Here I am, on the train from Valencia back to Barcelona. I’ve been to Valencia many times but the last time was so long ago that I don’t remember when it was exactly. I only had time for a short walk about this morning before getting a lift to the University campus, which is a bit out of town. I gave my talk as planned, had a nice lunch, and was personally driven back to the railway station, and am now on my way back to Barcelona.
I’ll probably doze off on the way, so I’ll just take this opportunity to thank Vicent Martínez for inviting me (including last night’s dinner) and everyone for their hospitality and nice questions after my talk!
Update: I got back to Barcelona about 15 minutes late, which wasn’t a big deal, although it’s a notably slower route than the Madrid-Barcelona line I travelled on a couple of months ago.
Ailing* laptop notwithstanding, I’ll shortly be taking the train to Valencia where I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow. The trip is about 350km each way and takes about 2 hours and 50 minutes. That’s a bit slower than the very fast train to Madrid but it looks like it’s all along the coast, so hopefully it will be quite enjoyable.
*I managed to get it to boot up into Windows, but it is running so extremely that I can’t do much on it. I have no idea what the issue is.
I thought I’d share the conference photograph from last week’s annual Euclid Consortium Meeting in Rome, along with a big “Thank You” to the organizers (both LOC and SOC). It’s a huge amount of work to organise a meeting of over 600 people. Although I was only there for a couple of days, I thought it went very well.
Next year’s meeting will be in Leiden in March so I probably won’t be able to attend because of teaching. But guess where it will be in 2026? Barcelona!
The Government of Ireland has set a target of achieving 100% open access to publicly funded scholarly publications by 2030. As a key element of achieving this objective, the PublishOA.ie project was established to evaluate the feasibility of establishing an all-island [Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland] digital publishing platform for Diamond Open Access journals and monographs designed to advance best practice and meet the needs of authors, readers, publishers, and research funding organisations in Irish scholarly publishing. It should be noted in this context that there is substantial ‘north–south’ cooperation between public bodies in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, some of whom operate on what is commonly termed an ‘all-island’ basis. The project commenced in November 2022 and will run until November 2024, with the submission of a Final Report. This article originated as an interim project report presented in September 2023 at the PubMet2023 conference in Zadar, Croatia. The project is unique in its mandate to report on the feasibility of a shared platform that will encompass scholarly publishing across the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, which are now, post-Brexit, inside and outside the European Union (EU): the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. The project is co-led by the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), Ireland’s leading body of experts in the Sciences and Humanities, and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute of Trinity College Dublin. There are sixteen partners and affiliates from universities and organisations from the island of Ireland. The feasibility study will be based on a review of the publishing practices in the island of Ireland, with gap analysis on standards, technology, processes, copyright practices, and funding models for Diamond OA, benchmarking against other national platforms, and specifications of the requirements, leading to the delivery of a pilot national publishing platform. A set of demonstrator journals and monographs will be published using the platform, which will be actively trialled by the partner publishers and authors. PublishOA.ie aims to deliver an evidence-based understanding of Irish scholarly publishing and of the requirements of publishers to transition in whole or in part to Diamond OA. This paper provides an interim report on progress on the project as of September 2023, ten months after its commencement.
I think the idea of having a national Diamond Open Access publishing platform is a very interesting one. In principle it could facilitate the federated system of repositories linked by refereeing overlays which I think is the future of academic publishing. I think a national peer review platform would be more to the point than a publishing platform.
I have two comments:
I am surprised that Maynooth University – publisher, among other things, of the Open Journal of Astrophysics (a Diamond Open Access journal) – is not among the partners in this project and does not even receive a mention as a publisher. I wonder how far this project will get if it excludes organizations that are already running Diamond Open Access Journals.
Less of a comment, more of a question: why on Earth is the report published in a journal run by MDPI, a publisher that is controversial (to say the least)? It would be deeply ironic if they had to pay an APC to publish an article on Diamond Open Access!
I wrote a piece a while ago about the richness of Jerome Kern’s great tune All The Things You Are. Here’s an example in the form of a wonderful live version on solo guitar by the great Joe Pass.
Until I can get my laptop fixed and/or get a new one, my ability to write blog posts is a bit limited. At least there is a sizeable collection of things to share, including a steady supply of new videos from the Euclid Consortium like this one:
Ongoing computer issues mean that this week’s update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics will have to be briefer and with fewer graphics than usual, for which I apologize. During the last week we published four new papers, taking the total so far in 2024 to 51 – so we have already passed last year’s total of 50 – and the total altogether to 166.
(in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, by Luca Broggi of the University of Milan, Italy, and six others; published on 21st June, arXiv version here)
(in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, by Andrey Kravtsov and Sophia Winney, of the University of Chicago, USA; published on 21st June, arXiv version here)
As I reported a couple of days ago, my laptop (which is about 6 years old) failed to restart when I got back to Barcelona from Rome.
I couldn’t attempt a reply until I got a key from IT Services in Maynooth. The 48 digits duly arrived yesterday. I tried a number of times to repair the disk but it kept failing. Last night I left a disk scan running when I went to bed, as it advised that several hours would be needed. When I got up this morning I found it had failed again.
I decided to try one more time, started the recovery process again and went out shopping. It was still running when I got back. I had all but given up at this point and had stopped paying attention to the screen. When I finally went to check again I saw to my amazement that it had restarted as far as the Windows login.
I logged in with fingers crossed. It took an eternity to start up and is still running very slowly. It’s probably quite ill, perhaps more undead than alive, but at least I could retrieve my files onto the hard disk I brought with me.
I have to travel to Valencia next week to give a talk and was wondering how I would manage without having access to my slides let alone a laptop to present them from…
Anyway, I’m nervous about what might happen if I have to restart again, so I’ll leave it on while I celebrate with a glass or several of wine. The Resurrection of the Laptop may well prove to be temporary but I’ll make the most of it while it lasts…
With all the excitement I almost forgot that Summer Solstice in the Northern hemisphere takes place later today, Thursday 20th June 2024, at 21.51 Irish Time(20.51 UTC)or 22.51 local time here in Barcelona.
Among other things, this means that today is the longest day of the year around these parts. Sunrise in Barcelona this morning was 06:17 and sunset at 21:28. The length of the day – the interval between sunrise and sunset – today is 15:10:13. Compare this with Dublin (sunrise 04:56, sunset 21:56, and day length 17:00:12).
This Sunday (23rd June) sees the Feast Day of St John (Sant Joan), which is celebrated in Barcelona with fireworks and bonfires, and people partying all night long on the beach. Monday is a holiday, presumably to allow people to recover. I am, of course, far too old, for that sort of thing.
What I thought would be a straightforward trip back from Rome to Barcelona turned into nothing of the sort.
I arrived at Roma Termini station and got on a train for Fiumicino Airport. The train didn’t move, however, and eventually we passengers were told that we should get off and take a bus or a taxi because of “a problem on the line” which would take an indefinite time to fix.
I went to see if I could get a bus, but the queue was predictably enormous. Same story for taxis. After waiting over an hour I had all but given up hope of catching my flight when suddenly it was announced that the track problem was fixed and I got back on the train. It reached the airport in good time and I passed a very long queue of people waiting to travel in the opposite direction; trains into Roma Termini from Fiumicino had also been cancelled:
I still thought I would miss the flight, but I thought that once in the airport I could perhaps book another. Helped by the fact that I had already checked in online and only had hand luggage, however, I made it through security and to the gate just in time to board.
So, all seemed well. I’ve travelled enough in Italy to have learnt how to cope with a fair amount of chaos.
I got back to Barcelona – which is somewhat cooler than Rome – just about on time and took the Aerobus as usual. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that today was the day that roads in the area around my flat were closed for a Formula 1 “Road Show”. The bus stopped at the edge of the sealed off area and passengers – many heavily laden with luggage – were left to make their way through the dense crowds. Whoever decided it was a good idea to block some of the busiest roads in Barcelona during the evening rush hour has a lot of questions to answer. The crush around Plaza de Catalunya was absurd and potentially dangerous, and not only for people like me who find such situations very difficult.
When I eventually got to my flat, I saw a protest against this stupid event had let to standoff in the street with some sinister-looking cops.
At home, and after a relaxing shower, I thought the day’s tribulations were over until I switched on my laptop and found it wouldn’t start:
Automatic Repair didn’t work so I logged a ticket with Maynooth IT Services. If they can’t fix it, it looks like I’ll be unable to work until I get a new machine…
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In the Dark 