It’s Friday afternoon but before I collapse, exhausted, into the arms of the weekend I’ll take the opportunity to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
The latest paper is the 45th so far in Volume 6 (2023) – just five to go for a half-century – and it’s the 110th altogether. This one was actually published on Tuesday November 14th.
The title is “Marginalised Normal Regression: Unbiased curve fitting in the presence of x-errors” and it’s by Deaglan J. Bartlett (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France) and Harry Desmond (Portsmouth, UK). It sounds like a statistical methods paper, and indeed it is, but remember that there’s a very long historical connection between astronomy and the development of statistical methods for data analysis, and this paper tackles a very longstanding issue: how best to fit curves in the presence of noisy data. This paper presents a new method for doing this, together with applications to cosmological and astrophysical data, and accompanying software. It is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.
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.
I was at a meeting this morning in which the vexed issue of the journal Impact Factor (IF) came up. That reminded me of something that struck me when I was checking the NASA/ADS entry for a paper recently published by the Open Journal of Astrophysics, and I thought it would be worth sharing it here. First of all, here’s a handy slide showing how the Impact Factor (IF) for a journal is calculated for a given year:
It’s a fairly straightforward piece of information to calculate, which is one of its few virtues.
As of today, according to the wonderful NASA/ADS system, this paper has 36 citations. That’s no bad considering that it was published less than a month ago. It’s obviously already quite an impactful paper. The problem is that if you look at the recipe given above you will see that none of those 36 citations – nor any more that this paper receives this year – will ever be included in the calculation of the Impact Factor for the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Only citations to this paper garnered in 2024 and 2025 will count to the impact factors (for 2025 and 2026 respectively). There’s every reason to think this paper will get plenty of citations over the next two years, but I think this demonstrates another bit of silliness to add to the already long list of silly things about the IF as a measure of citation impact.
My view of citation numbers is that they do contain some (limited) information about an article’s impact, but if you want to use them you should just use the citations for the article itself, not a peculiar and arbitrarily-constructed proxy like the IF. It is so easy to get article-level citation data that there is simply no need to use a journal-level metric for anything at all.
During my talk yesterday I mentioned the difference between “Green” and “Gold” forms of Open Access, which always makes me think of a scene from Blackadder II. I mentioned this in the talk and it seems not everyone in the audience was aware of the cultural reference, so here is the clip in question. It doesn’t have anything to do with Open Access, of course, but I think it is very funny.
I got up at 3am this morning to take a bus to an airport, then a flight to Bristol Airport, then another bus to Bristol Temple Meads, and then a train to Cardiff in order to give a seminar. Now I’m in the middle of the reverse process, having a pint in Bristol Airport.
In case you’re thinking of using Bristol Airport at any time in the next 8 weeks, then please bear in mind that there are major roadworks on the approach road, so be sure to allow extra time. It took over an hour from Bristol Temple Meads this evening, more than double the usual time, and it’s only 8 miles…
I’m more than a little tired after all that, but it was still very nice to meet up with friends and former colleagues again. I was particularly delighted to learn that Professor Haley Gomez has been appointed Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy. Congratulations to Haley!
I’ll upload the slides from my talk when I get back to base. For the time being, however, I’m just going to chill in the departure lounge before my return flight.
Update: the return leg ran to schedule so here, as promised, are the slides for the talk I was invited to give:
Of course, round my way, every week is Open Access Week.
The ongoing OA revolution should involve a radical reinvention/disruption of commercialized academic publishing instead of letting exploitative profit-making private publishing firms keep on fleecing the scholarly community. There is much still to do, and we’ll only succeed if more people turn words into actions.
It’s Sunday but I’ll be a bit busy next week so I’m taking the opportunity today to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one was published on Friday 20th October.
The primary classification for this paper is Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics and its title is “DES Y3 + KiDS-1000: Consistent cosmology combining cosmic shear surveys”. The article presents a joint analysis of the Dark Energy Survey Year 3 data and the Kilo-Degree Survey data, with a discussion of the implications for cosmological parameters. The key figure – a very important one – is this:
If you want to know more about the result and why it is so important you could read the paper. It is, however, rather long: 40 pages including 21 figures and 15 tables. Do not despair, though, because here is a video explaining the work in the series of Cosmology Talks presented by Shaun Hotchkiss:
Anyway, 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.
It’s Friday so it’s a good time to catch up with the week’s action at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, where there have been two new publications so far this week. These papers take us up to a total of 40 in Volume 6 (2023) and 105 in total since we started publishing.
The title of the first paper is “Halo Properties from Observable Measures of Environment: I. Halo and Subhalo Masses” and its primary classification is Astrophysics of Galaxies. it is an exploration using neural networks of how the peak masses of dark matter halos and subhaloes correlate with observationally-accessible measures of their dependence on environment.
The authors based in the United States of America: Haley Bowden and Peter Behroozi of the University of Arizona, and Andrew Hearin of the Argonne National Laboratory
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 18th October 2023. The primary classification for this one is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and is “Mitigating the noise of DESI mocks using analytic control variates”. For those of you not up with the lingo, DESI stands for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and you can read more about it here.
The lead author for this one is Boryana Hadzhiyska of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley (USA) and there are 32 other authors. This paper presents a method for reducing the effects of sample variance on cosmological simulations using analytical approximations and tests it using DESI data.
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.
Quite a few people have contacted me to ask about the Peer Review Process at the Open Journal of Astrophysics so I thought I’d do a quick post here to explain a bit about it here.
When a paper is submitted it is up to the Editor-in-Chief – that’s me! – to assign it to a member of the Editorial Board. Who that is depends on the topic of the paper and on the current availability due to workload. I of course take on some papers myself. I also reject some papers without further Peer Review if they clearer don’t meet the journal’s criteria of scientific quality, originality, relevance and comprehensibility. I usually run such papers past the Editorial Board before doing such a ‘Desk Reject’.
Once the paper has been assigned, the Editor takes control of the process, inviting referees (usually two) to comment and make recommendations. This is the rate-determining step, as potential referees are often busy. It can take as many as ten declined invitations before we get a referee to agree. Once accepted, a referee is asked to provide a report within three weeks. Sometimes they are quicker than that, sometimes they take longer. It depends on many factors, including the length of the manuscript.
Once all the referee reports are in the Editor can make a decision. Some papers are rejected upon refereeing, and some are accepted with only tiny changes. The most frequent decision is “Revise and Resubmit” – authors are requested to make changes in response to the referee comments. Sometimes these are minor, sometimes they are substantial. We never give a deadline for resubmission.
A resubmitted paper is usually sent to the same referee(s) who reviewed the original. The referees may be satisfied and recommend acceptance, or we go around again.
Once a paper is accepted, the authors are instructed to upload the final, accepted, version to arXiv. It normally takes a day or two to be announced. The article is then passed over from the Peer Review process to the Publication process. As Managing Editor, I make the overlay and prepare the metadata for the final version. This is usually done the same day as the final version appears on arXiv, but sometimes it takes a bit longer to put everything in order. It’s never more than a few days though.
Anyway, here are some “analytics” – it’s weird how anything that includes any quantitative information is called analytics these days to make it sound more sophisticated than it actually is – provided by the Scholastica platform:
These numbers need a little explanation.
The “average days to a decision” figure includes desk rejects as well as all submissions and resubmissions. Suppose a paper is submitted and it then takes 4 weeks to get referee reports and for the Editor to make a “Revise and Resubmit” request. That would count as 28 days. It might take the authors three months to make their revisions and resubmit the paper, but that does not count in the calculation of the “average days to decision” as during that period the manuscript is deemed to be inactive. If the revised version is accepted almost immediately, say after 2 days, then the average days to decision would be (28+2)/2 = 15 days. Also, being an average there are some shorter than 14 days and some much longer.
The acceptance rate is the percentage of papers eventually accepted (even after revision). The figure for ‘total submissions’ includes resubmissions, so the hypothetical paper in the preceding paragraph would add 2 to this total. That accounts for why the total number of papers accepted is not 50% of 388, which is 194; the actual figure is lower, at 105.
Finally, the number of manuscripts “in progress” is currently 23. That includes papers currently going through the peer review process. It does not include papers which are back with the authors for revisions (although it would be reasonable to count those as in progress in some sense).
There we are. I hope this clarifies the situation.
Time to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one was actually published on Friday (6th October 2023), but for one reason and another I’ve only just got around to announcing it here.
The latest paper is the 38th so far in Volume 6 (2023) and the 103rd in all. The authors are: Matthew Price, Matthijs Mars, Matthew Docherty, Alessio Spurio Mancini, Augustin Marignier and Jason McEwen – all affiliated with University College London, UK.
The primary classification for this paper is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and its title is “Fast emulation of anisotropies induced in the cosmic microwave background by cosmic strings”. It describes a generative technique for producing generating cosmic microwave background temperature maps using wavelet phase harmonics. For an explanation of what a cosmic string is, see here. If you don’t know the difference between “emulation” and “simulation”, I refer you to the text!
Here is a screen grab of the overlay of the published version 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.
A few days ago I posted an item about how the current system of scientific publication is under such intolerable strain that it is no longer fit for purpose. This is something I’ve felt for a while. Some time ago I wrote a post musing about what should replace it. That article included this:
I know I’m not alone in thinking that the current publishing ecosystem is doomed and will die a natural death soon enough. In my view the replacement should be a worldwide network of institutional and/or subject-based repositories that share research literature freely for the common good.
The Open Journal of Astrophysics was set up to demonstrate a way of achieving this kind of change in the field of Astrophysics. With this in mind I was delighted to to see a paper in PLOS Biology by Richard Sever (published just yesterday) with the following abstract:
Academic journals have been publishing the results of biomedical research for more than 350 years. Reviewing their history reveals that the ways in which journals vet submissions have changed over time, culminating in the relatively recent appearance of the current peer-review process. Journal brand and Impact Factor have meanwhile become quality proxies that are widely used to filter articles and evaluate scientists in a hypercompetitive prestige economy. The Web created the potential for a more decoupled publishing system in which articles are initially disseminated by preprint servers and then undergo evaluation elsewhere. To build this future, we must first understand the roles journals currently play and consider what types of content screening and review are necessary and for which papers. A new, open ecosystem involving preprint servers, journals, independent content-vetting initiatives, and curation services could provide more multidimensional signals for papers and avoid the current conflation of trust, quality, and impact. Academia should strive to avoid the alternative scenario, however, in which stratified publisher silos lock in submissions and simply perpetuate this conflation.
(I added the emphasis). In case you were not aware, Richard Sever is a cofounder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv.
I’m very glad to see similar thoughts to those I expressed about astrophysics being echoed in the field of biomedicine. I hope that more disciplines follow this path. The way it is realized will no doubt be domain-specific, but the benefits of such a new ecosystem will be for all science.
The views presented here are personal and not necessarily those of my employer (or anyone else for that matter).
Feel free to comment on any of the posts on this blog but comments may be moderated; anonymous comments and any considered by me to be vexatious and/or abusive and/or defamatory will not be accepted. I do not necessarily endorse, support, sanction, encourage, verify or agree with the opinions or statements of any information or other content in the comments on this site and do not in any way guarantee their accuracy or reliability.
In the Dark 