Archive for the Open Access Category

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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 March 2, 2024 by telescoper

It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon here in Sydney, and here’s the last update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics before I change time zones. In fact there is only one paper to report this week, being  the 16th paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 131st altogether. It was published on February 29th 2024.

The title is “Bound circumplanetary orbits under the influence of radiation pressure: Application to dust in directly imaged exoplanet systems” and it  is in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. It presents an investigation into the effect of radiation pressure on bound orbits, with applications to the behaviour of dust in exoplanet systems in general and to the Fomalhaut system in particular. The authors are Bradley Hansen of UCLA and Kevin Hayakawa of California State University (both in the 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 also find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

There are quite a few papers in the pipeline which I expect to be published during the next week or soon after.

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Western Sydney

Posted in Biographical, Open Access with tags , , , , , , on February 26, 2024 by telescoper

Today I made a journey by train to Kingswood, a suburb of Sydney which is the location of one of the campuses of Western Sydney University (WSU). The journey of about 50 km takes about an hour on the stopping train (T1) from Sydney Central Station. I was intrigued that the final destination for the train I got was Emu Plains; I had visions of vast herds of Emus gathered there, but I had to get off the stop before the terminus so never saw them. There’s about a 20-minute walk to the campus from Kingswood Station. It was quite warm so I was grateful when one of my hosts offered me a lift back to Kingswood Station at the end of my visit.

The reason for my visit was set another seminar about Open Access Publishing in Astrophysics. Here are the slides:

Although I’ve given a talk based on more-or-less the same slides recently, it always comes out slightly different. There was a bigger audience than I expected in the room, supplemented by even more on Zoom. The topic of Open Access Publishing does seem to be pretty hot these days in Australia and there was quite a lively discussion. I have a feeling we might have a manuscript or two submitted from WSU before too long.

Kingswood is a far less affluent area than where I am staying in Ultimo, and WSU is an institution that’s very different from the University of Sydney itself, but it was good to see another side of the city, geographically as well as socially. Thank you to everyone who attended and, especially, to Luke Barnes for inviting me and for lunch and coffee!

On the train back into Sydney I noticed that trains going in the opposite direction where crammed full, with (mostly) teenage girls heading to Olympic Park for a Taylor Swift concert. My train, heading into Sydney was fairly empty by contrast and the journey back pleasant enough.

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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 February 24, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning in Sydney, 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 15 and the total published by OJAp up to 130. I should have posted these before leaving but it slipped my mind.

The first paper of the most recent pair – published on  Thursday 22nd February – is “Modelling cross-correlations of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays and galaxies” by Federico Urban (Prague, Czech Republic), Stefano Camera (Torino, Italy) and David Alonso (Oxford, UK). It presents a discussion of the possible statistical correlations between Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic-Ray (UHECR) directions in various models and structure in the galaxy distribution and whether or not this signal could be measurable.  This one is in the folder marked “High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena“.

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 Friday 23rd February and has the title “The IA Guide: A Breakdown of Intrinsic Alignment Formalisms” and the authors are: Claire Lamman (Harvard, USA);  Eleni Tsaprazi (Stockholm, Sweden);  Jingjing Shi (Tokyo, Japan); Nikolina Niko Šarčević (Newcastle, UK); Susan Pyne (UCL, UK); Elisa Legnani (Barcelona, Spain); and Tassia Ferreira (Oxford, UK). This one, which is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, presents a review of Intrinsic Alignments, i.e. physical correlations involving galaxy shapes, galaxy spins, and larger scale structure, especially important for weak gravitational lensing

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!

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Open Access Talk at UNSW

Posted in Biographical, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on February 21, 2024 by telescoper

After an exciting start to the day involving a fire alarm and consequent evacuation of my hotel, I today ventured into the suburbs of Sydney via the Light Rail system (i.e. the tram) to the University of New South Wales. The tram ride took about 20 minutes from Central and, incidentally, took me right past the Sydney Cricket Ground. Anyway, the UNSW campus at Kensington is very impressive:

After a few gremlins with the WIFI connection, the talk I gave was a longer version of the one I did at the University of Sydney on Monday. In discussions with the Astrophysics group at UNSW, I found they were particularly unhappy about the decision of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society to charge a high level of APC (Article Processing Artificial Profit Charge) so is looking at alternative journals that aren’t so exploitative. A journal has no right to call itself “open access” if it excludes researchers on grounds of cost. The problem with the Open Journal of Astrophysics in this case is that they need their publications to be in “high impact journals” for research assessment purposes, and OJAp doesn’t have an “official” journal impact factor yet. The fascination of bureaucrats with the obviously flawed journal impact factor disturbs me greatly but I hope we will have one soon so we may be able to help them out before too long.

Anyway, here are the slides from today’s talk:

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ArXiv Accessibility

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on February 19, 2024 by telescoper

Just over a year ago I did a post about the need to make arXiv more accessible, particularly for readers with some form of visual impairment. Although I missed it at the time, there was an announcement from arXiv in December 2023 that new papers (by which is meant submitted after 1st December 2023) will be available as HTML as well as PDF format. This has been in development for some time, actually, and HTML versions have been available from arXiv labs by changing the address of a paper from, for example, “https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.15014v3” to “https://ar5iv.org/abs/2111.15014v3“. The latter produces this HTML version of one of the papers we have published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics:

As you can see, it works pretty well for this example.

Naturally I tried out the new “beta” release of the HTML generator, which you can now find on the right-hand panel of the abstract page alongside the PDF download instead of fiddling around with the URL. Here is an example of one of our papers on which it works well:

Here it is on another of our OJAp papers which, as you can see, does not work:

You can see the reason for the failure, which is that the LaTex used to generate the paper contains a package the HTML generator does not know about. One of the difficulties for arXiv is that new packages are always being developed and it is hard to keep up. I’m told that on average arXiv achieves ~75% successful conversions (and 97% partial success), but the articles from January 2024 (which contain more new packages) convert with a success rate of only 62%. It’s far from perfect, but it will improve -especially if authors follow the advice on best practice produced by arXiv; I actually think authors have a responsibility to help arXiv as much as possible in this regard.

This all reminds me of past experiences I’ve had teaching theoretical physics to blind and partially-sighted students. Years ago this used to involve making Braille copies of notes, but there are now various bits of software to help such people manage LaTeX both for creating and reading documents. In particular there are programs that can read Latex documents (including formulae and equations) which means that if a lecturer can supply LaTeX source version of their notes, the student can hear them spoken out loud as well as make their own annotations/corrections. While HTML may well be better for some fields, I do wonder if physicists and other people in disciplines that make heavy use of mathematics might prefer to use the LaTeX source code which is already downloadable from arXiv?

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Talking Down Under

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on February 19, 2024 by telescoper

This morning I gave a short talk at the “Astronomy Tea” at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy. No prizes for guessing what I talked about. The talk was followed by questions and then by a huge thunderstorm.

Here are the slides:

P.S. Today was the first day of teaching of the new academic year at the University of Sydney, so the campus was much busier today than it has been.

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Predatory Encounters

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on February 17, 2024 by telescoper

Yesterday I received two different emails from predatory publishers. The first invited me to submit a manuscript to the OSP Journal of Physics & Astronomy. I am informed that the journal is fully open access, with an Article Processing Charge of “only” $950. Of course $950 is $950 more than I’ll ever be prepared to pay for an APC, but did have a look at the website and found this:

A pretty good clue that OSP is a predatory publisher is that can spell neither “Scientific” nor “submit”…

Anyway, if you’re interested – and if I were you I wouldn’t be – you can find the OSP Journal of Physics & Astronomy here. I’ve skimmed the latest issue and the quality of articles is just as I expected.

The Second Encounter of the Predatory Kind was an email that begins thus:

I’ve never heard of the Auricle Global Society of Education and Research (AGSER) but the Open Journal of Astrophysics is not for sale to them (nor to anyone else, for that matter). Of course I don’t own OJAp anyway, but even if I did I wouldn’t sell it at any price. The only terms that I would agree to a takeover would be if the new owners committed to keep it as Diamond Open Access (i.e. free to authors and readers), and I can’t see any predators offering that!

I don’t know how AGSER arrived at a valuation of $70K but it got me thinking. We have so far published 128 articles at OJAp. Taking the APC for MNRAS of £2500 (approx $3000) as typical then we have saved the community about $384,000 in unnecessary publication charges.

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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 February 16, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning here in Sydney, which means it is time for another weekly update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics. In fact there is only one paper to report this week, being  the 13th paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 128th altogether. It was published on February 15th 2024.

The title is “Jet – counter-jet asymmetry in the jittering jets explosion mechanism of supernovae” and it  This one is in the folder called High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The paper presents a discussion of the production of jets in core-collapse supernovae and the resulting formation of neutron stars, and the implications for the morphology of the supernova remnant.

The sole author of the paper is Noam Soker of Technion, Haifa, in Israel.

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.

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The Cost of Imaging Neuroscience

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , on February 13, 2024 by telescoper

Last year I wrote a piece about the resignation of the entire Editorial Board of an Elsevier journal. The main reason for this action was `extreme’ Article Processing Charges imposed by the publisher for so-called Gold Open Access to the papers. As I wrote then, the

… current system of ‘Gold’ Open Access is a scam, and it’s a terrible shame we have ended up having it foisted upon us. Fortunately, being forced to pay APCs of many thousands of euros to publish their papers, researchers are at last starting to realize that they are being ripped off. Recently, the entire Editorial Board of Neuroimage and its sister journal Neuroimage: Reports resigned in protest at the `extreme’ APC levels imposed by the publisher, Elsevier. I’m sure other academics will follow this example, as it becomes more and more obvious that the current arrangements are unsustainable. Previously the profits of the big publishers were hidden in library budgets. Now they are hitting researchers and their grants directly, as authors now have to pay, and people who previously hadn’t thought much about the absurdity of it all are now realizing what a racket academic publishing really is.

Well, the new journal founded by former Editorial Board of Neuroimage and Neuroimage: Reports has now appeared. It’s called Imaging Neuroscience and its rather website can be found here.

Good news, you would think.

But no…

Imaging Neuroscience is itself a Gold Open Access journal which charges an APC of $1600 per paper. That’s about half the Elsevier were charging ($3,450) but is still far too high. It simply does not cost this much to publish papers online! (There’s a paper that gives a summary of the commercial costs of different aspects of publishing here.) The journal claims to be non-profit making so I’d love to see what they are spending this money on. It can’t be on their website, which is very rudimentary.

It seems that the neuroscientists concerned have just decided to replace Elsevier’s absurd APCs with their own absurd APCs. Oh dear. And they seemed so close to getting it…

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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 February 12, 2024 by telescoper

With all the excitement of my first weekend in Sydney I completely forgot to post an update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics. In fact there is only one paper to report from last week, being  the 12th paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 127th altogether. This one was published on 9th February 2024 and is the first published from Down Under.

The title is “Galaxy Clusters Discovered via the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect in the 500-square-degree SPTpol Survey” and it presents a catalogue of 689 galaxy clusters detected through the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich using the dual-frequency polarization-sensitive camera SPTPol on the South Pole Telescope. This one is in the folder called Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

This paper has lead author Lindsey Bleem  of the Argonne National Laboratory in the USA and has 127 other authors – too many to list individually here – but you can see them on the overlay below. I see quite a few names of people I know well!

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.

P.S. Incidentally, while I’m here I thought I’d share this little graphic I’ve generated (for other purposes) that shows how the rate of submissions to OJAp has increased over the last 5 years:

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