Publishing proceedings in SciPost

In September, we (the Surrey nuclear theory group) are hosting the 24th European Few-Body Physics Conference.  One of my main roles on the local organising committee is to arrange publication of the proceedings, and I'm pleased to have organised this with the journal SciPost Proceedings.  Unlike most (all?) of the other regular journal options, SciPost proceedings are free to publish in and free to read.  The costs involved in the whole publication process are pretty modest, being the web–hosting of the papers, and the provision of a doi for each paper.  All other tasks, such as managing and implementing the refereeing and editing process is done, as usual, free of charge by academics, who are paid a full time salary to be academics. 

Those low costs of running the journal are provided by sponsors, and I'm happy to see, from attending a presentation about Plan S last week, that the University of Surrey are sponsoring SciPost.  The amount paid by the University is minuscule compared to traditional journal subscription costs, and amounts to the cost of paying for a couple of Article Processing Charges to a regular journal.

I'm excited to go through the process of editing the proceedings (i say now, before the real work starts in earnest), and I'll report back here how it goes later in the year.

Advances in Time-Dependent Methods for Nuclear Structure and Dynamics

Together with some co-editors, I've started up a Research Topic in the journal Frontiers in Physics.  It's called Advances in Time-Dependent Methods for Nuclear Structure and Dynamics, which I hope is a reasonably self-descriptive title for the kinds of articles we are looking for for the special issue.  

There's a little picture of me on the topic web page among the list of editors.  Fame at last.  If you want to submit an original research article, a review, or a perspective piece on future research areas, please get in touch.  We (the other editors and me) hope it will be a thorough snapshot of time-dependent methods being used today in nuclear physics research.

Student placement in Beijing

Marko, at the entrance to the nuclear physics building

I'm heading home from my last trip of the season to visit students on their MPhys Research Year placement.  This time it's been to Beijing where we have a student, Marko, working on some calculations of nuclear fission.  He is being hosted by Peking University, working in the group of Junchen Pei.  Usually on these trips, I am visiting a student working in an area not exactly the same as my own.  In this case, Marko, together with Pei, is building on some work that I did with a PhD student a few years ago, and it's exciting for me to see this work being continued.  

I now have a relatively quiet summer (travel-wise, at least).  According to the rules for the MPhys Research Year, our students get visited twice by a member of academic staff, and I will make a second round of trips in September.