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From Valencia

Posted in Biographical, Books, Talks and Reviews, Open Access on June 26, 2024 by telescoper
Torres de Serranos, Valencia

Here I am, on the train from Valencia back to Barcelona. I’ve been to Valencia many times but the last time was so long ago that I don’t remember when it was exactly. I only had time for a short walk about this morning before getting a lift to the University campus, which is a bit out of town.  I gave my talk as planned, had a nice lunch, and was personally driven back to the railway station, and am now on my way back to Barcelona.

I’ll probably doze off on the way, so I’ll just take this opportunity to thank Vicent  Martínez for inviting me (including last night’s dinner) and everyone for their hospitality and nice questions after my talk!

Update: I got back to Barcelona about 15 minutes late, which wasn’t a big deal, although it’s a notably slower route than the Madrid-Barcelona line I travelled on a couple of months ago.

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To Valencia!

Posted in Barcelona, Open Access, Uncategorized on June 25, 2024 by telescoper

Ailing* laptop notwithstanding, I’ll shortly be taking the train to Valencia where I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow. The trip is about 350km each way and takes about 2 hours and 50 minutes. That’s a bit slower than the very fast train to Madrid but it looks like it’s all along the coast, so hopefully it will be quite enjoyable.

*I managed to get it to boot up into Windows, but it is running so extremely that I can’t do much on it. I have no idea what the issue is.

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An All-Ireland Diamond Open Access Publishing Platform?

Posted in Maynooth, Open Access with tags , , , , , , on June 24, 2024 by telescoper

Here’s a report on an interesting development about Open Access in Ireland. The article belongs to the Special Issue 10th Anniversary Special Issue “PUBMET2023 Conference on Scholarly Communication in the Context of Open Science” and has the following abstract:

The Government of Ireland has set a target of achieving 100% open access to publicly funded scholarly publications by 2030. As a key element of achieving this objective, the PublishOA.ie project was established to evaluate the feasibility of establishing an all-island [Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland] digital publishing platform for Diamond Open Access journals and monographs designed to advance best practice and meet the needs of authors, readers, publishers, and research funding organisations in Irish scholarly publishing. It should be noted in this context that there is substantial ‘north–south’ cooperation between public bodies in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, some of whom operate on what is commonly termed an ‘all-island’ basis. The project commenced in November 2022 and will run until November 2024, with the submission of a Final Report. This article originated as an interim project report presented in September 2023 at the PubMet2023 conference in Zadar, Croatia. The project is unique in its mandate to report on the feasibility of a shared platform that will encompass scholarly publishing across the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, which are now, post-Brexit, inside and outside the European Union (EU): the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. The project is co-led by the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), Ireland’s leading body of experts in the Sciences and Humanities, and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute of Trinity College Dublin. There are sixteen partners and affiliates from universities and organisations from the island of Ireland. The feasibility study will be based on a review of the publishing practices in the island of Ireland, with gap analysis on standards, technology, processes, copyright practices, and funding models for Diamond OA, benchmarking against other national platforms, and specifications of the requirements, leading to the delivery of a pilot national publishing platform. A set of demonstrator journals and monographs will be published using the platform, which will be actively trialled by the partner publishers and authors. PublishOA.ie aims to deliver an evidence-based understanding of Irish scholarly publishing and of the requirements of publishers to transition in whole or in part to Diamond OA. This paper provides an interim report on progress on the project as of September 2023, ten months after its commencement.

I think the idea of having a national Diamond Open Access publishing platform is a very interesting one. In principle it could facilitate the federated system of repositories linked by refereeing overlays which I think is the future of academic publishing. I think a national peer review platform would be more to the point than a publishing platform.

I have two comments:

  1. I am surprised that Maynooth University – publisher, among other things, of the Open Journal of Astrophysics (a Diamond Open Access journal) – is not among the partners in this project and does not even receive a mention as a publisher. I wonder how far this project will get if it excludes organizations that are already running Diamond Open Access Journals.
  2. Less of a comment, more of a question: why on Earth is the report published in a journal run by MDPI, a publisher that is controversial (to say the least)? It would be deeply ironic if they had to pay an APC to publish an article on Diamond Open Access!

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Bogus Scopus

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on June 17, 2024 by telescoper
How a widely used ranking system ended up with three fake journals in its top 10 philosophy list

Just to show that I’m not alone in having severe doubts about the reliability and integrity of Scopus here is an article from Retraction Watch that points out that three of the top ten philosophy journals (according to that database) are fake. Among the facts that could easily have been checked by a competent agency is this:

The same editorial board serves for three journals, with 10 members who are dead. 

The article concludes:

Rankings based on Scopus frequently serve universities and funding bodies as indicators of the quality of research, including in philosophy. They play a crucial role in decisions regarding academic awards, hiring, and promotion, and thus may influence the publication strategies of researchers… Our findings show that research institutions should refrain from the automatic use of such rankings. 

Quite. Any institute that has signed up to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment should not be basing any decisions on Scopus anyway, but I don’t think that goes far enough. Scopus is a corrupting influence. It is high time for universities and other agencies to stop paying their subscriptions and ditch it entirely.

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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 June 15, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning in Barcelona, and time to post another update relating to the  Open Journal of Astrophysics.  Since the last update we have published two more papers, taking  the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 47 and the total published by OJAp up to 162. We actually accepted four papers last week, but so far only two final versions have appeared on the arXiv.

The first paper of the most recent pair – published on  Friday 14th June – is “Spectroscopic Confirmation of an Ultra-Massive Galaxy in a Protocluster at z ~ 4.9″ . The author list has a strong University of California flavour: Stephanie M. Urbano Stawinski (UC Irvine), M. C. Cooper (UC Irvine), Ben Forrest (UC Davis) , Adam Muzzin (York University, Canada), Danilo Marchesini (Tufts University), Gillian Wilson (UC Merced), Percy Gomez (Keck Observatories, USA), Ian McConachie (UC Riverside), Z. Cemile Marsan (York University, Canada), Marianna Annuziatella (Centro de Astrobiología CSIC-INTA, Spain) and Wenjun Chang (UC Riverside).

This paper presents an investigation of a cluster system involving a massive galaxy using Keck spectroscopy with determination of its redshift and star formation properties. The results pose a challenge for theorists. The paper is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

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, also published on Friday 14th June and has the title “Boil-off of red supergiants: mass loss and type II-P supernovae” by Jim Fuller (Caltech) and  Daichi Tsuna (Caltech, USA and University of Tokyo, Japan). This one, which is in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, discusses A new model for stellar mass loss which predicts that low-mass red supergiants lose less mass than commonly assumed, while high-mass red supergiants lose more.

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. Will we reach 50 for 20204 next week? Tune in next Saturday to find out!

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Seriously, Scopus?

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

Five months ago I wrote a blog post mentioning that the Open Journal of Astrophysics (OJAp) had been accepted for listing in Scopus. A couple of months later, I posted an update explaining that the process of was taking much longer than the 4 to 6 weeks I was told it would. Well, I can now report that, a full five months after acceptance, we have finally made it onto the Scopus database.

Great! I hear you say. Well, no actually. Despite taking an excessive length of time to index the Open Journal of Astrophysics, the Scopus crew have messed up the bibliometric data relating to it in a most ridiculous fashion.

Here is the entry:

I draw your attention first to the column marked Documents 2020-23 under which you will see the number 67. In fact we published 99 articles between 2020 and 2023, not 67. This is easily established here. The number 67 relates to the period 2022-23 only. Accidentally or deliberately, Scopus has omitted a third of our papers from its database.

But the error doesn’t end there. Papers published in OJAp between 2020 and 2023 have actually been cited 959 times, not 137. If you restrict the count to papers published in 2022-23 there are 526 citations. It’s no wonder that OJAp has such a low CiteScore, and consequently appears so far down the rankings, when the citation information is so woefully inaccurate.

Incidentally, CiteScores are marketed by Scopus as “metrics you can verify and trust”. Oh no you can’t.

When I first saw this travesty I thought very hard about asking to have OJAp removed from Scopus altogether, but on reflection I decided to contact them with the actual numbers and a request that they issue a correction as soon as possible. Given that it took 5 months to get this far, however, I’m not optimistic for a speedy response.

While I’m waiting for that I suggest you consider whether these egregious errors are simply incompetent or whether they are deliberate acts of sabotage by a front organization for the commercial publishing industry? And another question: how much else in the Scopus database is as badly wrong as the OJAp entry?

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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 June 8, 2024 by telescoper

Time for another roundup of business at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics. This time I have three papers to announce, which brings the total we have published so far this year (Vol. 7) to 45 and the total published by OJAp to 160. We’re still on track to publish around 100 papers this year or more, compared to last year’s 50.

First one up, published on 3rd June 2024, is “Log-Normal Waiting Time Widths Characterize Dynamics” by Jonathan Katz of Washington University (St Louis, Missouri, USA). This paper presents a discussion of the connection between waiting time distributions and dynamics for aperiodic astrophysical systems, with emphasis on log-normal distributions.  This paper is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.

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 “An Empirical Model For Intrinsic Alignments: Insights From Cosmological Simulations” by Nicholas Van Alfen (Northeastern University, Boston, USA), Duncan Campbell (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA), Jonathan Blazek (Northeastern University), C. Danielle Leonard (Newcastle University, UK), Francois Lanusse (Université Paris-Saclay, France), Andrew Hearin (Argonne National Laboratory, USA), Rachel Mandelbaum (Carnegie Mellon University) and The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.  This paper presents an extension of the halo model (specifically the Halo Occupation Distribution, HOD) to include intrinsic alignment effects for the study of weak gravitational lensing. This paper is in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. It was published on Tuesday June 4th 2024.

The overlay looks like this:

 

 

You can read this paper directly on the arXiv here.

Last, but by no means least, comes  “Towards Cosmography of the Local Universe”  which proposes the multipoles of the distance-redshift relation as new cosmological observables that have a direct physical interpretation in terms of kinematical quantities of the underlying matter flow. This was also published on 4th June. The authors are Julian Adamek (IfA Zurich, Switzerland), Chris Clarkson (Queen Mary, London, UK), Ruth Durrer (Geneva, Switzerland), Asta Heinesen (U. Lyon, France & NBI Copenhagen, Denmark), Martin Kunz (Geneva), and Hayley J. Macpherson (Chicago, USA).

Here is a screengrab of the overlay:

 

 

To read the accepted version of this on the arXiv please go here. This paper is also in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.
That’s it for this week. I aim to post another update next weekend.

 

 

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Research Inventy Journal

Posted in Open Access with tags , on May 28, 2024 by telescoper

It is great to see the number of open access scientific journals increasing. Just yesterday I was contacted by another one that was previously unknown to me. The style of the advertisement leaves no doubt about the quality of this publication nor of the papers therein; from submission to publication within 24 hours, and all for 900 Rupees (about $10)! Amazing! There’s no question that this journal fills a much needed gap.

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An analysis of the effects of sharing research data, code, and preprints on citations

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access with tags , , , , , on May 27, 2024 by telescoper

Whenever researchers ask me why I am an advocate of open science the response that first occurs to me is somewhat altruistic: sharing results and data is good for the whole community, as it enables the proper progress of research through independent scrutiny. There is however a selfish reason for open science, demonstrates rather well by a recent preprint on arXiv. The abstract is here:

Calls to make scientific research more open have gained traction with a range of societal stakeholders. Open Science practices include but are not limited to the early sharing of results via preprints and openly sharing outputs such as data and code to make research more reproducible and extensible. Existing evidence shows that adopting Open Science practices has effects in several domains. In this study, we investigate whether adopting one or more Open Science practices leads to significantly higher citations for an associated publication, which is one form of academic impact. We use a novel dataset known as Open Science Indicators, produced by PLOS and DataSeer, which includes all PLOS publications from 2018 to 2023 as well as a comparison group sampled from the PMC Open Access Subset. In total, we analyze circa 122’000 publications. We calculate publication and author-level citation indicators and use a broad set of control variables to isolate the effect of Open Science Indicators on received citations. We show that Open Science practices are adopted to different degrees across scientific disciplines. We find that the early release of a publication as a preprint correlates with a significant positive citation advantage of about 20.2% on average. We also find that sharing data in an online repository correlates with a smaller yet still positive citation advantage of 4.3% on average. However, we do not find a significant citation advantage for sharing code. Further research is needed on additional or alternative measures of impact beyond citations. Our results are likely to be of interest to researchers, as well as publishers, research funders, and policymakers.

Colavizza et al., arXiv:2404.16171

This analysis isn’t based on astrophysics, but I think the relatively high citation rates of papers in the Open Journal of Astrophysics are at least in part due to the fact that virtually all our papers are all available as preprints arXiv prior to publication. Citations aren’t everything, of course, but the positive effect of preprinting is an important factor in communicating the science you are doing.

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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 May 25, 2024 by telescoper

After a very busy and unusual week, it’s time to get back to normal with the usual  Saturday roundup of business at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics. If you want to know how many papers we have published so far this year (Vol. 7), the answer is 42. The total published by OJAp is now 157. We’re still on track to publish around 100 papers this year, possibly more, compared to last year’s 50.

All the members of this week’s trio are in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, and indeed all three relate in one way or another to the topic of weak gravitational lensing.  All three were published on Wednesday 22nd May 2024.

First one up is “Joint constraints from cosmic shear, galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy clustering: internal tension as an indicator of intrinsic alignment modelling error” which is by Simon Samuroff (Northeastern U., USA), Andresa Campos (Carnegie Mellon U., USA), Anna Porredon (Bochum, Germany) and Jonathan Blazek (Edinburgh, UK).   A combined statistical approach to the identification of errors arising in cosmic shear analysis due to intrinsic alignments.

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 “A unified linear intrinsic alignment model for elliptical and disc galaxies and the resulting ellipticity spectra” by Basundhara Ghosh (Bangalore, India), with Kai Nussbaumer, Eileen Sophie Giesel & Björn Malte Schäfer (Heidelberg, Germany). It presents a discussion of the physical origin of intrinsic alignments of both elliptical and disk galaxies and the implications for cosmological studies

The overlay looks like this:

 

You can read this paper directly on the arXiv here.

The last paper of this batch is entitled “Neural style transfer of weak lensing mass maps”  and proposes a generative model for the mass-production of weak-lensing maps. The authors are Masato Shirasaki and Shiro Ikeda (both of the University of Tokyo, Japan)

Here is a screengrab of the overlay:

 

To read the accepted version of this on the arXiv please go here.
That’s all for now. I will do another update next week.

 

 

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