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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 12/04/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 12, 2025 by telescoper

Time for the weekly Saturday morning update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published four new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 37 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 272.

In chronological order of publication, the four 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 “Searching for new physics using high precision absorption spectroscopy; continuum placement uncertainties and the fine structure constant in strong gravity” by Chung-Chi Lee (Big Questions Institute (BQI), Sydney, Australia), John K. Webb (Cambridge, UK), Darren Dougan (BQI), Vladimir A. Dzuba & Victor V. Flambaum (UNSW, Australia) and Dinko Milaković (Trieste, Italy).

This presents a discussion of the problem of continuum placement in high-resolution spectroscopy, which impacts significantly on fine structure constant measurements, and a method for mitigating its effects. The paper is in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics and was published on Tuesday 8th April 2025. The overlay is here:

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

The second paper to announce, also published on 8th April 2025,  is “Deciphering Spatially Resolved Lyman-Alpha Profiles in Reionization Analogs: The Sunburst Arc at Cosmic Noon” by Erik Solhaug (Chicago, USA), Hsiao-Wen Chen (Chicago), Mandy C. Chen (Chicago),  Fakhri Zahedy (University of North Texas),  Max Gronke (MPA Garching, Germany),  Magdalena J. Hamel-Bravo (Swinburne, Australia), Matthew B. Bayliss (U. Cincinatti), Michael D. Gladders  (Chicago), Sebastián López (Universidad de Chile), Nicolás Tejos (Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile).

This paper, which presents a study of the Lyman-alpha emission properties of a gravitationally-lensed galaxy at redshift z=2.37, appears in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It was published

 

 

 

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

The third paper of the week  is “On the progenitor of the type Ia supernova remnant 0509-67.5” by Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel). This one was published on Wednesday 9th April 2025 in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The author discusses possible ideas for the origin of a supernova that exploded inside a planetary nebula.

Here is the overlay:

 

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

Last (but certainly) not least for this week, published on April 11th 2025, we have “Are Models of Strong Gravitational Lensing by Clusters Converging or Diverging?” by Derek Perera (U. Minnesota), John H Miller Jr & Liliya L. R. Williams (U. Minnesota, USA), Jori Liesenborgs (Hasselt U., Belgium), Allison Keen (U. Minnesota), Sung Kei Li (Hong Kong University), Marceau Limousin (Aix Marseille Univ., France).  This papers study various models of a strong gravitational lensing system, the results suggesting that lens models are neither converging to nor diverging from a common solution for this system, regardless of method.

Here is the overlay:

 

 

The official published version can be found on the arXiv here.

 

That’s all the papers for this week. By way of a postscript I’ll just mention that the gremlins that have affected submissions to Crossref (which we rely on for registering the article metadata) have now been resolved and normal services have been restored.

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Weekly update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 29/03/25

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on March 29, 2025 by telescoper

It’s time once more for the regular Saturday morning update of papers published 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 32 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 267.

We’re almost at the end of March so I checked the records. In the first three months of last year we published 22 papers, compared to the 32 so far this year.

We were affected by a few gremlins in the works at Crossref this week which delayed some submissions. Since our DOIs are generated and registered with Crossref at the time of publication this delayed some papers a little.  I think these problems are ongoing but I know that the team at Crossref are working on them so expect will be fixed soon.

Anyway, in chronological order of publication, the three 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 “Gravitational Lensing of Galaxy Clustering” by Brandon Buncher & Gilbert Holder (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign) and Selim Hotinli (Perimeter Institute, Canada). This paper is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics and it was published on Thursday 27th March 2025. it presents a study of the cross-correlations between lensing reconstruction using galaxies as sources with cosmic shear measurements.

Here is the overlay:

 

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

The second paper of the week is “Reformulating polarized radiative transfer for astrophysical applications. (I) A formalism allowing non-local Magnus solutions” by Edgar S. Carlin (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias), Sergio Blanes (Universitat Politcècnica de Valencia) & Fernando Casas (Universitat Jaume I), all in Spain.

It appears in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It presents a new family of numerical radiative transfer methods and their potential applications such as accelerating calculations involving Non-Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium. This paper was published on Friday 28th March 2025.

Here is the overlay:

 

 

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

The final paper, also published on Friday 28th March, is in the folder
Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The title is “CosmICweb: Cosmological Initial Conditions for Zoom-in Simulations in the Cloud” and the authors are Michael Buehlmann (Argonne National Laboratory), Lukas Winkler (U. Wien), Oliver Hahn (U. Wien), John C. Helly (ICC Durham) and Adrian Jenkins (ICC Durham).

This paper describes a new database and web interface to store, analyze, and disseminate initial conditions for zoom simulations of objects forming in cosmological simulations. The database can be accessed directly here.

Here is the overlay:

 

 

The official published version can be found on the arXiv here.

That’s all for this week. I’ll do another update next Saturday.

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Weekly Update at the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 08/03/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 8, 2025 by telescoper

Time for the weekly Saturday morning update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published four new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 25 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 260.

In chronological order of publication, the four 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 “Partition function approach to non-Gaussian likelihoods: information theory and state variables for Bayesian inference” by Rebecca Maria Kuntz, Heinrich von Campe, Tobias Röspel, Maximilian Philipp Herzog, and Björn Malte Schäfer, all from the University of Heidelberg (Germany). It was published on Wednesday March 5th 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics and it discusses the relationship between information theory and thermodynamics with applications to Bayesian inference in the context of cosmological data sets.

 

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

The second paper of the week  is “The Cosmological Population of Gamma-Ray Bursts from the Disks of Active Galactic Nuclei” by Hoyoung D. Kang & Rosalba Perna (Stony Brook), Davide Lazzati (Oregon State), and Yi-Han Wang (U. Nevada), all based in the USA. It was published on Thursday 6th March 2025 in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The authors use models for GRB electromagnetic emission to simulate the cosmological occurrence and observational detectability of both long and short GRBs within AGN disks

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

The next two papers were published on Friday 7th March 2025.

“The distribution of misalignment angles in multipolar planetary nebulae” by Ido Avitan and Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel) analyzes the statistics of measured misalignment angles in multipolar planetary nebulae implies a random three-dimensional angle distribution limited to <60 degrees. It is in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

Here is the overlay:

 

The official published version can be found on the arXiv here.

The last paper to report this week is “The DESI-Lensing Mock Challenge: large-scale cosmological analysis of 3×2-pt statistics” by Chris Blake (Swinburne, Australia) and 43 others; this is a large international collaboration and I apologize for not being able to list all the authors here!

This one is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics; it presents an end-to-end simulation study designed to test the analysis pipeline for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Year 1 galaxy redshift dataset combined with weak gravitational lensing from other surveys.

The overlay is here:

 

You can find the “final” version on arXiv here.

That’s all for this week. It’s good to see such an interesting variety of topics. I’ll do another update next Saturday

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Extrapolation of the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on December 18, 2024 by telescoper

This morning I published another paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, taking the total number of publications for this year to 115 and the total altogether to 230. This means that we have now published as many papers this year as we have in all previous years combined. Here’s a table showing the sequence of papers published over the last six years and the series formed from the aforementioned sequence:

Year201920202021202220232024
Papers1215171750115*
Total16314865115230

(*=not out)

We’ll probably publish a few more by the end of the year – there seems to be a bit of a rush right now of people submitting papers before the break – so the final column may change. Anyway, the bigger question is I wonder what will happen next year? Extrapolating from the last two years using a simple model, we will publish about 230 papers next year, 460 the year after that, then 920, 1820, etc. Even at that optimistic rate it will take us several years to catch up to the big astronomical publishers, who publish thousands of papers per year.

As Niels Bohr once said “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” but I wonder if anyone would like to make a guess as to how many papers we will publish in 2025. This time next year we’ll see who was closest. The prize will be a year’s free subscription to the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

Still, after a slow start it’s very gratifying to be accelerating. I’m certainly glad that I managed to use some of my sabbatical time automating the publishing side of the OJAp operation otherwise I’d definitely be struggling to keep up!

Anyway, this gives me the opportunity to make a small announcement about the forthcoming Christmas break. The site will remain open for submissions throughout the festive season, but please be aware that our volunteer Editors all deserve a bit of rest – as do referees – so progress may be slow at this time.

You may or may not know that the Scholastica platform we use is actually two distinct websites: one for peer review (used by all editors and authors); and the other for publishing (to which I, as Managing Editor, have sole access). I will be taking a break over Christmas and also preparing Volume 8 (2025) for the new year, so publishing will be suspended from 24th December until 2nd January (inclusive). If you want your paper to be published in 2024 the final version must be on arXiv by Monday 23rd December at the latest, otherwise it will be held over until 2025.

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Saving Money via Diamond Open Access

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

This morning I published a paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics that brought the total number of publications there to 217. That may not seem a very significant number but I’ve had it in the back of my mind for some time. Some time ago Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) decided to go Gold Open Access, charging a baseline APC of £2310 per article. I know that cost is not paid directly by authors from institutions with Read and Publish agreements with Oxford University Press (the publisher ofn MNRAS) but that doesn’t mean that it’s free: funds are still siphoned off from library budgets.

Anyway, taking the indicative cost of an APC to be the £2310 charged by MNRAS – some journals charge a lot more – the fact that we have published 217 papers means we have now saved the astronomical community around 217 × £2310 which is over £500k (€600k) in APCs. The cost to us is just a few percent of that figure.

The issue of University funding is a very live one in England, in Ireland and in The Netherlands. None of the financial crises can be solved completely by moving away from APCs but there is no justification at all for continuing to hand millions per year out of a shrinking pot over to greedy publishers. Surely this is an excellent time for Higher Education Institutions collectively to make a decisive move in the direction of Diamond Open Access?

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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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