For those of you who can’t get enough Maynooth University Library Cat action, I thought I’d share this instagram post that features a short documentary film made by some students about said feline: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Maynooth University (@maynoothuni) Incidentally, Fiona Morley (who you see interviewed in the video) is Head of Digital Programmes and Information Systems at Maynooth University and, with her team, has given huge support to the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This reminds me that today is the last day of teaching at Maynooth. There will be a short bre ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

Red Wall Destiny by Wassily Kandinsky (1909; oil on canvas, 83 x 116 cm; Astrakhan, Dogadin State Art Gallery ..read more

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 OJAp 50 371 7.42 Citations to papers publishe ..read more

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 ag ..read more

I’m having a lazy Sunday so instead of writing anything too demanding on here I thought I’d share something I stumbled across in a book I’ve been reading (and will probably review next week sometime). Not a lot of people know that the first true English dictionary was called A Table Alphabeticall which was created by Robert Cawdrey and first published in London in 1604, over 150 years before Samuel Johnson’s much more famous A Dictionary of the English Language. This, on the left, is the frontispiece of the First Edition to A Table Alphabeticall: Notice that it says i ..read more

It’s Saturday morning in Barcelona, and 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 32 and the total published by OJAp up to 147. There’s every chance we will reach 150 next week. The first paper of the most recent pair – published on  Monday 29th April- is “Supernovae in 2023 (review): possible breakthroughs by late observations” by Noam Soker of Technion in Haifa, Israel. It presents  a discussion of observations of the aftermath of supe ..read more

About Sligo I’m no longer in the part of not-Barcelona known as Sligo (which is Sligeach in Irish) but here are some random pictures and a random video clip I took while I was there ..read more

Quite a few people have asked for an update about Maynooth University Library Cat. I’m not actually in Maynooth right now so can’t pass on first-hand knowledge, but I am informed that said feline is doing fine and yesterday a colleague sent me this picture. To be honest he looks a bit peeved that his dish is empty. It is entirely possible, however, that he had been fed several times already before that picture was taken ..read more