They do- literally all papers do in astro. It's an amazing resource.

The point of this move is the UK funding agencies have prioritized open access across all of science. Which is great... but in the case of astronomy, it already basically is. The only ones paying for access these days are basically universities and the like.

[removed]

> Articles 3 and 4 describe mitigation strategies that SpaceX is looking into. But crucially, it ignores that in the future dozens of companies, from all over the world, will want to launch satellites constellations. It's useless if SpaceX follows all mitigation procedures to avoid contaminating astronomical observations, but a random company from China decides that this is not important and launches the satellites anyway. The number of satellites is growing at an exponential rate, and in 10-20 years we will have possibly ten or a hundred times more satellites than SpaceX is currently planing.

This is really the crucial thing here. People can argue all they want about Starlink’s potential impact and mitigation strategies etc. But Starlink is going to be one of potentially dozens of similar services in the next few decades. There are already many being worked on. Really strict standards need to be set.

Do papers currently published in MNRAS also go into ADS? If so, what would the point be of this move? If not, doesn't this move still have value for access (if not for researchers wanting to publish)?

I believe your outlook is incredibly shortsighted. The "dinosaurs" went extinct because they had no control? hmm, so if they could have banded together built towering weapon systems and blew the asteroid out of the sky then all would have been well I guess? How about quite possibly the dinosaurs were eating their children and were very destructive, even destroying Gods creation to the point he sent said asteroid to wipe them out! Today a bunch of men who are dinosaurs want to blow you and my family off the face of the earth with nuclear weapons because they are power hungry, blood thirsty and greedy! Sure each group believes they are right but the creator knows who is deadly and who really is the dinosaur that refuses to change, refuses to disarm, refuses to learn and desires blood. These same dinosaurs are in space ready to blow up more planets if you give them a chance. Maybe its time for the dinosaur people to end and a people of peace lead the way! Just a thought!

The asteroid they struck orbits another asteroid, and now that orbit takes 33 fewer minutes to complete.

That’s the post that I read before coming here, thanks for posting it!

[removed]

not if you stand directly at the impact site before it lands!

[removed]

True I actually forgot about that completely.

Doesn’t the Saturn family of rockets have a 100% success rate?

[deleted]

This move is actually deceptive and scummy. Yes, articles will be free to read, but only because publishers are shifting their profit mongering to shake down authors rather than readers and libraries. To wit:

> With this move to OA the journals will no longer charge subscription fees and will instead be supported by Article Processing Charges (APCs)...

So now, to finance the unpaid editors and unpaid reviewers, publishers will charge the unpaid authors thousands of dollars to publish their papers. This is literally paying to work for someone, and it's exploitative as hell. And it's furthermore a massive barrier for scientists in the developing world, as well as less privileged developed-world institutions. It's a massive assault on actual DEI.

This scam should not be called Open Access.

[removed]

This is the most accurate and clearest answer I've seen to this question. Great job with this post!

>Which is probably why you support more funding. We haven't perfected the weapon yet.

Your statement shows that you are just trying to troll me. They did hit the target. Perfectly. Physics just makes it really hard to overcome an error. This will never be used as a weapon. It can't be.

I hope that you are either still in school and haven't taken basic 9th grade physics yet or have just forgotten what you have learned.

Either way, If you would like to have a reasonable conversation on this topic, you seem to be worried and I could help you understand that you don't need to be, I would suggest you brush up on orbital mechanics, and the launch capabilities that we currently have. Until then have a great day.

Holy shit you link Wikipedia articles and then don't even read them. They weren't trying to develop clean energy. That was never the purpose of Fermi's research. Please do explain how weak interaction (Fermi's interaction) was the study of clean energy.

Rutherford's research was never for the purpose of clean energy either.

This is one of the "realest" problems humanity has.

The dinosaurs went extinct. They died because of something they couldn't predict and had no control over. We have now gotten better at predicting asteroids and the dart tests show that we finally have control over the situation.

To contrast, I'll use climate change as an example of "a real problem".

Like asteroid impacts, climate change is another existential threat, but we've been able to predict the effects of it for nearly a hundred years and we've always had control over it (all we have to do is agree to change how we generate energy, build things and move things around). On some level, climate change has always been less of a problem for us, because it's a slow process the solution is so obvious.

Asteroids will happen suddenly and without warning if we aren't tracking every single object we can all the time... It's like we've been living on thin ice our whole lives, in constant danger, we just never think about it. We've never before had this kind of possibility of survival vs an asteroid.

Post war Nazi-Soviet tech just had that perfect balance of German complexity and Russian simplicity.

What's being referred to here are rockets that put a payload into orbit or further, that return the first stage to land for reuse.

Yes, that's exactly it! I even remember the layout.

Oh so way more impressive then :O

It will just appear as a streak or series of dots, like satellites do already. It will be visible to the unaided eye if you are in the right place to see it at its closest.

Astronomer here! Believe it or not, there is actually significant concern that this will make astronomy much less accessible as a field. Two important reasons:

• The big journal run by the Royal Astronomical Society is the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS)- it has traditionally been a very important journal because unlike pretty much any other, it was free to publish in it. Obviously cool for obvious reasons, and meant researchers at less prestigious universities with less funding for these sorts of things would still be able to publish in a great journal (and MNRAS picked up the tab by having subscription charges to universities). Now, however, this means it'll be 2310 GBP (~$2700 US) to publish in MNRAS- a huge barrier for some institutes. They say there are going to be fee waivers, and authors from certain countries don't have to pay... but trust me, there are astronomers on more bare bones budgets in other countries where having "pay to play" to get your science out is going to be a hardship. :(

• Meanwhile, it is worth noting that astronomy has been open access since the 1990s! Pretty much everything goes on ArXiv.org when it's submitted/published, and older papers are available via the Astrophysical Data System (ADS), which is kinda what Google Scholar is for other science fields but leagues better. So it's not like anyone in astronomy has been hurting for a lack of access to MNRAS.

So, why is this happening? Well right now there is a push by science governmental organizations to have open access journals. I'm not knocking this at all, mind- it does seem ridiculous that the taxpayer has to pay for access- but my point is astronomy is the field that actually solved this decades ago. And, in practice, guess who's paying all those paper charges? The taxpayer, of course- it's just now in a way where it's bundled into grants, and makes the field less equitable in terms of who can afford to publish. Think of it this way- if you have a PhD student and X amount to spend on them, this is now going to mean that student will be attending one or two fewer conferences during their career for doing the same bare minimum of getting published (because I guarantee you that research grant sure ain't going up).

Mind, I don't know if MNRAS had much choice in this decision. But my point is, this is far more complicated than meets the eye from this initial press release.