Publishing Roger Griffin

Where does an astronomer go to discuss his results?

Last week we mentioned Roger Griffin, a very important astronomer that none of you will have heard of.  We did not emphasize the uniqueness of his work as much as we might have done: he produced the same sort of results, orbits of binary stars, produced by the same method, spectroscopic radial velocities, for roughly half a century.  This is, and was, highly unusual.  A new observing technique will produce high-visibility data for a few years; then standard data for another few; then it’s normally superseded by something more accurate, or easier, or producing data in more quantity.  Frequently the question it’s designed to answer is answered, and there’s no point in hanging around.  Even old, stodgy astronomers learn new tricks.  But Roger’s results continued to be useful, indeed important, even though they were no longer cutting-edge or individually striking.

So how should his findings be communicated to those people who might be interested, or should be?  In the nineteenth century Roger would have been on the staff of an observatory, and his work would be communicated in the annual or quarterly report.  That would be sent out to important libraries, university Astronomy Departments, other observatories and sometimes astronomers known to be working in the field.  If he’d started nowadays, he might have just posted them on a website, perhaps adhering to standards the field is trying to implement for databases (though without funding for a full-time IT person those are tricky to implement).  Instead, he found himself in the academic publishing world of the latter twentieth century.

Our astronomer summarizes the situation as follows.  Really important work, anything that will be recognized as such even from outside astronomy, can hope to publish in Science or Nature.  Roger’s latest orbit wouldn’t qualify.  High-profile astronomy-only papers appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, abbreviated conveniently but not pronounceably as MNRAS; and the US-based Astronomical Journal and Astrophysical Journal.  There are others of similar prestige and impact.  In them one can sometimes see a series of papers, three or even (unusually) five on different aspects of the same study.  But a steady stream of spectroscopic orbits would probably not meet their criteria for importance and novelty.  Perhaps as important, space in these journals is severely limited, and authors are continually being urged to cut out anything not vitally necessary.

Instead, Roger found a home in The Observatory.  It is a British-based astronomy journal, peer-reviewed and of high integrity, though not as well known even in astronomy as it might be.  It explicitly solicits papers that don’t quite fit other journals, but are still worth publishing.  Its length, from issue to issue, is highly variable.  Roger was not only able to publish several hundred papers in his series (one issue at hand, from 2015, holds number 241), he was able to write them his own way.  He would discuss the data, the difficulties of obtaining it and its reliability; how it was processed and what the final outcome was.  He used data from other astronomers when he could, but was critical of methods or statistics that he thought did not reach professional standards.  Our astronomer does not and did not work in the field of stellar orbits, but read each of Roger’s papers carefully, knowing he was in the presence of a master of the old school.

There is a place in the world for journals not quite in the main stream of science.  And for lengthy discussions.