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Friday, April 10, 2015

It's a pity that there are no Blue Öyster Cult lyrics on the theme of 'Astronomy' that might be used as a title for this post

Which scientific specialty attracts the greatest number of independent researchers whose innovative ideas are best expressed in green ink and miniscule script on the backs of old envelopes? This question appears again and again in the Riddled Advice Column mailbag, as if the readers think we have special expertise to draw upon.

A comment thread over at Scholarly Open Access last year degenerated quickly into a discussion of crank-friendly journals, and one cannot help noticing the preponderance of maths, theoretical physics and cosmology publications. Even in that company the Journal of Cosmology stands out for its editorial emphasis on panspermia and Hydro-Gravitational-Dynamics creationism, and for its authors' use of what appear to be Christian Psychedelia album covers to illustrate their neologasms of deeply-meaningful word coinage.
Conversely, there are surprisingly few free-lance particle physicists and molecular biologists seeking outlets for the discoveries they made from outside the mainstream in their improvised basement laboratories. Vertebrate zoology has the Monkey-Fucked-a-Pig and Initial Bipedalism theories of hominid ancestry... invertebrate zoologists have to make do with Williamson's larval-transfer hypothesis. Psychology is completely devoid of outsider science and wild-eyed loons for they devise new therapies and are welcomed into the fold (or onto Fox News) as valued practitioners.

So it happened that I was browsing through old edit logs at the Whackyweedia the other day, as one so often does when stuck in a barrel and waiting for the Anti-Bat Pills to start working, when the following list of contributions caught my eye. Someone operating from a Minnesota IP address spent a busy three weeks in 2012, improving various Whacky entries by the insertion of references to papers in Astronomical.Review.
Suffice to say that papers on interstellar travel and the Multiverse are likely to be more speculative than empirical.

"What in the name of feck is the Astronomical Review?" you ask. The bad news is that the Weedia's own entry on Astron.Rev. was discontinued just the other day IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY due to a shortage of bytes on the Innertubes. But never mind, the good news is that yer kindly uncle Smut has researched the Google and has all the details, which he will proceed to explain at exhaustive length with the occasional profanity.

We should begin with the journal's own website. It was a Minnesota-based quarterly, edited by Dylan Fazel, with no author fees. Or a nominal $25/page fee, depending on which part of the dogs breakfast website you are looking at. This seems reasonable unless your cosmological insights stretch across 83 pages. In that connection, here is Michael Peck -- a Relativity revisionist with refreshingly novel views about Red Shifts -- complaining that the Astron.Rev. staff accepted his magnum opus on "The Theory of Everything: Foundations, Applications and Corrections to General Relativity" and then wanted to edit it down to 25 pages.

The editorial policy leaned towards open-mindedness and new ideas, in the manner of a Salon des Refusés (which is not to be confused with the Saloon des Refusés -- a rather rough bar in the XVIIIe arrondissement redeemed by its unparalleled range of absinthes). Many of the papers had already been self-published in ArXiv or ViXra before the authors needed the imprimatur of appearance in a recognised print journal. Am I the only one who thinks that Imprimatur sounds like the hereditary title of the arch-villain in a Swords-&-Starships space-opera novel?

Those last paragraphs use the past tense because Astron.Rev. was bought last year by Taylor & Francis, juggernaut colossus of academic publishing. The T&F website for the journal already lists a paper in press (although the Editorial and Reviewers slots remain unfilled) and has hiked the Article Publishing Fee up to a flat charge of $750 / £469 / €625. This will be a bargain for anyone seeking to publish 83 pages of Relativity revision.

But this is where the baby's bath-water is muddied, and the tracks are muddled, by the appearance of a third website, from Knowledge Enterprises Journals. One of the three is an odd one out. It is, either Two Woozles and one, as it might be, Wizzle, or Two, as it might be, Wizzles and one, if it is so, Woozle. Let us continue to follow them.
This whole business of two memories three websites is not a cunning plan to manufacture controversy and convince the Whickyweedia that Astron.Rev. is indeed sufficiently newsworthy to restore the entry. It is closer to the way that there was originally Amon Düül, who split into Amon Düül II (who wanted to be commercial and sell records) and Amon Düül I (who were more into communal living and hippie stuff). It would seem that his time in the editorial chair has inspired Dylan Fazel of Minnesota with the love of academic publishing, and despite handing the journal over to T&F he is loath to leave show business, so he became Knowledge Enterprises Journals and added six new asses to his stable.

The KEJ site notes that
The Astronomical Review is no longer published by Knowledge Enterprises Journals
but Dylan Fazel is using a bog-standard OA platform with a template which fills in a lot of crap by default, so it still solicits on-line submission of contributions. We would wish him good luck if it weren't for the irritating spam sent to plague potential contributors / reviewers.

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18 comments:

  1. ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©April 10, 2015 at 7:20 AM

    What does one call the driver of a juggernaut, then?

    (Sometimes, Riddled posts take me far off into the weeds.)
    ~

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sirius LunacyApril 10, 2015 at 9:46 AM

    What does one call the driver of a juggernaut, then?

    Juggermiester.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JPApril 10, 2015 at 12:44 PM

    There is something about theoretical physics that attracts cranks, isn't there? There was one - an older gentleman - who used to hang out at the single gay bar in the town I went to college in. Odd duck - he was sort of a snappy dresser, and he always drank brandy. Out of a brandy snifter. But he was slightly homophobic and misogynistic and just weird in general, although he was kind of fun to wind up - at least he wasn't one of the "normals" who were invading the place at the time.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Smut ClydeApril 10, 2015 at 12:54 PM

    the single gay bar
    So there was another one for gay couples?

    ReplyDelete
  5. JPApril 10, 2015 at 1:00 PM

    I think I had originally meant to type "sole" instead of "single" gay bar, and I would mention that, but I'm afraid you might say something about fish.

    ReplyDelete
  6. JPApril 10, 2015 at 1:17 PM

    It was the sole perch in town without any social morays.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Smut ClydeApril 10, 2015 at 2:13 PM

    Fish puns! JP will fit in with the other Riddled commontaters.

    ReplyDelete
  8. ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©April 10, 2015 at 2:28 PM

    Casting asparagus again, S.C.?

    I turnip my nose at that sort of thing.
    ~

    ReplyDelete
  9. EmmaApril 10, 2015 at 2:45 PM

    One of them might be a Heffalump.
    (These kinds of posts are my favorites.)

    ReplyDelete
  10. Smut ClydeApril 10, 2015 at 3:42 PM

    Sea-rabbit-related present for Emma.

    ReplyDelete
  11. JPApril 10, 2015 at 4:10 PM

    SQUEEEE!

    ReplyDelete
  12. Big Bad Bald BastardApril 10, 2015 at 10:29 PM

    Needs moar Bubbles of Spacetime.

    ReplyDelete
  13. rhwombatApril 11, 2015 at 4:28 AM

    Emma:
    As long as it's not a boojum....

    ReplyDelete
  14. Smut ClydeApril 11, 2015 at 5:03 AM

    Needs moar Bubbles of Spacetime.

    Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an extraordinary island

    I know that island.

    ReplyDelete
  15. rhwombatApril 11, 2015 at 4:26 PM

    That's not a Bubble of Spacetime - that's the Roaring Forties and a lee shore.

    ReplyDelete
  16. H. Rumbold, Master BarberApril 11, 2015 at 8:13 PM

    Something seems wrong with the obligatory timecube.com or at least wrong in a novel way- it redirects immediately to sponsored listings for "scientific hypothesis".

    ReplyDelete
  17. JPApril 11, 2015 at 8:17 PM

    it redirects immediately to sponsored listings for "scientific hypothesis".

    Not from this computer. I'm getting something that's sort of like the inverse of Dr. Bronner.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Smut ClydeApril 12, 2015 at 12:14 AM

    Gustav Johansen's observations gain credence from the fact that he was actually replicating an earlier report from an obscure 14th-century poet.

    ReplyDelete