Archive for Open Access

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Funding Diamond Open Access

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , on June 3, 2025 by telescoper

In case you weren’t aware, SciPost is a publishing infrastructure that provides Diamond Open Access to scientific papers. That means they are free to publish and free to read. They are funded by a consortium but are now struggling financially. They have recently circulated an open letter to the Community explaining their predicament and asking for help. I encourage you to read it and, if you can, to make a donation (or bully your institution to do so).

The open letter explains that SciPost is currently running at an average cost per paper of €500. That is much less than a typical APC for a mainstream journal but it is not a negligible cost. At the rate at which SciPost is publishing it amounts to about €1000 per day. SciPost currently attracts a significant level of sponsorship but it is not enough to support its current level of activity. Information on how to help SciPost can be found here. It is a worthy cause and deserves to be supported.

One area in which SciPost has not really taken of is Astronomy, where it has published very few papers. This may at be at least partly because of the Open Journal of Astrophysics (OJAp) which is also Diamond Open Access but runs in a very different and much cheaper way. A full breakdown of costs at OJAp is given here our annual running costs are about €5000 per year, which works out at less than €50 per paper (on average); that comprises a fixed component and a marginal cost of €10 per paper.

The main reasons for the large difference in running costs are: (i) SciPost maintains and runs its own platform; and (ii) it offers a copy-editing service. OJAp piggy-backs on arXiv (where most astrophysics research papers are found anyway) and expects authors to provide the final version of their own work. Neither organization pays referees or Editors. To enable it to run, SciPost employs about three staff full-time (2.9 FTE to be precise); OJAp has no employees and we keep our costs down by offering a ‘no-frills’ service. Instead of having a wide range of sponsors, we are entirely funded by Maynooth University. I am very grateful for that support, but we are run on a shoestring budget.

I have written before about what I think the future of Diamond Open Access could be like. I would like to see a range of Diamond Open Access journals offering a choice for authors and serving different sub-disciplines. Most universities nowadays have publishing operations so there could be network of federated journals, some based on arXiv and some based on other repositories and others with different models, such as SciPost. Perhaps institutions are worried about the expense but, as we have shown the actual cost, is far less than they are wasting on Article Processing Charges.

I don’t see other Diamond Open Access journals as competitors, but as allies with community-led ecosystem. I’d be more than happy to discuss how to start up such a journal on the OJAp model with anyone interested, and have already done so with some interested parties. As far as I’m concerned, the more the merrier! It is neither fair nor reasonable, however, that the expense of running a journal that serves the global astrophysics community should fall entirely on one small University in Ireland.

By all means support SciPost (and get your institutions to do likewise), but please also consider supporting OJAp. We are currently covering our costs but have no funds to make enhancements (such as a much-needed new LaTex template). If you can afford to make a donation to SciPost, then perhaps you can afford to make a donation to OJAp proportionate to our lower running costs? For example, if you give €10K to SciPost, could you give us €1K too? That amount would keep SciPost running for a day and OJAp for many months…

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The Global Cost of “Article Processing Charges”

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on January 27, 2025 by telescoper

There’s an article on arXiv with the title Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023 and the following abstract

This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. APCs are fees charged for publishing in some fully open access journals (gold) and in subscription journals to make individual articles open access (hybrid). There is currently no way to systematically track institutional, national or global expenses for open access publishing due to a lack of transparency in APC prices, what articles they are paid for, or who pays them. We therefore curated and used an open dataset of annual APC list prices from Elsevier, Frontiers, MDPI, PLOS, Springer Nature, and Wiley in combination with the number of open access articles from these publishers indexed by OpenAlex to estimate that, globally, a total of $8.349 billion ($8.968 billion in 2023 US dollars) were spent on APCs between 2019 and 2023. We estimate that in 2023 MDPI ($681.6 million), Elsevier ($582.8 million) and Springer Nature ($546.6 million) generated the most revenue with APCs. After adjusting for inflation, we also show that annual spending almost tripled from $910.3 million in 2019 to $2.538 billion in 2023, that hybrid exceed gold fees, and that the median APCs paid are higher than the median listed fees for both gold and hybrid. Our approach addresses major limitations in previous efforts to estimate APCs paid and offers much needed insight into an otherwise opaque aspect of the business of scholarly publishing. We call upon publishers to be more transparent about OA fees.

Haustein et al., arXiv:2407.16551

I must have missed when it was submitted last July, but it has recently been doing the rounds on BlueSky which is how I noticed it. Here is the salient figure:

The paper estimates that over $8 billion has been wasted on “Article Processing Charges” (APCs) in the 5-year period covered. I put “Article Processing Charges” in inverted commas because, as I have said on many occasions, these fees have nothing to do with the cost of processing an article. They are simply charges levied by publishers to increase their profits.

The last sentence of the abstract “We call upon publishers to be more transparent about OA fees” is nowhere near as forceful as it should be. These charges are a scam and academia should not be feeding these parasites. A tiny fraction of that $8 billion would be enough to set up repositories similar to arXiv for all academic disciplines which would make OA publishing free to authors.

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Pay-to-Publish Academic Vanity Publishing

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on December 22, 2024 by telescoper

I’m not very good at keeping New Year’s resolutions, which is why I tend not to make many. I have however decided to make one for 2025. In future I will refer to any form of publishing in which the authors pay a fee as the ‘Pay-to-Publish’ model. This is much more descriptive of the reality of this form of the academic journal racket than terms such as “Gold Open Access”.

Many academic journals have switched to ‘Pay-to-Publish’ mode to maintain profit margines in response to demands that research outputs should be made freely available to read. This usually involves the payment of an Article Processing Charge, which is typically a four-figure sum in euros, pounds or dollars for each article.

Apart from the obvious danger with this model that the pressure to increase income by publishing more and more papers will lower editorial standards., the term ‘Open Access’ is inappropriate because, although the papers are free for anyone to read, authors are excluded if they cannot pay the fee. It seems to me that APC-driven publishers are therefore indistinguishable from what is usually called the Vanity Press. According to the Wikipedia page I just linked to,

[Vanity Publication]… has been described as a scam,[2] though, as the book does get printed, it does not necessarily rise to the level of fraud.[4] 

I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether it is fraudulent to charge an “Article Processing Charge” has nothing to do with the real cost of processing an article. I couldn’t possibly comment on that. It is, however, beyond question that it is a scam. I’m not the only person to think this. It is, without doubt, unethical.

I would argue that academic vanity is one of the main reasons for the very perpetuation of a publishing system that is so palpably absurd. There is among many academics and, especially, managers an unjustified reliance on journal brand-name or even impact factor as a proxy for the quality of a paper. This is despite the fact that we can easily measure impact for individual articles so there’s no need to rely on such things.

In any case I do think that it would be quite reasonable to warn potential readers of an article that its authors paid to have it published. How would you react if you saw the statement ‘The authors of this article paid to have it published’ at the start of an article? At least it might make you think about the reliability of the accompanying hype.

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The Future of Diamond Open Access in Astrophysics

Posted in Biographical, Open Access with tags , , , , , , on November 17, 2024 by telescoper

The Open Journal of Astrophysics is now reasonably well established as a Diamond Open Access journal for the astrophysics community. We have published over a hundred articles so far this year at such a low cost that we can make our publications free to read and to publish. Thanks for all this is due to the volunteers on our Editorial Board, the excellent team at Maynooth University library, who have supported this project for 6 years, to the arXiv, as well of course to the authors who have chosen to publish with us.

Although we have established a good base, we’re still much smaller than the mainstream journals publishing just a few percent of their output. There is no sign of a slowdown at OJAp. Indeed there are signs that pace will pick up. I heard last week, for example, that Oxford University Press (the publisher of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society) has decided to cancel the ‘Read-and-Publish’ agreement that allowed authors from Australian institutions to avoid APCs. I imagine we’ll get quite a few more submissions from Down Under thanks to that decision.

Nevertheless, we’ve a long way to go to catch up with the likes of A&A, MNRAS and ApJ in terms of numbers. If activity continues to grow then we will incur greater costs – our provider, Scholastica, charges us per paper. Those costs will still be smaller than regular journals, but I think it’s unfair that the expense of running a journal that serves the global astrophysics community should fall entirely on one small University in Ireland.

Expense is only one issue. I never envisaged that OJAp would be unique. It was more intended to be a proof of concept. I would like to see a range of Diamond Open Access journals offering a choice for authors and serving different sub-disciplines. Most universities nowadays have publishing operations so there could be network of federated journals, some based on arXiv and some based on other repositories. Perhaps institutions are worried about the expense but, as we have shown the actual cost, is far less than they are wasting on Article Processing Charges. I rather think it’s not the money that is the issue, just the unimaginatively risk-averse thinking in what passes these days for university management.

There are two simple – but not mutually exclusive – possibilities.

One is that astrophysics institutions club together and donate funds not only to keep OJAp going, but also to allow us to invest in improvements. A donation equivalent to the cost of just one APC for a typical journal would help us enormously. We do actually get some donations already, but more would always be welcome. In the long run, an investment in Diamond Open Access would pay back many times in savings; OJAp has already saved the worldwide community over £500,000.

The other is that other members of the community follow the lead of OJAp and set up their own journals. I wouldn’t see others as much as competitors, more as allies with community-led federated system. In the light of the OUP decision mentioned above, why don’t Australian research institutions set up their own version of OJAp? I’d be happy to discuss how to start up such a journal with anyone interested.

If you would like to discuss either of these possibilities please use the comment box below or email me here.

P.S. There is another issue concerning the future of OJAp, which is that I will be retiring in a few years, but now isn’t the time to discuss that one!

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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 Week 2024: Community over Commercialization

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , on October 22, 2024 by telescoper

This week is Open Access Week 2024, the theme of which is Community over Commercialization. In light of this, among with some other journal editors I was contacted by Scholastica to provide some comments for their blog, Scholastica being the provider of the platform used by The Open Journal of Astrophysics. I was happy to respond to a couple of questions about how to build engaged communities.

Here are the comments of mine that they used in the blog post:

We started with a small editorial board basically formed from people who read various blog posts I’d written about the idea of the journal and followed its germination. We were lucky to have an initial group of high-profile scientists based all around the globe, including the USA. We started to get some papers from very well-known authors from leading institutes, and large international consortia. Some of these papers have generated large numbers of citations and have attracted coverage in the mainstream media, which also helped raise our profile.

Last year I was on sabbatical, which gave me the opportunity to travel and give invited talks about open access publishing in astrophysics at institutions in France, Spain, the UK, and Australia, and to audiences around the world via the Internet. Other members of the editorial board have also done their bit in promoting the journal. Our submission rate increased only slowly at first but is now more than doubling each year and we are currently receiving several submissions a day.  It has taken a while to establish the reputation of the Open Journal of Astrophysics this way, (i.e., mainly by word of mouth), but that has been good for us because it has enabled us to scale up our processes without becoming overwhelmed by a deluge.

My advice to others trying to set up a new journal would be to have a strong editorial board and clear policies, and above all to be patient. It takes a while — in our case more than 5 years — to establish a reputation in the academic community. These days there are too many people talking about this sort of publishing and not enough actually doing it. It’s time for researchers and research institutions to claim back the original purpose of academic publishing, the free dissemination of research for the public good.

You can read comments from three other editors of open access journals in the original Scholastica blog post.

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Predicting the Future of Publishing from the Past

Posted in Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on October 11, 2024 by telescoper

I was intrigued by an editorial piece from 20 years ago that was sent to me by Prof. Peter Schneider (who, among many other things, is Chair of the Euclid Consortium Editorial Board) who happens to be one of the authors. The article gives an interesting insight into the processes involved in being an Editor for the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) at the time, and is worth reading all the way through, but I was particularly struck by Section 6.2, which makes some predictions about the future.

Here’s an excerpt:

We can even go a step further and ask the provocative question of whether we will need a peer-reviewed journal like A&A in the future. After all, in some communities, astro-ph has taken over the role of communicating new results. Is astro-ph not sufficient? A few aspects of a potentially very long answer to that question are as follows: many authors submit their manuscript to astro-ph, but only after it has been peer-reviewed, which shows that most researchers consider the peer-reviewing essential. People’s achievements are often judged by their refereed papers. Certainly at present, peer-reviewing is seen as a kind of quality stamp on manuscripts, and we are here to witness that papers are improved in the course of the refereeing process.


But what if astro-ph is supplemented by a refereeing process, essentially in the same way as the major journals do today, so that a manuscript gets a “green tick-mark” after successfully passing the reviewing stage and being “frozen”, i.e., cannot be replaced with an updated version anymore. We suspect that this is possible, although it would require a fairly large board of Editors to cope with the numbers of submissions to astro-ph, accompanied by costs that would have to be covered by someone. If this system were to replace the current journals, then one would end up with a single electronic-only astronomy journal and preprint service system. What if a paper is not passing through the refereeing stage? At present, a paper rejected by one journal can still be submitted to a second one, thus getting another chance to be published. We consider this second-chance opportunity a necessary feature for a fair peer-reviewed information flow. Hence, we would need more than one “astro-ph”-like system with different boards of editors, and this brings us back closely to a system of several electronic-only journals.

This is basically the idea behind the Open Journal of Astrophysics, which I didn’t really start thinking about until about 2010. In fact, when we were talking about setting up OJAp – about a decade after this paper was written – we did discuss the possibility of just having a “green tick-mark” on the arXiv entry. We rejected this idea in favour of the overlay concept primarily because of security concerns about who writes the tick mark into the arXiv field. I do agree with the point about having multiple platforms for such publications, however, and I have frequently argued that there should be alternatives to OJAp.

Here is another extract, from the very end of the paper:

We have taken here the role of devil’s advocate to demonstrate that issues in going electronic-only are far from being as simple and clear-cut as some open-access gurus would like us to believe. Obviously, electronic publishing is a timely and controversial issue that we will continue to consider in the coming years. The future of publication will be decided less by Boards of Directors and Editors, or by publishers, than by the community at large. With the availability of electronic-only journals, authors make their own decision on where to submit a manuscript. At present, this vote is clearly in favor of traditional journals, but as that may change we will remain open and ready to adapt.

I would hesitate to call myself a “guru” but I do think that the issues are clearer now than perhaps they were in 2004. Twenty years on, the balance is still in favour of traditional journals at least in terms of numbers of papers being published. Judging by the activity at OJAp, it may be that things may be changing…

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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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Four New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning, so once again it’s time for an update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This week we have published another batch of four papers, the same number as last week, which takes the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 64 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 179.

Before announcing the week’s papers I’ll add three other updates you might find interesting:

  1.  When I looked at NASA/ADS this morning to help construct this post I saw that papers published in OJAp have now garnered over 2500 citations between them;
  2. We had a good response to our recent call for new members of the Editorial Board and have added four new members here;
  3. Last week we received a significant (unsolicited) cash donation from a higher education institution based in Europe to help with our work in Diamond Open Access. If any other organizations or individuals would like to do similar then please contact me!

Now, in chronological order, 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.

First one up is: “Widespread disruption of resonant chains during protoplanetary disk dispersal by Bradley M S Hansen (UCLA), Tze-Yeung Yu (UCLA) and Yasuhiro Hasegawa (JPL), all based in California, USA.  The paper presents a discussion of the effect of a dispersing protoplanetary disk on the evolution of low-mass planets around a Solar mass star.  It was published on 21st July 2024 and is in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics.

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 second paper to announce is “Using A One-Class SVM To Optimize Transit Detection” by Jakob Roche of the University of South Florida, also in the USA (but not in California). This articles discusses the advantages of One-Class Support Vector Machines (SVMs) over Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in the context of exoplanet detection. Its in the folder called Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics and was published on 25th July 2024.

You can see the overlay here:

 

 

 

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

The next paper, also published on 25th July 2024, is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. Its primary classification on arXiv is General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc), but it is cross-listed on astro-ph so we considered it for publication and had it refereed, with favourable results. It is entitled “What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse” and is by Katy Clough (QMUL, UK), Tim Dietrich (Potsdam, Germany) and Sebastian Khan (Cardiff, UK).  Looking at the title of this paper you might be tempted to dismiss it on the grounds that warp drives are the stuff of science fiction (which they are), but this paper is really a rigorous technical study of the dynamical evolution and stability of spacetimes that violate the null energy condition, inspired by the idea of a warp drive.

Here is the overlay:

 

 

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

Last, published on 26th July 2024, we have a paper with the title “A study of gamma-ray emission from OJ 287 using Fermi-LAT from 2015-2023” by Vibhavasu Pasumarti and Shantanu Desai of the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India. It is an investigation of the properties of gamma-ray emission from OJ287 (a BL Lac object) using the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT).  This one is also in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena; here is the overlay

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

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned for another update next week.

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Academic Publishing is a Lucrative Scam

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access with tags , , , , , , , , on July 17, 2024 by telescoper

I saw an article in the Guardian yesterday with the title Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that. It’s written by Arash Abizadeh who is Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Canada. I urge you to read the piece if you’re interested in Open Access and the issues surrounding it.

I agree with virtually everything in the article. Indeed I’ve been saying much the same thing for about 15 years! I’m also determined to change things too, which is why we set up the Open Journal of Astrophysics, a “Diamond” Open Access Journal. Talking about the system of Gold Open Access, Prof. Abizadeh writes:

There is an obvious alternative: universities, libraries, and academic funding agencies can cut out the intermediary and directly fund journals themselves, at a far lower cost. This would remove commercial pressures from the editorial process, preserve editorial integrity and make research accessible to all. The term for this is “diamond” open access, which means the publishers charge neither authors, editors, nor readers (this is how our new journal will operate). Librarians have been urging this for years. So why haven’t academics already migrated to diamond journals?

I think the reason more academics haven’t already migrated to Diamond Open Access journals is that there are relatively few such journals. The reason for that is that although there are lots of people talking about Diamond Open Access there are many fewer actually taking steps to implement it. The initiative mentioned in the Guardian article is therefore very welcome. Although I think in the long run this transition is inevitable, it won’t happen by itself. It certainly won’t be helped by the Academic Publishing Industry either. We academics have to provide the push.

Here’s another excerpt:

Career advancement depends heavily on publishing in journals with established name recognition and prestige, and these journals are often owned by commercial publishers. Many academics – particularly early-career researchers trying to secure long-term employment in an extremely difficult job market – cannot afford to take a chance on new, untested journals on their own.

This is true, up to a point.

First of all any institution that has signed up to the San Francisco Declaration On Research Assessment (DORA) should not be relying on (often bogus) indicators of prestige such as the Journal Impact Factor or the journal’s presence in the Scopus index. If Diamond Open Access is to gain further traction it has to be accompanied to a wholesale change towards fairer research assessment practices.

Second, although it is true that it has taken some years to reach the volume it has now, I have been pleasantly surprised how many early career researchers in astrophysics have been keen to try out the Open Journal of Astrophysics. I think that’s because (a) early career researchers have not been indoctrinated into the absurdities of existing publishing practices and (b) they can see that the citation rates on OJAp are no worse than other allegedly more “prestigious” journals.

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