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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 26/07/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 26, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning again, so it’s time again for an update of papers published 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 105, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 340. I expect we’ll pass the century for this year sometime next week. I had expected a bit of a slowdown in July, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Anyway, with the century for the year having been achieved, the next target is 120 (the total number we published last year). At the current rate I expect us to reach that sometime in August.

The 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 “Non-equilibrium ionization in the multiphase circumgalactic medium – impact on quasar absorption-line analyses” by Suyash Kumar and Hsiao-Wen Chen (University of Chicago, USA). This was published on Tuesday 22nd July 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It discusses time-dependent photoionization (TDP) models that self-consistently solve for the ionization state of rapidly cooling gas irradiated by the extragalactic ultraviolet background (UVB) and the application thereof to observed systems.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version can be found on arXiv here.

The second paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 22nd July but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Do We Know How to Model Reionization?” by Nick Gnedin (University of Chicago, USA). This paper discusses the similarities and differences between the radiation fields produced by different numerical simulations of cosmic reionization. The overlay is here:

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

The third paper of the week is “The effects of projection on measuring the splashback feature” by Xiaoqing Sun (MIT), Stephanie O’Neil (U. Penn.), Xuejian Shen (MIT) and Mark Vogelsberger (MIT), all based in the USA. This paper describes an investigation whether projection effects could lead to any systematic bias in determining the position of the boundary between infalling and accreting matter around haloes. It was published on Wednesday 23rd July in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version can be found on arXiv here.

The fourth paper of the week, also published on Wednesday 22nd July in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Host galaxy identification of LOFAR sources in the Euclid Deep Field North” by Laura Bisigello, Marika Giulietti, Isabella Prandoni, Marco Bondi, & Matteo Bonato (INAF, Bologna, Italy), Manuela Magliocchetti (INAF-IAPS Roma, Italy), Huub Rottgering (Leiden Observatory, Netherlands), Leah, K. Morabito (Durham University, UK) and Glenn, J. White (Open Universirty, UK). This presents a catalogue of optical and near-infrared counterparts to radio sources detected in the Euclid Deep Field North using observations from the LOw-Frequency ARray (LOFAR). The overlay is here:

The final, accepted version of the paper is on arXiv here.

Fifth one up is “Constraining the dispersion measure redshift relation with simulation-based inference” by Koustav Konar (Ruhr University Bochum), Robert Reischke (Universität Bonn), Steffen Hagstotz (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München), Andrina Nicola (Bonn) and Hendrik Hildebrandt (Bochum); all authors based in Germany. This was published on Thursday 24th July in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It discusses using simulations to develop the use of Dispersion Measures of Fast Radio Bursts as cosmological probes. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The penultimate (sixth) article published this week is “Generating Dark Matter Subhalo Populations Using Normalizing Flows” by Jack Lonergan (University of Southern California), Andrew Benson (Carnegie Observatories) and Daniel Gilman (University of Chicago), all based in the USA. This paper describes a generative AI approach to subhalo populations, trained using the semi-analytical model Galacticus. This paper was published yesterday (i.e. on Friday 25th July) in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

You can find the final version on arXiv here.

The last article published this week is “21 Balmer Jump Street: The Nebular Continuum at High Redshift and Implications for the Bright Galaxy Problem, UV Continuum Slopes, and Early Stellar Populations” by Harley Katz of the University of Chicago, and 13 others based in the USA, UK, Germany, Denmark and Austria. This discusses the implications of extreme nebular emission for the spectroscopic properties of galaxies, especially at high redshift. It was published on Friday 25th July in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here:

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

And that’s all the papers for this week. I’ll do another update next Saturday, when we’ll be into August.

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 19/07/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 19, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning again, so it’s time again for an update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published six new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 98, and the total so far published by OJAp  up to 333. I expect we’ll pass the century for this year sometime next week.

The 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 “Reconstructing Galaxy Cluster Mass Maps using Score-based Generative Modeling” by Alan Hsu (Harvard), Matthew Ho (CMU), Joyce Lin (U. Wisconsin-Madison), Carleen Markey (CMU), Michelle Ntampaka (STScI), Hy Trac (CMU) & Barnabás Póczos (CMU), all based in the USA. This paper was published on 14th July 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It presents a diffusion-based generativbe AI model for reconstructing density profiles for galaxy clusters from observational data.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version can be found on arXiv here.

The second and third papers are related. They were both published on 14th July in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

The first of the pair is “J-PLUS: Tomographic analysis of galaxy angular density and redshift fluctuations in Data Release 3. Constraints on photo-z errors, linear bias, and peculiar velocities” by Carlos Hernández-Monteagudo (IAC, Tenerife, Spain) and 21 others. This presents an analysis of the Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS) in redshift slices with a discussion of prospects for extracting cosmological information. The overlay is here:

 

You can find the final version of the manuscript on arXiv here.

The second of this pair is “The J-PLUS collaboration. Additive versus multiplicative systematics in surveys of the large scale structure of the Universe” by Carlos Hernández-Monteagudo (IAC) and 21 others (the same authors as the previous paper).  This paper presents an analysis of systematic effects in the Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS), and a new model for handling such errors in this and other cosmological surveys. The overlay for this paper is here:

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

The fourth paper this week is “Why Machine Learning Models Systematically Underestimate Extreme Values” by Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State University). This one was published on July 16th in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.  This paper presents a theoretical framework for understanding and addressing a bias that suppresses the dynamic range of variables in applications of machine learning to astronomical data analysis. Here is the overlay:

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

The penultimate article for this week is “Bridging Machine Learning and Cosmological Simulations: Using Neural Operators to emulate Chemical Evolution” by Pelle van de Bor, John Brennan & John A. Regan (Maynooth University) and Jonathan Mackey (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies), all based in Ireland. This paper uses machine learning, in the form of neural operators, to emulate the Grackle method of solving non-equilibrium chemistry equations in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations and was published on 16th July also in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

The final, accepted version of the paper is on arXiv here.

The last article published this week is “Astronomical Cardiology: A Search For Heartbeat Stars Using Gaia and TESS” by Jowen Callahan, D. M. Rowan, C. S. Kochanek and K. Z. Stanek (all of Ohio State University, USA). This paper presents a study of a sample of 112 new spectroscopic binaries called hearbeat stars (because their light curves resemble electrocardiagrams). It was published on 16th July 2025 in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

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

And that’s all the papers for this week. I’ll do another update next Saturday.

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What should it mean to be an author of a scientific paper?

Posted in Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on February 12, 2023 by telescoper

The implementation of artificial intelligence techniques in tools for generating text (such as ChatGPT) has caused a lot of head-scratching recently as organizations try to cope with the implications. For instance, I noticed that the arXiv recently adopted a new policy on the use of generative AI in submissions. One obvious question is whether ChatGPT can be listed as an author. This has an equally obvious answer: “no”. Authors are required to acknowledge the use of such tools when they have used them in writing a paper.

One particular piece of the new policy statement caught my eye:

…by signing their name as an author of a paper, they each individually take full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. If generative AI language tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s).

The first sentence of this quote states an obvious principle, but there are situations in which I don’t think it is applied in practice. One example relates to papers emanating from large collaborations or consortia, where the author lists are often very long indeed, sometimes numbering in the thousands. Not all the “authors” of such papers will have even read the paper, so do they “each individually take full responsibility”? I don’t think so. And how can this principle be enforced as policy?

All large consortia have methods for assigning authorship rights as a way of assigning credit for contributions made. But why does “credit” have to mean “authorship”? Papers just don’t have thousands of authors, in the meaningful sense of the term. It’s only ever a handful of people who actually do any writing. That doesn’t mean that the others didn’t do any work. The project would probably not have been possible without them. It does mean, however, that pretending that they participated in writing the article that describes the work isn’t be the right way to acknowledge their contribution. How are young scientists supposed to carve out a reputation if their name is always buried in immensely long author lists? The very system that attempts to give them credit at the same renders that credit worthless.

As science evolves it is extremely important that the methods for disseminating scientific results evolve too. The trouble is that they aren’t. We remain obsessed with archaic modes of publication, partly because of innate conservatism and partly because the lucrative publishing industry benefits from the status quo. The system is clearly broken, but the scientific community carries on regardless. When there are so many brilliant minds engaged in this sort of research, why are so few willing to challenge an orthodoxy that has long outlived its usefulness.

In my view the real problem is not so much the question of authorship but the very idea of the paper. It seems quite clear to me that the academic journal is an anachronism. Digital technology enables us to communicate ideas far more rapidly than in the past and allows much greater levels of interaction between researchers. The future for many fields will be defined not in terms of “papers” which purport to represent “final” research outcomes, but by living documents continuously updated in response to open scrutiny by the community of researchers. I’ve long argued that the modern academic publishing industry is not facilitating but hindering the communication of research. The arXiv has already made academic journals redundant in many of branches of  physics and astronomy; other disciplines will inevitably follow. The age of the academic journal is drawing to a close. Now to rethink the concept of “the paper”.

In the meantime I urge all scientists to remember that by signing their name as an author of a paper, they individually take full responsibility for all its contents. That means to me that at the very least you should have read the paper you’re claiming to have written.

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