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The Strain on Scientific Publishing

Posted in Open Access with tags , on September 29, 2023 by telescoper

It’s the end of my first week away but before I go home for a swim in the pool on my roof terrace I thought I’d share an interesting paper on the arXiv by Hanson et al. (4 authors) entitled The Strain on Scientific Publishing. The abstract is:

Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was 47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth, if any, in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist (writing, reviewing, editing) has increased dramatically. We define this problem as the strain on scientific publishing. To analyse this strain, we present five data-driven metrics showing publisher growth, processing times, and citation behaviours. We draw these data from web scrapes, requests for data from publishers, and material that is freely available through publisher websites. Our findings are based on millions of papers produced by leading academic publishers. We find specific groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year, contributing to this strain. Some publishers enabled this growth by adopting a strategy of hosting special issues, which publish articles with reduced turnaround times. Given pressures on researchers to publish or perish to be competitive for funding applications, this strain was likely amplified by these offers to publish more articles. We also observed widespread year-over-year inflation of journal impact factors coinciding with this strain, which risks confusing quality signals. Such exponential growth cannot be sustained. The metrics we define here should enable this evolving conversation to reach actionable solutions to address the strain on scientific publishing.

arXiv:2309.15884

Here’s a table with some figures taken from the article, from which is easy to identify the most extreme behaviour and see that it is associated with predatory publishers.

How did we end up with such an absurd system that encourages this sort of behaviour?

This of course just covers the big publishers. The Open Journal of Astrophysics is much smaller: it has only published about a hundred papers in the period covered by the Table. For comparison, the OJAp rejection rate is about 49% and our turnaround time is about three weeks, on average, though with a large dispersion.

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

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

Time to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one was published yesterday (27th September 2023).

The latest paper is the 37th  so far in Volume 6 (2023) and the 102nd in all. The authors are Joe McCaffrey (Maynooth, Ireland), Samantha Hardin (Georgia Tech, USA), John Wise (Georgia Tech) and John Regan (Maynooth). As this one involved two authors from my own Department, I recused myself from the editorial process, although it is work I am very interested in.

The primary classification for this paper is Astrophysics of Galaxies and its title is “No Tension: JWST Galaxies at z>10 Consistent with Cosmological Simulations”.  I’ve blogged about this paper before, a few months ago, when it appeared on the arXiv. The editorial process on this one has been very thorough and  it has been a few rounds with the reviewers before being accepted for publication. The authors may have found this a bit irksome, but I think the process improved them paper considerably, which is what it is meant to do.

As many of you will be aware, there’s been a considerable to-do not to mention a hoo-hah about the detections by JWST of some galaxies at high redshift. Some of these have been shown not to be galaxies at high redshift after all, but some around z=10 seem to be genuine. This paper is a response to claims that these somehow rule out the standard cosmological framework.

The key figure in the current paper is this:

The solid curves show the number of galaxies of a given mass one would expect to see as a function of redshift in fields comparable to those observed with estimated values from observations (star-shaped symbols). As you can see the observed points are consistent with the predictions. There’s no tension, so you can all relax.

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.

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Let’s Make “No pay” Open Access Real…

Posted in Open Access, Politics with tags , on September 12, 2023 by telescoper

I took the liberty of reblogging this short post by Olivier Pourret about “No Pay” Open Access to direct readers to it and to make a couple of points. One is that you have to realize that “publishing-industry representatives” have a vested interest in the much of the discussion is about possible models for what might happen in the future, some of us have been busy making “No Pay” Open Access real in the here and now.

EU council ‘no pay’ publishing model is realistic

For some background, the article refers to a Council of Europe 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. 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. 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 some of these are mentioned in the article I reposted. I would love to see different models developed, but that needs action, not words.

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The 100th Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on September 11, 2023 by telescoper

I am happy to announce the publication of yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one is hot off the press; it was published today, 11th September 2023.

The latest paper is in fact our 100th publication. It is also the 35th in Volume 6 (2023), which means that we have now published more papers so far this year than in the previous two years put together. I’d like to thank everyone who has supported the Open Journal of Astrophysics and helped us get this far! Here’s to the next 100!

Anyway, the new paper is entitled A complete catalogue of merger fractions in AGN hosts: No evidence for an increase in detected merger fraction with AGN luminosity and it is a complete and systematic analysis of detected merger fractions in AGN hosts from the literature leading to the conclusion that there is no evidence for correlation between the two.

The primary classification for this paper is Astrophysics of Galaxies and the author is Carolin Villforth of the Department of Physics in the University of Bath. As author of our 100th paper, Carolin wins a year’s free subscription to the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

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.

Incidentally, you might notice a new feature on the overlay above. Just above the Abstract heading on the right and side you can see a little link saying “Download”. This allows you to download the citation to the paper in BibTex format.

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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 30, 2023 by telescoper

Not unexpectedly because of holidays, August has been rather a quiet month at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, but with people returning to work this week business has picked up again and it’s time to announce the last batch (all published this week).

In fact, this week we have published three papers, which I now present to you here. These take the count in Volume 6 (2023) up to 34 and the total published by OJAp up to 99. Who will be the author(s) of the 100th? We will just have to wait and see! I’ll do a special post for whichever paper wins that honour.

In chronological order, the three 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 “Bright common envelope evolution requires jets” by Noam Soker of Technion, Haifa in Israel. This is a discussion of the role of jets that a main sequence secondary star launches as it enters a common envelope evolution (CEE) with a primary giant star. The paper was published on 28th August, is just the fifth item in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 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 “Almanac: MCMC-based signal extraction of power spectra and maps on the sphere” by Elena Sellentin (Leiden), Arthur Loureiro (Stockholm); Lorne Whiteway (UCL); Javier Lafaurie (Leiden); Sreekumar Balan (UCL); Malak Olamaie (York); and Andrew Jaffe & Alan Heavens (Imperial).  This presents a new software tool called Almanac , which uses Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling to infer the underlying all-sky noiseless maps of cosmic structures, together with their auto- and cross-power spectra.

This one is  in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The paper was also published on 28th August 2023 and you can see the overlay here:

 

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

The last paper of this batch paper is in the Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics folder. It is entitled “Neural Network Based Point Spread Function Deconvolution For Astronomical Applications” and the authors are: Hong Wang, Sreevarsha Sreejith, Yuewin, Nesar Ramachandra*, Anze Slosar & Shinjae Yoo, all of the Brookhaven National Laboratory (NY) except * who is at the Argonne National Laboratory (IL), all based in the USA. This paper discusses a neural-network based deconvolution algorithm based on Deep Wiener Deconvolution Network (DWDN) and its performance in an astronomical context.

Here is the overlay:

 

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

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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.

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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 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.

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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.

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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 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.

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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 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.

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