As you may know, together with Fiona Morley of Maynooth University Library, last week I contributed to this `webinar’:
If you missed the event itself then you can follow the link here to access a full recording of the webinar. You can also find a quick summary of the goings-on here.
And if all this weren’t exciting enough, here are the slides I used for my bit.
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Just a quick reminder that tomorrow I’ll be participating in webinar (whatever that is) organized by Scholastica to do a about the Open Journal of Astrophysics, which will involved a short presentation delivered over the interwebs jointly by myself and Fiona Morley (Head of Digital Programmes and Information Systems at Maynooth University Library), followed by a question and answer session. The session will be conducted via Zoom (which is the pretty neat platform we use, e.g., for Euclid teleconference meetings).
Here is the advert:
You can sign up here.
Now I have to figure out what I should say.
Follow @telescoperYesterday we published another new paper at The Open Journal of Astrophysics, but I didn’t get time to write a post about because of teaching and other start-of-term business so I’m correcting that omission now.
The authors are Selim Can Hotinli of Imperial College London (UK), Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (USA) and Andrew Jaffe, also of Imperial College.
You can find the accepted version on the arXiv here. This version was accepted after modifications requested by the referee and editor. Because this is an overlay journal the authors have to submit the accepted version to the arXiv (which we then check against the copy submitted to us) before publishing; version 2 on the arXiv is the accepted version.
You will see that this is one for the `Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics’ folder. We would be happy to get more submissions from other areas, especially Stellar and Planetary astrophysics. Hint! Hint!
P.S. Just a reminder that we now have an Open Journal of Astrophysics Facebook page where you can follow updates from the Journal should you wish..
Follow @telescoperJust a quick post to advertise the fact that I’ve been invited by Scholastica to do a webinar (whatever that is) about the Open Journal of Astrophysics, which will involved a short presentation delivered over the interwebs jointly by myself and Fiona Morley (Head of Digital Programmes and Information Systems at Maynooth University Library), followed by a question and answer session. The session will be conducted via Zoom (which is the pretty neat platform we use, e.g., for Euclid teleconference meetings).
Here is the advert:
You can sign up here.
While I’m on the subject(s) of Scholastica and the Open Journal of Astrophysics, I thought I’d add a bit of news about Plan S. Scholastica has been working hard behind the scenes to develop a roadmap that will enable its journals to become compliant with Plan S. The roadmap is here. Three important landmarks on it are:
Currently we do some of these manually for each article, and it’s nice to see that Scholastica is intending to provide these services automatically which will save us (i.e. me) a considerable amount of fiddling about!
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In numerous rants about Open Access on this blog I’ve made the point that because of the arXiv the field I work in is way ahead of the game. Most researchers in astronomy astrophysics and cosmology post their papers on the arXiv, and many do that before the work has been accepted for publication. Even before the arXiv we used to circulate preprints ahead of publication.
But it seems there are some astronomers who aren’t aware of the culture of openness. Here is an excerpt from a referee report on a paper submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics which has been circulated on Twitter:
In summary the referee thinks the paper should be rejected because it has already appeared on the arXiv. That’s a pretty extraordinary recommendation when the authors were following standard practice for the field!
In a sense, though, the referee is right. Journals are no longer needed in order to publish papers. We can all do that ourselves on the arXiv for free. What we do need is to have some quality control via peer review. The imprimatur of a journal is not pointless because it indicates the paper has met a quality threshold. Indeed, in my opinion, it’s the only thing a journal does that’s not pointless..
The Open Journal Of Astrophysics provides peer review for papers on the arXiv, dispensing with the rest of the cumbersome paraphernalia of journals that digital publishing has made redundant.
So if your paper is rejected by a journal because you have put in on the arXiv then why not just submit it to OJA instead?
Follow @telescoperJust before I went off on my break I published another new paper at The Open Journal of Astrophysics, but I didn’t get time to write a post about before going on leave. In fact I completed the publication process using a WIFI connection in the departure lounge at Dublin Airport!
The authors are Miguel Aragon Calvo of Instituto de Astronomía at UNAM in Ensenada, Mexico , Mark Neyrinck of the University of the Basque Country and Joseph Silk – yes, that Joseph Silk! – of the Institut dAstrophysique de Paris Université Pierre et Marie Curie. If the Open Journal project is to succeed we need to get some big names submitting papers, and there aren’t many bigger than Joe Silk so I’m very glad to see him among the author list.
You can find the accepted version on the arXiv here. This version was accepted after modifications requested by the referee and editor. Because this is an overlay journal the authors have to submit the accepted version to the arXiv (which we then check against the copy submitted to us) before publishing; version 3 on the arXiv is the accepted version.
You will see that this is one for the `Astrophysics of Galaxies’ folder. We would be happy to get more submissions from other areas, especially Stellar and Planetary astrophysics. Hint! Hint!
P.S. Just a reminder that we now have an Open Journal of Astrophysics Facebook page where you can follow updates from the Journal should you wish..
Follow @telescoperI was a bit busy yesterday doing a number of things, including publishing a new paper at The Open Journal of Astrophysics, but I didn’t get time to write a post about it until now. Anyway, here is how the new paper looks on the site:
The authors are Tom Kitching, Paniez Paykari and Mark Cropper of the Mullard Space Sciences Laboratory (of University College London) and Henk Hoekstra of Leiden Observatory.
You can find the accepted version on the arXiv here. This version was accepted after modifications requested by the referee and editor. Because this is an overlay journal the authors have to submit the accepted version to the arXiv (which we then check against the copy submitted to us) before publishing. We actually have a bunch of papers that we have accepted but are awaiting the appearance of the final version on the arXiv so we can validate it.
Anyway, this is another one for the `Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics’ folder. We would be happy to get more submissions from other areas of astrophysics. Hint! Hint!
P.S. Just a reminder that we now have an Open Journal of Astrophysics Facebook page where you can follow updates from the Journal should you wish..
Follow @telescoperIn a blog I posted just a couple of day ago I mentioned that there were a number of papers about to be published by the Open Journal of Astrophysics and, to show that I wasn’t making that up, the first of the latest batch has just appeared. Here is how it looks on the site!
There are thirteen authors altogether (from Oxford, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Leiden, British Columbia, Zurich and Munich); the lead other is Elisa
You can find the accepted version on the arXiv here. This version was accepted after modifications requested by the referee and editor.
This is another one for the `Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics’ folder. We would be happy to get more submissions from other areas of astrophysics. Hint! Hint!
A few people have asked why the Open Journal of Astrophysics is not yet listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The answer to that is simple: to qualify for listing a journal must publish a minimum of five papers in a calendar year. Since OJA underwent a failure long hiatus after publishing its first batch of papers we haven’t yet qualified. However, this new one means that we have now published five papers so have reached the qualifying level. I’ll put in the application as soon as I can, but will probably wait a little because we have a bunch of other papers coming out very soon to add to that number.
P.S. Please note that we now have an Open Journal of Astrophysics Facebook page where you can follow updates from the Journal should you wish..
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Things have been a little quiet on this side of the Open Journal of Astrophysics but rest assured it has been very busy behind the scenes, with a sizeable batch of papers going through peer review and a number of those are very near the finishing post.
My target was to build up to an average of about one submission a week by the end of 2019, and I think we’re on track to reach that comfortably by the end of summer.
I’ll report more on new publications as they are published, but before that I thought I’d report on a couple of bits of news to do with Plan S, following the issuance last month of revised guidelines.
First, here is a nice summary (taken from this article) of the different ways in principle one could deliver Open Access publishing in a manner consistent with Plan S:
You can click on the image to make it bigger.
The important thing is that the Open Journal of Astrophysics belongs in the column on the far right of the table. I draw your attention to the various comments, especially the one at the end that says the cost of overlay journals is substantially lower. It is, as I explain here.
the authors of this post think it is unclear whether these are compliant with Plan S. That’s a fair comment, but it can be clarified into a definite yes with very few tweaks. It is very encouraging on this point that the CEO of Scholastica (who provide our platform) has written a blog in which he describes the steps being taken to ensure that all Scholastica journals are indeed compliant with Plan S.
Over the coming months, we will announce new functionality that supports complying with Plan S guidelines, and we’re committed to updating our software to meet changes to the Plan S implementation rules as they come out.
I was very happy to read this plan as it includes adding a number of things to the Scholastica system that we currently have to do ourselves (e.g. registering DOIs with CrossRef).
Anyway, another notification from Scholastica has just come in so that will have to be that for now.
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There was a programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 yesterday called The Great Science Publishing Scandal. It is now available on the interwebs here, which is how I listened to it this morning.
Here’s the blurb that goes with the programme:
Matthew Cobb, Professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester, explores the hidden world of prestige, profits and piracy that lurks behind scientific journals.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of articles on the findings on research are published, forming the official record of science. This has been going on since the 17th century, but recently a kind of war has broken out over the cost of journals to the universities and research institutions where scientists work, and to anyone else who wants to access the research, such as policy makers, patient support groups and the general public.
Traditionally journals charge their readers a subscription, but since the start of the 21st century there’s been a move to what’s called open access, where the authors pay to get their articles published but anyone can read them, without charge. In Europe Plan S has called for all research funded by the public purse to be open access, by 2020. If and when this is implemented it could have downsides on learned societies who depend on income from journal subscriptions to support young researchers and on scientists in the less developed world.
Some universities, and even countries, have recently refused to pay the subscriptions charged by some of the big science publishers. This has lead to some scientists using a service run by a Russian hacker, which has effectively stolen the whole of the scientific literature and gives it away, free, on the internet.
Matthew Cobb looks back at how the scientific publishing industry got to its current state and asks how it could change. He argues that scientists themselves need to break their addiction to wanting their articles to appear in a few well known journals, and instead concentrate on the quality of their research.
I think this programme is well worth listening to as it makes many of the right criticisms of the status quo. I did, however, find it very frustrating in that it doesn’t really even touch on any of the viable alternative ways of disseminating peer-reviewed scientific research. I didn’t expect a mention for the Open Journal of Astrophysics specifically, but this is one model that at least tries to challenge the status quo. I’m assuming that at least part of the reason for this is the presenter Matthew Cobb works in Zoology, and that is a field that perhaps does not have the established practice of sharing papers via repositories that we have in physics and astronomy via the arXiv. Anyway, it felt to me like he missed an open goal…
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In the Dark 