Archive for the Open Access Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Retractions and Resignations

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , , on December 16, 2023 by telescoper

I saw an article this week in Nature that revealed that more than 10,000 research papers have been retracted so far 2023. The actual number is probably much higher than that, as this is just the fraudulent papers that have been found out. Over 80% of the papers mentioned in the article were published by Hindawi, a known predatory publisher that specializes in Gold Open Access journals that charge Article Processing Charges. Hindawi is owned by Wiley but the brand has become so toxic that Wiley no longer wants to use the name. Presumably it still wants the profits.

(Another bit of news this week makes me think that Hindawi might be the academic publishing equivalent of Tesla…)

Here’s a figure showing how the number of retracted research articles has increased over time:

From https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03974-8

It has always seemed to me that the shift to “Gold” Open Access in which authors pay to have their work published would lead to a decrease in editorial standards. Since the publisher’s income comes from APCs, the more papers they publish the more money they get. This is another reason Diamond Open Access run on a not-for-profit basis with no fees for either authors or readers is a much better model.

At least some academics are taking a stand. Retraction Watch maintains a list of journals whose editors who have resigned – sometimes en masse from the same journal – in response to the imposition of dodgy practices by their publishers. Take the Journal of Geometric Mechanics, for example. The entire Editorial Board of this journal resigned because of pressure from above to increase “output” (i.e. profits) by lowering academic standards.

This is just a start, of course, but I don’t think it will take long for academic community to accept that the this publishing model is rotten to the core and embraces the only really viable and sustainable alternative.

4 Comments »

Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on December 14, 2023 by telescoper

As anticipated a couple of days ago, it’s now possible to announce another couple of new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. These papers take us up to a total of 49  in Volume 6 (2023) and 114 in total since we started publishing.

It would be nice if we could make it to 50 in Volume 6 (2023), but I have already decided to close the publishing platform from 22nd December until 5th January (inclusive), so there there isn’t much time to get the single needed for our half-century.  While we will not be publishing new papers during this closure, the peer review platform will remain open for submission of new and revised manuscripts and the editorial processes will continue.

Whether or not we make 50 this year, it is worth remarking that 49 is already a significant figure, as it corresponds to the total number of papers we published in the previous three years: 15 (2020); 17 (2021); and 17 (2022). Things are definitely looking up!

Anyway, the first paper of the most recent pair – published on December 8th – is “The Million Quasars (Milliquas) Catalogue, v8”; its primary classification is Astrophysics of Galaxies and the author is Eric Wim Flesch from New Zealand. The Milliquas catalogue includes quasars from the literature to 30 June 2023, including quasars from the DESI-EDR and SDSS-DR18Q surveys.

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 was published on 11th December 2023 and is also in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The authors are all from various institutions in the USA:  Michael Grudić (Carnegie Observatories), Stella Offner (University of Texas at Austin); Dávid Guszejnov (Harvard);  Claude-André Faucher-Giguère (Northwestern University); and Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech).  The paper presents a comparison of full radiative magnetohydrodynamics simulations of the formation of star clusters with simple stochastic modelling showing the limitations of the latter.

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.

2 Comments »

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on December 12, 2023 by telescoper

I was doing some work on the Open Journal of Astrophysics site and realized that there is a paper we published last week that I haven’t advertised on here yet, so I’m remedying that now.

The paper in question is the 47th so far in Volume 6 (2023)  and it’s the 112th altogether. This one was actually published on Tuesday December 5th. Two further papers are imminent; I’m just waiting for their metadata to be registered with Crossref.

The title of this one is “The SPHINX Public Data Release: Forward Modelling High-Redshift JWST Observations with Cosmological Radiation Hydrodynamics Simulations” and it represents  public data release of Sphinx20, a full box cosmological radiation-hydrodynamics simulation that provides a statistical sample of galaxies for comparison with those observed by JWST. It is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

There are 10 authors: Harley Katz (Oxford, UK); Joki Rosdahl (Lyon, France); Taysun Kimm (Seoul, Korea); Jeremy Blaizot (Lyon, France);  Nicholas Choustikov (Oxford, UK); Marion Farcy  and Thibault Garel (Geneva, Switzerland);  Martin G. Haehnelt (Cambridge, UK); Leo Michel-Dansac (Lyon, France); and Pierre Ocvirk (Strasbourg, France).

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

1 Comment »

Bravo, Sorbonne University!

Posted in Education, Open Access with tags , , , on December 10, 2023 by telescoper

Here’s some good news for advocates of open research. Sorbonne University (Paris) has made an important announcement. I quote:

Sorbonne University has been deeply committed to the promotion and the development of  open science for many years. According to its commitment to open research information, it has decided to discontinue its subscription to the Web of Science publication database and Clarivate bibliometric tools in 2024. By resolutely abandoning the use of proprietary bibliometric products, it is opening the way for open, free and participative tools.

That’s the way to do it! Such a decision requires real intellectual leadership, so I’m not sure how many other universities will follow suit. Those paralyzed by managerialism probably won’t.

The Sorbonne statement goes on to explain:

This decision is in line with the University’s overall policy of openness, and it is now working to consolidate a sustainable, international alternative, in particular by using OpenAlex.

Both Web of Science and Clarivate are, of course, fronts for the academic publishing industry and are just as pointless, as they sell to subscribers a biased subset of information which is already in the public domain through services such as CrossRef.

While I’m congratulating Sorbonne for its leadership, I should do likewise (though in a different context) for Utrecht University, which refused to participate in this year’s Times Higher World Rankings. Among their reasons are

  • Rankings put too much stress on scoring and competition, while we want to focus on collaboration and open science.
  • The makers of the rankings use data and methods that are highly questionable, research shows. 

I hope more institutions join the fight back against the box-tickers in this regard too, although I’m not particularly hopeful here either.

4 Comments »

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on December 1, 2023 by telescoper

It’s Friday and I thought I’d take  the opportunity before the weekend to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

The latest paper is the 46th so far in Volume 6 (2023) – just four to go for a half-century – and it’s the 111th altogether. This one was actually published on Wednesday November 29th.

The title is “Optimization and Quality Assessment of Baryon Pasting for Intracluster Gas using the Borg Cube Simulation” and it presents an algorithm for adding baryons to gravity-only simulations via a “pasting” approach. It is in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.

There are 8 authors: F. Kéruzoré;  L. Bleem; M. Buehlmann;  J.D. Emberson; N. Frontiere; S. Habib; K. Heitmann; and P. Larsen;  all of them based at the Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois (USA).

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

Leave a comment »

Connections and Submissions

Posted in Biographical, Open Access on November 30, 2023 by telescoper

If I have one gripe to make about the otherwise excellent train service between Barcelona and Paris (and back) , it’s that the Wi-Fi connection was very unreliable and at times unusable. That mean that I couldn’t do some of the fairly complicated things I needed to do online because of frequent disconnections. The upside of being disconnected is that I have a good excuse for not attending telecons!

I did manage to publish one paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics yesterday, because I did the necessary before leaving my hotel in Paris. Unfortunately, I had to wait until I got back to Barcelona to check that everything had been correctly registered with Crossref. Only then could I promote the paper on social media. I’ll probably do a post here tomorrow about it.

These connectivity problems yesterday resulted in me spending most of my first day back in Barcelona catching up with such things as writing Google Docs and editing things via Overleaf but mainly dealing with new OJAp submissions.

There have been three four new submissions today alone, adding to the little backlog that developed over the short periods I was offline. These days we’re getting an average of one paper per day so if I can’t afford to miss many days as then it is difficult to catch up.

The two talks I gave while I was away were both about Open Access publishing in general, and the Open Journal of Astrophysics in particular, but I don’t think today’s little surge in submissions is a direct consequence of me touting for trade as I don’t think any of the authors concerned attended either talk even virtually.

It’s gratifying to see the number of submissions steadily increasing. I am sometimes frustrated – as I’m sure the authors are – by the slowness of the refereeing process but at least that’s no different from other journals I suppose.

Anyway, that’s enough reflections. Hopefully I’ll be able to spend this evening and tomorrow doing some writing of my own. Apart from tomorrow afternoon, when I’ll have yet another telecon…

1 Comment »

To Saclay

Posted in Biographical, Open Access, Talks and Reviews with tags , on November 28, 2023 by telescoper

I am up early this morning ahead of a trip to Saclay, best known for CEA Saclay and the relatively new Paris-Saclay University, which involves an approximately 30-minute trip on an RER to Le Guichet, followed by road transport. It’s anomalous that Saclay itself is not served by either train or Metro, though I am told there are plans.

The only significant annoyance about yesterday’s journey was that the WIFI was hopeless, so I had to catch up with a lot of things last night and have more to do today. Still, my talk is this morning so I should have plenty time this afternoon and evening before heading back to Barcelona tomorrow.

Here are the slides I used for my talk, which was virtually identical to the one given at Montpellier last week.

Update: It has been a long day. I’m now back in the hotel in Port-Royal. The new Paris-Saclay campus is very impressive. The IPhT is a bit older and of a different style but is a nice working environment. Thanks to everyone there for their hospitality and especially for the splendid lunch after my talk!

10 Comments »

Signatories of DORA

Posted in Maynooth, Open Access, Science Politics with tags , on November 22, 2023 by telescoper

Following on from comments on a number of previous posts I just wanted to encourage anyone involved in research of any kind who hasn’t done so already to sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) as an individual and if your institution hasn’t done so yet please encourage them to do so. You can check whether your organization has signed it here.

The Number One recommendation of DORA is:

Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.

San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment

You can read the other recommendations for funders, publishers, institutions, and researchers, here.

I am well aware that some institutions have signed DORA but don’t really pay attention to it in their internal processes. Maynooth University is a signatory and certainly does take it into consideration when dealing with, e.g., recruitment and promotion but it, along with other signatories, has to deal with inconsistencies in the outside world. One of these is that, while Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council are both signatories of DORA, the Irish Government itself is not, so the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science is not bound by it. That makes no sense to me at all!

2 Comments »

SCOPUS SCOPUM

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on November 21, 2023 by telescoper

I’ve just spent the best part of two hours completing a lengthy and very tedious online form in order to apply to have the Open Journal of Astrophysics listed on Scopus. I did try this before, back in September, but the Scopus website crashed when I tried to submit the application. I emailed their helpline and they said they’d get back to me, but they never did.

One of the annoying things about the proposal form is the duplication of information. Almost every page requires the applicant to enter the name and email of the Managing Editor (that’s me). They could just carry that information forward from one page to the next.

An even more annoying thing is that one has to upload ten recent articles published by the Journal. It won’t accept weblinks, which would be more efficient for an online journal like OJAp. So I had to download ten papers from arXiv just to upload them again. Then I discovered they have a maximum file size of 10MB, which rules out several of our recent papers.

(All this reminds me that the next book on my reading list is Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber…)

My personal feeling is that I couldn’t care less about getting listed by Scopus – which is run by racketeering publishing giant Elsevier as a gate-keeper for the academic publishing industry – but it seems that there are a lot of bean-counters around the world who think a journal isn’t a journal unless it is on their list, no doubt because Elsevier told them that is the case.

In fact it’s quite easy to look up citations, etc, for journals and individual articles without recourse to Scopus but administrators have been brainwashed into handing over large sums of money to Elsevier to inflate their already substantial profits. I don’t feel I should be asking for approval from the likes of them.

Anyway, the flakiness of their Scopus application platform – see paragraphs 1 to 3 above – does not fill me with confidence that Elsevier put much effort into the process. On the other hand, they have a captive audience so why should they? Now, however, at least I have an email confirming they received the application along with a tracking number and the statement

Please allow up to several months for the review process to be completed. 

The only reason for posting this here is to remind me to post if and when they respond. I won’t be holding my breath.

9 Comments »

Thoughts of Retirement

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical, Maynooth, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on November 19, 2023 by telescoper

I’ve been reviewing my situation while here in Barcelona. One of the themes that keeps popping into my head is well expressed by part of a little speech by Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai:

But there are times… when suddenly you realize you’re nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything – or if it made any difference at all, really. Particularly in comparison with other men’s careers. I don’t know whether that kind of thinking’s very healthy, but I must admit I’ve had some thoughts on those lines from time to time.

Healthy or not I’ve also had thoughts along those lines, and sometimes feel I should step aside and create a job opportunity for someone younger. I know my employer wouldn’t mind if I did that either. They’d much prefer replacing me with someone cheaper and more compliant than me. I think if I asked for early retirement they would probably jump at the chance. I’d miss the teaching and the students, of course,

The fact of the matter is though that I can’t afford to retire yet. I have a mortgage to pay and I’ve only had five full years of pensionable service in the Irish system, so won’t get much of a pension. I have the frozen residue of my UK pension, of course, but that is subject to an actuarial reduction if I take the benefit before I’m 65, which is also the standard retirement age for academic staff in Ireland. I can’t be made to retire here until I’m 70, in fact, but I think I’ll be well beyond my best-before date by then and am not keen to overstay my welcome.

So it looks like I’ll have to stay until I’m 65 at the earliest. In fact I won’t be able to collect the State Pension (SPC) until I’m 66, so I’ll probably have to stay another year. That means that when I get back from sabbatical I will have four or five years left until I can retire. I don’t know what I’ll be teaching when I return but I hope I get a chance to teach a few new modules before the end. In particular some cosmology or astrophysics would be particularly nice. All this is predicated on: (a) me living long enough; and (b) Physics at Maynooth not being closed down; neither of these is certain.

When I moved to the Emerald Isle in 2017 I supposed that I would carry on living in Ireland after retiring. Now I’m having some doubts about that. I have been advised by medical experts that my arthritis would be more tolerable in a warmer climate. And there’s the cost of living in Ireland, which is much higher than Spain. I can imagine living here, actually, though I think Barcelona itself might be a bit expensive for a pensioner. Somewhere in the surrounding countryside, or along the coast, might be nice. I’ve got a few years to think about that.

Another thing in my mind is what will happen to the Open Journal of Astrophysics when I retire? I would like some larger organization or community to take it over in the long term. It’s not expensive to run, actually, but someone would have to take over as Managing Editor. Moreover, I don’t think it’s really fair to expect one small University in Ireland to bear the full cost of a global astrophysics journal indefinitely.

8 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »