In the Dark

We have published another new paper at The Open Journal of Astrophysics. We actually published this one last week but (presumably because of the Thanksgiving holiday) it has taken longer than usual to register the DOI with Crossref and I held off mentioning this paper here until everything was sorted.

Here is a grab of the overlay:

The authors are Farhad Feroz and Mike Hobson of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge (UK), Ewan Cameron (now at Oxford, UK) and Anthony N. Pettitt of Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

You can find the accepted version on the arXiv here. This version was accepted after modifications requested by the referee and editor. Because this is an overlay journal the authors have to submit the accepted version to the arXiv (which we then check against the copy submitted to us) before publishing; version 3 on the arXiv is the accepted version (which contains a link to updated software).

It is worth mentioning a couple of points about this paper.

The first is that it is mainly a statistical methods paper rather than astrophysics per se but it does contain applications to astrophysics and cosmology and, more relevantly, was posted on the `Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics’ section on the arXiv. The Editorial Board felt that we should consider it for publication because our rule for whether a paper can be considered for publication in the Open Journal of Astrophysics is stated clearly on our instructions for authors:

We apply a simple criterion to decide whether a paper is on a suitable topic for this journal, namely that if it it is suitable for the astro-ph section of the arXiv then it is suitable for The Open Journal of Astrophysics.

So far our publication list is dominated by papers in `Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics’ and `Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics’ (which is not surprising given its origin) but we would be very happy to get more submissions from other areas, especially Stellar and Planetary astrophysics. Hint! Hint!

The other point to make is that this paper actually appeared on the arXiv over six years ago and has been widely cited as a preprint but it has never previously been published by a journal. The Editorial Board felt that we should consider it for publication in order to ensure that it is properly curated and citations properly assigned, but we treated it as a new submission and sent it out for review just like any other paper. The review led to some changes and, most importantly, a few updates to the software which you can find here. The editorial process has been quite lengthy for this paper but I think we have done a valuable service to the community in reviewing and publishing this paper.

P.S. Just a reminder that we now have an Open Journal of Astrophysics Facebook page where you can follow updates from the Journal should you so wish..