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IOAP Diamond Open Access Awards 2024

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

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.

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IOAP Diamond Open Access Awards 2024

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , , on December 18, 2023 by telescoper

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.

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Retractions and Resignations

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , , on December 16, 2023 by telescoper

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:

From https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03974-8

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.

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Flying visit to Cardiff

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Open Access with tags , , , , on November 1, 2023 by telescoper

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:

P.S. I’ll be giving two talks on the same theme later this month in different institutes in France.

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Open Access Week 2023

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on October 23, 2023 by telescoper

I’m reminded by multiple sources that this week is International Open Access Week 2023, with a theme of “Community over Commercialization”.

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.

P.S. You could always start by making a donation to arXiv.

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Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , on October 20, 2023 by telescoper

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.

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on June 13, 2023 by telescoper

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:

 

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Open Access: the Future is Diamond

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on May 24, 2023 by telescoper

As it was foretold the Council of Europe has now released a document (PDF) that calls for “transparent, equitable, and open access to scholarly publications”.  In its conclusions, the Council calls on the Commission and the member states to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers. In other words, it calls for Diamond Open Access. The covering press release includes:

If we really believe in open science, we need to make sure that researchers can make their findings available and re-usable and that high-quality scientific articles are openly accessible to anyone that needs to read them. This should be particularly the case for research that benefits from public funding: what has been paid by all should be accessible to all.

Mats Persson, Swedish Minister for Education, Ministry of Education and Research

This is clearly how Open Access should be, though I am still worried that the sizeable publishing lobby will still try to persuade research agencies and institutions to pay the existing fees on behalf of authors, which does not solve the problem but merely hides it.

I know I’m not alone in thinking that the current publishing ecosystem is doomed and will die a natural death soon enough. The replacement should be a worldwide network of institutional and/or subject-based repositories that share research literature freely for the common good. Universities and research centres should simply bypass the grotesque parasite that is the publishing industry. Indeed, I would be in favour of hastening the demise of the Academic Journal Racket by having institutions make it a disciplinary offence for any researcher to pay an APC to any journal.

We are lucky in physics and astronomy because arXiv has already done the hard work for us. With the existence of arXiv, old-style journals are no longer necessary. It is great that arXiv is being joined by similar ventures in other fields, such as BiorXiv and EarthArxiv. A list of existing repositories can be found here. I’m sure many more will follow. The future is Diamond.

What is needed is a global effort to link these repositories to each other and to peer review mechanisms. One way is through overlays as demonstrated by the Open Journal of Astrophysics, there being no reason why the idea can’t be extended beyond arXiv. Other routes are possible, of course, and I would love to see different models developed. I hope the European Council call will result in more support for Diamond Open Access. But whether this happens or not, I think the next few years are going to be very exciting.

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Progress on Open Access?

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , on April 27, 2023 by telescoper

The current state of play with regard to Open Access publishing is very disappointing. The academic publishing industry seems to have persuaded the powers that be to allow them to charge exorbitant article processing charges (APCs) to replace revenues lost from subscriptions when they publish a paper free to readers. This simply transfers the cost from reader to author, and excludes those authors who can’t afford to pay.

This 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: Reports resigned 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.

The people at the top have been slow to grasp this reality, but there are signs that this is at last happening, In the USA there has been the Nelson Memorandum (see discussion here). Now there is movement in the European Union, with member states apparently set on agreeing a  text to be published next month (May 2023) that calls for immediate open access the default, with no author fees. This is clearly how Open Access should be, though I am still worried that the sizeable publishing lobby will try to persuade research agencies and institutions to pay the existing fees on behalf of authors, which does not solve the problem but merely hides it.

I know I’m not alone in thinking that the current publishing ecosystem is doomed and will die a natural death soon enough. The replacement should be a worldwide network of institutional and/or subject-based repositories that share research literature freely for the common good. Universities and research centres should simply bypass the grotesque parasite that is the publishing industry. Indeed, I would be in favour of hastening the demise of the Academic Journal Racket by having institutions make it a disciplinary offence for any researcher to pay an APC.

We are lucky in physics and astronomy because arXiv has already done the hard work for us. Indeed, it is now a truth universally acknowledged* that every new research paper worth reading in these disciplines can be found on arXiv. Old-style journals are no longer necessary. It is great that arXiv is being joined by similar ventures in other fields, such as BiorXiv and EarthArxiv. A list of existing repositories can be found here. I’m sure many more will follow. What is needed is a global effort to link these repositories to each other and to peer review mechanisms. One way is through overlays as demonstrated by the Open Journal of Astrophysics, there being no reason why the idea can’t be extended beyond arXiv. Other routes are possible, of course, and I would love to see different models developed. I think the next few years are going to be very exciting.

*It is also a truth universally acknowledged that anyone who doesn’t understand the reference to “a truth university acknowledged” has not read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen…

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Response to the Nelson Memorandum from arXiv

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on April 11, 2023 by telescoper

I just noticed on the arXiv blog that arXiv, along with bioRxiv and medRxiv, has released its response in the form of an open letter to the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) “Nelson Memorandum” which recommends that US government agencies update their public access policies to make publications and data from research funded by US taxpayers publicly accessible immediately without embargo or cost. I thought I’d take the liberty of reproducing the letter in full here because what it says should apply beyond the United States. I agree particularly strongly with the last paragraph. I haven’t edited the letter except to replace footnotes with links.

—o—

April 11, 2023

The recent Office of Science and Technology Policy “Nelson Memorandum” on “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research” is a welcome affirmation of the public right to access government funded research results, including publication of articles describing the research, and the data behind the research. The policy is likely to increase access to new and ongoing research, enable equitable access to the outcome of publicly funded research efforts, and enable and accelerate more research. Improved immediate access to research results may provide significant general social and economic benefits to the public.

Funding Agencies can expedite public access to research results through the distribution of electronic preprints of results in open repositories, in particular existing preprint distribution servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv. Distribution of preprints of research results enables rapid and free accessibility of the findings worldwide, circumventing publication delays of months, or, in some cases, years. Rapid circulation of research results expedites scientific discourse, shortens the cycle of discovery and accelerates the pace of discovery.

Distribution of research findings by preprints, combined with curation of the archive of submissions, provides universal access for both authors and readers in perpetuity. Authors can provide updated versions of the research, including “as accepted,” with the repositories openly tracking the progress of the revision of results through the scientific process. Public access to the corpus of machine readable research manuscripts provides innovative channels for discovery and additional knowledge generation, including links to the data behind the research, open software tools, and supplemental information provided by authors.

Preprint repositories support a growing and innovative ecosystem for discovery and evaluation of research results, including tools for improved accessibility and research summaries. Experiments in open review and crowdsourced commenting can be layered over preprint repositories, providing constructive feedback and alternative models to the increasingly archaic process of anonymous peer review.

Distribution of research results by preprints provides a well tested path for immediate, free, and equitable access to research results. Preprint archives can support and sustain an open and innovative ecosystem of tools for research discovery and verification, providing a long term and sustainable approach for open access to publicly funded research.

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