#ojap — Public Fediverse posts

Editorial Opportunity at the Journal of Open Source Software

The Journal of Open Source Software – known to its friends as JOSS – is is a developer friendly, diamond open access journal for research software packages which has been running since 2016 and is enormously successful, publishing Open Source software across many fields of science. Its UR, joss.theoj.org, is a giveaway that it is a stablemate of astro.theoj.org, aka the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

The driving force behind JOSS, responsible for getting it off the ground at the very beginning, is Arfon Smith whom I’ve known since Nottingham days and it iis fair to say that without his considerable help, OJAp would never have started. Both journals started off as speculative ventures, and OJAp has taken a considerable time to establish itself, but JOSS took off very quickly indeed and has now published over 3,500 papers. There are numerous differences between the two journals but, like OJAp, all publications in JOSS are free to authors and readers.

Arfon has held the role of Editor-in-Chief at JOSS since 2016 but in a recent blog post he explains that he is stepping down from his role as Editor-in-Chief, although he will remain at JOSS. The call for a replacement is here. It’s an opportunity that will appeal to anyone interested in open-source research software and open-access publishing so if that’s you then please consider applying. It will be a substantial investment of time, probably about a day a week. I quote:

Candidates should have the capacity to commit the time this role requires. For those in institutional positions, we ask for a brief letter or statement from your employer or supervisor confirming support for this commitment. Independent researchers, consultants, or others without a traditional institutional affiliation should include a brief statement describing how they plan to allocate the time.

P.S. Today OJAp published its 100th paper of 2026 so far…

P.P.S. I’ll be stepping down as Editor-in-Chief at OJAp in a couple of years, when I retire, and we’ll be doing a similar search nearer the date.

#ArfonSmith #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #JOSS #JournalOfOpenSourceSoftware #OJAp #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #openSourceSoftware #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

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

Time for another roundup of business at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics. This time I have three papers to announce, which brings the total we have published so far this year (Vol. 7) to 45 and the total published by OJAp to 160. We’re still on track to publish around 100 papers this year or more, compared to last year’s 50.

First one up, published on 3rd June 2024, is “Log-Normal Waiting Time Widths Characterize Dynamics” by Jonathan Katz of Washington University (St Louis, Missouri, USA). This paper presents a discussion of the connection between waiting time distributions and dynamics for aperiodic astrophysical systems, with emphasis on log-normal distributions.  This paper is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.

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 present is “An Empirical Model For Intrinsic Alignments: Insights From Cosmological Simulations” by Nicholas Van Alfen (Northeastern University, Boston, USA), Duncan Campbell (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA), Jonathan Blazek (Northeastern University), C. Danielle Leonard (Newcastle University, UK), Francois Lanusse (Université Paris-Saclay, France), Andrew Hearin (Argonne National Laboratory, USA), Rachel Mandelbaum (Carnegie Mellon University) and The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.  This paper presents an extension of the halo model (specifically the Halo Occupation Distribution, HOD) to include intrinsic alignment effects for the study of weak gravitational lensing. This paper is in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. It was published on Tuesday June 4th 2024.

The overlay looks like this:

 

 

You can read this paper directly on the arXiv here.

Last, but by no means least, comes  “Towards Cosmography of the Local Universe”  which proposes the multipoles of the distance-redshift relation as new cosmological observables that have a direct physical interpretation in terms of kinematical quantities of the underlying matter flow. This was also published on 4th June. The authors are Julian Adamek (IfA Zurich, Switzerland), Chris Clarkson (Queen Mary, London, UK), Ruth Durrer (Geneva, Switzerland), Asta Heinesen (U. Lyon, France & NBI Copenhagen, Denmark), Martin Kunz (Geneva), and Hayley J. Macpherson (Chicago, USA).

Here is a screengrab of the overlay:

 

 

To read the accepted version of this on the arXiv please go here. This paper is also in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. That’s it for this week. I aim to post another update next weekend.

 

 

https://telescoper.blog/2024/06/08/three-new-publications-at-the-open-journal-of-astrophysics-9/

#aperiodicSystems #arXiv230305578v3 #arXiv231107374v2 #arXiv240212165v2 #cosmography #Cosmology #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #HaloModel #haloOccupationDistribution #HighEnergyAstrophysicalPhenomena #intrinsicAlignments #Lognormal #lognormalDistributions #OJAp #statistics #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics #waitingTimes #weakGravitationalLensing