Archive for Chile

Virtually in Chile

Posted in Maynooth, Open Access, Talks and Reviews with tags , , , on November 4, 2025 by telescoper

Today has been a very busy day. I had a one-hour lecture on Partial Differential Equations from 11-12 this morning and a two-hour lecture on Ordinary Differential Equations from 2-4 this afternoon. In between those instead of having a lunch break, I was virtually in Chile giving a talk via Teams about the Open Journal of Astrophysics at LISA 10. That is not LISA as in the Laser Interferometric Space Antenna, but LISA as in Library and Information Services in Astronomy. I was invited to attend this in person, and would have gone, had it not clashed with teaching, as I have never set foot in Chile nor anywhere else in South America.

The talk went well and I had a number of questions and comments.

I got up early this morning to publish a paper taking our total so far to 399. By an unfortunate coincidence there was some problem with the integration between Crossref and our Scholastica platform so the publication didn’t go through properly. When I returned after my afternoon lectures, however, I found that whatever the problem was, it had sorted itself out; the paper is here.

The last talk I gave of this kind was May 2025, and the slides for that talk indicate that OJAp had published 293 papers so we have published over 100 papers in the 6 months since then. Unless there is another glitch tomorrow I expect we’ll reach 400 in the morning.

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The Land of Inadequate Research Stipends

Posted in Education with tags , , , on October 13, 2023 by telescoper

I noticed yesterday that the Irish Government has announced that the stipend for PhD research supported by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Irish Research Coucil (IRC) will increase by €3,000 a year. The increase will bring the rate of stipend to €22,000 a year for doctoral researchers from January 2024. While this is €3,000 less than the €25,000 recommended by a report published earlier this year, and the Government itself has already tacitly admitted that a level of €28,000 is needed to attract the best students, this is at least a step in the right direction.

Current levels of funding for research students are simply exploitative, forcing research students to take on extra work – often low-paid teaching duties – in order to make enough money to make ends meet. That is, unless they are students from affluent backgrounds. The discriminatory aspect of this policy is plain for all to see: should a career in research only be possible for the wealthy?

Of course this applies only to PhD students funded by SFI and IRC. It remains to be seen whether other funders – particularly Universities themselves – will match this increase. If they don’t, it will create an unhealthy division between students doing similar work but receiving vastly different levels of remuneration.

In related news I notice the Irish Universities Association has proudly announced a new agreement to fund Chilean students undertaking PhD and Research Masters courses in Ireland. Sounds great, I thought when I saw the announcement, astronomy being a likely area for research projects involving Chilean students.

Strangely (?) the website advertising this scheme doesn’t mention the level of stipend offered, but I found out independently that it is $15,000 per annum. That’s about €14,250, completely inadequate for a research student in Ireland, especially in the Dublin area, and especially for one who has travelled halfway round the world to get to Ireland. I certainly won’t be encouraging any students to apply for this scheme unless and until the miserly bursary is increased to the same level as SFI/IRC.

The IUA, of course, knows full well that this stipend is insupportable, so it is reprehensible for it to have agreed to these terms, the only possible outcome of them being to create an underclass within an underclass.

I had my university education for free, without tuition fees and with a full maintenance grant. The stipend I received for my PhD, although by no means luxurious, was adequate too. At times like this I wonder yet again why my generation spends so much time shitting on the young?

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