Archive for the Open Access Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Open Access Publishing in Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access on August 25, 2023 by telescoper

I’ve got a short talk this afternoon here at INAM about Open Access Publishing in Astrophysics so I thought I’d share the slides here. Among other things, the talk contains some updates about the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

The month of August has been rather quiet in terms of publishing at the OJAp no doubt because authors and referees have been taking vacations. When I managed to reconnect to the internet last night, though, I saw that revised versions of two manuscripts have been accepted so, depending on when the final versions hit the arXiv, I expect to publish a couple of papers early next week. That will take us to 98…

Update: mine was the last talk of the meeting and I overran a bit but I think it was reasonably well received despite that. Now I’m on a train waiting to go home.

3 Comments »

Four New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 29, 2023 by telescoper

The rate of publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics has now reached the point at which I think I’ll have to limit myself to weekly updates here rather than announcing every paper as it appears. We still announce individual papers on social media of course, meaning Mastodon, Facebook and the platform formerly known as Twitter…

This week we have published four papers which I now present to you here. These four take the count in Volume 6 (2023) up to 31 and the total published by OJAp up to 96. I speculated earlier this year that we might reach 100 before the end of 2023, now it looks certain we will reach the century mark as early as August! It is gratifying to see the range of papers published increasing, with all four of these in different categories.

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 “M-σ relations across cosmic time” by David Garofalo (1), Damian J. Christian (2), Chase Hames (1), Max North (3), Keegan Thottam (1) & Alisaie Eckelbarger (1). The author affiliations are: (1) Department of Physics, Kennesaw State University, USA; (2) Department of Physics and Astronomy, California State University, Northridge, USA; (3) Department of Information Systems, Kennesaw State University, USA. This is a discussion of the relationship between black hole mass and stellar velocity dispersion discovered in low redshift galaxies and its evolution with cosmic time. The paper was published on 25th July, is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies and can be found 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 “The fastest stars in the Galaxy” by Kareem El-Badry et al. (21 authors. This one is the fourth item in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics and it reports the spectroscopic discovery of 6 new “runaway” stars, probably the surviving members of binary star systems in which one star exploded in a Type 1a supernova. The paper was published on 27th July 2023 and you can see the overlay here:

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

The next paper is in the Earth and Planetary Astrophysics folder. It is in fact only the second paper we have published in that area. It is entitled “WHFast512: A symplectic N-body integrator for planetary systems optimized with AVX512 instructions” by Pejvak Javaheri & Hanno Rein (University of Toronto, Canada) and Daniel Tamayo (Harvey Mudd College, USA). This paper presents a fast direct N-body integrator for gravitational systems, and demonstrates it using a 40 Gyr integration of the Solar System.

Here is the overlay:

 

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

Last but by no means least, published yesterday (29th July), we have a paper that asks the question “Can Einstein (rings) surf Gravitational Waves?” by Leonardo Giani, Cullan Howlett and Tamara M. Davis of the University of Queensland, Australia. The primary classification for this one is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and it discusses the possible effect(s) of gravitational waves on gravitational lensing observations.

 

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 »

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on July 22, 2023 by telescoper

Time to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one was published yesterday, on 21st July 2023.

The latest paper is the 27th  so far in Volume 6 (2023) and the 92nd in all. The authors are Sohan Ghodla, Richard Easther, M.M. Briel and J.J. Eldridge, all of the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

The primary classification for this paper is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and its title is “Observational implications of cosmologically coupled black holes”.  The paper elucidates some of the consequences of a suggestion that the interaction between black holes and the global properties of space-time underlying explanation for dark energy. The key result is that the existence of cosmologically-coupled black holes implies a much larger rate of black-hole merger events than is observed.

The papers to which this is a response are mentioned here. For reference ,these earlier works were published in The Astrophysical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters. There is also a detailed twitter thread about this paper by Richard Easter, posted when it was submitted as a preprint to the arXiv last month:

 

Anyway, 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.

Leave a comment »

Four New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , on July 19, 2023 by telescoper

Time for an update at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Owing to a well-deserved holiday by a member of the OJAp team, we were unable to register DOIs and associated metadata for a couple of weeks so refrained from announcing new papers during this period while other functions of the journal continued. Anyway, this week we have caught up with the backlog of four papers, which I now present to you here, all published on 17th July 2023. These four take the count in Volume 6 (2023) up to 26 and the total published by OJAp up to 91.

In no particular 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.

“Large-scale power loss in ground-based CMB mapmaking” by Sigurd Naess (Oslo, Norway) and Thibaut Louis (Saclay, France). This one is a discussion of the possible biases introduced by using a data model to create sky maps of CMB temperature fluctuations and is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for 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 primary classification for the next paper paper is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and its title is “”The cumulant generating function as a novel observable to cumulate weak lensing information”. The authors are Aoife Boyle (Saclay, France), Alexandre Barthelemy (LMU, Germany), Sandrine Codis (Saclay, France), Cora Uhlemann (Newcastle, UK) & Oliver Friedrich (LMU, Germany). The paper explores the use of the cumulant generating function (CGF), from which the probability density function (PDF) can be obtained, in the context of weak gravitational lensing information.

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.

Also in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is the third paper “Cosmology with 6 parameters in the Stage-IV era: efficient marginalisation over nuisance parameters” by B. Hadzhiyska (Berkeley, USA), K. Wolz (Trieste, Italy), S. Azzoni (Oxford, UK; Tokyo, Japan), D. Alonso (Oxford, UK), C. García-García (Oxford, UK), J. Ruiz-Zapatero (Oxford, UK) and A. Slosar (Tokyo, Japan). This presents an efficient analytical method to speed up marginalization over nuisance parameters introduced to model systematic effects in large-scale structure data.

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 final paper in this quartet, also in Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Modeling the Galaxy Distribution in Clusters using Halo Cores” by D. Korytov, E. Rangel, L. Bleem, N. Frontiere, S. Habib, K. Heitmann, J. Hollowed, and A. Pope (all of the Argonne National Laboratory, USA). This presents a new method to speed up numerical simulations using a method of simplifying the handling of substructure in galaxy clusters using halo ‘core-tracking’.

The overlay of this one is here:

 

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

2 Comments »

Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on June 28, 2023 by telescoper

Time to catch up with a couple of recent publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

The first paper was published on Friday 23rd June. It is the 21st in Volume 6 (2023) and the 86th in all.

The primary classification for this paper is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and its title is “CosmoPower-JAX: high-dimensional Bayesian inference with differentiable cosmological emulators”. The paper is about a new method, based on machine learning, to construct emulators for cosmological power spectra for the purpose of speeding up inference procedures. The software described in the paper is available here.

The authors are Davide Piras (of the University of Geneva, Switzerland) and Alessio Spurio Mancini (of the Mullard Space Sciences Laboratory, University College, London, UK)

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 yesterday. It is the 22nd in Volume 6 (2023) and the 87th in all. Although 87 is an unlucky number for Australian cricketers – 13 short of a century – we’re still well on track to reach 100 papers by the end of the year.

Once again the primary classification for this paper is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The title of this one is “The alignment of galaxies at the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation scale” by Dennis van Dompseler, Christos Georgiou & Nora Elisa Chisari all of Utrecht University, in The Netherlands.

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.

1 Comment »

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on June 21, 2023 by telescoper

I may be away at a conference, but it’s still time to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one was published on Monday 19th June.

The latest paper is the 20th  so far in Volume 6 (2023) and the 85th in all,  so with still more than half of 2023 remaining and many papers still in the pipeline, we’re on track to reach a total of 100 papers by the end of 2023!

The primary classification for this paper is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and its title is “Sparse Bayesian mass-mapping using trans-dimensional MCMC”.  The paper describes a new trans-dimensional Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler for mass-mapping, using wavelets, for the construction of mass maps from weak gravitational lensing which, as I’ve previously mentioned on this blog, is what the cool kids do these days.

The authors are: Augustin Marignier, Thomas D. Kitching & Jason D. McEwen (MSSL, Mullard Space Science Laboratory), Ana M. G. Ferreira (Department of Earth Sciences), all at University College London.

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.

Leave a comment »

Never mind the points, look at the line!

Posted in Bad Statistics, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on June 14, 2023 by telescoper

I was just thinking this morning that it’s been a while since I posted anything in my Bad Statistics folder when suddenly I come across this gem from a paper in Nature Astronomy entitled Could quantum gravity slow down neutrinos?

The paper itself is behind a paywall (though a preprint version is on the arXiv here). The results in the paper were deemed so important that Nature Astronomy tweeted about them, including this remarkable graph:

Understandably there has been quite a lot of reaction from scientists on Twitter to this plot, questioning how the blue line is obtained from the dots (as only one point to the right appears to be responsible for the trend), remarking on the complete absence of any error bars on either axis for any of the points, and above all wondering how this managed to get past a referee, never mind one for a “prestigious” journal such as Nature Astronomy. It wouldn’t have passed muster as an undergraduate exercise.

Of course this is how a proper astronomer would do it:

Joking aside, if you look at the paper (or the preprint if you can’t afford it) you will see another graph, which shows two other points at higher energy (red triangles):

The extra two points don’t have any error-bars either, and according to the preprint these appear to be unconfirmed candidate GRB events.

The abstract of the paper is:

In addition to its implications for astrophysics, the hunt for neutrinos originating from gamma-ray bursts could also be significant in quantum-gravity research, as they are excellent probes of the microscopic fabric of spacetime. Some previous studies based on neutrinos observed by the IceCube observatory found intriguing preliminary evidence that some of them might be gamma-ray burst neutrinos whose travel times are affected by quantum properties of spacetime that would slow down some of the neutrinos while speeding up others. The IceCube collaboration recently significantly revised the estimates of the direction of observation of their neutrinos, and we here investigate how the corrected directional information affects the results of the previous quantum-spacetime-inspired analyses. We find that there is now little evidence for neutrinos being sped up by quantum spacetime properties, whereas the evidence for neutrinos being slowed down by quantum spacetime is even stronger than previously determined. Our most conservative estimates find a false-alarm probability of less than 1% for these ‘slow neutrinos’, providing motivation for future studies on larger data samples.

I agree with the last sentence where it says larger data samples are needed in future, but also I’d suggest higher standards of data analysis are also called for. Not to mention refereeing. After all, it’s the quality of the reviewing that you pay for, isn’t it?

P.S. For those of you wondering, this paper would not have been published by the Open Journal of Astrophysics even if passed review, as it is not on the astro-ph section of arXiv (it’s on gr-qc).

8 Comments »

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on June 13, 2023 by telescoper

It’s time to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one was published on Friday 9th June.

The latest paper is the 19th paper so far in Volume 6 (2023) and the 84th in all,  so with more than half of 2023 remaining and many papers still in the pipeline we’re on track to reach a total of 100 papers by the end of 2023!

The primary classification for this paper is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and its title is “Categorizing models using Self-Organizing Maps: an application to modified gravity theories probed by cosmic shear”. For the uninitiated, a Self-Organizing Map is a machine-learning technique that makes large-dimensional data sets easier to analyze. This paper is yet another one about weak gravitational lensing (cosmic shear), which is obviously what the cool kids do these days.

The authors are: Agnès Ferté (JPL); Shoubaneh Hemmati (IPAC); Daniel Masters (IPAC); Brigitte Montminy (JPL); Peter L. Taylor (JPL); Eric Huff (JPL);  and Jason Rhodes (JPL).

(JPL=Jet Propulsion Laboratory, IPAC= Infrared Processing & Analysis Center, both associated with California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA)

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.

P.S. The first author tweeted about this paper:

 

Leave a comment »

Abolishing an “Industry”?

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on June 2, 2023 by telescoper

A week or so ago I mentioned that the European Council had adopted a text that calls for the EU Commission and Member States to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers.

The journal Nature has responded to the news with a piece entitled EU council’s ‘no pay’ publishing model draws mixed response and the lede:

Some academics have welcomed the proposed open access plans. But publishing industry representatives warn they are unrealistic and lack detail.

It’s not really accurate to describe the response as mixed as it is completely separated: the vested interests in the academic publishing industry are against it and everyone else is for it! It’s hardly surprising to see Nature (owned by academic publishing company Springer Nature). I found this in the text of the Nature piece:

The conclusions are concerning because they support a move that would abolish an industry

Caroline Sutton, the chief executive of the STM (a membership organization of academic publishers)

Indeed, though I would argue that what the proposals would abolish is not so much an industry as a racket. I’ve been blogging here about the Academic Journal Racket since 2009. It’s nice at last to see some real movement towards its abolition. Further on, I find:

The STM is also concerned that the move would eliminate independent European publishing companies and usher in a state-defined system that could stymie academic freedom. It warns that the amount of public funds used to build repositories of academic research papers by member states or institutions is hard to quantify.

How would free open access publishing stymie academic freedom? If anything does that it’s the extortionate publishing fees levied by publishers. And it’s a very bad argument to say that the costs of repositories is hard to quantify when everyone can see your enormous profit margins!

I was thinking about the financial strife currently afflicting many UK universities. If the UK university sector has to choose over the next few years between sacking hundreds of academic staff and ditching its voluntary subsidy to the publishing industry, I know what I would pick. In this respect I’m definitely an abolitionist.

6 Comments »

Open Access: the Future is Diamond

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on May 24, 2023 by telescoper

As it was foretold the Council of Europe has now released a document (PDF) that calls for “transparent, equitable, and open access to scholarly publications”.  In its conclusions, the Council calls on the Commission and the member states to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers. In other words, it calls for Diamond Open Access. The covering press release includes:

If we really believe in open science, we need to make sure that researchers can make their findings available and re-usable and that high-quality scientific articles are openly accessible to anyone that needs to read them. This should be particularly the case for research that benefits from public funding: what has been paid by all should be accessible to all.

Mats Persson, Swedish Minister for Education, Ministry of Education and Research

This is clearly how Open Access should be, though I am still worried that the sizeable publishing lobby will still try to persuade research agencies and institutions to pay the existing fees on behalf of authors, which does not solve the problem but merely hides it.

I know I’m not alone in thinking that the current publishing ecosystem is doomed and will die a natural death soon enough. The replacement should be a worldwide network of institutional and/or subject-based repositories that share research literature freely for the common good. Universities and research centres should simply bypass the grotesque parasite that is the publishing industry. Indeed, I would be in favour of hastening the demise of the Academic Journal Racket by having institutions make it a disciplinary offence for any researcher to pay an APC to any journal.

We are lucky in physics and astronomy because arXiv has already done the hard work for us. With the existence of arXiv, old-style journals are no longer necessary. It is great that arXiv is being joined by similar ventures in other fields, such as BiorXiv and EarthArxiv. A list of existing repositories can be found here. I’m sure many more will follow. The future is Diamond.

What is needed is a global effort to link these repositories to each other and to peer review mechanisms. One way is through overlays as demonstrated by the Open Journal of Astrophysics, there being no reason why the idea can’t be extended beyond arXiv. Other routes are possible, of course, and I would love to see different models developed. I hope the European Council call will result in more support for Diamond Open Access. But whether this happens or not, I think the next few years are going to be very exciting.

13 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »