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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 27/09/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 27, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for a summary of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published five new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 141, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 376.

The first paper to report this week is “The Bispectrum of Intrinsic Alignments: Theory Modelling and Forecasts for Stage IV Galaxy Surveys” by Thomas Bakx (Utrecht U., NL), Alexander Eggemeier (U. Bonn, DE), Toshiki Kurita (MPA Garching, DE), Nora Elisa Chisari (Leiden U., NL) and Zvonimir Vlah (Ruđer Bošković Institute, Croatia). This paper was published on Monday 22nd September 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It studies the bispectrum of intrinsic galaxy alignments, a possible source of systematic errors in extracting cosmological information from the analysis of weak lensing surveys.

The overlay is here:

You can make this larger by clicking on it.  The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, published on Tuesday 23rd September 2025 is “Reanalysis of Stage-III cosmic shear surveys: A comprehensive study of shear diagnostic tests” by Jazmine Jefferson (University of Chicago, USA) and 13 others for the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. It is also in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics; it describes diagnostic tests on three public shear catalogs (KiDS-1000, Year 3 DES-Y3 s, and Year 3 HSC-Y3); not all the surveys pass all the tests.

The corresponding overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The third one this week, published on Wednesday 24th September 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Is feedback-free star formation possible?” by Andrea Ferrara, Daniele Manzoni, and Evangelia Ntormousi (all of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy). This paper presents an argument that Lyman-alpha radiation pressure strongly limits star formation efficiency, even at solar metallicities, so that a feedback-free star formation phase is not possible without feedback. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here.

Next we have “Microphysical Regulation of Non-Ideal MHD in Weakly-Ionized Systems: Does the Hall Effect Matter?” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA), Jonathan Squire (U. Otago, New Zeland), Raphael Skalidis (Caltech) and Nadine H. Soliman (Caltech). This was also published on Wednesday 24th September 2025, but in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. It presents an improved treatment of non-ideal effects in magnetohydrodynamics, particularly the Hall effect, and a discussion of the implications for weakly-ionized astrophysical systems.

The corresponding overlay is here:

 

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

The fifth, and last, one for this week is “The Local Volume Database: a library of the observed properties of nearby dwarf galaxies and star clusters” by Andrew B. Pace (University of Virginia, USA). This one was published on Friday 26th September (i.e. yesterday) in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents a catalogue of positional, structural, kinematic, chemical, and dynamical parameters for dwarf galaxies and star clusters in the Local Volume. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version of this paper on arxiv here.

 

And that concludes the report for this week. I’ll post another update next Saturday.

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How to Fight Fraudulent Publishing

Posted in mathematics, Open Access with tags , , , , , , , on September 23, 2025 by telescoper
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

There’s a short article on arXiv with the title How to Fight Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences: Joint Recommendations of the IMU and the ICIAM which is well worth reading. The abstract is not useful but the prelude reads:

Prelude. In November 2023, Clarivate announced that it had excluded the entire field of mathematics from the latest edition of its influential list of ‘highly cited researchers’. This prompted the IMU and the ICIAM to conduct a more thorough investigation into the problem of fraudulent publishing in the mathematical sciences (see [1]). Understanding the problem is one thing; finding a way out and regaining control is another. With the recommendations given below, we would like to start the discussion on how, as a global community, we can achieve this. We are all concerned. It affects the very core of the science we love so much. I.A.

arXiv:2509.09877

The paper correctly identifies predatory journals and citation cartels as two consequences of the effort to quantify and rank the quality of research through scientific ‘performance indicators’, in the form of bibliometric measures and suggests some possible remedies.

Many of the recommendations are already included in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (SFDORA). Many also apply beyond the mathematical sciences (which is why I dropped the Mathematical Sciences bit in the title of the paper from the title of this blog post) and it’s not a long paper so I suggest you read it.

In my view one of the most important steps to take is to ditch the reliance on such companies as Scopus and Clarivate, who have deliberately constructed a system that is so easy to game. All higher education institutes should follow the examples of the Sorbonne University in Paris and, more recently, Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The academic publishing racket is inherently fraudulent. Too many universities, and indeed researchers employed by them, are willing participants in the system.

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 20/09/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , on September 20, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for a summary of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 136, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 371.

The first paper to report this week is “The Moon as a possible source for Earth’s co-orbital bodies” by Rafael Sfair, L. C. Gomes, O. C. Winter & R. A. Moraes (São Paulo State University, Brazil), G. Borderes-Motta (Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic) and C. M. Schäfer (Universität Tübingen, Germany). This paper was published on Monday 15th September, in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, and it presents a numerical exploration of the ejection velocities and launch locations necessary for lunar ejecta to evolve into Earth’s co-orbital bodies.

The overlay is here:

 

You can make this larger by clicking on it.  The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, published on Friday 19th September in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, is  “Jet-Driven Formation of Bipolar Rings in Planetary Nebulae: Numerical Simulations Inspired by NGC 1514” by Muhammad Akashi, Ealeal Bear, and Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel). This paper presents evidence from numerical simulations notion that jets play a substantial role in shaping planetary nebulae (PNe).

The corresponding overlay is here:

 

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 13/09/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 13, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for another summary of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published seven new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 134, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 369. We seem to be emerging for the slight late-summer hiatus we have experienced over the last few weeks.

Anyway, the first paper to report this week is “Observing the Sun with the Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST): Forecasting Full-disk Observations” by Mats Kirkaune & Sven Wedemeyer (U. Oslo, Norway), Joshiwa van Marrewijk (Leiden U., Netherlands), Tony Mroczkowski (ESO, Garching, Germany) and Thomas W. Morris (Yale, USA). This paper discusses possible strategies and parameters for full-disk observations of the Sun using the proposed Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST). It was published on Tuesday 9th September 2025 in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

 

You can make this larger by clicking on it.  The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, published on Wednesday 10th September in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is “The exact non-Gaussian weak lensing likelihood: A framework to calculate analytic likelihoods for correlation functions on masked Gaussian random fields” by Veronika Oehl and Tilman Tröster (ETH Zurich, Switzerland).  This paper shows how to calculate likelihoods for the correlation functions of spin-2 Gaussian random fields defined on the sphere in the presence of a mask with applications to weak gravitational lensing.

The overlay is here:

and you can find the final accepted version on arXiv here.

Next one up, the third paper this week, is  “Subspace Approximation to the Focused Transport Equation. II. The Modified Form” by B. Klippenstein and Andreas Shalchi (U. Manitoba, Canada). This was also published on 10th September 2025 in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It is about solving the focused transport equation analytically and numerically using the subspace method in two or more dimensions.

You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The fourth paper of this week was also published on Wednesday 10th September. It is “Mass models of galaxy clusters from a non-parametric weak-lensing reconstruction” by Tobias Mistele (Case Western Reserve U., USA), Federico Lelli (INAF, Firenze, Italy), Stacy McGaugh (Case Western), James Schombert (U. Oregon, USA) and Benoit Famaey (Université de Strasbourg, France).  Published in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, it presents new, non-parametric deprojection method for weak gravitational lensing applied to a sample of galaxy clusters. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The fifth paper of the week is “A Swift Fix II: Physical Parameters of Type I Superluminous Supernovae” by Jason T. Hinkle & Benjamin J. Shappee (U. Hawaii, USA) and Michael A. Tucke (Ohio State, USA). This one was published on Thursday 11th September 2025 in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The paper uses recalibrated Swift photometry to recompute peak luminosities and other properties of a sample of superluminous Type I supernovae. The overlay is here:

You can find the official accepted version on arXiv here.

Paper No. 6 for this week is “Detailed Microwave Continuum Spectra from Bright Protoplanetary Disks in Taurus” by Caleb Painter (Harvard, USA) and 11 others, too numerous to mention by name, based in the USA, Germany, Mexico and Taiwan.  This one was published in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics on September 11th 2025. It presents new observations sampling the microwave (4-360 GHz) continuum spectra from eight young stellar systems in the Taurus region. The overlay is here:

 

The final version can be found on arXiv here.

The last paper for this update is “On Soft Clustering For Correlation Estimators” by Edward Berman (Northeastern University, USA) and 13 others based in the USA, France, Denmark and Finland and Cosmos-Web:The JWST Cosmic Origins Survey. This was published on Friday 12th September 2025 in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. It presents an algorithm for estimating correlations that clusters objects in a probabilistic fashion, enabling the uncertainty caused by clustering to be quantified simply through model inference. The overlay is here:

You can find the final version on arXiv here.

And that’s all the papers for this week. I’ve noticed a significant recent increase in the number of papers in Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, which means we’re broadening our impact across the community. Which is nice.

P.S. I found out last week that, according to NASA/ADS, papers in OJAp have now accumulated over 5000 citations.

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 06/09/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on September 6, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for a summary of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 127, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 362. It’s been another relatively slow week, not least because of the Labor (sic) Day holiday in the USA on Monday which, among other things, meant there was no arXiv update on Tuesday.

Anyway, the first paper to report this week is “An analytical model for the dispersion measure of Fast Radio Burst host galaxies” by Robert Reischke, Michael Kovač & Andrina Nicola (U. Bonn, Germany), Steffen Hagstotz (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München) and Aurel Schneider (U. Zurich, Switzlerland). This is a theoretical study of the dispersion measures (DMs) intrinsic to host galaxies of Fast Radio Burst (FRB) sources to enable separation of that from the line-of-sight DM. This one was published on Monday 1st September 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

 

You can make this larger by clicking on it.  The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, published on Wednesday 3rd Sepember in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, is “Complex spectral variability and hints of a luminous companion in the Be star + black hole binary candidate ALS 8814” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), Matthias Fabry (Villanova U., USA), Hugues Sana (KU Leuven, Belgium), Tomer Shenar (Tel Aviv U., Israel) and Rhys Seeburger (MPA Heidelberg, Germany).

The overlay for this one is here:

 

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

And that’s all the papers for this week. It’s still a bit slow as we emerge from the summer vacations, we have a lot of papers in the pipeline that I expect to emerge pretty soon.

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 30/08/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2025 by telescoper

Once again it’s time for a summary of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published three new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 125, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 360.

The first paper to report this week is “Large-scale surveys of the quasar proximity effect” by Rupert Croft, Patrick Shaw & Ann-Marsha Alexis (Carnegie Mellon University; CMU), Nianyi Chen (Princeton), Yihao Zhou & Tiziana Di Matteo (CMU), Simeon Bird (UC Riverside), Patrick Lachance (CMU), and Yueying Ni (Harvard). This paper was published on Monday 25th August in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It presents a CDM-based halo model of the quasar proximity effect, tested on quasar Lyman-alpha spectra from the ASTRID cosmological simulation, including self-consistent formation of quasar black holes and the intergalactic medium.

The overlay is here:

 

You can make this larger by clicking on it, as you can with all the overlays below. The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, also published on Monday 25th August, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Redshift evolution of Lyman continuum escape fraction after JWST” by Andrea Ferrara (Pisa), M. Giavalisco (UMass Amherst), L. Pentericci (Rome), E. Vanzella (Bologna), A. Calabrò (Rome) and M. Llerena (Rome). This paper is about the Attenuation-Free Model (AFM) for galaxies, in which radiation-driven outflows develop once the galaxy specific star formation rate exceeds a certain level, which is tested on data with positive results. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The third and final paper this week is “Primordial black holes in cosmological simulations: growth prospects for supermassive black holes” by Lewis R Prole, John A Regan, Daxal Mehta & Peter Coles (National University of Ireland, Maynooth) and Pratika Dayal (Groningen, NL). This one was published in Astrophysics of Galaxies folder on Thursday 28th August 2025. You can read more about this paper here: basically it studies the growth of primordial black holes in the early Universe using numerical simulations, with implications for the subsequent formation of massive black holes.

The overlay is here:

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

And that’s all the papers for this week. It’s still a bit slow as we emerge from the summer vacations, but I expect things will start to pick up from now on.

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Working for Elsevier…

Posted in Open Access with tags , on August 29, 2025 by telescoper

I found this on Mastodon and, for obvious reasons, couldn’t resist sharing it here:

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Our Million-Dollar Journal!

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on August 25, 2025 by telescoper

The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publishing a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) is now £2356. Converting that to dollars at current rates gives about $3150 per paper.

As of today, 25th August 2025, the Open Journal of Astrophysics has published 359 articles.

Using the dollar cost of an MNRAS APC as a benchmark – many journals charge more – this means that we have now saved the global astrophysics community about $1.1M (for an outlay of around $10K).

Yes, we are still a small journal but the size of that figure should help you understand how much money is being wasted globally on publishing fees that could instead be spent on actual research.

It’s good to see that more and more researchers are seeing the light and switching to Diamond Open Access. Today we published the 124th article in Volume 8 (2025) of the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This means that we have so far in 2025 published more papers than we published in the whole of 2024. At the end of August we will be about two-thirds of the way through the year so I expect we will publish more than 180 articles this year.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in running this journal: the Editors, staff at Maynooth University Library who help us, the host of volunteer referees, and of course our authors. I’m confident that, together, we can change the publishing landscape in astrophysics, and put the power (and money) back in the hands of researchers instead of greedy publishers.

This is a slightly-edited version of a post I made last week for the Open Journal of Astrophysics blog.

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 23/08/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 23, 2025 by telescoper

So it’s Saturday again, so it’s time for the usual update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics which I do every Saturday. Since the last update we have published six new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 122, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 357. As I mentioned here we have overtaken the total of 120 published in Volume 7 (2024) and are on track for in excess of 180 publications in 2025.

The first paper to report this week is “Mass-feeding of jet-launching white dwarfs in grazing and common envelope evolution” by Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel). This was published on Tuesday 19th August in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It proposes a theoretical suggestion about the production of jets in common-envelope evolution with massive stars.

The overlay is here:

You can make this larger by clicking on it, as you can with all the overlays below. The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, published on Wednesday 20th August in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, is “Transition metal abundance as a key parameter for the search of Life in the Universe” by Giovanni Covone and Donato Giovannelli (University of Naples, Italy). This paper presents an argument that the availability of transition elements is an essential feature of habitability, and should be considered as such in selecting exoplanetary targets in the search for life.

The overlay is here:

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

The third paper this week, also published on 20th August 2025 in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, is “Discrete element simulations of self-gravitating rubble pile collisions: the effects of non-uniform particle size and rotation” by Job Guidos, Lucas Kolanz and Davide Lazzati (Oregon State University, USA).  This presents a new computer code for simulating the growth of granular masses through collisions of smaller particles and discusses results generated by it.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The next paper, the fourth this week, is “Seeing the Outer Edge of the Infant Type Ia Supernova 2024epr in the Optical and Near Infrared” by W.B. Hoogendam (University of Hawaii, USA) and 32 others – too numerous to list by name – based in various institutes in the USA, Australia, UK, Denmark, Taiwan and China. This paper was also published on Wednesday 20th August 2025, but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.  The article reports on the results of optical-to-near-infrared photometry and spectroscopy of the Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) 2024epr and a discusses how these challenge models for this sort of supernova.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The fifth paper this week is “Computing Nonlinear Power Spectra Across Dynamical Dark Energy Model Space with Neural ODEs” by Peter L. Taylor of Ohio State University (USA).  This one shows how to compute the evolution of cosmological power spectra into the non-linear regime via neural differential equations. It was published on Friday 22nd August 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

And finally for this week we have “Symbiotic star candidates in Gaia Data Release 3” by Samantha E. Ball & Benjamin C Bromley (University of Utah, USA) and Scott J. Kenyon (Smithsonian Observatory, USA). This paper was published on Friday 22nd August in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It describes a new search for symbiotic star candidates in Gaia Data Release 3 (GDR3), based on astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic information. The overlay is here:

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

And that’s all the papers for this week. I suppose there will come a time when we publish a paper on every day of the week and each week’s summary will contain a paper in each of the astro-ph categories on arXiv, but we haven’t done that yet. This week we published on every day but Monday 18th August, and have papers in four of the six categories.

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Il Sorpasso

Posted in Film, Open Access with tags , , , on August 21, 2025 by telescoper

Just a quick note to say that yesterday we published the 120th article in Volume 8 (2025) of the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This means that we have so far in 2025 published as many papers we published in the whole of 2024. At the end of August we will be about 2/3 of the way through the year so I expect we will publish more than 180 articles this year. It may be more than that because we have a group of articles in the pipeline that will be published simultaneously in a special issue, which may be completed this year. We might in this case reach 200 altogther for 2025, but if not the special issue will appear in 2026.

The relevance of all this to the 1962 Italian comedy film Il Sorpasso is entirely negligible, except that I like the movie.

I hope this clarifies the situation

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