Four New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

It is time yet again for an update of recent activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

This week we have published four papers, which I now present to you. These four take the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 36 and the total published by OJAp up to 151. I speculated last week that we would probably pass the 150 mark this week, and so we did. We’re still on target to publish around 100 papers this year.

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 “Ephemeris Matching Reveals False Positive Validated and Candidate Planets from the K2 Mission” by Drake A. Lehmann (U. Wisconsin-Madison, USA) and Andrew Vanderburg (MIT, USA). It presents a description and application of a technique for identifying false positives among candidate exoplanets. The paper was published on 7th May 2024, is in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, and can be found here.

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 is “Accuracy requirements on intrinsic alignments for Stage-IV cosmic shear” which is by by Anya Paopiamsap, Natalia Porqueres & David Alonso (Oxford, UK) and Joachim Harnois-Deraps & C. Danielle Leonard (Newcastle, UK). This paper sets about quantifying the Quantifying the permissible level of disagreement between the true intrinsic galaxy alignments and the theoretical models thereof that can be allowed for future Stage-IV cosmic shear surveys. This one is in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The paper was published on May 9th 2024 and you can see the overlay here:

 

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

The next paper, is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics and is entitled “Optimal Summary Statistics for X-ray Polarization”. The authors are Jeremy Heyl (Uni. British Columbia, Canada), Denis González-Caniulef (Uni. Toulouse, France) and Ilaria Caiazzo (Caltech, USA). This presents new statistical estimators for use in studies of X-ray polarization, with an analytic discussion of their efficiency. It can be found here and the accepted version can be read on arXiv here. Here is the overlay:

The last paper of this batch is called  “B-modes from galaxy cluster alignments in future surveys” and is by Christos Georgiou, Thomas Bakx, Juliard van Donkersgoed and Nora Elisa Chisari, all from Utrecht University in The Netherlands. It presents a discussion of the possible detection of cosmic shear B-modes produced by intrinsic alignments in future galaxy surveys.

Here is the overlay:

You can find the full text for this one on the arXiv here. The primary classification for this one is Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.

And that ends this week’s update. More next week!

 

Another Day, Another Predator…

It’s been a while since I reported on a couple of encounters with predatory publishers so I thought I’d do another post in the same vein. Just this morning I received an email:

The email is in Polish, followed by the above translation into English. Out of curiosity I had a look at the website for UK Zhende Publishing. Imagine my lack of surprise when I found out it was down! The company is however registered at Companies House. Mr Zihan Li – who is resident in China -owns 75% of the business.

The Open Journal of Astrophysics is not for sale under any circumstances, not that I own it anyway. I did toy with the idea of selling them some other journal I don’t own, but I’m too busy to play such games. I did, however, find the time to reply giving my “thoughts/comments” as requested, though it would be inappropriate to repeat them here.

The last time I received such an approach ( a few months ago) the suggested price was $70,000. I see it has now gone up to $100,000. I don’t know how Mr Zihan arrived at a valuation of $100K but it got me thinking. We have so far published 149 articles at OJAp. Taking the APC for MNRAS of £2500 (approximately $3000) as typical then we have saved the community about $447,000 in unnecessary publication charges.

Who Publishes A&A?

The journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, generally known as A&A, which featured in yesterday’s post, is and has been for some time the journal of choice for many astrophysics researchers, especially those based in Europe. It is the journal in which the bulk of publications from Euclid will be published, including a batch due to come out in a couple of weeks.

The journal, which has existed since 1969, is published on behalf of the European Southern Observatory by EDP Sciences (Édition Diffusion Presse Sciences) which began life as a joint venture of four French learned societies in science, mathematics, and medicine. The company was acquired in 2019 by  China Science Publishing & Media (which has headquarters in Beijing). Judging by its social media activity, EDP Sciences sees A&A as a flagship journal; for a list of other journals it runs see here.

A&A publishes papers through a curious hybrid model called “S2O” (Subscribe to Open; not to be confused with “420”). This is not fully Open Access because it requires libraries to pay a subscription to access the journal, but unlike some journals A&A does allow authors to place their papers on arXiv without restriction, so they can be read there for free. On the other hand, A&A also requires authors to pay “Page Charges” – essentially an Article Processing Charge (APC) – if they are not from a “member country”. Authors from a member country do not have to pay APCs to publish but their institutional libraries still have to pay a subscription if they are to access the paper.

You might ask why you should publish in A&A if you can put your papers on arXiv. The answer given on the website is:

Preprint servers such as arXiv play a vital role in bringing research into the astronomy and astrophysics communities as quickly as possible. However, content uploaded to this service has not undergone rigorous peer review and the editorial oversight offered by a professional publisher such as EDP Sciences. In addition, preprints don’t offer the content selection and curation processes that make a scholarly journal a reliable and trusted addition to library collections.

In summary, publishing your article in A&A increases the value and impact of your work by making your article more trustworthy, easier to find, read, and cite, whilst ensuring that the version of record is preserved in perpetuity.

In other words, A&A does nothing that the Open Journal of Astrophysics doesn’t do for free…

Incidentally, I am struck by the frequent assertion that publishers preserve or curate content. Actually they don’t. Libraries do that. If a publisher such as EDP Science decides a journal is no longer commercially viable it will simply ditch it. Fortunately nowadays institutions maintain their own repositories of published papers as insurance against this.

Here is some more information about how S20 works, taken from the A&A website:

A&A is a community journal sponsored by a board of member countries. While subscriptions fund the publishing costs of the journal, the editorial costs are funded both by the contributions from member countries, and the page charges for authors of non-member countries. This division of costs between authors and readers makes it possible to offer low subscription prices, while at the same time removing barriers to publishing for authors from A&A sponsoring countries, and allowing authors from non-sponsoring countries to publish for a modest charge.

If the S2O model is successful, editorial costs will continue to be funded by A&A member contributions and page charges, while subscriptions will be used to cover the open access publication of the journal. Authors from sponsoring countries can therefore publish in open access free of charge, while authors from other countries remain liable for page charges to fund the editorial process of their article (note: page charges are paid to A&A directly and not to the publisher).

This arrangement is being kept under annual review so whether it will persist is open to question.

Publishing Stats for Astrophysics Journals

Somebody asked me about this recently so this afternoon while I was paying rapt attention to a Zoom call I was attending I did some quick sums and produced the table below. The request that was made was to give details of total numbers of papers published in the big astronomy and astrophysics journals last year. This is easy relatively easy to do using the excellent NASA/ADS search tool.

Name of Journal	Number of Papers	Number of Citations	Average citations per paper
MNRAS	4131	25,540	6.18
A&A	2354	15,901	6.75
ApJ	2859	15,771	5.52
ApJL	726	10,228	14.09
ApJS	338	2,611	7.72
OJAp	50	371	7.42

Citations to papers published in 2023 (Data from NASA/ADS)

In case you weren’t aware of the standard abbreviations, MNRAS is Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and A&A is Astronomy and Astrophysics; ApJ is the Astrophysical Journal, ApJL is the Astrophysical Journal Letters and ApJS is the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The Open Journal of Astrophysics is OJAp.

Anyway, you can see that the big journals published many more papers last year than OJAp but in terms of citations per paper OJAp is doing well. We have a lot of ground to make up if we’re going to be a significant player in the game in terms of sheer quantity of publications, but since we don’t make a profit from APCs we have no reason to lower standards to achieve that.

If you’re interested, the average citations per paper so far this year (i.e. as of 6th May 2024) are: MNRAS (1.84); A&A (1.66); ApJ (2.29); ApJL (2.05), ApJS (2.09) and OJAp (2.90).

Open Access in Ecology

My attention was drawn yesterday to the following blog post about Open Access in the field of ecology. I recommend you read it (and the comments, some of which are excellent).

The state of academic publishing in 3 graphs, 6 trends, and 4 thoughts

I will add a few comments of my own here.

First, whenever I read an article like this from a discipline different from my own it makes me not only feel grateful that we have arXiv but also wonder why so many fields don’t have the equivalent. On the other hand, there is EarthArxiv, but it doesn’t seem to have very many papers on it.

Second, I agree with the author of the post that far too many papers are being published. That is driven by the absurdity of a system that no longer regards the journal article as a means of disseminating scientific results but instead as a kind of epaulette to give status to the author. I also agree that scientists have largely got themselves to blame for this ridiculous situation.

Third, I disagree most strongly with this statement:

First, pipe dreaming academics who believed in the mirage of “Diamond OA” (nobody pays and it is free to publish). Guess what – publishing a paper costs money – $500-$2000 depending on how much it is subsidized by volunteer scientists. 

This is nonsense. It does not cost anything like $500-$2000 dollars to publish a paper. Of course it does cost something, but the true amount is trivial – tens of dollars, rather than hundreds or thousands – and can easily be absorbed. The entire annual running costs of OJAp are less than the typical Article Processing Charge for a single paper in a “prestigious” journal. Most money being paid in the form of APC goes directly into profit for the publishers, and the rest is largely wasted on administrative overhead. The Open Journal of Astrophysics is a Diamond Open Access journal, not a mirage. It may be a no-frills service, but it’s a reality. Why doesn’t someone set up an overlay journal on EarthArXiv?

The author of this blog post also spectacularly misses the point with “depending on how much it is subsidized by volunteer scientists”. Volunteer scientists are already subsidizing the profits of profit-making publishers! One of the commenters on the blog post has it right:

On Diamond OA and who pays; we’re already paying the big publishers with both our time and our money to publish in / review for / edit for their journals. Perhaps if we redirected that time to Diamond OA titles things would be somewhat different.

A final comment, only tangentially related to this post, is that I have been (pleasantly) surprised by the extent to which early career researchers have embraced the concept of the Open Journal of Astrophysics when you might have thought that they had more to lose by not publishing in mainstream journals rather than us oldies who don’t care any more. The explanation seems to be that younger people seem to see the absurdity and obvious unsustainability of the current publishing environment more easily than those who have put up with it for decades already.

Three New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

It’s time for the usual  Saturday roundup of business at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics. The latest batch of publications consists of three papers, taking the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 30 and the total published by OJAp up to 145.

First one up is “Baryonic Imprints on DM Halos: the concentration-mass relation and its dependence on halo and galaxy properties” .  The authors, Mufan Shao and Dhayaa Anbajagane of the University of Chicago, USA, use  a non-linear model informed by simulations to study the imprint of galaxy formation physics on the concentration-mass relationship using various different choices of halo selection criteria. This one is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies and was published on 24th April 2024.

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 announce is “Variability in SSTc2d J163134.1-240100, a brown dwarf with quasi-spherical mass loss” which describes a search for variability in a brown dwarf star known to be losing mass and the implications of the lack thereof for the reason for the outflow therefrom. The authors are Aleks Scholz (St Andrews, UK),  Koraljka Muzic (Lisbon, Portugal), Victor Almendros-Abad (Palermo, Italy), Antonella Natta (DIAS, Ireland), Dary Ruiz-Rodriguez (NRAO, USA), Lucas Cieza (Uni. Diego Portales, Chile), Cristina Rodriguez-Lopez (IAA-CSIC, Granada, Spain)

This one is in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics and was also published on 24th April 2024. The overlay looks like this:

 

You can read this paper directly on the arXiv here.

The last paper of this batch, also in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, is  entitled “MAGICS I. The First Few Orbits Encode the Fate of Seed Massive Black Hole Pairs”  and is a computational study of the process by which massive black holes are formed by merging smaller seed black holes. It was published on April 26th 2024 (i.e. yesterday). The authors are: Nianyi Chen, Diptajyoti Mukherjee and Tiziana Di Matteo (all Carnegie Mellon University); Yueying Ni (Harvard); Simeon Bird (University of California, Riverside); and Rupert Croft (Carnegie Mellon University). All authors are based in the USA.

Here is a screengrab of the overlay:

 

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

That’s all for now. More news in a week or so!

 

 

Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

It’s Saturday, and it’s time to post another update relating to the  Open Journal of Astrophysics.  Since the last update we have published two more papers, taking  the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 27 and the total published by OJAp up to 142.

The first paper of the most recent pair – published on  Tuesday April 16th – is “An Enhanced Massive Black Hole Occupation Fraction Predicted in Cluster Dwarf Galaxies” by Michael Tremmel (UCC, Ireland), Angelo Ricarte (Harvard, USA), Priyamvada Natarajan (Yale, USA), Jillian Bellovar (American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA), Ray Sharma (Rutgers, USA), Thomas R. Quinn (University of Washington, USA). It presents a  study, based on the Romulus cosmological simulations, of the impact of environment on the occupation fraction of massive black holes in low mass galaxies. This one is in the folder marked “Astrophysics of Galaxies“.

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.

The second paper was published on Wednesday 17th April and has the title “A 1.9 solar-mass neutron star candidate in a 2-year orbit” and the authors are: Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), Joshua D. Simon (Carnegie Observatories, USA), Henrique Reggiani (Gemini Observatory, Chile), Hans-Walter Rix (Heidelberg, Germany),  David W. Latham (Harvard, USA),  Allyson Bieryla (Harvard, USA),  Lars A. Buchhave (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark),  Sahar Shahaf (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel),  Tsevi Mazeh (Tel Aviv University, Israel), Sukanya Chakrabarti (University of Alabama, USA), Puragra Guhathakurta (University of California Santa Cruz, USA), Ilya V. Ilyin (Potsdam, Germany), and Thomas M. Tauris (Aalborg University, Denmark)

This one, which is in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, presents a discussion of the discovery of a 1.9 solar mass neutron star candidate using Gaia astrometric data, together with the implications of its orbital parameters for the formation mechanism.

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!

The Gates Foundation and Open Access

There has been quite a lot of reaction (e.g. here) to the recent announcement of a new Open Access Policy by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is one of the one of the world’s top funders of biomedical research. This mandates the distribution of research it funds as preprints and also states that it will not pay Article Processing Charges (APCs). The essentials of the policy, which comes into effect on 1st January 2025, are these:

1. Funded Manuscripts Will Be Available. As soon as possible and to the extent feasible, Funded Manuscripts shall be published as a preprint in a preprint server recognized by the foundation or preapproved preprint server which applies a sufficient level of scrutiny to submissions. Accepted articles shall be deposited immediately upon publication in PubMed Central (PMC), or in another openly accessible repository, with proper metadata tagging identifying Gates funding. In addition, grantees shall disseminate Funded Manuscripts as described in their funding agreements with the foundation, including as described in any proposal or Global Access commitments.
2. Dissemination of Funded Manuscripts Will Be On “Open Access” Terms. All Funded Manuscripts, including any subsequent updates to key conclusions, shall be available immediately, without any embargo, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) or an equivalent license. This will permit all users to copy, redistribute, transform, and build on the material in any medium or format for any purpose (including commercial) without further permission or fees being required.
3. Gates Grantees Will Retain Copyright. Grantees shall retain sufficient copyright in Funded Manuscripts to ensure such Funded Manuscripts are deposited into an open-access repository and published under the CC-BY 4.0 or equivalent license.
4. Underlying Data Will Be Accessible Immediately. The Foundation requires that underlying data supporting the Funded Manuscripts shall be made accessible immediately and as open as possible upon availability of the Funded Manuscripts, subject to any applicable ethical, legal, or regulatory requirements or restrictions. All Funded Manuscripts must be accompanied by an Underlying Data Availability Statement that describes where any primary data, associated metadata, original software, and any additional relevant materials or information necessary to understand, assess, and replicate the Funded Manuscripts findings in totality can be found. Grantees are encouraged to adhere to the FAIR principles to improve the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse of digital assets.
5. The Foundation Will Not Pay Article Processing Charges (APC). Any publication fees are the responsibility of the grantees and their co-authors.
6. Compliance Is A Requirement of Funding. This Open Access policy applies to all Funded Manuscripts, whether the funding is in whole or in part. Compliance will be continuously reviewed, and grantees and authors will be contacted when they are non-compliant.
   • As appropriate, Grantees should include the following acknowledgment and notice in Funded Manuscripts:
   • “This work was supported, in whole or in part, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [Grant number]. The conclusions and opinions expressed in this work are those of the author(s) alone and shall not be attributed to the Foundation. Under the grant conditions of the Foundation, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License has already been assigned to the Author Accepted Manuscript version that might arise from this submission. Please note works submitted as a preprint have not undergone a peer review process.”

Reactions to this new policy are generally positive, except (unsurprisingly) for the academic publishing industry.

For what it’s worth, my view is that it is a good policy, and I wish more funders went along this route, but it falls short of being truly excellent. As it stands, the policy seems to encourage authors to put the “final” version of their articles in traditional journals, without these articles being freely available through Open Access. That falls short of goal establishing a global worldwide network of institutional and/or subject-based repositories, linked to peer review mechanisms such as overlays, that share research literature freely for the common good. To help achieve that aim, the Gates’ Foundation should to encourage overlays rather than traditional journals as the way to carry out peer review. Perhaps this will be the next step?

Five New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

As promised a couple of days ago, I am taking the opportunity today to announce the batch of papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics that were paused slightly while we updated our system. This batch includes five papers, which I now present to you here. These five take the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 25 and the total published by OJAp up to 140. We’re publishing roughly two papers a week these days so we expect publish about 100 this year.

In chronological order, the five papers, 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.

This paper, by Yingtian Chen and Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan, is the 21st paper to be published in Volume 7 and the 136th altogether. It is a study of kinematic, chemical and age data of globular clusters from Gaia yielding clues to how the Milky Way Galaxy assembled. Here’s a screenshot of the overlay which includes the abstract. Note the new-style DOI at the bottom left.

You can read the article on arXiv directly here. This paper has a publication date of 20th March 2024, and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The second paper is “Generation of realistic input parameters for simulating atmospheric point-spread functions at astronomical observatories” by Claire-Alice Hébert (Stanford), Joshua E. Meyers (Stanford), My H. Do (Cal. State U, Pomona), Patricia R. Burchat (Stanford) and the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. It explores the use of atmospheric modelling to generate realistic estimates of the point-spread function for observational work, especially for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This one is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics and was published on 4th April 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 third paper to announce is “Cosmic Dragons: A Two-Component Mixture Model of COSMOS Galaxies” by William K. Black and August E. Evrard of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA). This paper was also published on 4th April 2024,  is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies and you can see the overlay here:

 

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

The next paper is “High mass function ellipsoidal variables in the Gaia Focused Product Release: searching for black hole candidates in the binary zoo” by Dominick M. Rowan, Todd A. Thompson,
Tharindu Jayasinghe, Christopher S. Kochanek and Krzysztof Z. Stanek of Ohio State University (USA). This paper, in the Solar and Stellar Astrophysics collection, describes a search for massive unseen stellar companions variable star systems found in Gaia data. This one was also published on 4th April 2024.

Here is the overlay:

 

 

You can find the full text for this one on the arXiv here.

Last in this batch, but by no means least, published yesterday (5th April 2024), we have a paper “Machine Learning the Dark Matter Halo Mass of Milky Way-Like Systems” by Elaheh Hayati & Peter Behroozi (University of Arizona, USA) and Ekta Patel (University of Utah, USA).  The primary classification for this one is once again Astrophysics of Galaxies and it presents a method for estimating the mass of a galaxy halo using neural networks that does not assume, for example,  dynamical equilibrium:

 

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.

As you can see this is quite a diverse collection of papers. Given the increase in submissions in the area of galactic astrophysics we are very happy to welcome another expert in that area to our Editorial Board, in the form of Professor Walter Dehnen of the University of Heidelberg.

Open Journal of Astrophysics Update

I’ve just noticed that my post earlier in the week about changes to the publication system at the Open Journal of Astrophysics is dated April 1st. I can assure you it wasn’t meant as a joke! Anyway, the integration with Crossref is now complete and I’ve started clearing the backlog of papers waiting to be published. I would say normal service has been resumed, but the idea is to make the process faster and more reliable than before so it’s hopefully a return but to better-than-normal service.

I want first of all to thank the people at Maynooth University Library, Crossref, and Scholastica for helping us figure out the issue and solve it. We would no doubt have got there faster were it not for the intervention of the Easter break, but in any case it has only required a pause of publication for a couple of weeks.

I’ll resume the regular weekly updates at the weekend. However, one paper got snarled up when we ran into a problem. Although published on 20th March, it was never properly registered with Crossref. The only way I could think of to sort out the issue with this one was to start it again, which I did this morning, and it is now published though I kept the publication date as 20th March.

This paper, by Yingtian Chen and Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan, is the 21st paper to be published in Volume 7 and the 136th altogether. It is a study of kinematic, chemical and age data of globular clusters from Gaia yielding clues to how the Milky Way Galaxy assembled. You can read the article on arXiv directly here.

You will note the new format of DOI on the overlay. Nothing else has changed that’s visible to the reader.