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.

Changes at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Regular readers of this blog – both of them – will have noticed that I haven’t posted any new publications from the Open Journal of Astrophysics for a couple of weeks. The reason for this is that we are switching to a new system of publishing that automatically integrates the Scholastica platform with Crossref, the system that (among many other things) keeps track of citations to published articles.

Up to now, I have had to prepare manually an XML file containing the metadata for each paper for upload, then send it to a colleague to register with Crossref. There are two problems with this. One is that transcribing the information from each overlay is prone to errors (made by me), especially if there is a long author list. The other problem is that it is rather slow and inefficient, which wasn’t such a problem when we were only publishing a few papers, but now that we are handling much more it is taking up too much time.

The obvious solution is to cut out the middle man (i.e. me) and register everything with Crossref directly from our platform. That will ensure that what goes to Crossref will be exactly the same as on our website and it will go there much faster. Another advantage is that if there is an error on the platform, such as a spelling mistake in an author name, correcting it there will automatically update the metadata on Crossref. You have no idea how much time and frustration this will save. Up to now we have to raise a ticket with Crossref for their staff to make the change, which can take a while to complete.

Scholastica offers a way to do this integration, but it doesn’t work with our existing Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), which have the format 10.21105/astro.1234.56789, because it doesn’t allow us to include the “astro” which we need it to do because we share the prefix (10.21105) with another journal, the Journal of Open Source Software and we need to keep the two separate; they use 10.21105/joss at the start of their DOIs. After much to-ing and fro-ing we were unable to persuade Scholastica to change their policy, so to use their integration we have been forced to change prefix. Fortunately, Maynooth University (which runs Maynooth Academic Publishing, the official publisher of OJAp) is registered to mint its own DOIs so we can switch to a new prefix (10.33232) and avoid potential problems with the old one.

This change seems straightforward but it requires Crossref to switch the “ownership” of the journal and give us permission to add new papers with the same journal title “The Open Journal of Astrophysics” from what is effect a new publisher. This is a straightforward process, but has been a bit slower than expected because of the Easter break. I expect it to be completed in a week or so, at the latest.

It is important to stress that this change only affects the DOIs and registration of new papers. Existing papers are not affected at all: they continue with the old DOIs. The DOI is meant to be a persistent identifier so this is as it should be. The name of our website domain (astro.theoj.org) remains unchanged too. In other words, nothing visible to authors will change except for the format of the DOIs and the fact we go from acceptance to publication even faster.

If al this seems rather boring, that’s because it is. But please bear with us while we complete this change. It’s definitely going to be worth it in the long run, for me if nobody else!

Don’t call me FRAS

Some time ago I mentioned on this blog that I was resigning my Fellowship of the Institute of Physics as a consequence of the IOP’s blatant dishonesty over its publication policy. In a subsequent post giving further details of my fundamental disagreements with IOP Publishing’s profiteering, I stated that

I will decide in the next few days whether or not to resign also from the Royal Astronomical Society for the same reason.

After giving the matter a lot of thought, I have indeed now decided to resign my Fellowship of the Royal Astronomical Society, of which I have been a Fellow since 1990. The main reason for this decision is that I feel it would be inconsistent to remain FRAS after resigning as FInstP when I have the same problem with both institutions, i.e. the way they fund themselves through exploitative publishing practices.

Here is the email I sent to the Royal Astronomical Society earlier today.

Dear Membership Officer,

After much deliberation about the new policy of the Royal Astronomical Society to charge exorbitant fees for publishing in its journals (especially Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society), I have decided that I cannot in good conscience remain a member of a society that funds itself this way. I therefore resign my Fellowship of the Royal Astronomical Society with immediate effect. Kindly remove me from your membership list. I have cancelled the Direct Debit relating to my subscription.

Regards,

Peter Coles

Other, subsidiary, reasons for resignation include the expense, and the fact that Astronomy & Geophysics, the house magazine of the RAS, one of the few direct benefits of membership, even if it doesn’t have a crossword, only ever arrives in Ireland 6-8 weeks late (if it arrives at all). In any case, since I now live in Ireland, it is much more appropriate for me to participate in the activities of the Astronomical Society of Ireland than the Royal Astronomical Society, which is a UK institution.

As I am no longer a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, I am no longer eligible to remain a member of the RAS Dining Club, of which I have been a member for 15 years, so I have resigned from that too. It has been in any case difficult and expensive for me to attend the dinners since I moved to Ireland. No more dinners at the Athenaeum for me!

The IOAP Diamond Open Access Awards

Before Christmas on this blog I mentioned the Irish Open Access Publishers inaugural Diamond Open Access awards. I nominated the Open Journal of Astrophysics in the 1st Category – Best Peer Reviewed Open Access Journal. I was also nominated in the 4th Category – Outstanding Contribution to the Open Access Publishing Field in Ireland. Neither nomination was successful.

In fact I was on my way back to Ireland from Arizona when the awards were announced at webinar on March 12th which I couldn’t attend because I was on my way back from Arizona then. The rules for the competition stated that “Nominees including winners notified by email on the 1st March, 2024”. Since I heard nothing at all by then (or indeed until the weekend before the official announcement) I made the (correct) inference that I was not in contention* and my presence was not required. I subsequently forgot about the awards until I was coincidentally reminded yesterday.

*Update: although I wasn’t informed by the organizers, and only found out indirectly on Saturday 23rd March, it seems I was given an honourable mention.

Anyway, here are the lucky winners:

The winner in Category 1 was Alphaville, a journal “about all aspects of film and screen media history, theory and criticism through multiple research methodologies and perspectives” which is based at University College Cork. This journal was founded in 2011, so has been going for far longer than the Open Journal of Astrophysics! Congratulations to them!

There was no winner in Category 2, Best Peer Reviewed Open Access Monograph.

The winner in Category 3, Best Open Educational Resource was the MTU Assignment Toolkit.

There were joint winners in Category 4: Yvonne Desmond of TU Dublin, and the team behind the journal SCENARIO, based at University College Cork. The latter journal is a trilingual journal “in the area of performative teaching, learning and research” which was founded in 2007, so has been going for even longer than the Category 1 Winner!

Congratulations to all the winners!

P.S. At least I had some consolation when I got back from the USA, in the form the Times Literary Supplement Crossword prize!

Academic Publishing: Never Mind the Quality…

I was interested to see that the latest issue of Private Eye contains a short item about academic publishing:

I’ve heard many stories of this type, with publishers putting pressure on their Editorial Boards to allow more papers to be published. This is undoubtedly motivated by the Gold Open Access model in which authors or their institutions are forced to pay thousands of dollars upfront to publish papers. Since the publisher makes an eye-watering profit on every article, why not publish as many as possible? The recent decision by the Royal Astronomical Society adopt this model is highly likely to have a similar effect there, as its journals will be able to increase revenue at the expense of quality. Under the older subscription-based system, publishers could sell their product to libraries on the basis of quality but they no longer need to do that to make a profit.

The academic publishing industry is perverse enough without adding this obvious incentive to lower editorial standards. There are far too many low quality papers being published already, a situation driven not only by the profiteering of the publishing industry but also by the absurd policies of academia itself which require researchers to churn out huge numbers of papers to get promotion, win research grants, etc.

This part of the academic system is definitely broken. To fix it, academic publishing must be taken out of the hands of commercial publishers and put into the care of research institutions whose libraries are perfectly capable of publishing and curating articles on a non-profit basis. But that won’t be enough: we need also to overhaul how we do research assessment. The principles outlined in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment would be a start.

Scopus Update

A couple of months ago I blogged about how the Open Journal of Astrophysics had been accepted for listing on Scopus. The process has turned out to be much slower than I was led to believe and the “technical team” responsible for the indexing required much more help than I’d imagined, so we’re not fully there yet. However, I can confirm that we are in the process. This is an excerpt from the accepted titles list which you can find here:

The Scopus indexation process seems to involve processing every article manually, so it’s possible that there will be some errors. Here is a verbatim excerpt from a recent email from the Scopus team that perhaps illustrates why I lack confidence in the process:

We have activated your journal for Scopus indexation and you will be able to find the content indexed online shortly. The title, however, will take some time to have a source page and you will not be able to view it on source list. If the articles indexed on Scopus exceeds 15, Source Page for your title will be automatically created during Scopus browser update. Post which the title will be discoverable on Scopus source list as well.

I hope this clarifies the situation.