Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 07/06/2025

It’s Saturday so once again it’s time for the weekly update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 69 and the total so far published by OJAp  is now up to 304.

The two 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.

The first paper to report is “Chemical Abundances in the Leiptr Stellar Stream: A Disrupted Ultra-faint Dwarf Galaxy?” by Kaia R. Atzberger (Ohio State University) and 13 others based in the USA, Germany, the UK, Sweden, Australia, Canada and Brazil. This one was published on 2nd June 2025 and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents a spectroscopic study of stars in a stellar stream suggesting that the stream originated by the accretion of a dwarf galaxy by the Milky Way.

The overlay is here:

You can read the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The second paper is “Scaling Laws for Emulation of Stellar Spectra” by Tomasz Różański (Australian Nastional University) and Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State University, USA). This was published yesterday, i.e. on 6th June 2025, and is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The paper discusses certain scaling models and their use to achieve optimal performance for neural network emulators in the inference of stellar parameters and element abundances from spectroscopic data.

The overlay is here:

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

That’s the papers for this week. I’ll post another update next weekend.

As a postscript I have a small announcement about our social media. Owing to the imminent demise of Astrodon, we have moved the Mastodon profile of the Open Journal of Astrophysics to a new instance, Fediscience. You can find us here. The old profile currently redirects to the new one, but you might want to update your links as the old server will eventually go offline.

#arXiv241017312v2 #arXiv250318617v2 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #DiamondOpenAcccess #InstrumentationAndMethodsForAstrophysics #MilkyWay #neuralNetworks #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #spectroscopy #stellarSpectra #StellarStreams #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

As it was foretold on Saturday, this afternoon I gave a talk at the 32nd General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union currently taking place in Cape Town, or rather at a side event thereof called Open Access Encounters: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. I actually gave the last talk in the session, which may or may not mean that I was representing The Ugly…

About 50 people attended online plus an unknown number in person, so it was quite a decent size of audiance.

I’m not sure if Slideshare is still working on WordPress, but if not here is a PDF of the slides.

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/2KaeVtUSNTngpq?hostedIn=slideshare&page=upload

https://telescoper.blog/2024/08/07/open-access-encounters-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

#Astrophysics #DiamondOpenAcccess #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #OpenAccess

Here’s a report on an interesting development about Open Access in Ireland. The article belongs to the Special Issue 10th Anniversary Special Issue “PUBMET2023 Conference on Scholarly Communication in the Context of Open Science” and has the following abstract:

The Government of Ireland has set a target of achieving 100% open access to publicly funded scholarly publications by 2030. As a key element of achieving this objective, the PublishOA.ie project was established to evaluate the feasibility of establishing an all-island [Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland] digital publishing platform for Diamond Open Access journals and monographs designed to advance best practice and meet the needs of authors, readers, publishers, and research funding organisations in Irish scholarly publishing. It should be noted in this context that there is substantial ‘north–south’ cooperation between public bodies in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, some of whom operate on what is commonly termed an ‘all-island’ basis. The project commenced in November 2022 and will run until November 2024, with the submission of a Final Report. This article originated as an interim project report presented in September 2023 at the PubMet2023 conference in Zadar, Croatia. The project is unique in its mandate to report on the feasibility of a shared platform that will encompass scholarly publishing across the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, which are now, post-Brexit, inside and outside the European Union (EU): the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. The project is co-led by the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), Ireland’s leading body of experts in the Sciences and Humanities, and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute of Trinity College Dublin. There are sixteen partners and affiliates from universities and organisations from the island of Ireland. The feasibility study will be based on a review of the publishing practices in the island of Ireland, with gap analysis on standards, technology, processes, copyright practices, and funding models for Diamond OA, benchmarking against other national platforms, and specifications of the requirements, leading to the delivery of a pilot national publishing platform. A set of demonstrator journals and monographs will be published using the platform, which will be actively trialled by the partner publishers and authors. PublishOA.ie aims to deliver an evidence-based understanding of Irish scholarly publishing and of the requirements of publishers to transition in whole or in part to Diamond OA. This paper provides an interim report on progress on the project as of September 2023, ten months after its commencement.

I think the idea of having a national Diamond Open Access publishing platform is a very interesting one. In principle it could facilitate the federated system of repositories linked by refereeing overlays which I think is the future of academic publishing. I think a national peer review platform would be more to the point than a publishing platform.

I have two comments:

1. I am surprised that Maynooth University – publisher, among other things, of the Open Journal of Astrophysics (a Diamond Open Access journal) – is not among the partners in this project and does not even receive a mention as a publisher. I wonder how far this project will get if it excludes organizations that are already running Diamond Open Access Journals.
2. Less of a comment, more of a question: why on Earth is the report published in a journal run by MDPI, a publisher that is controversial (to say the least)? It would be deeply ironic if they had to pay an APC to publish an article on Diamond Open Access!

https://telescoper.blog/2024/06/24/an-all-ireland-diamond-open-access-publishing-platform/

#academicPublishing #DiamondOpenAcccess #journals #MDPI #OpenAccess #Publishing #research

It is also part of our new University Press package, including university publishers that are either 100% #DiamondOpenAcccess already or moving towards at least 75% #OpenAccess on new books https://openbookcollective.org/view/collections/13/