Faculty Perspectives on Open Access: A Multidimensional Analysis of Open-Access Usage and Library Relationships at an R2 Institution

https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/2026/06/08/faculty-perspectives-on-open-access-a-multidimensional-analysis-of-open-access-usage-and-library-relationships-at-an-r2-institution/

#JamesEVanLoon #JuliaERodriguez #OpenAccess #OpenAccessPublishing

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 06/06/2026

Another Saturday, another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further five papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 119 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 567.

I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.

The first paper to report this week, published on Tuesday 2nd June, is “The impact of the formation channel on gravitational-wave-galaxy cross-correlations” by Kabir Chakravarti (Chennai Mathematical Institute, India) and Federico R Urban (CEICO-FZU, Czech Republic). This article, published in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, explores how uncertainties in binary formation affect the cross-correlation signal between gravitational wave events and galaxy catalogues, finding that time-delay distribution significantly impacts the signal.

The overlay for this paper is here

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116679308847047911

The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 2nd June but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “Transient X-ray Sources as Extremely Eccentric Mass-Transfer Binaries with Compact Companions” by Jonathan I Katz and Michael A Nowak (Washington University, St Louis, USA). This article suggests that X-ray transients, similar to tidal disruption events, are produced in eccentric stellar-compact object binaries, with their frequency gradually increasing over time.

The overlay for this one looks like this:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116679395198117735

Next one up, the third paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 2nd June in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena is “Resolving the (Debate About) Nozzle Shocks in Tidal Disruption Events” by Zachary L. Andalman & Eliot Quataert (Princeton U., USA), Eric R. Coughlin (Syracuse U. USA) and C. J. Nixon (U. Leeds, UK). This paper presents a model to understand the role of nozzle shocks in the circularization of stellar debris during a tidal disruption event when a star approaches a supermassive black hole (SMBH)

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/116679426224933831

The fourth paper this week, published on Wednesday 3rd June in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Validating Digital Twins of the Local Universe with the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Signal” by Richard Stiskalek (University of Oxford, UK) and Harry Desmond (University of Portsmouth, UK). The thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect and constrained simulations are used to analyze the thermal pressure of ionized gas in galaxy clusters and produce a set of digital twins for cosmological study.

The overlay is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116684470440285496

The fifth and final paper this week, published on Thursday 4th June in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Photon (Non)Conservation in the Reduced Speed of Light Approximation and How to (Almost) Fix It” by Nickolay Y. Gnedin (University of Chicago, USA). The “Reduced Speed of Light” approximation in cosmological simulations can lead to photon non-conservation, and while some missing photons can be counted, adding them back is challenging.

The overlay for this one is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116691566968428861

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 30/05/2026

It’s Saturday once again, so it’s time for another 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 114 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 562.

I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.

The first paper to report this week, published on Monday 25th May is “Little Red Dot – Host Galaxy = Black Hole Star: A Gas-Enshrouded Heart at the Center of Every Little Red Dot” by Wendy Q. Sun (MIT, USA) and 32 others from around the world. This study presents evidence that “black hole stars” (BH*), early stages of black hole growth, power Little Red Dots (LRDs) and every massive black hole may have been a BH*.

The overlay for this paper is here

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116633975428093674

The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 25th May but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Catalog-based detection of unrecognized blends in deep optical ground based imaging” by Shuang Liang (Stanford U., USA) and Prakruth Adari & Anja von der Linden (Stony Brook U., USA) on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. The study uses machine learning to detect unrecognized blends in deep ground-based imaging, improving sample purity and potentially enhancing accuracy in future cosmological 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/116634039240557325

Next one up, the third paper of the week, published on Tuesday 26th May in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Control variates from Eulerian and Lagrangian perturbation theory: Application to the bispectrum” by Nickolas Kokron and Shi-Fan Chen (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA). This paper hexplores the use of control variates in cosmological simulations, introducing a new ‘shifted control variate’ that improves precision and enables accurate bispectrum emulators, aiding in cosmology modeling.

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/116594304124291605

The fourth and final paper this week, also published on Tuesday 26th May is “How precisely can we measure the ages of subgiant and giant stars?” by Cheyanne Shariat, Kareem El-Badry and Soumyadeep Bhattacharjee (California Institute of Technology, USA). This article, published in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, is about testing the accuracy of stellar age estimates from recent catalogs, finding that spectroscopic metallicities provide reliable subgiant ages, while photometric ages underestimate uncertainties. Accurate chemical abundance measurements are essential.

The overlay is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116639604621500984

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 23/05/2026

It’s Saturday once again, so time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further six papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 110 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 558.

I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.

The first paper to report this week, published on Monday 18th May in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics is “Edges In Coadded Images” by Erin Sheldon (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA). This paper describes a study exploring how image discontinuities and noise impact weak gravitational lensing measurements, finding no significant biases under typical conditions. Biases occur only in extreme cases, but can be mitigated.

The overlay for this paper is here

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116594222032390191

The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 18th May but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Joint cosmological fits to DESI-DR1 full-shape clustering and weak gravitational lensing in configuration space” by A. Semenaite (Swinburne Institute of Technology, Australia) and 72 other authors from all round the world. This paper presents a cosmological analysis of correlations between the DESI-DR1 Bright Galaxy Survey and Luminous Red Galaxy samples and overlapping shear measurements from various weak lensing 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/116594256215421009

Next one up, the third paper of the week, and the third published on Monday 18th May, and in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Probing Dark Energy Microphysics with kSZ Tomography” by Julius Adolff, Selim Hotinli and Neal Dalal (all of the Perimeter Institute, Canada). This paper explores how kinetic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich tomography and galaxy clustering can enhance our understanding of dark energy and its effects, potentially revealing its microphysical properties in future surveys.

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/116594304124291605

The fourth paper this week, published on Wednesday May 20th is “A Census of Variable Radio Sources at 3 GHz” by Yjan A. Gordon, Peter S. Ferguson, Michael N. Martinez and Eric J. Hooper (all of the University of Wisconsin, USA). This article, published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, uses data from the Very Large Array Sky Survey to analyze variability in the radio sky, finding most changes consistent with blazars and quasars.

The overlay is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116607468481260244

The fifth article of this week was published on Friday 22nd May in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The title is “Uncovering the Next Galactic Supernova with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory” by John Banovetz (Lawrence Berkeley Lab., USA), Claire-Alice Hebert & Peter B. Denton (Brookhaven National Lab., USA), Dan Scolnic (Duke University, USA), Anze Slosar (Brookhaven) and Chris Walter (Duke). The paper presents a study simulating how effectively the Vera C. Rubin Observatory can localize supernovae using neutrino triggers, finding a 57-97% success rate based on stellar mass density predictions.

The overlay is here:

You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116617293753093751

Last, but by no means least, this week we have “Pulsar timing solutions for 17 pulsars at 150 MHz from the Irish LOFAR station” by David J. McKenna (ASTRON, The Netherlands), Evan F. Keane (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), Peter T. Gallagher (DIAS, Ireland) and Joe McCauley (Trinity). This was published on Friday 22nd May in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. It presents a demonstration of the use of international Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) stations in tracking and characterizing pulsars, providing new insights into these neutron stars’ emission properties.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116617404344791486

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one next Saturday.

Challenges of Open Access Adoption in Low-Resource Settings: Lessons From Tunisia

https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/2026/05/22/challenges-of-open-access-adoption-in-low-resource-settings-lessons-from-tunisia/

#HybridOpenAccess #OpenAccess #OpenAccessPublishing #RidhaMhamdi #ScientificCommunication #Tunisia

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 16/05/2026

It’s Saturday once again, so time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further five papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 104 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 552. It took us until late July to pass 100 last 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, published on Monday 11th May in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena is “Triaxial magnetars as sources of fast radio bursts” by Jonathan I Katz (Washington University, USA). This paper suggests that the mysterious properties of Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) could be explained by triaxial magnetars, with their activity levels influenced by precessional time scales.

The overlay for this paper is here

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116554775791392800

The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday 12th May in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “The Abundance of Thin Dwarf Galaxies: a Challenge for Cosmological Simulations” by Jose Benavides & Laura V. Sales (UC Riverside, USA), Julio F. Navarro (U. Victoria, Canada), Simon D. M. White (MPA Garching, Germany), and Carlos S. Frenk, Kyle A. Oman & Shaun Cole (U. Durham, UK). Depending on mass up to 40% of galaxies are intrinsically flat, a fraction that numerical models of galaxy formation struggle to reproduce suggesting the models are incomplete.

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/116560106342500157

Next one up, the third paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 12th May but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Cosmological peculiar velocities in general relativity” by Chris Clarkson (Queen Mary, University of London, UK) and Roy Maartens (U. Western Cape, South Africa). This paper refutes claims that the 1+3 covariant approach to cosmological perturbation theory predicts stronger growth of galaxy peculiar velocities, arguing that standard treatments are correct and fully relativistic.

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/116560224426499932

The fourth paper this week, published on Wednesday May 13th “Possible evidence for a pair-instability supernova nature of ultra-early JWST sources” by Andrea Ferrara & Stefano Carniani (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy), Takahiro Morishita (California Institute of Technology, USA), and Massimo Stiavelli (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA). Published in the section Astrophysics of Galaxies. This paper argues that recent observations challenge early galaxy formation models, suggesting that the bright source, Capotauro, could be a supernova from a massive, metal-free star, not a luminous galaxy as initially thought.

The overlay is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116566147448743997

The fifth and final article of this week was also published on Wednesday 13th May but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The title is “Evolving and interacting dark energy: photometric and spectroscopic synergy with DES Y3 and DESI DR2” and it is by Maria Tsedrik and Benjamin Bose (University of Edinburgh, UK). The study investigates the Dark Scattering interacting dark energy scenario, using data from various sources. Results show no evidence of dark-sector interaction and a preference for the Chevallier-Polarski-Linder parametrisation.

The overlay is here:

You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116566165139100860

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 09/05/2026

It’s Saturday once again, so time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further five papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 99 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 547. We didn’t quite make it to a hundred for the year last week, but will do so with the next paper.

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 “Formation of Close Binaries through Massive Black Hole Perturbations and Chaotic Tides” by Howard Hao-Tse Huang and Wenbin Lu (University of California at Berkeley, USA). This one was published on Wednesday 6th May 2026 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The paper presents a model of massive black hole-binary systems, showing that repeated tidal interactions can lead to the creation of hyper-velocity stars and other nuclear transients.

The overlay for this paper is here

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116526323790020433

The second paper for this week, also Wednesday 6th May, but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Detection of supernova magnitude fluctuations induced by large-scale structure” by Andrew Nguyen (Swinburne Institute of Technology, Australia) and 58 others based all around the world. This study uses supernovae and galaxy velocities to measure the universe’s structure growth rate, confirming the Planck LambdaCDM model prediction. The methodology is validated and shows potential for future research.

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/116526449130876366

Next one up, the third paper of the week, also published on Wednesday 6th May in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Comparing cosmic shear nulling methods for Stage-IV surveys” by Naomi Clare Robertson and Alex Hall (University of Edinburgh, UK). This study compares three strategies for reducing baryon feedback impact on cosmic shear measurements. All methods effectively mitigate bias, with varying degrees of efficiency and information preservation.

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/116526251813375105

The fourth paper this week, published on Thursday May 7th, is “Egent: An Autonomous Agent for Equivalent Width Measurement” by Yuan-Sen Ting & Serat Mahmud Saad (Ohio State University, USA), Fan Liu (National Astronomical Observatories, Beijing, China), and Yuting Shen (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA). Egent is an autonomous agent that combines multi-Voigt profile fitting with large language model visual inspection for efficient, automated analysis of raw flux spectra, validated against expert measurements. This one is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The associated software can be found here.

The overlay is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116531924397498394

The fifth and final article of this week was published on Friday 8th May in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “DiffstarPop: A generative physical model of galaxy star formation history” and it is by Alex Alarcon (Institute of Space Sciences, Barcelona, Spain), Andrew P. Hearin , Matthew R. Becker & Gillian Beltz-Mohrmann (Argonne National Laborarory, USA), and Andrew Benson & Sachi Weerasooriya (Carnegie Observatories, USA). DiffstarPop is a model that accurately and rapidly reproduces statistical distributions of galaxy star formation histories (SFH), using parameters related to galaxy formation physics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116537709130989142

Here endeth this week’s update. There shall be another next Saturday.

P.S. Just a reminder that, thanks to the efforts of a member of our Editorial Board, the Open Journal of Astrophysics now has a Wikipedia page.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 02/05/2026

Here we are, on schedule, with another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further seven papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 94 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 542. I checked the corresponding update for last year (on 3rd May 2025), and we’ve had an increase from 54 to 94 in papers published (about 74%) between the first four months of 2025 and the first four months of 2026.

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 “DESI-DR1 3 × 2-pt analysis: consistent cosmology across weak lensing surveys” by Anna Porredon (CIEMAT, Madrid, Spain) and 72 others (DESI Colllaboration). This paper was published on Tuesday 28th April in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. This paper presents a joint cosmological analysis of galaxy clustering and gravitational lensing observations, providing consistent constraints on cosmological parameters. The analysis also introduces a new blinding procedure to prevent confirmation bias. See this post for news of an important DESI milestone.

The overlay for this paper is here

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116480407578621011

The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 28th April but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena is “Masers and Broad-Line Mapping Favor Magnetically-Dominated AGN Accretion Disks” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA), Dalya Baron (Stanford U., USA) and Joanna M. Piotrowska (Caltech). This one presents a new constraint on supermassive black hole accretion disks physics, suggesting that outer regions are likely in a ‘hyper-magnetized’ state, as thermal or radiation pressure models appear inconsistent.

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/116480505354195181

Next one up, the third paper of the week, is “Galaxy mergers and disk angular momentum evolution: stellar halos as a critical test” by Eric F. Bell (U. Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA), Richard D’Souza (Vatican Observatory), Monica Valluri & Katya Gozman (U. Michigan). This was published on Wednesday 29th April in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The paper argues that satellite accretion impacts the angular momentum evolution of galaxies, often causing significant reorientation. This process is detectable in Milky Way-mass galaxies so the idea is testable observationally.

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/116486649450860283

The fourth paper this week, published on Thursday April 30th, is “Time-Dilation Methods for Extreme Multiscale Timestepping Problems” by Philip F. Hopkins and Elias R. Most (Caltech, USA). This paper is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics: it presents a new method for astrophysical simulations that modulates time evolution with a variable dilation/stretch factor, improving efficiency and accuracy in modeling processes across different scales.

The overlay is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116492226856595031

The fifth article of this week was also published on Thursday 30th April, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “Cosmic Rays on Galaxy Scales: Progress and Pitfalls for CR-MHD Dynamical Models” and the author is Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA) who has three papers featured this week. The paper presents an overview of cosmic ray (CR) modeling, highlighting its influence on galactic physics and star formation. It addresses previous modeling errors and presents new methods for full-spectrum dynamics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116492282488422075

The sixth paper of the week is “Baryonification III: An accurate analytical model for the dispersion measure probability density function of fast radio bursts” by MohammadReza Torkamani (Universität Bonn, Germany) and 8 others based in Germany, Switzerland, UK and Sweden. This article was also published on Thursday April 30th in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. It presents a framework for predicting dispersion measures of fast radio bursts using the baryonification model, providing a cost-effective alternative to hydrodynamical simulations. The model’s accuracy is validated through full numerical simulations. The overlay is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116492403170125062

Seventh and finally for this week we have “The stellar and dark matter distributions in early-type galaxies measured by stacked weak gravitational lensing” by Momoka Fujikawa and Masamune Oguri (Chiba University, Japan). This study uses weak gravitational lensing to investigate stellar mass and dark matter density in red galaxies, suggesting a stronger feedback effect than current simulations predict. This was published on Friday 1st May 2026 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The overlay is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116497987401632687

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one at the end of next week. Will Vol. 9 have reached a hundred by then?

P.S. Just a reminder that, thanks to the efforts of a member of our Editorial Board, the Open Journal of Astrophysics now has a Wikipedia page.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 25/04/2026

So here we are again, on a Saturday morning, with another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further five papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 87 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 535.

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 “Bayesian Cosmic Void Finding with Graph Flows” by Leander Thiele (U. Tokyo, Japan). This was published on Monday 20th April in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The paper presents a method using a deep graph neural network to identify cosmic voids in sparse galaxy surveys, improving upon traditional deterministic algorithms by considering the problem’s probabilistic nature. 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/116435864086025246

The second paper for this week, published on Wednesday 22nd April in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Sifting for a Stream: The Morphology of the 300S Stellar Stream” by Benjamin Cohen (U. Chicago, USA) and 20 others distributed around the world. This study analyzes the morphology of the $300S$ stellar stream, revealing three density peaks, a possible gap, and a kink, suggesting significant influence from the Large Magellanic Cloud on its structure.

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/116447005556180402

Next one up, the third paper of the week, is “IRMaGiC: Extending Luminous Red Galaxy Selection into the Infrared with Joint Rubin Observatory’s Large Survey of Space Time and Roman’s High Latitude Imaging Survey” by Zhiyuan Guo & Chris. W. Walter (Duke U., USA) and Eli S. Rykoff (Stanford U., USA) on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. This was published on Wednesday April 22nd in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The paper introduces IRMaGiC, an algorithm that improves the selection and redshift estimation of Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) by incorporating infrared data, enhancing future cosmological surveys.

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/116447067337351283

The fourth paper this week, published on Thursday April 23rd, is “The Diagnostic Temperature Discrepancy as Evidence for Non-Maxwellian Coronal Electrons” by Victor Edmonds (Final Stop Consulting, USA). This paper, in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, presents two methods of measuring electron temperature in the quiet solar corona yielding different results, suggesting non-Maxwellian electron velocity distributions may be responsible for the discrepancy.

The overlay is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116452775389963618

The fifth and final paper for this week was published on Friday 24th April in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “Galaxy evolution in the post-merger regime. IV – The long-term effect of mergers on galactic stellar mass growth and distribution” by Sara L. Ellison (U. Victoria, Canada) and Leonardo Ferreira (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Brazil). This study uses a large sample of post-merger galaxies to demonstrate that galaxy mergers trigger significant and extended stellar mass growth in their central regions, independent of stellar population modelling.

The overlay is here:

You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116458316824739014

The overlay for this one is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116458316824739014

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one at the end of next week.

P.S. Thanks to the efforts of a member of our Editorial Board, the Open Journal of Astrophysics now has a Wikipedia page.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 18/04/2026

It is Saturday morning, and therefore time for yet another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further six papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 82 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 530.

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 “Beyond Spherical geometry: Unraveling complex features of objects orbiting around stars from its transit light curve using deep learning” by Ushasi Bhowmick & Shivam Kumaran (Indian Space Research Institute, Ahmedabad, India). This study uses deep neural networks to predict the shape of objects orbiting stars based on their transit light curves, demonstrating the potential to extract geometric information from these systems. It was published on Monday 13th April in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics and the overlay can be seen here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116395992732332356

The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 13th April but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “statmorph-lsst: Quantifying and correcting morphological biases in galaxy surveys” by Elizaveta Sazonova (U. Waterloo, Canada) and an international cast of 18 others. This paper presents an investigation of potential biases in quantitative morphology metrics used in galaxy evolution studies, proposing two new measurements to resolve biases, and provides a related Python package (statmorph-lsst), which can be found here on github.

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/116396069424189312

Next one up, the third paper of the week, one of four published on Friday 17th April, is “Disentangling the galactic and intergalactic components in 313 observed Lyman-alpha line profiles between redshift 0 and 5” by Siddhartha Gurung-López (Universitat de València, Spain) and 7 others based in Spain and Germany. Published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, this paper uses the zELDA package to analyze Lyman-alpha photons from star-forming galaxies, revealing IGM effects dominate Lyman-alpha observability at high redshifts, while galactic outflows become more important at lower z.

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/116418831864134501

The fourth paper this week, also published on Friday 17th April is “Using Symbolic Regression to Emulate the Radial Fourier Transform of the Sérsic Profile for Fast, Accurate and Differentiable Galaxy Profile Fitting” by Tim B. Miller (Northwestern University, USA) and Imad Pasha (Yale University, USA). This one is published in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics: it develops an emulator for galaxy profile fitting in Fourier space, improving speed by 2.5 times with minimal accuracy loss, aiding in managing increasing data flow.

The overlay is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116418855010158656

The fifth paper for this week is “The THESAN project: Lyman-alpha emitters as probes of ionized bubble sizes” by Meredith Neyer (MIT, USA) and 6 others based in the USA, Colombia, Canada, Japan and UK. The study uses THESAN simulations to explore how Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs) trace ionized bubble sizes during the Epoch of Reionization, providing a framework for interpreting LAE surveys. This was published on Friday 17th April in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116418887225003954

The sixth and final paper for this week is “Closed-Form Statistical Relations Between Projected Separation, Semimajor Axis, Companion Mass, and Host Acceleration” by Timothy D Brandt (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA). This was published on Friday 17th April in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. In this paper the author derives statistical relationships between radial velocity, a companion’s mass, and projected separation, useful for calculations requiring derivatives. The results are verified with empirical comparisons to existing literature.

The overlay for this one is here:

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

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116418938017199814

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one at the end of next week.

P.S. Just a reminder, for those of you into LinkedIn, that we now have a page there.