Archive for Diamond Open Acccess

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 07/06/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday so once again it’s time for the weekly update of papers published 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 69 and the total so far published by OJAp  is now up to 304.

The two 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.

The first paper to report is “Chemical Abundances in the Leiptr Stellar Stream: A Disrupted Ultra-faint Dwarf Galaxy?” by Kaia R. Atzberger (Ohio State University) and 13 others based in the USA, Germany, the UK, Sweden, Australia, Canada and Brazil. This one was published on 2nd June 2025 and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents a spectroscopic study of stars in a stellar stream suggesting that the stream originated by the accretion of a dwarf galaxy by the Milky Way.

The overlay is here:

 

You can read the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The second paper is “Scaling Laws for Emulation of Stellar Spectra” by Tomasz Różański (Australian Nastional University) and Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State University, USA). This was published yesterday, i.e. on 6th June 2025, and is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The paper discusses certain scaling models and their use to achieve optimal performance for neural network emulators in the inference of stellar parameters and element abundances from spectroscopic data.

The overlay is here:

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

That’s the papers for this week. I’ll post another update next weekend.

As a postscript I have a small announcement about our social media. Owing to the imminent demise of Astrodon, we have moved the Mastodon profile of the Open Journal of Astrophysics to a new instance, Fediscience. You can find us here. The old profile currently redirects to the new one, but you might want to update your links as the old server will eventually go offline.

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Open Access Encounters: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on August 7, 2024 by telescoper

As it was foretold on Saturday, this afternoon I gave a talk at the 32nd General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union currently taking place in Cape Town, or rather at a side event thereof called Open Access Encounters: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. I actually gave the last talk in the session, which may or may not mean that I was representing The Ugly…

About 50 people attended online plus an unknown number in person, so it was quite a decent size of audiance.

I’m not sure if Slideshare is still working on WordPress, but if not here is a PDF of the slides.

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/2KaeVtUSNTngpq?hostedIn=slideshare&page=upload

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An All-Ireland Diamond Open Access Publishing Platform?

Posted in Maynooth, Open Access with tags , , , , , , on June 24, 2024 by telescoper

Here’s a report on an interesting development about Open Access in Ireland. The article belongs to the Special Issue 10th Anniversary Special Issue “PUBMET2023 Conference on Scholarly Communication in the Context of Open Science” and has the following abstract:

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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!

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Five New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on April 6, 2024 by telescoper

As promised a couple of days ago, I am taking the opportunity today to announce the batch of papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics that were paused slightly while we updated our system. This batch includes five papers, which I now present to you here. These five take the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 25 and the total published by OJAp up to 140. We’re publishing roughly two papers a week these days so we expect publish about 100 this year.

In chronological order, the five papers, 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.

This paper, by Yingtian Chen and Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan, is the 21st paper to be published in Volume 7 and the 136th altogether. It is a study of kinematic, chemical and age data of globular clusters from Gaia yielding clues to how the Milky Way Galaxy assembled. Here’s a screenshot of the overlay which includes the abstract. Note the new-style DOI at the bottom left.

You can read the article on arXiv directly here. This paper has a publication date of 20th March 2024, and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The second paper is “Generation of realistic input parameters for simulating atmospheric point-spread functions at astronomical observatories” by Claire-Alice Hébert (Stanford), Joshua E. Meyers (Stanford), My H. Do (Cal. State U, Pomona), Patricia R. Burchat (Stanford) and the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. It explores the use of atmospheric modelling to generate realistic estimates of the point-spread function for observational work, especially for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This one is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics and was published on 4th April 2024. 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 third paper to announce is “Cosmic Dragons: A Two-Component Mixture Model of COSMOS Galaxies” by William K. Black and August E. Evrard of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA). This paper was also published on 4th April 2024,  is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies and you can see the overlay here:

 

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

The next paper is “High mass function ellipsoidal variables in the Gaia Focused Product Release: searching for black hole candidates in the binary zoo” by Dominick M. Rowan, Todd A. Thompson,
Tharindu Jayasinghe, Christopher S. Kochanek and Krzysztof Z. Stanek of Ohio State University (USA). This paper, in the Solar and Stellar Astrophysics collection, describes a search for massive unseen stellar companions variable star systems found in Gaia data. This one was also published on 4th April 2024.

Here is the overlay:

 

 

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

Last in this batch, but by no means least, published yesterday (5th April 2024), we have a paper “Machine Learning the Dark Matter Halo Mass of Milky Way-Like Systems” by Elaheh Hayati & Peter Behroozi (University of Arizona, USA) and Ekta Patel (University of Utah, USA).  The primary classification for this one is once again Astrophysics of Galaxies and it presents a method for estimating the mass of a galaxy halo using neural networks that does not assume, for example,  dynamical equilibrium:

 

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.

As you can see this is quite a diverse collection of papers. Given the increase in submissions in the area of galactic astrophysics we are very happy to welcome another expert in that area to our Editorial Board, in the form of Professor Walter Dehnen of the University of Heidelberg.

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