Archive for Open Journal of Astrophysics

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Scopus should be banned

Posted in Maynooth, Open Access with tags , , , on September 5, 2024 by telescoper

I think it’s time to provide an update on the (lack of) progress getting The Open Journal of Astrophysics properly indexed in Scopus (which markets itself as a purveyor of “metrics you can trust”).

You might recall back in June that I reported that OJAp had been included in the index, but unfortunately the Scopus team messed up very badly by omitting about one-third of our papers and most of our citations. Here’s what they did:

In the column marked Documents 2020-23  you will see the number 67. In fact we published 99 articles between 2020 and 2023, not 67. This is easily established here. The number 67 relates to the period 2022-23 only. Accidentally or deliberately, Scopus has omitted a third of our papers from its database. But the error doesn’t end there. Papers published in OJAp between 2020 and 2023 have actually been cited 959 times, not 137. If you restrict the count to papers published in 2022-23 there are 526 citations. It’s no wonder that OJAp has such a low CiteScore, and consequently appears so far down the rankings, when the citation information is so woefully inaccurate. “Metrics you can trust?” My arse!

If you want accurate bibliometric information about the papers published in the two years that Scopus has chosen to ignore you can look here.

I sent this information to Scopus on 15th June, soon after noticing the error, but I then got shunted around. I eventually got a reply on 23rd August, acknowledging the mistake and including this:

I want to assure you that your request has been promptly forwarded to our technical team for the addition of the paper to our database. While we strive to resolve this as swiftly as possible, please be aware that this correction process may take up to four weeks to be completed. 

I think they’re using some definition of “promptly” with which I am unfamiliar. I’m not optimistic that they will actually correct it in four weeks, either, since it took 5 months to get the initial 67 papers indexed.

This all merely demonstrates the folly that so many institutions place so much trust in Scopus. Based on my interactions with them, I wouldn’t trust them with anything at all. Unfortunately the powers that be have decided that Scopus listing is such a reliable indicator of quality that any article not published in a Scopus journal is worthless. Knowing that it has a monopoly, Scopus has no incentive to put any effort into its own quality assurance. It can peddle any error-ridden tripe to its subscribers, most of them paying for the product with taxpayers’ money.

(I might add that if OJAp were a commercial journal, then the willful publication of demonstrably false information about it would be actionable as it is potentially damaging to business. )

Presumably at the instigation of senior management, IT services at Maynooth University are still banning access to this blog from campus. It would make far more sense for them to ban Scopus.

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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 August 31, 2024 by telescoper

I am back in circulation after my little break and, since it’s Saturday, I will resume blogging with another report on activity at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics.  Since the last update we have published two more papers, taking  the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 71 and the total published by OJAp up to 186.  We’ve still got a few in the pipeline waiting for the final versions to appear on arXiv so I expect we’ll reach the 200 mark fairly soon.

The first paper of the most recent pair, published on August 26th 2024,  is “Impact of lensing of gravitational waves on the observed distribution of neutron star masses”  by Sofia Canevarolo, Loek van Vonderen and Nora Elisa Chisari, all of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. This article presents a discussion of the bias in neutron star mass determinations caused by gravitational lensing of the gravitational waves they produceThe paper is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

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 has the title “FORGE’d in FIRE III: The IMF in Quasar Accretion Disks from STARFORGE” and was published (in the early hours of the morning) on 29th August 2024. The authors, all based in the USA, are Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech), Michael Y. Grudic (Carnegie Observatories), Kyle Kremer (Caltech), Stella S. R. Offner (UT Austin), David Guszejnov (UT Austin) and Anna L. Rosen (UCSD). This paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, presents a numerical study of star formation and the initial mass function in quasar accretion disks. The previous two papers in this series have also been published in the OJAp: you can find them here and here; images and movies related to this project can be found here.

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.

That concludes this week’s update. We still have quite a few papers in the pipeline after the summer lull so I expect I’ll have a larger update for you next week!

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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 August 24, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning so it’s time for the usual weekly update of publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Once again this week’s report will be short because there is only one paper to report this week, being  the 69th paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 184th  altogether. It was published on Wednesday 21st August 2024.

This week has been a bit strange, actually. We have actually accepted four papers that I was expecting to publish this week but only one has been published because the authors of the others have not yet put the final versions on arXiv. I suppose this is due to ongoing holidays and they’ll appear in due course. The other thing that happened was that when I published the paper below I discovered that the Crossref system was down for a scheduled upgrade that took a whole day to complete. Although I published the paper on 21st August I couldn’t register the metadata, etc, until 22nd August. Just as well I didn’t have more to do really!

Anyway, the title of the latest paper is is The compact circumstellar material of SN 2024ggi: another supernova with a pre-explosion effervescent zone and jet-driven explosion and it  is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The author is Noam Soker of Technion, Haifa, in Israel; the paper presents a possible explanation of then properties of recently-observed supernova SN 2024ggi.

Here is the overlay of the paper containing the abstract:

 

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can also 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 August 17, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning and time for the usual weekly update of publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This will be a short post because there is only one paper to report this week, being  the 68th paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 183rd  altogether. It was published on Thursday August 15th 2024.

The title of the latest paper is is “Spatial segregation of massive clusters in a simulation of colliding dwarf galaxies” and it  is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. The authors are Bruce Elmegreen (IBM, NY, USA) and Natalia Lahen (MPA Garching, Germany);  the paper presents a numerical study of the properties and spatial distribution of star clusters resulting from a collision between dwarf galaxies.

Here is the overlay of the paper containing the abstract:

 

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can also find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

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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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Call for Editors at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 7, 2024 by telescoper

Just over halfway into 2024 the number of papers submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics continues to rise, as demonstrated by this nice graphic which shows the submission stats for the last five years:

The increasing number of articles is of course very welcome indeed, but it is increasing the load on our Editorial Board and that includes me! We’re therefore looking for volunteers to join the team, in any area of astrophysics. As a reminder, here are the areas we cover, corresponding to the sections of astro-ph on the arXiv:

  1. astro-ph.GA – Astrophysics of Galaxies. Phenomena pertaining to galaxies or the Milky Way. Star clusters, HII regions and planetary nebulae, the interstellar medium, atomic and molecular clouds, dust. Stellar populations. Galactic structure, formation, dynamics. Galactic nuclei, bulges, disks, halo. Active Galactic Nuclei, supermassive black holes, quasars. Gravitational lens systems. The Milky Way and its contents
  2. astro-ph.CO – Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. Phenomenology of early universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological parameters, primordial element abundances, extragalactic distance scale, large-scale structure of the universe. Groups, superclusters, voids, intergalactic medium. Particle astrophysics: dark energy, dark matter, baryogenesis, leptogenesis, inflationary models, reheating, monopoles, WIMPs, cosmic strings, primordial black holes, cosmological gravitational radiation
  3. astro-ph.EP – Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. Interplanetary medium, planetary physics, planetary astrobiology, extrasolar planets, comets, asteroids, meteorites. Structure and formation of the solar system
  4. astro-ph.HE – High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. Cosmic ray production, acceleration, propagation, detection. Gamma ray astronomy and bursts, X-rays, charged particles, supernovae and other explosive phenomena, stellar remnants and accretion systems, jets, microquasars, neutron stars, pulsars, black holes
  5. astro-ph.IM – Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. Detector and telescope design, experiment proposals. Laboratory Astrophysics. Methods for data analysis, statistical methods. Software, database design
  6. astro-ph.SR – Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. White dwarfs, brown dwarfs, cataclysmic variables. Star formation and protostellar systems, stellar astrobiology, binary and multiple systems of stars, stellar evolution and structure, coronas. Central stars of planetary nebulae. Helioseismology, solar neutrinos, production and detection of gravitational radiation from stellar systems.

We are looking for experienced scientists in any of these areas, and it would indeed be useful to have people who can cover a range of subjects (as some of our existing editors do), but there are two specific topics that have seen a big increase recently: (a) galaxy formation simulations (especially involving hydrodynamics) covered by astro-ph.CO; and (b) galactic dynamics, covered by astro-ph.GA. The latter increase is driven Gaia data, an immensely rich source for discovery science.

Since we don’t charge authors or readers we can not offer payment to Editors but it is nevertheless a way of providing a service to the community.

Please get in touch either through the Open Journal website here, or through a message Mastodon here, BlueSky here, or Facebook here. You could even send a message through this form:

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

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Seriously, Scopus?

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on June 10, 2024 by telescoper

Five months ago I wrote a blog post mentioning that the Open Journal of Astrophysics (OJAp) had been accepted for listing in Scopus. A couple of months later, I posted an update explaining that the process of was taking much longer than the 4 to 6 weeks I was told it would. Well, I can now report that, a full five months after acceptance, we have finally made it onto the Scopus database.

Great! I hear you say. Well, no actually. Despite taking an excessive length of time to index the Open Journal of Astrophysics, the Scopus crew have messed up the bibliometric data relating to it in a most ridiculous fashion.

Here is the entry:

I draw your attention first to the column marked Documents 2020-23 under which you will see the number 67. In fact we published 99 articles between 2020 and 2023, not 67. This is easily established here. The number 67 relates to the period 2022-23 only. Accidentally or deliberately, Scopus has omitted a third of our papers from its database.

But the error doesn’t end there. Papers published in OJAp between 2020 and 2023 have actually been cited 959 times, not 137. If you restrict the count to papers published in 2022-23 there are 526 citations. It’s no wonder that OJAp has such a low CiteScore, and consequently appears so far down the rankings, when the citation information is so woefully inaccurate.

Incidentally, CiteScores are marketed by Scopus as “metrics you can verify and trust”. Oh no you can’t.

When I first saw this travesty I thought very hard about asking to have OJAp removed from Scopus altogether, but on reflection I decided to contact them with the actual numbers and a request that they issue a correction as soon as possible. Given that it took 5 months to get this far, however, I’m not optimistic for a speedy response.

While I’m waiting for that I suggest you consider whether these egregious errors are simply incompetent or whether they are deliberate acts of sabotage by a front organization for the commercial publishing industry? And another question: how much else in the Scopus database is as badly wrong as the OJAp entry?

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Another Day, Another Predator…

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on May 9, 2024 by telescoper

It’s been a while since I reported on a couple of encounters with predatory publishers so I thought I’d do another post in the same vein. Just this morning I received an email:

The email is in Polish, followed by the above translation into English. Out of curiosity I had a look at the website for UK Zhende Publishing. Imagine my lack of surprise when I found out it was down! The company is however registered at Companies House. Mr Zihan Li – who is resident in China -owns 75% of the business.

The Open Journal of Astrophysics is not for sale under any circumstances, not that I own it anyway. I did toy with the idea of selling them some other journal I don’t own, but I’m too busy to play such games. I did, however, find the time to reply giving my “thoughts/comments” as requested, though it would be inappropriate to repeat them here.

The last time I received such an approach ( a few months ago) the suggested price was $70,000. I see it has now gone up to $100,000. I don’t know how Mr Zihan arrived at a valuation of $100K but it got me thinking. We have so far published 149 articles at OJAp. Taking the APC for MNRAS of £2500 (approximately $3000) as typical then we have saved the community about $447,000 in unnecessary publication charges.

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Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on May 4, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning in Barcelona, and time to post another update relating to the  Open Journal of Astrophysics.  Since the last update we have published two more papers, taking  the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 32 and the total published by OJAp up to 147. There’s every chance we will reach 150 next week.

The first paper of the most recent pair – published on  Monday 29th April- is “Supernovae in 2023 (review): possible breakthroughs by late observations” by Noam Soker of Technion in Haifa, Israel. It presents  a discussion of observations of the aftermath of supernovae explosions, such as supernova remnants, and how these may shed light on the explosion mechanism. This one is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.

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 Thursday 2nd May and has the title “ΛCDM is alive and well” The authors are: Alain Blanchard (Université de Toulouse, France), Jean-Yves Héloret (Université de Toulouse, France), Stéphane Ilíc (Université Paris-Saclay, France), Brahim Lamine (Université de Toulouse, France) and Isaac Tutusaus (Université de Genève, Switzerland). This one, which is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, presents a review of  review of the alleged tensions between observations and the standard cosmological model.

I did a post recently relating to a Royal Society Meeting on this topic. The first version of this paper appeared on arXiv about two years ago but the final version is extensively modified.

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.

And that concludes this week’s update. More next week!

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Five New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on April 6, 2024 by telescoper

As promised a couple of days ago, I am taking the opportunity today to announce the batch of papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics that were paused slightly while we updated our system. This batch includes five papers, which I now present to you here. These five take the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 25 and the total published by OJAp up to 140. We’re publishing roughly two papers a week these days so we expect publish about 100 this year.

In chronological order, the five papers, 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.

This paper, by Yingtian Chen and Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan, is the 21st paper to be published in Volume 7 and the 136th altogether. It is a study of kinematic, chemical and age data of globular clusters from Gaia yielding clues to how the Milky Way Galaxy assembled. Here’s a screenshot of the overlay which includes the abstract. Note the new-style DOI at the bottom left.

You can read the article on arXiv directly here. This paper has a publication date of 20th March 2024, and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The second paper is “Generation of realistic input parameters for simulating atmospheric point-spread functions at astronomical observatories” by Claire-Alice Hébert (Stanford), Joshua E. Meyers (Stanford), My H. Do (Cal. State U, Pomona), Patricia R. Burchat (Stanford) and the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. It explores the use of atmospheric modelling to generate realistic estimates of the point-spread function for observational work, especially for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This one is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics and was published on 4th April 2024. 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 third paper to announce is “Cosmic Dragons: A Two-Component Mixture Model of COSMOS Galaxies” by William K. Black and August E. Evrard of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA). This paper was also published on 4th April 2024,  is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies and you can see the overlay here:

 

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

The next paper is “High mass function ellipsoidal variables in the Gaia Focused Product Release: searching for black hole candidates in the binary zoo” by Dominick M. Rowan, Todd A. Thompson,
Tharindu Jayasinghe, Christopher S. Kochanek and Krzysztof Z. Stanek of Ohio State University (USA). This paper, in the Solar and Stellar Astrophysics collection, describes a search for massive unseen stellar companions variable star systems found in Gaia data. This one was also published on 4th April 2024.

Here is the overlay:

 

 

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

Last in this batch, but by no means least, published yesterday (5th April 2024), we have a paper “Machine Learning the Dark Matter Halo Mass of Milky Way-Like Systems” by Elaheh Hayati & Peter Behroozi (University of Arizona, USA) and Ekta Patel (University of Utah, USA).  The primary classification for this one is once again Astrophysics of Galaxies and it presents a method for estimating the mass of a galaxy halo using neural networks that does not assume, for example,  dynamical equilibrium:

 

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.

As you can see this is quite a diverse collection of papers. Given the increase in submissions in the area of galactic astrophysics we are very happy to welcome another expert in that area to our Editorial Board, in the form of Professor Walter Dehnen of the University of Heidelberg.

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