Your Love is King

 I was on 6music radio earlier today on their "The Chain" segment, in which listeners pick a song which links to the previous one on The Chain.  It started quite a while ago and a website shows the complete history of choices. 

The previous song was Running in the Family by Level 42, and I chose Sade's Your Love is King.  Mark King is the frontman of Level 42 and so King makes the link between the two songs. 

 When Sade's Diamond Life album came out in 1984 it was a big thing.  Your Love is King was one of the big hit singles from it and I was well aware of it, as I was of all chart music when I was around that age.  But I was 10 years old, and Sade's sophistpop songs about adult life didn't speak to me.  My parents, then in their 30s, were fans and I ended up hearing the album over the years, initially inducing groans as I wanted to listen to the specific music I was into at each age as I got older.

Now I am a great fan of the album.  The whole thing is great, and I find myself listening to it from time to time, enjoying the non-single tracks perhaps more than the big hits, as befits a listener of 6music.  It is the radio station that the mother of my kids says is "for people who like music too much"

Here's the link to my song in The Chain's database  and below is a video of the track

  

Can UKRI funded research be published in Physical Review?

For many of my colleagues in low-energy nuclear physics, Physical Review C is the default journal for most of their research.  The default publishing model of Physical Review C is via subscription in which the author gives the article to the journal for free, handing over copyright, with the journal then charging people to read.  They also do allow authors to pay an "article processing charge" which will mean the journal will then distribute the article for free.

Research which is funded by the UKRI umbrella of UK government funding agencies have an open access requierement for research funded by them, meaning ultimately funded by the taxpayer.  The details of the UKRI rules are on their website.  There are two routes to acceptable open access publication.  Route one is to ensure the published version is free under the popular CC-BY license, and this would happen in Physical Review if the authors pays the article processing charge.  

The relevant points for the second method are (from UKRI website):

Route 2: publish the research article in a subscription journal and deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (or Version of Record, where the publisher permits) in an institutional or subject repository at the time of final publication, as defined in Annex 1:

• a. the deposited version must be free and unrestricted to view and download. It must have a CC BY licence, or other licence permitted by UKRI (see ‘licensing requirements’)

 This is the way colleagues here at the University of Surrey have been doing it recently.  In this current environment when universities are getting rid of staff for financial reasons, and passing real-terms pay cuts to those who remain, the idea of using cash to pay to publish research is understandably unpopular.  At my institution, we don't have a fund for that at the moment. 

Earlier this week I tried to submit a paper to Physical Review C, thinking that I could satisfy the various rules by making sure a final version of the paper was deposited in our institutional repository, but during the submission process on the Physical Review website I saw this (you might have to click on picture to see a fully legible version):

It seems to be saying that we can only post our work in an institutional repository if we use a more restrictive license that required by the UKRI funding.  

On the face of it, then, the answer to the questions posed in the title of the blog post seems to be "yes, but only by paying the article processing charge".  I think in practice almost everyone is fudging this matter by following route 2 and either breaking the CC-BY agreement with Physical Review or nor complying with the rules of the funders.

The right solutions is clearly to publish in diamond open access journals, with no fee for the author or the reader.  Since more or less all my work is done in collaboration, I can't just unilaterally decree that I will do this for all future publication on which I am coauthor, but I at least have decided to make SciPost the sole journal I support with editorial volunteering, and am pleased to see some excellent nuclear physics papers start to appear there.  The more nuclear physics research that appears there, the more our community might start looking for new articles there.  As for specialist nuclear journals, I am aware of two options which effectively act as diamond open access:  Physics Letters B (historically a subscription journal, but currently has long term (perpetual?) funding to make all articles open access) and Nuclear Physics and Atomic Energy, a somewhat obscure and parochial journal from Ukraine which currently has rather low impact, but could be supported by more of the community putting more of there best work there. 

 

25 Years

With the start of October the new academic year has started, and it brings with it the start of my 26th year at the University of Surrey.  I started here 25 years ago.  In some ways it doesn't feel like very long, but if I look back to those days when I started, they seem sufficiently shrouded in the veils of memory to count as a long time ago.  

I suppose these days it is getting increasingly unusual to be at one employer for so long, and 25 years at one place is quite unusual.  Certainly the place has changes quite a bit over those years - not surprising for a University which is only now about 60 years old.  If things carry on as they are, I should still be expecting to work there around my 40 year anniversary (!), but expecting soon to retire at that point. 

I haven't received anything congratualing me on my long service or offering me a carriage clock.  Usually it gets flagged somewhere eventually and I get a belated letter.  I might have to casually drop some hints in the right place this time. 

EuNPC in Caen

 

I am at day 5 of 5 at the European Nuclear Physics Conference in Caen, France.   It's the first time I've been at one of the conferences in this series, and I've enjoyed the broad range of talks, attending not only the sessions very close to my own activity, but also those on applications and distant parts of the field.  

Caen seems like a nice enough place, though I can't say I have explored it very much.  We were driven out to something like an old tithe barn for the conference dinner, where we were treated to a covers band composed of nuclar physicists from the IJCLab in Paris.  

My talk was scheduled on Monday, so I enjoyed getting that out of the way, and the subsequent ongoing discussions about it with people as the week went on.  

I am staying on for one extra day to take part in a NuPECC meeting finishing Saturday lunchtime.

Homework is an uncountable noun

It's that time of year when my children enter a new school year.  In the case of one of them, it's a new school, too, as she enters year 7 and so secondary school.  

The school uses an app called Bromcom, named after the genre of male romantic comedy films for reasons that escape me. 

In the homework section of the app, parents and children can keep an eye on any homework assignments set.  Since we're just in the first few days of school, my daughter has not received any homework yet, and the app says "No homeworks found!"

Using homework as a countable noun grates with me.  I'm sure there's an element of me railing against new usages, but the uncountable status of homework is well-attested in dictionaries.  Here's the Cambridge dictionary's guide to countable and uncountable nouns, where they explicitly use homework as one of the examples of a uncountable noun:

Other common uncountable nouns include: accommodation, baggage, homework, knowledge, money, permission, research, traffic, travel.

These nouns are not used with a/an or numbers and are not used in the plural.

In my quick internet search, there seemed complete consensus on this from a whole range of sources.   

Oh well, here's a recent picture of me reacting to these kind of usages:

 

 

Summer projects

 It is getting near the end of the summer holidays.  Literally at the end for school kids with mine going back today and tomorrow, while university undergraduates have a couple more weeks to go before they are back in classes.  

There is no automatic summer holiday for university-based academics in the UK, though summer is, for many of us, the easiest time to take the bulk of our annual leave allowance.  It is not just research and community/admin activities that carry on in summer - there is teaching too.  In particular the standard UK MSc programme lasts for a full 12-month long year with the summer months being taken up doing a final project.  

I have been (co-)supervising  4 projects in nuclear physics and quantum computing, and I've been pleased to get two of the projects to get involved in providing some sample results for a paper for a conference proceeding that gives a summary of some methods for determining eigenstates and eigenvalues on a quantum computer.  This means that two of my MSc project students are now co-authors on a publication with me.  I'm not sure when the paper will appear in the official conference proceedings, but I've stuck it up on the University repository so that it is available to anyone to read.  May I present ... 

“Quantum Computing for Nuclear Structure”, Paul Stevenson, Chandan Sarma, Robbie Giles, Lloyd LaRonde, and Bhoomika Maheshwari, submitted to proceedings of 17^th International Conference of Nuclear Structure Properties (NSP2025), Sivas, Türkiye (2025)  

Holiday in Oberstdorf

 I am on holiday for the week in Oberstdorf, Germany.  It's a mountain resort in the very far south of the country and we are here because there is a short track speed skating summer camp which one of my kids is attending.  I am here with him, and two of my other children, trying to keep everyone entertained while doing all the training activities for my 8yo.

It's very pretty here.  The town is in a valley between mountains.  There is a cable car up to the peaks, though we have stayed down in the town where the ice rink is, as we are not really here to (or equipped to) go hiking.