Yesterday I received two different emails from predatory publishers. The first invited me to submit a manuscript to the OSP Journal of Physics & Astronomy. I am informed that the journal is fully open access, with an Article Processing Charge of “only” $950. Of course $950 is $950 more than I’ll ever be prepared to pay for an APC, but did have a look at the website and found this:
A pretty good clue that OSP is a predatory publisher is that can spell neither “Scientific” nor “submit”…
Anyway, if you’re interested – and if I were you I wouldn’t be – you can find the OSP Journal of Physics & Astronomy here. I’ve skimmed the latest issue and the quality of articles is just as I expected.
The Second Encounter of the Predatory Kind was an email that begins thus:
I’ve never heard of the Auricle Global Society of Education and Research (AGSER) but the Open Journal of Astrophysics is not for sale to them (nor to anyone else, for that matter). Of course I don’t own OJAp anyway, but even if I did I wouldn’t sell it at any price. The only terms that I would agree to a takeover would be if the new owners committed to keep it as Diamond Open Access (i.e. free to authors and readers), and I can’t see any predators offering that!
I don’t know how AGSER arrived at a valuation of $70K but it got me thinking. We have so far published 128 articles at OJAp. Taking the APC for MNRAS of £2500 (approx $3000) as typical then we have saved the community about $384,000 in unnecessary publication charges.
… current system of ‘Gold’ Open Access is a scam, and it’s a terrible shame we have ended up having it foisted upon us. Fortunately, being forced to pay APCs of many thousands of euros to publish their papers, researchers are at last starting to realize that they are being ripped off. Recently, the entire Editorial Board of Neuroimage and its sister journal Neuroimage: Reportsresigned in protest at the `extreme’ APC levels imposed by the publisher, Elsevier. I’m sure other academics will follow this example, as it becomes more and more obvious that the current arrangements are unsustainable. Previously the profits of the big publishers were hidden in library budgets. Now they are hitting researchers and their grants directly, as authors now have to pay, and people who previously hadn’t thought much about the absurdity of it all are now realizing what a racket academic publishing really is.
Well, the new journal founded by former Editorial Board of Neuroimage and Neuroimage: Reports has now appeared. It’s called Imaging Neuroscience and its rather website can be found here.
Good news, you would think.
But no…
Imaging Neuroscience is itself a Gold Open Access journal which charges an APC of $1600 per paper. That’s about half the Elsevier were charging ($3,450) but is still far too high. It simply does not cost this much to publish papers online! (There’s a paper that gives a summary of the commercial costs of different aspects of publishing here.) The journal claims to be non-profit making so I’d love to see what they are spending this money on. It can’t be on their website, which is very rudimentary.
It seems that the neuroscientists concerned have just decided to replace Elsevier’s absurd APCs with their own absurd APCs. Oh dear. And they seemed so close to getting it…
As the first month of 2024 is now over, I thought I’d post an update relating to the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two papers, taking the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 9 (the total for January) and the total published by OJAp up to 124. We will have others soon, but I will be travelling for the first few days of February so the next update will be in a week or so.
Using our sophisticated forecasting algorithm, based on the first month of 2024 as input, I predict that we will publish around 9×12=108 papers in 2024, more than double last year’s total of 50.
Anyway, the first paper of the most recent pair – published on January 30th – is “Capse.jl: efficient and auto-differentiable CMB power spectra emulation”, by Marco Bonici (INAF Milano, Italy & Waterloo, Canada), Federico Bianchini (Stanford, USA) and Jaime Ruiz-Zapatero (Oxford, UK). This paper presents an emulator for rapid and accurate prediction of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature, polarization, and lensing angular power spectra, that works much faster than traditional methods. The code is written in Julia, in which language we are seeing an increasing number of submissions to OJAp.
Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:
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.
The second paper was published yesterday (31st January 2024) and has the title “Cosmological Inflation in N-Dimensional Gaussian Random Fields with Algorithmic Data Compression” which is a study of inflationary models with Gaussian random potentials for multiple scalar fields, tracking the evolutionary trajectories numerically. The authors are Connor Painter and Emory Bunn, both the Physics Department at the University of Richmond, Virginia (USA). Ted Bunn (as he is usually known) is a longstanding member of the Editorial Board of the Open Journal of Astrophysics (and was thereby excluded from any involvement in the editorial process for this paper).
Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:
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.
A week or so before Christmas I posted about a new organization called Irish Open Access Publishers whose mission statement is as follows:
Irish Open Access Publishers (IOAP) is a community of practice driven by Irish open access publishers for Irish open access publishers. The IOAP promotes engagement with the Diamond Open Access publishing model (free to publish and free to read) as well as indexing on the Directory of Open Access Journals and the Directory of Open Access Books. The aim of this dynamic community of practice is to promote publishing activity that is free of pay walls and publication embargoes to further the dissemination of high quality scholarly output to all in society.
These aims are laudable and I support them wholeheartedly. I should also mention that the Open Journal of Astrophysics is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals here, where you will find details of all the papers we have published so far. This index is all part of the service. We have also been accepted for inclusion in Scopus, in case that matters to you.
Anyway, I thought I would remind readers of this blog (both of them) about the fact that the IOAP is offering a new set of awards, for which nominations are now open:
(Unfortunately the links in the above image are not clickable, but you can the award details here…)
Nominations for the first three categories are by self-nomination only. I will of course, on behalf of Maynooth Academic Publishing, the Editorial Board, the authors, and everyone who has helped behind the scenes, be nominating the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
Nominations for the final category, Outstanding Contribution to the OA Field are described thus:
Category 4 welcomes third party as well as self nominations from academics, students, librarians, research managers, academic leaders, publishers and other stakeholders across further and higher education for an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to open access publishing in Ireland. Nominations from scholarly societies and other scholarly organisations are also welcome. Nominations for individuals based in Northern Ireland are also invited.
Self nominations are restricted to individuals based in Ireland including Northern Ireland. Third party nominations are invited from individuals based in Ireland including Northern Ireland as well as individuals based overseas. All third party nominations must be for individuals practising in the field of open access publishing in Ireland including Northern Ireland solely.
Notice that nominations are not restricted to individuals based in Ireland. So, wherever you are, if you can think of any individual based in Ireland who has done enough to merit being described as having made an “outstanding contribution”, perhaps not only for being a long-term advocate of Diamond Open Access but also for setting up and being Managing Editor of a successful Diamond Open Access journal in the field of astrophysics, then please feel free to nominate me them. I hope you get the message. If you want subtle, you’ve come to the wrong place!
The nomination form is here. The closing date for nominations is 1st February 2024.
Last week I found out about a new organization called Irish Open Access Publishers whose mission statement is as follows:
Irish Open Access Publishers (IOAP) is a community of practice driven by Irish open access publishers for Irish open access publishers. The IOAP promotes engagement with the Diamond Open Access publishing model (free to publish and free to read) as well as indexing on the Directory of Open Access Journals and the Directory of Open Access Books. The aim of this dynamic community of practice is to promote publishing activity that is free of pay walls and publication embargoes to further the dissemination of high quality scholarly output to all in society.
These aims are laudable and I support them wholeheartedly. I should also mention that the Open Journal of Astrophysics is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals here, where you will find details of all the papers we have published so far. This index is all part of the service.
The reason I found out about the existence of IOAP is that they are offering a new set of awards, for which nominations are now open:
(Unfortunately the links in the above image are not clickable, but you can the award details here…)
Nominations for the first three categories are by self-nomination only. I will of course, on behalf of Maynooth Academic Publishing, the Editorial Board, the authors, and everyone who has helped behind the scenes, be nominating the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
Nominations for the final category, Outstanding Contribution to the OA Field are described thus:
Category 4 welcomes third party as well as self nominations from academics, students, librarians, research managers, academic leaders, publishers and other stakeholders across further and higher education for an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to open access publishing in Ireland. Nominations from scholarly societies and other scholarly organisations are also welcome. Nominations for individuals based in Northern Ireland are also invited.
Self nominations are restricted to individuals based in Ireland including Northern Ireland. Third party nominations are invited from individuals based in Ireland including Northern Ireland as well as individuals based overseas. All third party nominations must be for individuals practising in the field of open access publishing in Ireland including Northern Ireland solely.
Notice that nominations are not restricted to individuals based in Ireland. So, wherever you are, if you can think of any individual based in Ireland who has done enough to merit being described as having made an “outstanding contribution”, perhaps not only for being a long-term advocate of Diamond Open Access but also for setting up and being Managing Editor of a successful Diamond Open Access journal in the field of astrophysics, then please feel free to nominate me them. I hope you get the message. If you want subtle, you’ve come to the wrong place!
The nomination form is here. The closing date for nominations is 1st February 2024.
I saw an article this week in Nature that revealed that more than 10,000 research papers have been retracted so far 2023. The actual number is probably much higher than that, as this is just the fraudulent papers that have been found out. Over 80% of the papers mentioned in the article were published by Hindawi, a known predatory publisher that specializes in Gold Open Access journals that charge Article Processing Charges. Hindawi is owned by Wiley but the brand has become so toxic that Wiley no longer wants to use the name. Presumably it still wants the profits.
(Another bit of news this week makes me think that Hindawi might be the academic publishing equivalent of Tesla…)
Here’s a figure showing how the number of retracted research articles has increased over time:
It has always seemed to me that the shift to “Gold” Open Access in which authors pay to have their work published would lead to a decrease in editorial standards. Since the publisher’s income comes from APCs, the more papers they publish the more money they get. This is another reason Diamond Open Access run on a not-for-profit basis with no fees for either authors or readers is a much better model.
At least some academics are taking a stand. Retraction Watch maintains a list of journals whose editors who have resigned – sometimes en masse from the same journal – in response to the imposition of dodgy practices by their publishers. Take the Journal of Geometric Mechanics, for example. The entire Editorial Board of this journal resigned because of pressure from above to increase “output” (i.e. profits) by lowering academic standards.
This is just a start, of course, but I don’t think it will take long for academic community to accept that the this publishing model is rotten to the core and embraces the only really viable and sustainable alternative.
I got up at 3am this morning to take a bus to an airport, then a flight to Bristol Airport, then another bus to Bristol Temple Meads, and then a train to Cardiff in order to give a seminar. Now I’m in the middle of the reverse process, having a pint in Bristol Airport.
In case you’re thinking of using Bristol Airport at any time in the next 8 weeks, then please bear in mind that there are major roadworks on the approach road, so be sure to allow extra time. It took over an hour from Bristol Temple Meads this evening, more than double the usual time, and it’s only 8 miles…
I’m more than a little tired after all that, but it was still very nice to meet up with friends and former colleagues again. I was particularly delighted to learn that Professor Haley Gomez has been appointed Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy. Congratulations to Haley!
I’ll upload the slides from my talk when I get back to base. For the time being, however, I’m just going to chill in the departure lounge before my return flight.
Update: the return leg ran to schedule so here, as promised, are the slides for the talk I was invited to give:
Of course, round my way, every week is Open Access Week.
The ongoing OA revolution should involve a radical reinvention/disruption of commercialized academic publishing instead of letting exploitative profit-making private publishing firms keep on fleecing the scholarly community. There is much still to do, and we’ll only succeed if more people turn words into actions.
It’s Friday so it’s a good time to catch up with the week’s action at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, where there have been two new publications so far this week. These papers take us up to a total of 40 in Volume 6 (2023) and 105 in total since we started publishing.
The title of the first paper is “Halo Properties from Observable Measures of Environment: I. Halo and Subhalo Masses” and its primary classification is Astrophysics of Galaxies. it is an exploration using neural networks of how the peak masses of dark matter halos and subhaloes correlate with observationally-accessible measures of their dependence on environment.
The authors based in the United States of America: Haley Bowden and Peter Behroozi of the University of Arizona, and Andrew Hearin of the Argonne National Laboratory
Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:
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.
The second paper was published on 18th October 2023. The primary classification for this one is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and is “Mitigating the noise of DESI mocks using analytic control variates”. For those of you not up with the lingo, DESI stands for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and you can read more about it here.
The lead author for this one is Boryana Hadzhiyska of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley (USA) and there are 32 other authors. This paper presents a method for reducing the effects of sample variance on cosmological simulations using analytical approximations and tests it using DESI data.
Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:
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.
It’s time to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one was published on Friday 9th June.
The latest paper is the 19th paper so far in Volume 6 (2023) and the 84th in all, so with more than half of 2023 remaining and many papers still in the pipeline we’re on track to reach a total of 100 papers by the end of 2023!
The primary classification for this paper is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and its title is “Categorizing models using Self-Organizing Maps: an application to modified gravity theories probed by cosmic shear”. For the uninitiated, a Self-Organizing Map is a machine-learning technique that makes large-dimensional data sets easier to analyze. This paper is yet another one about weak gravitational lensing (cosmic shear), which is obviously what the cool kids do these days.
The authors are: Agnès Ferté (JPL); Shoubaneh Hemmati (IPAC); Daniel Masters (IPAC); Brigitte Montminy (JPL); Peter L. Taylor (JPL); Eric Huff (JPL); and Jason Rhodes (JPL).
(JPL=Jet Propulsion Laboratory, IPAC= Infrared Processing & Analysis Center, both associated with California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA)
Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:
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.
P.S. The first author tweeted about this paper:
Excited about our new paper published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics! We propose to use unsupervised learning to map a large theory space into 2D, a useful tool to select models to test with future data. Looking forward to taking this approach to the next steps! https://t.co/2zQtXQbMkn
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In the Dark 