richardalexander.bsky.social
Astrophysicist at the University of Leicester | Dad | Cyclist | Exiled Scot
https://rdalexander.github.io
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MNRAS now has such an agreement with all UK univs, so it's still effectively free-to-publish for UK astronomers. The main impact of the OA move seems to have been silo-ing us all back to only publishing in our "local" journals. (UK researchers can no also longer publish for free in A&A.)
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I think that was the original intent, but in practice the post-lobbying version of the legislation ended up requiring that even more research funding is funnelled to publishers than was the case beforehand.
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But then the lobbyists got their hands on things. Most funders now require open access, but also set rules such that paid-for open access is effectively the only allowed option (e.g., the pan-European "Plan S"). Journals like MN were basically forced to move from a subscription model to author-pays.
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It's the same in a lot of places. Several of the big EU funding schemes now mandate gold open access too, as do a number of national funding agencies across Europe.
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Completely. But the publishing industry did a better job lobbying govt than researchers did, so here we are.
[Similar discussion of this from a few months ago below.]
bsky.app/profile/rich...
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In the UK, at least, "gold" (paid) open access is now required by funders and/or govt. So what's driving this is basically that future (and even current) funding is dependent on paying those OA fees.
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📌
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I think it bothers me less than people being born in the 2000s being old enough to get PhDs, but...yeah. 🫣
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I think so. The various papers that looked at it excluded geographical biases, but could never disentangle causal effects from “self-promotion” of better papers. Either way though, it’s a surprisingly strong effect.
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This is 15+ years old now, but anecdotally it’s even worse now. Many (most?) people time their submissions to appear nearer the top of the daily listings.
[The old submission deadline was 4pm Eastern time; it changed to 2pm a few years ago.]
arxiv.org/abs/0907.4740
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There are papers showing the distributions of submission times - there is a *huge* spike immediately after the deadline as people try to get to the top of the listings. And with good reason - there’s also data showing that papers posted at/near the top are cited more often, even several years later.
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Sometimes she brought it on herself though. “Do you like my mask? Isn’t it pretty? It raises the dead…”
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Also planets in binary systems which orbit both stars. Which dynamicists call "circumbinary" planets, and everyone calls "Tatooines".
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Nominative determinism at its finest, but also a top-notch entry in the "people whose names are sentences" category.
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Yesterday I learned about urologist Dr Nick Burns-Cox...😂
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Ugh. Hope any damage isn’t too painful / expensive.
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So the Oort cloud is made of...cats?
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Apparently the Leicester one was locally profitable, but run by a larger company that was losing money in other cities, and the company folded. 😢
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Understandable though. Jaffa Cakes can compensate for a lot.
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I can only assume you are in central Edinburgh. 🤣 Usually the number density of pipers drops off as a fairly steep function of distance from the Royal Mile.
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Things in the UK are…not great…on this front either, but if we look good by comparison…yikes. 😬
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I'd like to think that it's a character study where he is baited repeatedly until he snaps, thus establishing Eddington's limit.
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It would help this discussion to look at recent publication trends. This is from ADS, total publications in all the AAS journals + MNRAS + A&A +JCAP. This year’s total is extrapolated from the first quarter. The feeling that things have changed suddenly is not an illusion.
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Ouch - I didn't realise it was that severe. And that's against a community (at least in the countries hosting those journals) that is not expanding significantly, and in which people have a lot more demands on their time than a few years ago. Not hard to understand why the system is creaking.
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Very nice. Was baking hot up there today - I have some very silly tan lines after this weekend too. 🤦🏻♂️
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Has to be formatted properly though - we olds still see “CGS4” and think of the (then) cutting-edge IR spectrograph.
(“Cooled grating spectrometer 4” on UKIRT.)
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Pope Haribo VII
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I've heard similar stories from Italy too. So many questions. 😆
But for our (UK) system it's just not logistically possible. Our exam period is also ~4 weeks, so it's potentially viable for one big class. But when you have 3-4 classes it's simply not doable (setting aside all the other concerns!).
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Problem with oral exams is that they don't scale to even modest class sizes, let alone large ones. If I did 15 minute vivas for my undergrad classes, I would spend almost a month doing literally nothing else. (Also there's no way that you can be consistent between the first one and the 100th.)
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Did a double-take there - absolutely crazy that it's the same law that made it a huge pain for us to renew driving licenses almost 20 years ago. Process suddenly took months instead of minutes.
[It only applied to non-citizens back then, and only then in the few states that adopted it immediately.]
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Also the sterrato stage was maybe the best single day’s racing at the Giro in the past decade+.
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📌
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Is there a non-paywalled version anywhere? Can only read the headline, but it certainly doesn't sound good.
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Ugh. Hard not to assume the worst at this point. 😕
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Any word on numbers? The 2024 round had the start dates pushed back *and* the number of small awards cut by ~1/3. As bad as it is, the delay might actually be the lesser evil here; the alternative is probably awarding far fewer grants across the board.
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😂
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Congrats. 🥳 Should I assume we'll see the full collection on arXiv tomorrow? At the moment only papers I-V are up on the ApJ website...
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We had the same announcement a few months ago, and lots of other places have done similar. Seems like everyone is reading from the same script, just with slightly different pacing. 😕
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The press release says there is a 0.3% false probability.
This comes from a mistranslation of Bayesian to frequentist statistics.
If you take the Bayes factor considering the 'maximal' set of molecules from the paper, the probability of no DMS and DMDS (1/(1+B)) is actually 27.6%.
So close to 1σ.
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Also worth noting that “3-sigma” here doesn’t refer to a signal-to-noise ratio; it’s how they’re describing the statistical preference for one model over another when fitted to the data.