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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 04/04/2026

It may be the Easter weekend, but it’s still time for a Saturday morning update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further four papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 71 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 519. This update coimpletes the first quarter of 2026, which suggests that if we continue to publish at the same rate we’ll reach about 280 for the year.

I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience) to encourage you to visit it. Mastodon is a really excellent service, and a more than adequate replacement for X/Twitter (which nobody should be using); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.

The first paper to report this week is “Testing halo models for constraining astrophysical feedback with multi-probe modeling: I. 3D Power spectra and mass fractions” by Pranjal R. S. (U. Arizona, USA), Shivam Pandey Johns Hopkins U., USA), Dhayaa Anbajagane (U. Chicago, USA), Elisabeth Krause (U. Arizona) and Klaus Dolag (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany). This paper was published on Tuesday March 31st in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116322295318460212

The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday March 31st in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Validation of the DESI-DR1 3×2-pt analysis: scale cut and shear ratio tests” by Ni Putu Audita Placida Emas (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) and an international cast of 56 others. This study validates the combined analysis of galaxy clustering and weak gravitational lensing data from various surveys, ensuring accurate tests of the standard cosmological model using future Stage-IV surveys

The overlay for this one is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116322348900996677

Next one up, the third paper of the week, also published on Tuesday March 31st in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Differentiable Stochastic Halo Occupation Distribution with Galaxy Intrinsic Alignments” by Sneh Pandya and Jonathan Blazek (both of Northeastern University, USA). This is a paper introducing diffHOD-IA, a differentiable model for galaxy population analysis that incorporates intrinsic alignments and halo occupation distribution. It’s validated against existing models and can be used in next-generation weak-lensing analyses.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116322403314492269

The fourth and final paper this week, published on Wednesday April 1st (but not a joke), is “The Growth of Dust in Galaxies in the First Billion Years with Applications to Blue Monsters” by Desika Narayanan (U. Florida, USA) and 11 others based in the USA and Europe. This one is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies; it presents a simulation-based study of dust accumulation in early galaxies via supernovae production and rapid growth on tiny dust grains, with local density and grain size being important factors.

The overlay is here:

The finally accepted version of this paper can be found here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116328145696781139

And that concludes the update for this week. I’ll do another next week, but I’m expecting a fairly low number of papers owing to the Easter vacation.

The latest #DiamondOpenAccess peer-reviewed articles published on the Journal website have set the stage for open conversation and debate on the use and validation of catastrophe models.

Last month, we published a paper authored by Dominick Dusseau, Zachary Zobel, and Christopher Schwalm, Woodwell Climate Research Center which analysed the performance of seven catastrophe flood models and the wide range of loss estimates from the state level to the asset level - https://journalofcrr.com/research/04-01-dusseau-et-al/

Un grand merci @umontreal for your continued investment in our work 💫

As part of our network of Institutional Partners, you empower the growth and development of our award-winning #DiamondOpenAccess publishing programme.

Join to support us: https://tinyurl.com/support-PH

Paying for the Open Journal of Astrophysics

A couple of days ago I received an email from a publisher offering to buy the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This happens from time to time, but it’s interesting to see the offer price increasing. This time it was for $150,000. I don’t know how that valuation was arrived at but I think OJAp is worth a lot more. But then there is a difference between price and value…

The publisher in question this time was XLESCIENCE, which is based in India and which charges typical Article Processing Charges of $1,200 per paper. I wonder how they would plan to make a profit from OJAp, which charges nothing? If a publisher did buy OJAp and started trying to charge an APC, people would just stop using it!

(The offer price is not the only reason I dismissed the approach, however. One other reason is that I don’t want to do business with a commercial publisher. Another reason I wouldn’t consider selling the Open Journal of Astrophysics is that I don’t actually own it. I did think about offering to sell them one of the many other journals I don’t own, just for a laught, but that might have been construed as attempted fraud…)

This episode reminded that some time ago I wrote a piece about funding open access journals. Having made the decision not to charge fees of any kind, we lack any source of income other than Maynooth University. I am very grateful for that support, but we are run on a shoestring budget. We are run entirely by volunteers and keep costs to an absolute minimum, but are not free.

I have written before about what I think the future of Diamond Open Access could look 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.

Everything is going well at OJAp, but it is not reasonable that the expense of running a journal that serves the global astrophysics community should fall entirely on one small University in Ireland. It won’t be sustainable in the long run, either, if we continue to grow at the present rate. Compare us with the Diamond Open Access publisher SCIPOST, which has a long list of sponsors covering its costs; we have none. I know that money is very tight in astrophysics these days but if you have access to any potential sources of funding – then please consider supporting OJAp!

Gerhard Lauer über Chinas Anstrengungen, bis 2035 "zu einer bestimmenden Macht auf dem Markt der wissenschaftlichen Publikationen auf[zu]steigen und wesentlich mit[zu]bestimmen, was wissenschaftlich publiziert werden kann."

Ein Mittel dazu: Zeitschriften im #DiamondOpenAccess, bei denen weder Autor:innen noch Leser:innen Gebühren zahlen. Hochreputierte und kostenintensive westliche Journals finanziert die chinesische Wissenschaft ab sofort nicht mehr.

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/karriere-hochschule/chinas-griff-nach-den-top-journalen-accg-200663402.html

#OpenAccess

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 28/03/2026

Once again it’s time for the usual Saturday morning update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further eight papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 67 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 515.

I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience) to encourage you to visit it. Mastodon is a really excellent service, and a more than adequate replacement for X/Twitter (which nobody should be using); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.

The first paper to report this week is”Constraining Brown Dwarf Desert Formation Mechanisms through Bayesian Statistical Comparison of Observed and Simulated Populations” by Behrooz Karamiqucham (College of Charleston, USA). This paper was published on Tuesday March 24th in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. It presents a Bayesian statistical analysis exploring why brown dwarf companions are rarely found at orbital separations <5 AU. The results suggest that brown dwarfs form at wider separations then migrate.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116282898593823676

The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday March 24th, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “JWST observes the assembly of a massive galaxy at z ~ 4” by Aayush Saxena (University of Oxford, UK) and 20 others (based in the UK, Europe, USA, Brazil, Japan and China). The paper presents observations of radio galaxy TGSSJ1530+1049, revealing it as part of a dense structure of emitting objects likely to merge to form a massive galaxy within a few Gyr.

The overlay for this one is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116282956216523629

Next one up, the third paper of the week, also published on Tuesday March 24th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “The dawn is quiet II: Gaia XP constraints on the Milky Way’s proto-Galaxy from very metal-poor MDF tails” by Boquan Chen (Ohio State U., USA), Matthew D. A. Orkney (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain), Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State U.) & Michael R. Hayden (U. Oklahoma, USA). The paper aegues that the Milky Way’s metallicity distribution suggests that its early evolution involved a moderate gas reservoir, sustained by weak continuous inflow, and star formation efficiency similar to the present value.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116283020198162509

The fourth paper this week, published on Wednesday 25th March 2026 in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena is “Shaping the diffuse X-ray sky: Structure, Variability and Visibility” by Philipp Girichidis (Heidelberg U., Germany) and 7 others based in Germany, USA, Austria and Italy. The paper argues that the X-ray properties of the Local Bubble (LB), a low-density cavity in the solar neighborhood reveal that supernova events significantly influence X-ray emissions, which show pronounced temporal variability

The overlay is here:

The finally accepted version of this paper can be found here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116288916505020843

The fifth paper this week, also published on Wednesday 25th March 2026, is “Graph-Based Light-Curve Features for Robust Transient Classification” by Jesús D. Petro-Ramos David J. Ruiz-Morales, David Sierra Porta (Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, Colombia). This paper, which is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, uses graph-based representations of astronomical light curves for transient classification, achieving competitive multiclass performance, highlighting the potential of visibility graphs as a survey-agnostic tool for classifying time series.

This is the overlay:

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement follows:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116288982927449308

The sixth paper this week is “Redshift-Frame Systematics and Their Impact on the Hubble Constant from Pantheon+ Supernovae” by Said Laaroua (Santa Rosa Junior College, USA)This was published on Thursday 26th March in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The study analyzes redshift-frame transformations in the Pantheon+ Type Ia supernova sample, finding a negligible shift in the Hubble constant, thus limiting redshift-frame systematics.

The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on arXiv here, and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116294271036561714

The penultimate, that is to say the seventh, paper for this week is “Why Machine Learning Models Systematically Underestimate Extreme Values II: How to Fix It with LatentNN” by Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State University, USA). The paper introduces LatentNN, a method that reduces attenuation bias in neural networks by optimizing network parameters and latent input values, improving inference in low signal-to-noise astronomical data; the code is available here. This article was published on Thursday 26th March 2026 in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

The overlay for this one is here:

The official version of this paper can be found here. This is the Mastodon announcement:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116294325612775166

And finally for this week, published yesterday (Friday 27th March 2026) in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, we have “Catalog of Mock Stellar Streams in Milky Way-Like Galaxies” by Colin Holm-Hansen, Yingtian Chen and Oleg Y. Gnedin (University of Michigan, USA).

Here is the overlay for this one:

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116300257535421390

And that concludes the update for this week.

You will have observed that this week’s papers cover five of the six main categories on astro-ph. We haven’t yet managed to cover all six in a week – we only missed Solar and Stellar Astrophysics this time!

"Ouvrez-la ! Données et publications ouvertes : pour une science partagée" 30/03/26-03/04/26

1 semaine de webinaires science ouverte (BU toulousaines/Atelier de la donnée Occitanie Ouest).

Focus #DiamondOpenAccess 31/03 : webinaire sur Interfas + European Diamond Capacity Hub

Infos ➡️
https://www.univ-toulouse.fr/evenements/ouvrez-donnees-et-publications-ouvertes-pour-science-partagee