HomeTensione di Hubble, due studi riaprono il caso: l’universo locale potrebbe espandersi più lentamente
In the DarkEuclid on Sky
I haven’t posted much recently about the European Space Agency’s Euclid Mission but I’ve got an excuse to remedy that today as I’ve just seen that the Special Issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics called Euclid on Sky has at last been published (with a date of 30th April 2025). This contains the main mission and instrument overview papers as well as scientific papers relating to the Early Release Observations. All the individual papers have been on arXiv for some time already.
You can access the Special Issue here.
The main mission overview paper has 1139 authors (including yours truly); that’s definitely the longest author list I’ve ever been on! The arXiv version has been available for almost a year and has already got 254 citations. Here is the abstract:
The current standard model of cosmology successfully describes a variety of measurements, but the nature of its main ingredients, dark matter and dark energy, remains unknown. Euclid is a medium-class mission in the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will provide high-resolution optical imaging, as well as near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy, over about 14,000 deg^2 of extragalactic sky. In addition to accurate weak lensing and clustering measurements that probe structure formation over half of the age of the Universe, its primary probes for cosmology, these exquisite data will enable a wide range of science. This paper provides a high-level overview of the mission, summarising the survey characteristics, the various data-processing steps, and data products. We also highlight the main science objectives and expected performance.
Here’s Figure 1.
#AstronomyAstrophysics #EarlyReleaseObservations #Euclid #EuclidEarlyReleaseObservations
Page Charges at A&A
The journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A for short) announced last week that it was increasing page charges on longer papers. The table of new charges to be implemented is here:
A&A 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. I gave some background on A&A 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. For this reason it is not compatible with some institutional open access policies. Unlike some journals, however, A&A does allow authors to place their papers on arXiv without restriction, so they can be read there for free. Previously A&A required authors (or their institutes) to pay “Page Charges” – essentially an Article Processing Charge (APC) – if they were not from a “member country”; this policy was introduced in 2020. Authors from a member country will now have to pay APCs to publish (if their paper exceeds the page limit) but their institutional libraries still have to pay a subscription if they are to access the paper. In other words, A&A is double-dipping.
According to A&A,
… the average length of papers has also been increasing. Too often, papers are longer than necessary, leading to increased workload for authors, referees, and editors, and hindering the reader’s ability to efficiently grasp their content. As well as needing logistical consideration, the challenges related to the journal’s growth have financial implications that must be addressed to ensure long-term sustainability.
I agree that many papers are far too long. As a journal Editor myself I know that it is much harder to find people willing to review very long papers, a fact that some authors seem reluctant to recognize. On the other hand I very much doubt that any of the funds generated by page charges will be given to the refeees who do the most important – indeed I would argue the only important – work of a journal.
If the desired effect is to reduce the number of long papers this policy may work, though I suspect authors who are incurably prolix will respond by splitting their work into several shorter papers to avoid the page charges and thereby generating even more work for the journal. I suspect however that the desired effect is really to increase revenue; so often in the context of academic publishing “sustainability” really means “profitability”. I would also bet that these charges will increase further in future.
The changing charges at A&A have widespread implications, including for the Euclid Consortium, most of whose scientific papers are published there. I’m sure the Euclid Consortium Editorial Board will discuss this development. I’m not a member of the ECEB so it would be inappropriate to comment further on publication policy so I’ll leave the discussion to them. I would say, however, that the publication process at A&A is rather slow. The main post-launch Euclid Overview paper by Mellier et al., for example, was accepted for publication in August 2024 but has still not appeared. It is, however, available on arXiv, which is all that really matters. That paper, incidentally, is over 90 pages long. According to the table above that would cost about €12,000 in page charges. It was submitted in May 2024 and accepted quite quickly but is planned to appear in a special issue Euclid on Sky the publication of which is being delayed by other papers still going through the editorial process.
(Incidentally, Mellier et al. has already acquired 157 citations despite not yet being officially published, which illustrates how little difference “official” publication is actually worth.)
#ArticleProcessingCharge #AstronomyAstrophysics #EuclidConsortium #OpenAccessPublishing #pageCharges #S20
I was intrigued by an editorial piece from 20 years ago that was sent to me by Prof. Peter Schneider (who, among many other things, is Chair of the Euclid Consortium Editorial Board) who happens to be one of the authors. The article gives an interesting insight into the processes involved in being an Editor for the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) at the time, and is worth reading all the way through, but I was particularly struck by Section 6.2, which makes some predictions about the future.
Here’s an excerpt:
We can even go a step further and ask the provocative question of whether we will need a peer-reviewed journal like A&A in the future. After all, in some communities, astro-ph has taken over the role of communicating new results. Is astro-ph not sufficient? A few aspects of a potentially very long answer to that question are as follows: many authors submit their manuscript to astro-ph, but only after it has been peer-reviewed, which shows that most researchers consider the peer-reviewing essential. People’s achievements are often judged by their refereed papers. Certainly at present, peer-reviewing is seen as a kind of quality stamp on manuscripts, and we are here to witness that papers are improved in the course of the refereeing process.
But what if astro-ph is supplemented by a refereeing process, essentially in the same way as the major journals do today, so that a manuscript gets a “green tick-mark” after successfully passing the reviewing stage and being “frozen”, i.e., cannot be replaced with an updated version anymore. We suspect that this is possible, although it would require a fairly large board of Editors to cope with the numbers of submissions to astro-ph, accompanied by costs that would have to be covered by someone. If this system were to replace the current journals, then one would end up with a single electronic-only astronomy journal and preprint service system. What if a paper is not passing through the refereeing stage? At present, a paper rejected by one journal can still be submitted to a second one, thus getting another chance to be published. We consider this second-chance opportunity a necessary feature for a fair peer-reviewed information flow. Hence, we would need more than one “astro-ph”-like system with different boards of editors, and this brings us back closely to a system of several electronic-only journals.
This is basically the idea behind the Open Journal of Astrophysics, which I didn’t really start thinking about until about 2010. In fact, when we were talking about setting up OJAp – about a decade after this paper was written – we did discuss the possibility of just having a “green tick-mark” on the arXiv entry. We rejected this idea in favour of the overlay concept primarily because of security concerns about who writes the tick mark into the arXiv field. I do agree with the point about having multiple platforms for such publications, however, and I have frequently argued that there should be alternatives to OJAp.
Here is another extract, from the very end of the paper:
We have taken here the role of devil’s advocate to demonstrate that issues in going electronic-only are far from being as simple and clear-cut as some open-access gurus would like us to believe. Obviously, electronic publishing is a timely and controversial issue that we will continue to consider in the coming years. The future of publication will be decided less by Boards of Directors and Editors, or by publishers, than by the community at large. With the availability of electronic-only journals, authors make their own decision on where to submit a manuscript. At present, this vote is clearly in favor of traditional journals, but as that may change we will remain open and ready to adapt.
I would hesitate to call myself a “guru” but I do think that the issues are clearer now than perhaps they were in 2004. Twenty years on, the balance is still in favour of traditional journals at least in terms of numbers of papers being published. Judging by the activity at OJAp, it may be that things may be changing…
https://telescoper.blog/2024/10/11/predicting-the-future-of-publishing-from-the-past/
#astroPh #AstronomyAstrophysics #OpenAccess #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #PeterSchneider