#OpenJournalOfAstrophysics

2025-06-22

EAS 2025 in Cork

Tomorrow I’ll be travelling to the fine city of Cork, where I shall be for most of next week, attending the 2025 Annual Meeting of the European Astronomical Society I was planing to travel today, but I have some things to attend to at home tomorrow morning so I won’t get to Cork until late afternoon.

The EAS Annual Meeting is a very large meeting with well over a thousand participants expected. It is held each year in a different European city but, according to tradition, never a capital. Last year it was in Padova (Italy) and the year before that in Kraków (Poland).

I usually enjoy smaller-scale meetings and workshops over these mega-conferences, but I’m looking forward to this one. There will be a strong Maynooth contingent there but I also hope to see some old friends from elsewhere, as well as catching up on some exciting science results.

Talking of science, I am on the Scientific Organizing Committee for this meeting. The programme is very large and diverse and there were a few headaches on the way, but nothing compared to the logistical challenges facing the local organizers; they will probably reach peak stress levels ahead of the opening of the meeting, but I’m sure everything will go well. The Irish National Astronomy Meeting (INAM) was actually held in Cork in 2023. Although a much smaller meeting than EAS, the experience of running that will probably have helped the organizers.

I’m not actually giving a talk at EAS but I will be participating in a panel discussion in a special session on The Future of Scientific Publishing: Strategies and Challenges for Astronomy on Tuesday 24th June. When I saw the initial announcement for this special session, I was was concerned that it would be entirely dominated by representatives of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and their publisher EDP Sciences. The first session (9.00 to 10.30) titled “SCIENCE PUBLISHING TODAY AND TOMORROW” is still like that, but the panel discussion in the second session (13.15 to 14.45) “SCIENCE PUBLISHING: A COMMUNITY’S VIEW” is a bit more balanced than that, with a representatives of NASA/ADS and the European Southern Observatory (among others). If I’m given an opportunity to get a word in, I’ll be arguing that traditional journals are unnecessary and obsolete.

#Cork #EAS2025 #EuropeanAstronomicalSociety #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

2025-06-20

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 20/06/2025

Yesterday (Thursday 19th June 2025) was a national holiday in the USA, which means that no new papers were announced on arXiv today (Friday 20th June). I have therefore decided to bring forwarded the usual weekly update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics by a day. Since the last update we have published three new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 74, and the total so far published by OJAp  is now up to 309.

The three papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. All three were published on Tuesday, June 17th 2025. 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 “Illuminating the Physics of Dark Energy with the Discovery Simulations” by Gillian D. Beltz-Mohrmann (Argonne National Laboratory, USA) and 12 others based in the USA and Spain. This describes new high-resolution cosmological simulations providing a testbed for alternative cosmological probes that may offer additional constraining power beyond Baryon Accoustic Oscillations. It is filed in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can read the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The second paper is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. It is “LIGHTS. The extended point spread functions of the LIGHTS survey at the LBT” by Nafise Sedighi (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain) and 15 others based in Spain, USA, Iran, Italy and the UK. It describes the procedure used to construct the extended Point Spread Functions (PSFs) of the LIGHTS survey in images taken with the Large Binocular Cameras (LBCs) of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT).

The overlay is here:

 

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

Finally this week we have “Fast radio bursts as a probe of gravity on cosmological scales” by Dennis Neumann (Leiden University, Netherlands), Robert Reischke (Universität Bonn, Germany), Steffen Hagstotz (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany) and Hendrik Hildebrandt (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany). This is about using dispersion measures derived from Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) in combination with cosmic shear to investigate modified gravity theories, specifically Horndeski gravity. It is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

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

That’s all the papers for this week. I’ll revert to the usual schedule for updates next week, and post the next one on Saturday 28th June.

 

#arXiv240911163v3 #arXiv241020190v2 #arXiv250305947v2 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #cosmicShear #Cosmology #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #DiscoverySimulations #fastRadioBursts #HorndeskiGravity #LargeBinocularTelescope #LIGHTSSurvey #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #PointSpreadFunction #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

2025-06-14

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 14/06/2025

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 71, and the total so far published by OJAp  is now up to 306.

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 “Analysis of optical spectroscopy and photometry of the type I X-ray bursting system UW CrB2” by Mark Kennedy (University College Cork, Ireland) and 21 others based in Ireland, UK, USA, Finland, Netherlands and Australia. This one was published on Tuesday June 10th in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.  This describes optical photometry and spectroscopy of the low-mass X-ray binary UW Coronae Borealis taken over 2 years

The overlay is here:

 

 

You can read the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The second paper is “The Impact of Feedback-driven Outflows on Bar Formation” by Martin D. Weinberg (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA). This paper uses a generalization of the Hamiltonian Mean-Field model to of the disruption of bar formation in galaxies by stellar feedback. It was published on Friday 13th June 2025 in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here:

 

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

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

 

#arXiv240312138v2 #arXiv240806404v2 #Astrophysics #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #BarFormationInGalaxies #DiamondOpenAccess #HighEnergyAstrophysicalPhenomena #lowMassXRayBinary #OpenAccessPublishing #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #StellarFeedback #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics #UWCoronaeBorealis

2025-06-07

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

2025-06-03

Funding Diamond Open Access

In case you weren’t aware, SciPost is a publishing infrastructure that provides Diamond Open Access to scientific papers. That means they are free to publish and free to read. They are funded by a consortium but are now struggling financially. They have recently circulated an open letter to the Community explaining their predicament and asking for help. I encourage you to read it and, if you can, to make a donation (or bully your institution to do so).

The open letter explains that SciPost is currently running at an average cost per paper of €500. That is much less than a typical APC for a mainstream journal but it is not a negligible cost. At the rate at which SciPost is publishing it amounts to about €1000 per day. SciPost currently attracts a significant level of sponsorship but it is not enough to support its current level of activity. Information on how to help SciPost can be found here. It is a worthy cause and deserves to be supported.

One area in which SciPost has not really taken of is Astronomy, where it has published very few papers. This may at be at least partly because of the Open Journal of Astrophysics (OJAp) which is also Diamond Open Access but runs in a very different and much cheaper way. A full breakdown of costs at OJAp is given here our annual running costs are about €5000 per year, which works out at less than €50 per paper (on average); that comprises a fixed component and a marginal cost of €10 per paper.

The main reasons for the large difference in running costs are: (i) SciPost maintains and runs its own platform; and (ii) it offers a copy-editing service. OJAp piggy-backs on arXiv (where most astrophysics research papers are found anyway) and expects authors to provide the final version of their own work. Neither organization pays referees or Editors. To enable it to run, SciPost employs about three staff full-time (2.9 FTE to be precise); OJAp has no employees and we keep our costs down by offering a ‘no-frills’ service. Instead of having a wide range of sponsors, we are entirely funded by Maynooth University. I am very grateful for that support, but we are run on a shoestring budget.

I have written before about what I think the future of Diamond Open Access could be like. 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 and others with different models, such as SciPost. 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 don’t see other Diamond Open Access journals as competitors, but as allies with community-led ecosystem. I’d be more than happy to discuss how to start up such a journal on the OJAp model with anyone interested, and have already done so with some interested parties. As far as I’m concerned, the more the merrier! It is neither fair nor reasonable, however, that the expense of running a journal that serves the global astrophysics community should fall entirely on one small University in Ireland.

By all means support SciPost (and get your institutions to do likewise), but please also consider supporting OJAp. We are currently covering our costs but have no funds to make enhancements (such as a much-needed new LaTex template). If you can afford to make a donation to SciPost, then perhaps you can afford to make a donation to OJAp proportionate to our lower running costs? For example, if you give €10K to SciPost, could you give us €1K too? That amount would keep SciPost running for a day and OJAp for many months…

#DiamondOpenAccess #OJAp #OpenAccess #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #SciPost #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

2025-05-31

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 31/05/2025

Once again it’s time for the weekly Saturday morning update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published five new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 67; the total so far published by OJAp has passed the 300 mark and is now up to 302. If we keep up at the same rate for the rest of the year as we did for the first five months now completed, we will publish around 160 papers altogether in 2025.

In chronological order of publication, the five 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 “Which is the most eccentric binary known? Insights from the 2023/4 pericenter passages of Zeta Boötis and Eta Ophiuchi” by Idel Waisberg, Ygal Klein and Boaz Katz (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel).  This is a report of interferometric observations of two very eccentric binary star systems, published on Tuesday 27th May 2025 in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

You can read the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The second paper to report is “On the full non-Gaussian Surprise statistic and the cosmological concordance between DESI, SDSS and Pantheon+” by Pedro Riba Mello & Miguel Quartin (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and Bjoern Malte Schaefer & Benedikt Schosser (Heidelberg, Germany). This paper is in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics and was published on Tuesday 27th May 2025. The paper presents an application of the “Surprise Statistic”, based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence, as a measure of the difference between results inferred from different data sets.

The overlay is here:

 

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

The third paper we published last week, and our 300th overall, is “Cosmic Ray Feedback in Massive Halos: Implications for the Distribution of Baryons” by Eliot Quataert (Princeton, USA) and Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA).  This was published on Thursday 29th May in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The paper discusses the effects of cosmic rays produced by massive black holes on the structure of the baryonic component of galaxies and how these might affect cosmological parameter estimation. The overlay is here:

 

You can read the officially accepted version of this paper on arXiv here.

The next one to report is “Mixing neutron star material into the jets in the common envelope jets supernova r-process scenario” by Noam Soker (Technion, Israel). This was published on Thursday 27th May in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena; it presents a discussion of the chemical enrichment of an evolved star consequent upon its ingestion of a neutron star.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

Last, but by no means least, for this week we have “Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Synthetic-source Injection Across the Full Survey Using Balrog” by Dhayaa Anbajagane (Kavli Institute, Chicago) et al. (81 authors) on behalf of the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration. It was also  published on Thursday 27th May  2025, but in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It is about testing the Dark Energy Survey analysis pipeline using synthetic sources.

The overlay is here:

 

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

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

#arXiv240808385v2 #arXiv250105683v3 #arXiv250201753v2 #arXiv250202411v2 #arXiv250417858v2 #binaryStars #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DarkEnergySurvey #DiamondOpenAccess #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #HighEnergyAstrophysicalPhenomena #neutronStar #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #rProcess #SolarAndStellarAstrophysics #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

2025-05-24

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 24/05/205

It’s  time once again for the regular Saturday update of papers published during the past week at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published three new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 62 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 297.

In chronological order of publication, the three 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: “Jet-shaped filamentary ejecta in common envelope evolution” by Ron Schreier, Shlomi Hillel and Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel). This paper, which was published on Monday May 19th 2025 in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Processes, presents three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of common envelope evolution of a neutron star inside the envelope of a rotating red supergiant with Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities forming filamentary ejecta.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

Second one up is “Weighing The Options: The Unseen Companion in LAMOST J2354 is Likely a Massive White Dwarf” by M. A. Tucker, A. J. Wheeler & D. M. Rowan (Ohio State University, USA) and M. E. Huber (U. Hawaii, USA). This paper was published on Tuesday 20th May 2025 in the folder for Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It discusses a spectroscopic study of the binary system LAMOST J235456.73+335625 (J2354) with a discussion of the implications for the nature of the dark component.

The overlay is here:

 

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

The third and last paper of the week, published on Thursday May 22nd 2025, also in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, is “How to use Gaia parallaxes for stars with poor astrometric fits” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA).  This paper presents a method for extracting reasonable estimates of stellar parallaxes from Gaia data when the overall astrometric solution is unreliable due to errors and noise

Here is the overlay:

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

That’s all the papers for this week. Looking at the publishing workflow, I expect we will pass the 300 mark next week. We’ll see when I post the next update next Saturday.

 

#arXiv240719004v2 #arXiv250109663v3 #arXiv250411528v2 #astrometry #binaryStars #commonEnvelopeEvolution #DiamondOpenAccess #GAIA #HighEnergyAstrophysicalPhenomena #hydrodynamics #LAMOSTJ2354 #LAMOSTJ23545673335625 #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #parallax #SolarAndStellarAstrophysics #stars #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics #whiteDwarfs

2025-05-17

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 17/05/2025

It’s a lovely Saturday morning in May, and it’s time for the weekly  update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published four new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 59 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 294.

In chronological order of publication, 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.

The first paper to report is: “Multi-Phase Thermal Structure & The Origin of the Broad-Line Region, Torus, and Corona in Magnetically-Dominated Accretion Disks” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA). This was published on Monday May 12th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents simple accretion disk model that predicts the properties of many features including the dusty torus, broad-line region, continuum emission and coronal gas.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

Second one up is “Sparsity covariance: a source of uncertainty when estimating correlation functions with a discrete sample of observations in the sky” by Pierre Fleury (U. Montpellier, France). This one was published on Tuesday 13th May 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.  This paper presents a discussion of the uncertainty in cosmological observables caused by discrete sampling and a method to compute the covariances resulting from this.

The overlay is here:

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

The third paper of the week, published on Wednesday May 14th 2025,  is “Dark Matter Particle Flux in a Dynamically Self-consistent Milky Way Model” by Lucijana Stanic, Mark Eberlein, Stanislav Linchakovskyy, Christopher Magnoli, Maryna Mesiura, Luca Morf, Prasenjit Saha (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Eugene Vasiliev (University of Surrey, UK). This one presents a study of the behaviour of dark matter in an anisotropic model for the Milky Way halo with implications for particle detection rates. It is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

Here is the overlay:

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

The last paper published this week is “Too fast to be single: Tidal evolution and photometric identification of stellar and planetary companions” by Ilay Kamai and Hagai B. Perets (Technion, Haifa, Israel). This one was published on Friday 16th May 2025 in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It presents an analysis of the rotation of stars observed in the Kepler field to identify non-single systems with high spin rates resulting from tidal effects.

Here is the overlay:

The official published version can be found on the arXiv here.

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

#accretionDisk #arXiv240700160v2 #arXiv250208805v2 #arXiv250218327v2 #arXiv250303839v2 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #binaryStars #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #magnetizedDisks #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #SolarAndStellarAstrophysics #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

2025-05-10

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 10/05/2025

It’s time for another update Saturday morning update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. After the record-breaking stats described in the last update , this week has been on the slow side with just one paper published. This brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 55 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 290.

The paper to report is “Late-time growth weakly affects the significance of high-redshift massive galaxies” by Qianran Xia & Dragan Huterer (U. Michigan, USA) and Nhat-Minh Nguyen (U. Tokyo, Japan). This paper, which was published on Wednesday 7th May 2025,  is published in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It presents an argument that changes in the growth rate of perturbations at low redshift do not have much effect on predictions of the abundance of lassive galaxies at high redshift.

The overlay is here:

 

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

That’s all for now. I’ll do another update next week.

#arXiv250300155v2 #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccess #galaxyFormation #growthRate #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

2025-05-03

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 03/05/2025

Saturday morning once again, and time for another update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. It’s been a recording-breaking week: since the last update we have published no fewer than ten papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 54 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 289.

The first paper to report is “Subspace Approximations to the Focused Transport Equation of Energetic Particles, I. The Standard Form” by B. Kippenstein & A. Shalchi (U. Manitoba, Canada). This paper, which was published on Monday 28th April 2025, presents a hybrid analytical-numerical method to solve the Fokker-Planck equation for the transport of energetic particles. It is published in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

Next is “The Importance of Subtleties in the Scaling of the ‘Terminal Momentum’ For Galaxy Formation Simulations” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA). This presents a technical discussion of issues surrounding the proper modelling of supernova blast waves and their effects in numerical simulations of galaxy formation. It was published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The overlay is here:

The final version can be found on arXic here.

Next one up is “Local variations of the radial metallicity gradient in a simulated NIHAO-UHD Milky Way analogue and their implications for (extra-)galactic studies” by Sven Buder (ANU, Australia), Tobias Buck (U. Heidelberg, Germany), Qian-Hui Chen (ANU) and Kathryn Grasha (ANU). This one was also published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It describes a numerical study of the variation of chemical abundance with radial position in galaxies and the implications of this for galaxy formation. Here is the overlay:

and you can find the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The fourth paper this week is “Zooming In On The Multi-Phase Structure of Magnetically-Dominated Quasar Disks: Radiation From Torus to ISCO Across Accretion Rates” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA) and 14 others based in the USA and Canada. This was also published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents very detailed numerical study of the structure of magnetized quasar accretion disks. The overlay is here:

You can find the official final version on arXiv here.

Next is “Tomographic halo model of the unWISE-Blue galaxies using cross-correlations with BOSS CMASS galaxies” by Alex Krolewski, Jensen Lawrence, and Will J. Percival (U. Waterloo, Canada). This one was also published on 29th April 2025, which was a busy day(!), but in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.  This paper describes using the halo model to create mock samples unWISE-Blue galaxies, applicable to other tomographic cross-correlations between photometric samples and narrowly-binned spectroscopic samples. The overlay is here:

The final version of this one can be found on the arXiv here.

Number six for this week is “StratLearn-z: Improved photo-estimation from spectroscopic data subject to selection effects” by Chiara Moretti (SISSA, Trieste, Italy), Maximilian Autenrieth (Imperial College, UK), Riccardo Serra (SISSA), Roberto Trotta (SISSA), David A. van Dyk (Imperial) and Andrei Mesinger (SNS Pisa, Italy). This was published on Thursday 1st May 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. This one is about estimating photometric redshifts using an approach that relies on splitting the source and target datasets into strata based on estimated propensity score. The overlay is here:

 

The official version can be found on arXiv here.

Next is “The Impact of Galaxy-halo Size Relations on Galaxy Clustering Signals” by Joshua B. Hill and Yao-Yuan Mao (U. Utah, USA). This one was also published on May 2nd 2025 and is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It discusses the challenge of identifying a specific galaxy halo property that controls galaxy sizes through constraints from galaxy clustering alone. The overlay is here:

You can find the official version of the paper on arXiv here.

The next paper is “Detection of Thermal Emission at Millimeter Wavelengths from Low-Earth Orbit Satellites” by Allen Foster (Princeton, USA) and an international cast of 90 others, which is too many to list individually. This one was also published on Thursday May 1st but is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.  The paper discusses the experimental detection of thermal emission from satellites and a discussion of the implications for astrophysical observations, especially time-domain astronomy. The overlay is here:

You can find the final version of the paper on arXiv here.

The penultimate paper of this week is “Pseudo-Cls for spin-s fields with component-wise weighting” by David Alonso (U. Oxford, UK). This one was published yesterday (Friday 2nd May 2025).  The paper presents an approach to power spectrum estimation appropriate for data with anisotropic noise properties or for which complicated masks are required.  It can be found in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

 

The final version of this paper is on arXiv here.

The last paper this week is “The past, present and future of observations of externally irradiated disks” by Planet formation environments collaboration: Megan Allen (U. Sheffield, UK) and 52 others. This paper was published on Friday 2nd May in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.  It presents a review of research on the effects of the ultraviolet radiation environment on protoplanetary disc evolution and planet formation. The overlay is here:

You can find the final version on arXiv here.

That’s all the papers for this week. I’ll just add that there were quite a few gremlins at Crossref this week, particularly yesterday. I usually do the publishing first thing in the morning but yesterday’s papers were held in a queue for most of the day pending registration. Usually it just takes a few minutes, but for these I had to wait several hours but we got there in the end. Although ten papers is more than we have ever published in a week, we still haven’t had a week in which we’ve published on every working day!

Anyway, that’s all for this week. I’ll post another update next Saturday.

#arXiv240416987v2 #arXiv240920379v2 #arXiv241007077v3 #arXiv241103374v4 #arXiv241113484v2 #arXiv241201157v2 #arXiv250202744v2 #arXiv250205268v2 #arXiv250212255v3 #arXiv250410756v2 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccess #InstrumentationAndMethodsForAstrophysics #OpenAccessPublishing #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #Satellites #SolarAndStellarAstrophysics #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics #ThermalEmission

2025-04-26

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 26/04/2025

It’s Satuday morning once again, and time for another update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 44 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 279.

The first paper to report is “Approximating non-Gaussian Bayesian partitions with normalising flows: statistics, inference and application to cosmology” by Tobias Röspel, Adrian Schlosser & Björn Malte Schäfer (Universität Heidelberg, Germany) which was published on April 23rd 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It is an introduction to normalizing flows – a machine learning technique for transforming distributions – and its application to the extraction of cosmological parameters from supernova data.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The other paper this week is “Dwarf Galaxies in the TNG50 Field: connecting their Star-formation Rates with their Environments” by Joy Bhattacharyya & Annika H.G. Peter (Ohio State University, USA) and Alexie Leauthaud (UC Santa Cruz, USA).  This one was published on 24th April 2025 in the older Astrophysics of Galaxies and it studies dwarf galaxies with properties similar to the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds that form in different environments in the TNG50 simulation of the IllustrisTNG project.

The overlay is here:

 

and you can find the final accepted version on arXiv here.

 

That’s all for this week. I’ll have another update next Saturday.

#arXiv250101946v2 #arXiv250104791v3 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #Cosmology #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccess #dwarfGalaxies #Illustris #MachineLearning #normalizingFlows #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

2025-04-19

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 19/04/2025

It may be the Easter holiday weekend, but it’s still time for the weekly Saturday morning update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published five new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 42 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 277.

In chronological order of publication, the five 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 “Galaxy Clustering with LSST: Effects of Number Count Bias from Blending” by Benjamin Levine (Stony Brook, NY), Javier Sánchez (STScI, MD), Chihway Chang (Chicago, IL) Anja von der Linden (Stony Brook), Eboni Collins (Dillard, LA), Eric Gawiser (Rutgers, NJ), Katarzyna Krzyżańska (Cornell, NY), Boris Leistedt (Imperial College, UK) on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.

This presents a simulation-based study of the effect of source overlaps (blending) on galaxy counts expected for the Vera C. Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The paper is in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics and was published on Monday 14th April 2025. The overlay is here:

 

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

The second paper to announce, published onTuesday 15th April 2025,  “Rapid, strongly magnetized accretion in the zero-net-vertical-flux shearing box” by Jonathan Squire (Otago, New Zealand), Eliot Quataert (Princeton, USA) & Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA). This  paper presents a numerical study of turbulence in a flux shearing box, with discussion of the implications of the results for global accretion disk models and simulations thereof. It was published in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena and the overlay is here:

 

You can read the officially accepted version of this paper on arXiv here.

The third paper of the week, published on Wednesday April 16th 2025,   is “DeepDISC-photoz: Deep Learning-Based Photometric Redshift Estimation for Rubin LSST” by Grant Merz (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) and 13 others (all based in the USA) on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. This paper describes adding photometric redshift estimation to the DeepDISC framework for classification objects in co-added images for use with the Vera C. Rubin LSST survey. It can be found in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.

Here is the overlay:

 

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

The next one to report is “Multidimensional Nova Simulations with an Extended Buffer and Lower Initial Mixing Temperatures” by Alexander Smith Clark and Michael Zingale (Stony Brook University, NY, USA). This paper presents new computer models of classical novae with improved ability to follow nucleosynthesis in the thermonuclear outburst and better treatment of convective transport. This one was also published on Wednesday 16th April 2025 but in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

Here is the overlay:

 

The official published version can be found on the arXiv here.

The last paper of the five published this week is “Measurement of the power spectrum turnover scale from the cross-correlation between CMB lensing and Quaia” by David Alonso (Oxford, UK), Oleksandr Hetmantsev (Kyiv, Ukraine), Giulio Fabbian (Cambridge, UK), Anze Slosar (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA) and Kate Storey-Fisher (Stanford, USA). This is a discussion of using the spatial correlations of quasars and their cross-correlations with cosmic microwave background lensing data to measure a feature corresponding to the matter-radiation equality scale with consequences for cosmological parameter estimation. It was published on Thursday 17th April 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

That’s all the papers for this week. I’ll just add a couple of things.

One is that, although there have been weeks before in which we have published five or more papers, we still haven’t managed to have a week on which we’ve published a paper on every weekday. This week we had two on Wednesday 16th but didn’t have any yesterday (Friday).

The second is that tt has been a while since I last posted a breakdown of the running costs here at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Today I received an email from Scholastica, our service provider, reminding me our costs will go up shortly (from 22nd April). In the interest of transparency I am passing this information on here.

The new prices will be as follows:

  • Peer Review System annual cost will be $425/year (was $350/year) plus $10 per submission (no change)
  • OA Publishing Platform annual cost will be $1,499/year (was $1,399/year)

Last year we published 120 papers with about 250 submissions. We’re a bit ahead of that this year, so I estimate that our next year’s costs will be a bit less than $5000. That’s still less than the typical APC for a single paper at many journals.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

#arXiv240905467v3 #arXiv241024134v3 #arXiv241114564v2 #arXiv241118769v2 #arXiv250300595v2 #CMBLensing #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #fluxShearing #HighEnergyAstrophysicalPhenomena #InstrumentationAndMethodsForAstrophysics #magnetizedAccretion #Nova #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #Quaia #quasars #SolarAndStellarAstrophysics #StellarModels #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics #VeraCRubinObservatory

2025-03-22

Weekly Update at the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 22/03/2025

It’s Satuday morning once again, and time for another update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 29 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 264.

The papers we have published this week are connected by the theme of black holes and their role in galaxy formation, which is a very hot topic nowadays!

The first paper to report is “Hawking Radiation from non-evaporating primordial black holes cannot enable the formation of direct collapse black holes” by Jonathan Regan, Marios Kalomenopoulos and Kelly Kosmo O’Neil of the University of Nevada, USA. This paper, which is based on an undergraduate thesis, is a study of the irradiating effects of primordial black holes and a discussion of whether these might influence the subsequent formation of supermassive black holes. It is in the section marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, and was published on Tuesday  18th March.

The overlay is here:

and you can find the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The second paper, which was published on Wednesday 19th March and is also in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “First Light and Reionization Epoch Simulations (FLARES) – XV: The physical properties of super-massive black holes and their impact on galaxies in the early universe” by Stephen Wilkins & Jussi K. Kuusisto (U. Sussex, UK), Dimitrios Irodotou (Institute of Cancer Research, UK), Shihong Liao (Beijing, China) Christopher C. Lovell (Portsmouth, UK), Sonja Soininen (Insitute of Cancer Research), Sabrina C. Berger (Melbourne, Australia), Sophie L. Newman (Portsmouth, UK), William J. Roper (Sussex), Louise T. C. Seeyave (Sussex), Peter A. Thomas (Sussex) and Aswin P. Vijayan Sussex). This paper uses cosmological hydrodynamical zoom simulations to study the formation of supermassive black holes and their impact on star formation in the early Universe.

Here is the overlay, which you can click on to make larger if you wish:

 

You can read the officially accepted version of this paper on arXiv here.

That’s all for this week. It’s been a bit frustrating for me as Managing Ediutor, because we have built up a backlog of several papers that were accepted for publication some time ago, but are still waiting for the authors to place the final version on arXiv. I hope these won’t take too long to appear, not least because I would like to clear my workflow on the Scholastica platform!

#arXiv240402815v3 #arXiv241109081v2 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #DiamondOpenAccess #FirstLight #FLARES #galaxyFormation #HawkingRadiation #OpenAccessPublishing #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #primordialBlackHoles #reionization #supermassiveBlackHoles

2025-02-01

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 01/02/2025

It’s Saturday morning, so once again it’s time for an update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. There were no papers to report last week but since the last update we have published four new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 11 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 246.

In chronological order of publication, 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 halo model approach for mock catalogs of time-variable strong gravitational lenses” by Katsuya T. Abe & Masamune Oguri (Chiba U, Japan), Simon Birrer & Narayan Khadka (Stony Brook, USA), Philip J. Marshall (Stanford, USA), Cameron Lemon (Stockholm U., Sweden), Anupreeta More (IUCAA, India), and the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. It was published on 27th January 2025 in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The paper discusses how to generate mock catalogs of strongly lensed QSOs and Supernovae on galaxy-, group-, and cluster-scales based on a halo model that incorporates dark matter halos, galaxies, and subhalos.

 

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

This paper, also published on Monday 27th January 2025, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “The Soltan argument at redshift 6: UV-luminous quasars contribute less than 10% to early black hole mass growth” by Knud Jahnke (MPI Heidelberg, Germany). This paper presents an argument that almost all growth of supermassive black hole mass at z>6 does not take place in UV-luminous quasars.

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, published on 29th January 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is “A Heavy Seed Black Hole Mass Function at High Redshift – Prospects for LISA” by Joe McCaffrey & John Regan (Maynooth U., Ireland), Britton Smith (Edinburgh U., UK), John Wise (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA), Brian O’Shea (Michigan State U., USA) and Michael Norman (University of California, San Diego). This is a numerical study of the growth rates of massive black holes in the early Universe and implications for their detection via gravitational wave emission.

You can see the overlay here:

 

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

The last paper of this batch is “Forecasting the Detection of Lyman-alpha Forest Weak Lensing from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and Other Future Surveys” by Patrick Shaw & Rupert A. C. Croft (Carnegie Mellon U., USA) and R. Benton Metcalf (U. Bologna, Italy). This paper, published on January 30th 2025, is about extending the applicationof  Lyman-α forest weak gravitational lensing to lower angular source densities than has previously been done, with forecasts for future spectral surveys. It is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here

 

You can find the accepted version on arXiv here.

Incidentally, we currently have 121 papers under review, including 81 under a revise and resubmit request.

That’s all for this week. I’ll do another update next Saturday.

#arXiv240916413v2 #arXiv241020014v2 #arXiv241103184v2 #arXiv241107509v3 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #BlackHoleSeeds #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccess #eLISA #LSST #LymanAlphaForest #OJAp #OpenAccessPublishing #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #quasars #SoltanArgument #strongGravitationalLensing #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics #weakGravitationalLensing

2024-12-31

2024 in Retrospect

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

T. S. Eliot, from Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets.

I wasn’t really planning on posting a retrospective of the year 2024, but the rain is pouring down outside so I’ve decided to use up a bit of time before going out in the hope that the rain stops.

The past year has been very busy with significant life events. One particular highlight has to be a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime trip to Sydney in February. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to visit Australia again, but if I do I’ll take it! Shortly after returning from that trip I went back to Barcelona until the summer, leaving briefly for visits to Rome (Euclid Consortium Meeting) and Valencia (Department Colloquium). Unfortunately at that point my laptop gave up the ghost so I had to come back to Maynooth a little earlier than planned to salvage what was on it and get a new one. And so ended my sabbatical. I’d like to take the opportunity again to thank everyone at the Universiies of Barcelona and Sydney for making me feel so welcome and, of course, to Maynooth for granting me a full-year sabbatical.

As well as my own research, the year saw significant progress with the Open Journal of Astrophysics, both in terms of numbers of papers published (120 in 2024) but also some much-needed work on automation and an increase in the size of the Editorial Board. It’s hard to predict what will happen in 2025, but I’m glad that a significant number of members of the astrophysics community seem to be regarding OJAp as a viable avenue for communicating their research.

I will also mention – for those that care – that the Open Journal of Astrophysics is now listed in Scopus, but all the numbers they have published about the journal are inaccurate. I have spent months trying to get them to correct the figures but, although they have admitted errors, they have failed to do so. My next step will be to take legal action against Scopus (which is based in The Netherlands) under the Dutch Civil Code.

The big event workwise at Maynooth was the merger of the Departments of Theoretical Physics and Experimental Physics into a single Department of Physics. So far this has been largely paper exercise. What will result from it in the long term remains to be seen. I was given two new modules to teach last Semester and have another new one next Semester (as well as one I’ve done before). Although this made for a heavy workload, it wasn’t as bad as what happened after the only other sabbatical I’ve had in my career. I got a one Semester sabbatical when I was at Nottingham, but the Department simply moved my first-semester teaching to the second semester in addition to what had already been allocated for the second, so I had a double teaching load when I got back!

There has been a significant change in my personal circumstances too. During 2024 I finally completed the sale of my house in Pontcanna Cardiff. I had intended to do this years ago, but the pandemic and subsequent workload issues made it difficult to travel and sort this matter out. In the meantime bought my house in Maynooth with a mortage so I owned two properties, one of which was empty for much of the time. After much stopping and starting, and being badly let down by more than one prospective buyer, the Cardiff house is now sold. I now feel much less delocalised. I also felt very rich when the proceeds hit my bank account, but only briefly. I used a big chunk to pay off my mortgage and put the rest into fixed-term investments for retirement.

Writing about Sydney reminded me that there are parts of the world in which it is 2025 already, so let me end with a “Happy New Year” and a few interesting numerological facts about the number 2025:

P.S. It’s still raining.

#2025 #DepartmentOfPhysics #Maynooth #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #sabbatical #Sydney

2024-12-15

Qeios and the Nature of a Journal

Last week I encountered, for the first time, a website called Qeios.com. This is a platform that does peer review of preprints and then posts those approved with Open Access. It also issues a DOI for approved articles. Qeios is also a member of Crossref so presumably the metadata for these articles is deposited there too.

You might think this is the same as what the Open Journal of Astrophysics does, but it is a bit different. For one thing, it is not an arXiv overlay journal so the preprints actually appear on the Qeios platform, though I suppose there’s nothing to stop authors posting on arXiv either before or after Qeios. Since most astrophysicists find their research on arXiv, the overlay concept seems more efficient than the Qeios one.

Anyway, my attention was drawn to Qeios by an astrophysicist who had been asked to review an article for Qeios that is already under consideration by OJAp. In our For Authors page there is this:

No paper should be submitted to The Open Journal of Astrophysics that is already published elsewhere or is being considered for publication by another journal.

This rule is adopted by many journals and has in the past led to authors being banned for breaking it. Apart from anything else it means that the community is not bombarded with multiple review requests for the same paper (as in the case above). There is an issue of research misconduct, the definition of which varies from one institution to another. For reference here is what it says in Maynooth University’s Research Integrity Policy statement:

Publication of multiplier papers based on the same set(s) or sub-set(s) of data is not acceptable, except where there is full cross-referencing within the papers. An author who submits substantially similar work to more than one publisher must disclose this to the publishers at the time of submission.

The document also specifically refers to “artificially proliferating publications” as an example of research misconduct. Authors whose papers do end up in multiple journals could thus find themselves in very hot water with their employers as a consequence.

Getting back to the specifics of Qeios and OJAp, however, there two questions about whether this rule applicable in this situation. One is that the preprint may have been submitted to Qeios after submission to OJAp, which means the rule as written is not violated. Authors of papers published by OJAp retain full copyright of their work so we can’t control what they do after publication, but if they try to publish it again in another journal they will fall foul of the rule there.

The other is whether Qeios counts as a “another journal” in the first place. Instead of going into the definition of what a journal is, I’ll refer you to an old post of mine in which I wrote this:

I’d say that, at least in my discipline, traditional journals are simply no longer necessary for communicating scientific research. I find all the  papers I need to do my research on the arXiv and most of my colleagues do the same. We simply don’t need old-fashioned journals anymore.  Yet we keep paying for them. It’s time for those of us who believe that  we should spend as much of our funding as we can on research instead of throwing it away on expensive and outdated methods of publication to put an end to this absurd system. We academics need to get the academic publishing industry off our backs.

The point that I have made many times is that the only thing that journals do of any importance is to organize peer-review. The publishing side of the business is simply unnecessary. Journals do not add value to an article, they just add cost. The one thing they do – peer review – is not done by them but by members of the academic community.

There is a thread on Bluesky by Ethan Vishniac (Editor-in-Chief of the Astrophysical Journal) about Qeios. There are six parts so please bear with me if I include them all to show context:

https://bsky.app/profile/ethan-vishniac.bsky.social/post/3lco4s6bfq223

https://bsky.app/profile/ethan-vishniac.bsky.social/post/3lco4s6bllk23

https://bsky.app/profile/ethan-vishniac.bsky.social/post/3lco4s6bmks23

https://bsky.app/profile/ethan-vishniac.bsky.social/post/3lco4s6xjqc23

https://bsky.app/profile/ethan-vishniac.bsky.social/post/3lco4s6xkpk23

https://bsky.app/profile/ethan-vishniac.bsky.social/post/3lco4s6xlos23

This thread repeats much of what I’ve said already, but I’d like to draw your attention to the 4th of these messages, which contains

Qeios.com takes the position that they are not a journal, but a website that vets papers through peer review. The AAS journals (and as far as I know, all other professional journals) does not regard this as a meaningful distinction.

I’m not sure what a journal actually is, as I think it is an outmoded concept, but I agree with Ethan Vishniac that to all intents and purposes Qeios is a journal. It has an ISSN that says as much too. On the other hand, this quote seems to me to contain a tacit acceptance that the only thing that defines a journal is that it vets papers by peer review, which is the point I made above.

#academicPublishing #arXiv #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #Qeios

2024-11-23

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

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!

#AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #chemicalAbundances #HeliumEnrichment #HighRedshiftGalaxies #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

2024-11-17

The Future of Diamond Open Access in Astrophysics

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!

#DiamondOpenAccess #journals #MNRAS #OpenAccess #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #OxfordUniversityPress #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

2024-11-16

Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

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!

#arXiv240815194v2 #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DarkMatterHaloes #DiamondOpenAccess #Enzo #galaxyFormation #JWST #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

2024-10-14

I think it’s time to provide an update on the continuing (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. I reported a month ago that Scopus had committed to fixing the issue within two weeks. Now almost FIVE WEEKS later they haven’t done a thing.

Here’s the problem:

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.

This all merely demonstrates the folly that so many institutions place so much trust in Scopus. 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. Unfortunately the bean-counters at Maynooth University are as credulous as any, mindlessly parroting spurious announcements based on the Scopus database.

Maynooth University is proud to offer undergraduates a course in Critical Skills. I suggest it that the gullible members of its management team would do well to take it.

https://telescoper.blog/2024/10/14/failures-of-scopus/

#CriticalSkills #journal #MaynoothUniversity #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #research #SCOPUS

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