Love, the world Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight Splits through the rat's tail Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning. It is the Arctic,
This little black Circle, with its tawn silk grasses - babies hair. There is a green in the air, Soft, delectable. It cushions me lovingly.
I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly happy, My Wellingtons Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.
This is my property. Two times a day I pace it, sniffing The barbarous holly with its viridian Scallops, pure iron,
And the wall of the odd corpses. I love them. I love them like history. The apples are golden, Imagine it ----
My seventy trees Holding their gold-ruddy balls In a thick gray death-soup, Their million Gold leaves metal and breathless.
O love, O celibate. Nobody but me Walks the waist high wet. The irreplaceable Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.
So it’s June 16th which means it is Bloomsday. I looked around for ways to celebrate this day in Barcelona and found that there is a Irish bar on La Rambla called Bloomsday. When I went there, though, I was disappointed to find it not only closed, but apparently abandoned:
Barcelona gets a mention – just one – in James Joyce’s Ulysses:
Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi sétier! A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me at his beck. Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez ah, oui! She thought you wanted a cheese hollandais. Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well: slainte!
I can confirm that there is no shortage of queer fellows here, but I’ll have to have my lunch before I can have a postprandial but slainte! to you too.
It seems to be widely believed (by those responsible for research assessment) that what is important about research papers and their authors is not the research they describe but how many citations they attract. Thinking about this recently yet another anomaly in this attitude struck me arising from the fact that papers continue to attract citations long after the authors are dead. It seems surprising therefore institutions have not tried harder to use the citations of deceased researchers to boost their research profile. The last Research Excellence Framework in the UK allowed institutions to claim some credit for work by researchers who had moved on to another institution. Why then not allow institutions to claim credit for researchers who passed away?
The obvious problem with this idea is that it might encourage University managers to do even more than they do already to work their staff into an early grave. It seems to me the answer to that is obvious. Researchers should be allowed to stipulate in their last will and testament whom they would like to benefit from post-mortem citations. Or indeed carry some form of donor card…
The free market solution would of course be to set up a market to allow the citations accrued after death of a researcher to be traded.
Another anomaly is that the deceased are generally – though see here for an exception – not allowed to be authors on new papers. I think this is highly discriminatory. You might argue that a dead person can contribute neither to the writing of a paper nor contribute to the scientific discussions that led to it, nor even read a draft of the text, yet I have first-hand experience of many living people who do none of those things yet still manage to appear in the author lists of many papers…
In future the only mark of recognition allowed on a researcher’s headstone will be their H-index
Finally, let me remark that a researcher’s H-index, a quantity often used by institutions to inform decisions about promotion, also continues to increase after the researcher has kicked the bucket. Why, then, should the dead be barred from promotion? Perhaps there should be a new job category of PHR (PostHumous Researcher)? The departed could even take up senior management positions where they could do just as good a job as those in such positions already without incurring any salary costs. This approach could address many of the grave problems facing modern universities.
It is high time institutions adopted a much more inclusive approach to their late researchers who, instead of merely pushing up the daises, could be used to push up the citations.
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.
In the course of a rare episode of tidying-up in my office I came across this. You can click on it to make it bigger if it’s difficult to read. It was the first paper of my finals examination at the University of Cambridge way back in 1985. Yes, that really was thirty years ago…
As you can probably infer from the little circle around number 4, I decided to write an Essay about topic 4. I’ve always been interested in detective stories so this was an easy choice for me, but I have absolutely no idea what I wrote about for three hours. Nor do I recall actually ever getting a mark for the essay, so I never really knew whether it really counted for anything. I do remember, however, that I had another 3-hour examination in the afternoon of the same day, two three-hour examinations the following day, and would have had two the day after that had I not elected to do a theory project which let me off one paper at the end.
I survived this rigorous diet of examinations (more-or-less) and later that year moved to Sussex to start my DPhil, returning here couple of years ago as Head of the same School in which I did my graduate studies. To add further proof that the universe is cyclic, this year I’ve taken on the job of being External Examiner for physics at the University of Cambridge, the same place I did my undergraduate studies.
Anyway, to get back to the essay paper, we certainly don’t set essay examinations like that here in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Sussex and I suspect they no longer do so in the Department of Physics at Cambridge. I don’t really see the point of making students write such things under examination conditions. On the other hand, I do have an essay as part of the coursework in my 2nd Year Theoretical Physics module. That may seem surprising and I’m not sure the students like the idea, but the reason for having it is that theoretical physics students don’t do experimental work in the second year so they don’t get the chance to develop their writing skills through lab reports. The essay titles I set are much more specific than those listed in the paper above and linked very closely to the topics covered in the lectures, but it’s still an opportunity for physics students to practice writing and getting some feedback on their efforts. Incidentally, some of the submissions last year were outstandingly good and I’m actually quite looking forward to reading this year’s crop!
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In the Dark 