If you are a scholar and haven't spent the last ten years in a vacuum, you have heard of Open Access: the emerging practice of providing unrestricted access to peer-reviewed scholarly works, such as journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters. Open Access comes in two flavors, _green_ and _gold_, depending on how an article is made available to the public. The "green road" to Open Access involves an author making her article publicly available after publication, e.g. by depositing the article's post-print in an open institutional repository. According to many, the preferred avenue to achieve Open Access, however, is the "golden road" which happens when an author publishes an article directly in an OA journal. THE FACT THAT OPEN ACCESS, REGARDLESS OF ITS FLAVOR, HAS INNUMERABLE BENEFITS FOR RESEARCHERS AND THE PUBLIC AT LARGE IS BEYOND DISCUSSION --- even the most traditional scholarly publishers would have to agree. Importantly, the vision of universal Open Access to scholarly knowledge, i.e., the idea that the entire body of published scholarship should be made available to everyone free of charge, is not too far fetched. In practice, by a combination of green and golden OA practices, this vision is already a reality in some scientific fields, such as physics and astronomy. So: Open Access is both fundamentally necessary and bound to happen. BUT, WHETHER OPEN ACCESS, ALONE, CAN GUARANTEE REPRODUCIBILITY AND TRANSPARENCY OF RESEARCH RESULTS IS A DIFFERENT AND COMPELLING QUESTION. Do research articles contain enough information to exactly (or even approximately) replicate a scientific study? Unfortunately, very often the answer to this question is no. As science, and scholarship in general, become inevitably more computational in nature, the experiments, calculations, and analyses performed by researchers are too many and too complex to be described in detail in a research article. As such, the minutiae of research activity are often hidden from view, making science unintelligible and irreproducible, not only for the public at large, but also for scientists, experts and, paradoxically, even for the same scientists who conducted the research in the first place, who may have not documented their exact workflows elsewhere. A parallel movement to Open Access --- Open Science --- is building up momentum in scholarly circles. Its mission is to provide open, universal access to the full sources of scientific research.

The search for extrasolar planets (EXOPLANETS) is one of the most rapidly expanding fields in astrophysics. Thanks to recent space-based efforts the number of detected planets in extrasolar stellar systems has increased dramatically, and more than 900 objects have been identified as of today, see e.g. http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/. With candidates identified in the so-called habitable zone (HZ)[1] the question of extraterrestrial life becomes very actual. Here we discuss ideas that could lead to infer the presence (or the past existence) of an extraterrestrial civilization by the detection of artifacts in orbit around the host planet. [1] The theoretical band around a star where a planet could orbit and host liquid water

Instructions for Co-Authors The full file repository for this paper is at a shared Google Drive directory, https://drive.google.com/#folders/0BxIRxiTe1u6BcGlnUGt2ckU1Vms, shared with all co-authors. NOTE: THE “AAS” (PRESS CONFERENCE) SLIDES AT HTTPS://DRIVE.GOOGLE.COM/#FOLDERS/0BXIRXITE1U6BRKLQRZLUAUNUUUU GIVE A BETTER IDEA OF WHERE THIS DRAFT IS GOING THAN THE TEXT/FIGURES HERE AS OF NOW... AG WILL UPDATE ALL BY C.1/1/13! The Mendeley Library “Nessie and Friends” used to house references used in this work, at: http://www.mendeley.com/groups/2505711/nessie-and-friends/, but since Authorea works more directly with ADS links, we’ll use the ADS Private Library at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-abs_connect?library&libname=Nessie+and+Friends&libid=488e32b08b instead. The Mendeley library is the source of the nessie.bib file in the “Bibliography” folder here on Authorea, but I am not sure how to get the ADS references out as a .bib file. xxAlberto?xx The Glue software used to intercompare data sets used in this work is online through: http://glue-viz.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ We are using Authorea.com as an experimental platform to compile this paper. The manual steps we will need to take before submission include: - download LaTeX file - modify LaTeX file to use aas macros - insert needed information (e.g. about authors, running header) into was version of LaTeX manuscript - extract needed figures from relevant folders here & bundle them with LaTeX manuscript & macros - create .bib file from ADS Private Library - add .bib file to folder with manuscript & figures - fix in-line referencing so that $\citet$ and $\citep$ commands work

Thermohaline mixing has recently been proposed to occur in low-mass red giants, with large consequence for the chemical yields of low-mass stars. We investigate the role of thermohaline mixing during the evolution of stars between 1$\mso$ and 3$\mso$, in comparison with other mixing processes acting in these stars. We use a stellar evolution code which includes rotational mixing, internal magnetic fields and thermohaline mixing. We confirm that during the red giant stage, thermohaline mixing has the potential to decrease the abundance of ³He, which is produced earlier on the main sequence. In our models we find that this process is working on the RGB only in stars with initial mass $ \le 1.5\mso$. Moreover we report that thermohaline mixing is also present during core He-burning and beyond, and has the potential to change the surface abundances of AGB stars. While we find rotational and magnetic mixing to be negligible compared to the thermohaline mixing in the relevant layers, the interaction of thermohaline motions with the differential rotation may be essential to establish the timescale of thermohaline mixing in red giants. To explain the surface abundances observed at the bump in the luminosity function, the speed of the mixing process needs to be more than two orders of magnitude higher than in our models. However it is not clear if thermohaline mixing is the only physical process responsible for these surface-abundance anomalies. Therefore it is not possible at this stage to calibrate the efficiency of thermohaline mixing against the observations.

This article was published as _How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted Preprints: Article Downloads, Twitter Mentions and Citations_. Xin Shuai, Alberto Pepe, Johan Bollen. PLoS ONE 7(11): e47523. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0047523. Open Access Article. ABSTRACT. We analyze the online response to the preprint publication of a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and May 2011. We study three forms of responses to these preprints: downloads on the arXiv.org site, mentions on the social media site Twitter, and early citations in the scholarly record. We perform two analyses. First, we analyze the delay and time span of article downloads and Twitter mentions following submission, to understand the temporal configuration of these reactions and whether one precedes or follows the other. Second, we run regression and correlation tests to investigate the relationship between Twitter mentions, arXiv downloads and article citations. We find that Twitter mentions and arXiv downloads of scholarly articles follow two distinct temporal patterns of activity, with Twitter mentions having shorter delays and narrower time spans than arXiv downloads. We also find that the volume of Twitter mentions is statistically correlated with arXiv downloads and early citations just months after the publication of a preprint, with a possible bias that favors highly mentioned articles.

We study the convection zones in the outer envelope of hot massive stars which are caused by opacity peaks associated with iron and helium ionization. We determine the occurrence and properties of these convection zones as function of the stellar parameters. We then confront our results with observations of OB stars. A stellar evolution code is used to compute a grid of massive star models at different metallicities. In these models, the mixing length theory is used to characterize the envelope convection zones. We find the iron convection zone (FeCZ) to be more prominent for lower surface gravity, higher luminosity and higher initial metallicity. It is absent for luminosities below about $10^{3.2}\lso$, $10^{3.9}\lso$, and $10^{4.2}\lso$ for the Galaxy, LMC and SMC, respectively. We map the strength of the FeCZ on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram for three metallicities, and compare this with the occurrence of observational phenomena in O stars: microturbulence, non-radial pulsations, wind clumping, and line profile variability. The confirmation of all three trends for the FeCZ as function of stellar parameters by empirical microturbulent velocities argues for a physical connection between sub-photospheric convective motions and small scale stochastic velocities in the photosphere of O- and B-type stars. We further suggest that clumping in the inner parts of the winds of OB stars could be caused by the same mechanism, and that magnetic fields produced in the FeCZ could appear at the surface of OB stars as diagnosed by discrete absorption components in ultraviolet absorption lines.

This article was published as _A measure of total research impact independent of time and discipline_. Alberto Pepe, Michael J. Kurtz. PLoS One. 7(11): e46428. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.00464282012. (Open Access Article) ABSTRACT. Authorship and citation practices evolve with time and differ by academic discipline. As such, indicators of research productivity based on citation records are naturally subject to historical and disciplinary effects. We observe these effects on a corpus of astronomer career data constructed from a database of refereed publications. We employ a simple mechanism to measure research output using author and reference counts available in bibliographic databases to develop a citation-based indicator of research productivity. The total research impact (tori) quantifies, for an individual, the total amount of scholarly work that others have devoted to his/her work, measured in the volume of research papers. A derived measure, the research impact quotient (riq), is an age independent measure of an individual’s research ability. We demonstrate that these measures are substantially less vulnerable to temporal debasement and cross-disciplinary bias than the most popular current measures. The proposed measures of research impact, tori and riq, have been implemented in the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System.