Archive for The Open Journal of Astrophysics

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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 November 23, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning so it’s time for the usual weekly update of publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This week’s report will be short because there is only one paper to report this week, being  the 105th paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 220th  altogether. It was published on Wednesday 19th November 2024.

The title of the latest paper is”Early Bright Galaxies from Helium Enhancements in High-Redshift Star Clusters” and the authors are Harley Katz (U. Chicago), Alexander P. Ji (U. Chicago), Grace Telford (Princeton) & Peter Senchyna (Carnegie Observatories), all based in the USA. This paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, discusses chemical abundance – specfically Helium enhancement – as a factor in the luminosity of high-redshift 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.

That’s all for this week – tune in next Saturday for next week’s update!

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Galactic Outflows

Posted in Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on November 22, 2024 by telescoper

We have a visiting speaker for a colloquium this afternoon in the form of Dr Martin Rey, formerly of Oxford University and now a lecturer at the University of Bath. Last night at dinner I learned that he has a YouTube channel called Cosmic Rey (geddit?) so I thought I’d share one of the videos here.

The paper relating to this video can be found on the arXiv here.

P.S. Martin has now joined the Editorial Board of the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

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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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Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , on November 16, 2024 by telescoper

Once again it’s time for a Saturday morning update 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 104 and the total published by OJAp up to 219.

The first paper of the most recent pair, published on November 13 2024,  in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is “Stochastic Super-resolution of Cosmological Simulations with Denoising Diffusion Models” by Andreas Schanz, Florian List and Oliver Hahn (all based in the University of Vienna, Austria). It presents a  discussion of denoising diffusion in generative models for achieving super-resolution in simulations of cosmic large-scale structure.

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 this paper on the arXiv here.

The second paper to be published this week is also in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It was published on November 14 and has the title “Halo mass functions at high redshift” by Hannah O’Brennan, John A. Regan, Chris Power (*), Saoirse Ward, John Brennan, and Joe McCaffrey. Five of the six authors are colleagues of mine from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth; Chris Power (marked with a *) is from the University of Western Australia.

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. More  next week!

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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 November 9, 2024 by telescoper

Once again it’s time for a quick update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update a week ago we have published  four papers, which takes the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 102 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 217.   This means not only that we have reached a century for the year but also that so far in 2024 we have published more than double the number of papers that we published in all of 2023. I blogged about the significance of the figure 217 here.

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 “A generative model for Gaia astrometric orbit catalogs: selection functions for binary stars, giant planets, and compact object companions” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), Casey Lam (Carnegie Observatories), Berry Holl & Jean-Louis Halbwachs (U. Geneva), Hans-Walter Rix (MPA Heidelberg, Germany), Tsevi Mazeh (Tel Aviv, Israel) and Sahar Shahaf (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel). This one is in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. The paper presents a forward method for estimating the selection function (i.e. the probability of a system with a given set of parameters being included in a catalog). It was published on November 4th 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 second paper to announce, published on 5th November 2024. is “Primordial magnetogenesis in a bouncing model with dark energy” by Marcus V. Bomfim (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Emmanuel Frion (Western U. Canada), Nelson Pinto-Neto (Espírito Santo, Brazil), and Sandro D. P. Vitenti (Paraná, Brazil). This paper, in the section on Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, presents a discussion of the possible generation of magnetic fields on cosmological scales by in a model involving a scalar field coupled to electromagnetism

You can see the overlay here:

 

 

 

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

The third paper, published on 6th November 2024 in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, is called  “Evidence for large scale compressible turbulence in the ISM of CSWA13, a star-Forming Lensed Galaxy at z = 1.87 with outflowing wind” by Itzhak Goldman (Tel Aviv, Israel). It presents a statistical analysis of the spatial distribution and kinematics of nebular gas with discussion of the nature of the turbulence present.

Here is the overlay

 

 

The final version accepted on arXiv is here.

Last in this batch is “Star formation in the high-extinction Planck cold clump PGCC G120.69+2.66” by Anlaug Amanda Djupvik (Aarhus, Denmark), João L. Yun (Lisbon, Portugal), and Fernando Comerón (ESO, Garching, Germany). It was published on 7th November 2024 in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. The paper uses imaging and spectroscopy  information to identify sites of star formation in a molecular cloud. This is the overlay:

You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.

That’s all for now. I will post another update in a week.

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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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Three New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on November 2, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday, so it’s time once again for another summary of business at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics. This week I have three papers to announce, which brings the total we have published so far this year (Vol. 7) to 98 and the total published by OJAp to 213.

First one up, published on Tuesday 29th October 2024, is “Cosmology with shear ratios: a joint study of weak lensing and spectroscopic redshift datasets” by Ni Emas & Chris Blake (Swinburne U., Australia), Rossana Ruggeri (Queensland U, Australia) and Anna Porredon (Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany). This paper is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The paper investigates the use of shear ratios as a cosmological diagnostic, with applications to lensing surveys

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:

You can read the paper directly on arXiv here.

The second paper to present, also published on Tuesday 29th October 2024, is “Echo Location: Distances to Galactic Supernovae From ASAS-SN Light Echoes and 3D Dust Maps” by Kyle D. Neumann (Penn State), Michael A. Tucker & Christopher S. Kochanek (Ohio State), Benjamin J. Shappee (U. Hawaii), and K. Z. Stanek (Ohio State), all based in the USA. This paper is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena and it presents a new approach to estimating the distance to a source by combining light echoes with recent three-dimensional dust maps with application to supernova distances.

The overlay looks like this:

 

 

You can read this paper directly on the arXiv here.

Last, but by no means least, comes  “A deconstruction of methods to derive one-point lensing statistics” by Viviane Alfradique (Universidade Federal do Rio De Janeiro, Brazil), Tiago Castro (INAF Trieste, Italy), Valerio Marra (Trieste), Miguel Quartin (Rio de Janeiro), Carlo Giocoli (INAF Bologna, Italy), and Pierluigi Monaco (Trieste).  Published in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, it describes a comparative study of different methods of approximating the one-point probability density function (PDF) for use in the statistical analysis of gravitational lensing.

Here is a screengrab of the overlay:

 

To read the accepted version of this on the arXiv please go here.

That’s it for this week. I hope to post another update next weekend, by when we might well have reached a century for this year!

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The trouble with arXiv

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

We’re now publishing papers at a steady rate at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This is probably not obvious to outsiders, but our platform actually consists of two different sites, one handling submissions and the other dealing with publishing those papers accepted. Although we have a large (and still expanding) team of volunteer Editors to deal with the former, as Managing Editor I am the only person with the keys to the publishing side of things. This part of the process has been simplified enormously after the automation introduced earlier this year but it still takes some time to do, as I have to check the overlay and metadata before pressing the button to deposit everything with Crossref and make the overlay live. I also announce each paper on social media. This usually takes around 15 minutes per paper, give or take.

Now that I’ve returned to full teaching duties at Maynooth University, I’ve developed a routine to deal with this activity. During workdays I usually wake around 7am, make some coffee, and then check the day’s arXiv mailing to see if any of our accepted papers have been announced. If any have, I do the honours while I have my coffee, and then proceed to shower and breakfast (including Coffee no. 2); if none have, I go straight to shower and breakfast. I’ve been following this routine for quite a while now.

In the last couple of weeks, however, I have noticed quite often when I try to look up newly-announced papers on arXiv that the connection times out with a message saying ‘rate exceeded’. If that happens I just wait a while and try again. It’s not a very serious issue but it does slow down the process.

Well, today I found out the reason via a message on Mastodon. The loading errors at arXiv are caused by people doing many simultaneous downloads in attempts to scrape all the content from arXiv as soon as it is announced. This is almost certainly to provide material for Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, which are essentially Automated Plagiarism Engines. I propose the acronym APE for the kind of person who engages in this sort of activity.

This is a very tedious development and I hope arXiv can find a way of putting a stop to it without inconveniencing its authentic users. I suggest that the people managing arXiv identify the culprits and send the boys round.

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Six New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 12, 2024 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog (both of them) will have noticed that I didn’t post an update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics last weekend. Despite having accepted several papers for publication in the preceding week, no final versions had made it onto the arXiv. We can’t published a paper until the authors post the final version, so that meant a bit of a backlog developed. This week included one day with no arXiv update (owing to a US holiday on Tuesday 8th October) and a major glitch on Crossref on Thursday which delayed a couple, but even so we’ve published six papers which is the most we’ve ever managed in a week. This week saw the publication of our 200th article; the total as of today is 202.  The count in Volume 7 (2024) is now up to 87; we have four papers in the queue for publication so we should pass 90 next week if all goes well.

In chronological order, the six 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, published on Monday 7th October 2024 is “z~2 dual AGN host galaxies are disky: stellar kinematics in the ASTRID Simulation” by Ekaterina Dadiani (CMU; Carnegie Mellon U.) Tiziana di Matteo (CMU), Nianyi Chen (CMU), Patrick Lachance (CMU), Yue Shen (U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Yu-Ching Chen (Johns Hopkins U.), Rupert Croft (CMU), Yueying Ni (CfA Harvard) and Simeon Bird (U. California Riverside) – all based in the USA. The paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies describes a numerical study of the morphology of AGN host galaxies containing close pairs of black holes.

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, published on 8th October 2024, is “Origin of LAMOST J1010+2358 Revisited” by S.K. Jeena and Projjwal Banerjee of the Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad, Kerala, India. This paper discusses  the possible formation mechanisms for Very Metal Poor (VMP) stars and the implications for the origin of LAMOST J1010+2358 and is in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

You can see the overlay here:

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

The third paper is very different in both style and content: “Assessing your Observatory’s Impact: Best Practices in Establishing and Maintaining Observatory Bibliographies” by Raffaele D’Abrusco (Harvard CfA and 14 others; the Observatory Bibliographers Collaboration) and is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. It presents discussion of the methods used by astronomical observatories to construct and analyze bibliographic databases. The overlay is here:

(This one gave me a rare opportunity to use the library of stock images that comes with the Scholastica platform!) The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here.

The fourth paper, also published on 8th October 2024, and our 200th publication, is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, and is called “CombineHarvesterFlow: Joint Probe Analysis Made Easy with Normalizing Flows“. The authors are Peter L. Taylor, Andrei Cuceu, Chun-Hao To, and Erik A. Zaborowski of Ohio State University, USA. The article presents a new method that speeds up the sampling of joint posterior distributions in the context of inference using combinations of data sets. The overlay is here

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

The fifth paper in this batch is “Estimating Exoplanet Mass using Machine Learning on Incomplete Datasets” by Florian Lalande (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology), Elizabeth Tasker (Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Kanagawa) and Kenji Doya (Okinawa); all based in Japan. This one was published on 10th October 2024 in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. It compares different methods for inferring exoplanet masses in catalogues with missing data

 

 

You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.

Finally for this week we have “Forecasting the accuracy of velocity-field reconstruction” by Chris Blake and Ryan Turner of Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. This was also published on 10th October 2024 and is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The paper describes a numerical study of the reliability and precision of different methods of velocity-density reconstruction. The overlay is here

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here.

That’s it for now. We have published six papers, with a very wide geographical spread of authors, and in five of the six astro-ph categories we cover. I think it’s been a good week!

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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 September 29, 2024 by telescoper

A day later than has been usual for such things, it’s now time for a quick update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This week we have published another batch of four papers which takes the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 81 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 196. I think there may come a week in we publish papers on every day of that week, but it was not this week…

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 “Finding the unusual red giant remnants of cataclysmic variable mergers” by Nicholas Z. Rui and Jim Fuller of California Institute of Technology (Caltech), USA. It presents a discussion of the possible photometric, astroseismological, and surface abundance signatures of red giants formed by mergers of cataclysmic variable stars. It was published on 23rd September 2024 and is in the folder marked Solar and Stellar 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, also published on 23rd September 2024, is “Notes on the Practical Application of Nested Sampling: MultiNest, (Non)convergence, and Rectification” by Alexander Dittmann (U. Maryland, USA). A critical analysis of the MultiNest algorithm together with suggestions for approving its applicability. It is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.

You can see the overlay here:

 

 

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

The third paper, published on 24th September 2024 in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is called  “Merger Precursor: Year-long Transients Preceding Mergers of Low-mass Stripped Stars with Compact Objects” and is by Daichi Tsuna, Samantha Wu & Jim Fuller (Caltech), Yize Dong (UCLA) and Anthony Piro (Carnegie Observatories), all based in the USA.

Here is the overlay

 

 

The final version accepted on arXiv is here.

Last in this batch is “Spectroscopic Observations of the GALEX Nearby Young Star Survey Sample. I. Nearby Moving Group Candidates” by Navya Nagananda (Rochester, NY, USA), Laura Vican (UCLA), Ben Zuckerman (UCLA), David Rodriguez (STScI), Alexander Binks (Tübingen, Germany) & Joel Kastner (Rochester). It describes investigations of the spectra of the GALNYSS sample of over 2000 young stars and the assignment of these stars into moving groups. It is is in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, and was published on 25th September 2024 with this overlay:

 

You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.

That’s all for now. I will post another update in a week.

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