicky Transient Facility“, results of a trial search for signals of gravitational lensing of one component in a binary system by a compact companion, with a discussion of future prospects for larger surveys. This one, which was also published on 9th August, is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The authors are Allison Crossland & Eric C Bellm (U. Washington), Courtney Klein (UC Irvine), James R. A. Davenport (U. Washington), Thomas Kupfer (Hamburg Observatory) and Steven L. Groom, Russ R. Laher & Reed Riddle (Caltech).

Here is a screengrab of the overlay:

To read the accepted version of this on the arXiv please go here.

That’s it for this week. I hope to post another update next weekend.

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Open Access Encounters: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on August 7, 2024 by telescoper

As it was foretold on Saturday, this afternoon I gave a talk at the 32nd General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union currently taking place in Cape Town, or rather at a side event thereof called Open Access Encounters: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. I actually gave the last talk in the session, which may or may not mean that I was representing The Ugly…

About 50 people attended online plus an unknown number in person, so it was quite a decent size of audiance.

I’m not sure if Slideshare is still working on WordPress, but if not here is a PDF of the slides.

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/2KaeVtUSNTngpq?hostedIn=slideshare&page=upload

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Open Access Updates & Announcements

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on August 3, 2024 by telescoper

When I wrote last week’s update on papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, I was a little surprised that our publishing activity had not tailed off because of the summer vacations. Well, it has now because we haven’t publish any papers this week! Rather than not post an update at all, however, I thought I’d point out a few interesting things that have happened in the world of open access.

First. I draw your attention to an article in C&EN (Chemical & Engineering News) reflecting on the fact that the Gates Foundation (one of the largest research charities in the world) announced in March 2024 that, starting from Jan. 1, 2025, it would no longer cover publishing costs. I actually wrote about this decision here. The article is largely about the threat this poses to the Gold Open Access model, which in my opinion thoroughly deserves to be threatened. It does, however, talk briefly about Diamond Open Access which commercial publishers don’t like as it removes – or should do – their source of profits:

Another alternative model is diamond OA, in which all research papers and their associated peer-reviewed reports are published without fees for the author or the reader and are also freely available to read and reuse. 

It goes on to say:

Under diamond OA, publishers are no longer gatekeepers of research. Instead, they become service providers that handle manuscript submissions, typesetting, and copyediting. This is in contrast to the current publishing system, in which the publisher controls everything from the copyright to the production process.

I don’t really agree with even the limited role of “service providers” mentioned here, as much of what that role entails just involves a decent reviewing platform. Elsewhere the article says that moving to Diamond OA would entail a significant cost. That may be but, as I’ve said over and over again, the actual cost of online publishing is low compared to the level of profit extracted by commercial publishers. The cost to academia of moving to Diamond OA would be much less than not moving to Diamond OA.

The second item I’d like to draw your attention is called Choosing a publisher? It’s not all about the impact factor and is by Antigoni Messaritaki, a senior publisher at IOP Publishing,  When I saw the title I thought that it might be about the uselessness of Journal Impact Factors and a commitment by IOP Publishing to stop using them. Sadly it’s nothing of the sort. It tries to entice authors to look beyond journal impact factors when choosing a publisher, pushing Open Access as an important factor to consider. It admits that APCs are expensive, but never even mentions Diamond OA. It’s an entirely self-serving piece. I find the IOP’s stance on publishing, and the disingenuous way they try to excuse their own profiteering, unethical and unacceptable. That’s why I resigned my fellowship of the IOP.

Last, and by all means least, I should draw your attention that the 32nd General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union takes place next week in Cape Town. I’m not attending in person – I’ve done enough travelling this year! – but I have accepted an invitation to give a remote talk at a side event called Open Access Encounters on Wednesday 7th August:

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Taighde Éireann

Posted in Maynooth, Open Access, Science Politics with tags , , , , , , , , , , on July 31, 2024 by telescoper

On 1st August 2024, i.e. tomorrow, a new funding organization comes into existence in Ireland, formed by the merger of SFI with the Irish Research Council. The new outfit is called Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland and many of us working in Irish academia were optimistic that it might improve the funding environment in Ireland, especially with regard to basic research.

Taighde Éireann has not got off to a very promising start. In particular, the long-running saga of who would be Chief Executive Officer of the new organization does not inspire confidence. Professor Philip Nolan, former Director-General of Science Foundation Ireland was originally intended to take the helm, but then he was dismissed from his position at SFI which made the prospect of him taking over the new organization seem less likely. Indeed, more recently, it was announced that a new temporary CEO would be appointed “pending the recruitment of a new CEO on a permanent basis”.

Starting with a caretaker manager is far from ideal, although it probably just means that the interim CEO will just look after transferring activity from IRC and SFI to the new organization without actually changing much. I just hope that in the long run a person is appointed who actually understands research rather than a generic management type. Otherwise the only change that will actually happen will be purely administrative rather than the systemic overhaul of attitudes and culture that Ireland really needs. As an outsider, one way of reading the controversy of the CEO the current SFI establishment resisting any possibility of change.

From my own perspective, the fundamental problem is that research funding for fundamental science in Ireland is so limited as to be virtually non-existent by a matter of policy at Science Foundation Ireland, which basically only funds applied research. This is a short-sighted and damaging policy that is causing, among other things, a significant exodus of talented young researchers to opportunities elsewhere (especially in the EU).

I know there will be many competing calls for changes in practice for the new Council but I thought I would add a few suggestions that will probably be ignored but which I’ll make anyway.

  1. A funding stream should be set up to enable scientific exploitation of Ireland’s current memberships of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), European Space Agency (ESA) and future membership of CERN. Ireland’s membership of ESO provides a cautionary tale. The Irish astronomical community was very happy about the decision to join ESO, but that decision was not accompanied by significant funding to exploit the telescopes. Few astronomers have therefore been able to benefit from ESO membership. While there are other benefits of course, the return to science has been extremely limited. The phrase “to spoil a ship for a ha’porth of tar” springs to mind. Even a few PDRA and PhD positions would provide an enormous boost.
  2. There should be far less emphasis on top-down funding ventures, such as the research “Centres”. These lock up a huge amount of money which makes it much more difficult to provide support to exciting curiosity-driven research, which is often where real innovation occurs. Let’s have much more responsive-modem grants, including areas of basic research currently excluded by SFI policy. This could be done by simply expanding the remit of the SFI Frontiers programme.
  3. The current IRC Laureate programme is inadequate. This currently has one call every four years. It should be annual, even if fewer positions are funded in each round, to allow it to be more responsive.
  4. Ban the use of any funds from the new organization being wasted on Gold Open Access, but invest in Diamond Open Access activities across all disciplines (i.e. Arts and Humanities as well as Science).
  5. Work with Government to provide a much more coherent system of funding research infrastructure, including if necessary requiring HEIs to commit a share of their surpluses to capital projects. In the UK, for example, capital projects funded by research councils usually require 50% institutional contribution.

That’s just five off the top of my head. I’m sure others will have suggestions. If so, please feel free to make suggestions through the comments box below.

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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 July 27, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning, so once again it’s time for an update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This week we have published another batch of four papers, the same number as last week, which takes the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 64 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 179.

Before announcing the week’s papers I’ll add three other updates you might find interesting:

  1.  When I looked at NASA/ADS this morning to help construct this post I saw that papers published in OJAp have now garnered over 2500 citations between them;
  2. We had a good response to our recent call for new members of the Editorial Board and have added four new members here;
  3. Last week we received a significant (unsolicited) cash donation from a higher education institution based in Europe to help with our work in Diamond Open Access. If any other organizations or individuals would like to do similar then please contact me!

Now, in chronological order, 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: “Widespread disruption of resonant chains during protoplanetary disk dispersal by Bradley M S Hansen (UCLA), Tze-Yeung Yu (UCLA) and Yasuhiro Hasegawa (JPL), all based in California, USA.  The paper presents a discussion of the effect of a dispersing protoplanetary disk on the evolution of low-mass planets around a Solar mass star.  It was published on 21st July 2024 and is in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics.

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 is “Using A One-Class SVM To Optimize Transit Detection” by Jakob Roche of the University of South Florida, also in the USA (but not in California). This articles discusses the advantages of One-Class Support Vector Machines (SVMs) over Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in the context of exoplanet detection. Its in the folder called Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics and was published on 25th July 2024.

You can see the overlay here:

 

 

 

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

The next paper, also published on 25th July 2024, is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. Its primary classification on arXiv is General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc), but it is cross-listed on astro-ph so we considered it for publication and had it refereed, with favourable results. It is entitled “What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse” and is by Katy Clough (QMUL, UK), Tim Dietrich (Potsdam, Germany) and Sebastian Khan (Cardiff, UK).  Looking at the title of this paper you might be tempted to dismiss it on the grounds that warp drives are the stuff of science fiction (which they are), but this paper is really a rigorous technical study of the dynamical evolution and stability of spacetimes that violate the null energy condition, inspired by the idea of a warp drive.

Here is the overlay:

 

 

You can find the full text for this one on the arXiv here.

Last, published on 26th July 2024, we have a paper with the title “A study of gamma-ray emission from OJ 287 using Fermi-LAT from 2015-2023” by Vibhavasu Pasumarti and Shantanu Desai of the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India. It is an investigation of the properties of gamma-ray emission from OJ287 (a BL Lac object) using the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT).  This one is also in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena; here is the overlay

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

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned for another update next week.

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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 July 20, 2024 by telescoper

This week we have published four papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, which I now present to you here. These four take the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 60 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 175. It is gratifying to see the range of high-quality papers published steadily increasing. We are getting several papers submitted every day now.

In chronological order, 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: “A population of neutron star candidates in wide orbits from Gaia astrometry” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA) and 12 others based across the world.  The paper presents  a spectroscopic study of neutron star candidates identified using GAIA astrometry to be in wide binary orbits around main sequence stars,  was published on 15th July 2024 and is in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. For more information about this one, see here.

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 is “Systematic Effects in Galaxy-Galaxy Lensing with DESI” and was written by Johannes Ulf Lange (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA) and 58 others, again distributed internationally.  This one reports a study of systematic effects (such as incompleteness and intrinsic alignment) on galaxy-galaxy lensing results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. This one is in the folder called Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics and was published on 16th July 2024.

You can see the overlay here:

 

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

The next paper is also in the folder called Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.  It is entitled “Unleashing cosmic shear information with the tomographic weak lensing PDF” and is by by Lina Castiblanco (Newcastle Univresity, UK), Cora Uhlemann (Bielefeld University, Germany), Joachim Harnois-Déraps (Newcastle University, UK) and Alexandre Barthelemy (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany). This one was published on 17th July 2024.

Here is the overlay:

 

You can find the full text for this one on the arXiv here.

Last but by no means least, published on 18th July 2024, we have a paper  entitled “When to interfere with dark matter? The impact of wave dynamics on statistics“. The primary classification for this one is again Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and it discusses the imprint of wave-mechanical behaviour, perhaps associated with ultra-light scalar field dark matter on the statistical properties of large-scale structure. The authors are Alex Gough (Newcastle University, UK) and Cora Uhlemann (Bielefeld University, Germany; who also featured in the author list of the previous paper). This is a paper close to my own interests, but because I know both authors well and was the PhD examiner of the first author I thought it best to recuse myself from an editorial role on this one.

 

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

It did look likely at one stage that we might publish a paper every day last week, but the final version of one other paper didn’t make it onto arXiv in time to be announced on Friday so I will publish that one on Monday.

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Academic Publishing is a Lucrative Scam

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access with tags , , , , , , , , on July 17, 2024 by telescoper

I saw an article in the Guardian yesterday with the title Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that. It’s written by Arash Abizadeh who is Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Canada. I urge you to read the piece if you’re interested in Open Access and the issues surrounding it.

I agree with virtually everything in the article. Indeed I’ve been saying much the same thing for about 15 years! I’m also determined to change things too, which is why we set up the Open Journal of Astrophysics, a “Diamond” Open Access Journal. Talking about the system of Gold Open Access, Prof. Abizadeh writes:

There is an obvious alternative: universities, libraries, and academic funding agencies can cut out the intermediary and directly fund journals themselves, at a far lower cost. This would remove commercial pressures from the editorial process, preserve editorial integrity and make research accessible to all. The term for this is “diamond” open access, which means the publishers charge neither authors, editors, nor readers (this is how our new journal will operate). Librarians have been urging this for years. So why haven’t academics already migrated to diamond journals?

I think the reason more academics haven’t already migrated to Diamond Open Access journals is that there are relatively few such journals. The reason for that is that although there are lots of people talking about Diamond Open Access there are many fewer actually taking steps to implement it. The initiative mentioned in the Guardian article is therefore very welcome. Although I think in the long run this transition is inevitable, it won’t happen by itself. It certainly won’t be helped by the Academic Publishing Industry either. We academics have to provide the push.

Here’s another excerpt:

Career advancement depends heavily on publishing in journals with established name recognition and prestige, and these journals are often owned by commercial publishers. Many academics – particularly early-career researchers trying to secure long-term employment in an extremely difficult job market – cannot afford to take a chance on new, untested journals on their own.

This is true, up to a point.

First of all any institution that has signed up to the San Francisco Declaration On Research Assessment (DORA) should not be relying on (often bogus) indicators of prestige such as the Journal Impact Factor or the journal’s presence in the Scopus index. If Diamond Open Access is to gain further traction it has to be accompanied to a wholesale change towards fairer research assessment practices.

Second, although it is true that it has taken some years to reach the volume it has now, I have been pleasantly surprised how many early career researchers in astrophysics have been keen to try out the Open Journal of Astrophysics. I think that’s because (a) early career researchers have not been indoctrinated into the absurdities of existing publishing practices and (b) they can see that the citation rates on OJAp are no worse than other allegedly more “prestigious” journals.

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Sun-like Stars with Hidden Companions

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on July 16, 2024 by telescoper

I usually only do updates at weekends about papers published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics but I’m making an exception today because a paper we published yesterday is making some waves that I think are worth propagating. The paper is called “A population of neutron star candidates in wide orbits from Gaia astrometry” and the first author is Kareem El-Badry of Caltech (USA); his institution have put out a press release to go with the paper which you an read for more details. They key point is that these are main sequence stars with (probably) neutron star companions and nobody really knows how such systems formed. The paper is also yet another illustration of the amazingly rich source of discovery data that is the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.

The press release also contains some snazzy graphics, such as this:

The press release explains

The new study, which includes a team of co-authors from around the world, was published in The Open Journal for Astrophysics. Data from several ground-based telescopes, including the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai‘i; La Silla Observatory in Chile; and the Whipple Observatory in Arizona, were used to follow up the Gaia observations and learn more about the masses and orbits of the hidden neutron stars.

It is very gratifying to see one of our papers gaining such traction. It also exemplifies something that has struck me recently. Obviously, when we started the Open Journal of Astrophysics I really had no idea how it would go, but one thing that has surprised me (in a pleasant way) is how many articles we are getting from authors based in high-profile US institutions, such as Caltech, Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley (among others). I always assumed that such institutions were rich enough not to be worried by the cost of Article Processing Charges and, being based in America, the authors would in any case be used to paying page charges for the Astrophysical Journal which has been standard practice for ages. Whatever the reason, it sends a great message to the community to see these leading institutions going via the Diamond Open Access route. I hope this provides even more evidence to persuade even more authors that OJAp is a serious journal!

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Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , on July 13, 2024 by telescoper

Another Saturday, another update of the  Open Journal of Astrophysics.  Since the last update we have published two more papers, taking  the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 56 and the total published by OJAp up to 171.  Both these papers were published on Thursday 11th July 2024.

The first paper of the most recent pair, published on July 3rd 2024,  is “Sunyaev-Zeldovich signatures from non-thermal, relativistic electrons using CMB maps” by Sandeep Kumar Acharya of The Open University of Israel, Ra’anana, Israel.  This article presents a discussion the possible effects of non-thermal electron energy distributions on the form of Sunyaev-Zeldovich distortions and how they might be measured. The paper is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

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

 

 

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

The second paper has the title “On the contribution of dwarf galaxies to reionization of the Universe” and is by Zewei Wu and Andrey Kravtsov of the University of Chicago in the USA. This paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, presents a model of galaxy formation that suggests that radiation from very faint galaxies may contribute significantly to the reionization of the Universe.

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

 

 

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

That concludes this week’s update. No doubt I’ll have more for you next week!

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Counting the Cost of Gold Open Access

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2024 by telescoper

If you’re interested in how Article Processing Charges (APCs) have changed over the past five years, the data from six major publishers are now available accompanied by a paper on the arXiv with the abstract:

This paper introduces a dataset of article processing charges (APCs) produced from the price lists of six large scholarly publishers – Elsevier, Frontiers, PLOS, MDPI, Springer Nature and Wiley – between 2019 and 2023. APC price lists were downloaded from publisher websites each year as well as via Wayback Machine snapshots to retrieve fees per journal per year. The dataset includes journal metadata, APC collection method, and annual APC price list information in several currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, JPY, CAD) for 8,712 unique journals and 36,618 journal-year combinations. The dataset was generated to allow for more precise analysis of APCs and can support library collection development and scientometric analysis estimating APCs paid in gold and hybrid OA journals.

There’s even an interactive data explorer here, at which link you can also find this very informative summary graphic:

Surprise, surprise: the vast majority have gone up!

These figures apply to Gold and Hybrid Open Access publications, but not to Diamond Open Access journals which are free to both authors and readers and avoid these rip-off charges. In my opinion research institutions would be much better off investing in Diamond Open Access publishing than sending their hard-earned cash to profiteering outfits such as Elsevier.

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