![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Oemler_1985.png?resize=700%2C390&ssl=1\")
This is a guest post by Prof. Jim Schombert
\n\n\n\nGreetings Stacy’s blog readers! My name is Jim Schombert, I’ve been working with Stacy for about a quarter of a Hubble time. I knew him when his hair was brown.
\n\n\n\nIn any case, I asked him if I could make a contribution to the dark matter discussion. Partly this is motivated by the LUX-ZEPLIN ‘detection’, but also cause there are some clear red flags from a philosophy of science viewpoint. I was a philosophy major in college, switched to astronomy when I 1) realized there was no money in philosophy, and 2) people at parties would talk to an astronomy major, not so much a philosophy major. I never lost my interest in the philosophy of science, tried to keep up with the literature, so how should we view the current MOND vs dark matter debate from a philosophical view? (and for a more sophisticated analysis of the topics below, I direct the reader to Merritt’s superb books and articles on MOND).
\n\n\n\nThere are basically two types of philosophers when it comes to science, one type is heavy in mathematical logic and deep discussions of foundations of science, the other type is more concerned about how science is done, i.e. the history and impact side of science. All of us know the key writers of this second type of philosophy of science; Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos (hereafter PKL). You will know them cause when you read their works you will immediately recognize yourself and colleagues in their descriptions. You basically have this strong sense that we operate on our data and computer simulations just as described by these famous thinkers. In short form, Popper = ‘falsification’, Kuhn = ‘paradigms’, Lakatos = ‘research programs’, we will expand upon this below.
\n\n\n\nWe all know there is no ‘truth’ to our science, you can never prove a scientific idea, you can only test it, hard, in an attempt to falsify it (Popper). The more the idea stands up to testing, the ‘stronger’ it gets, where stronger means more used/accepted by the community. Paradigms (Kuhn) are now thought of more as frameworks (think Newtonian mechanics), and research programs (Lakatos) are like giant factories of ideas that define how we come up with new ideas to test. Key to all this was that PKL insisted that this only worked when discussing the history of science, and the philosophy community was deeply disappointed in the works of PKL because they wanted criteria that could be applied in the moment (i.e., some system to assist the science community in directing science to more productive methods and goals). It’s obvious to all of us (who have been doing science for awhile) that this description is more of an idealization and usually doesn’t work (pick any observing or funding review panel as an example of how this just fails in the moment, but works well in retrospect).
\n\n\n\nLet’s take a very simple example (that almost everyone is familiar with) to see how the methods proposed by PKL work best in hindsight and are fairly useless in the moment. Consider Newtonian gravity in the mid-19th century (by the way, did you know that Ptolemy’s system of epicycles was used by the makers of almanacs into the 20th century? The math was simpler and just as accurate as using Newton. But I digress). So, a wobble in the orbit of Uranus. Abandon Newton? Hell no, the framework/paradigm has solved so many problems. Consider an auxiliary hypothesis, i.e. another planet. Right there, Neptune! Boy, how strong is your paradigm that predicts new planets. Better telescopes, more accurate data, hmm, wobble in Mercury. Obviously, try the same hypothesis (the so-called planet of Vulcan). Nothing found, fortunately relativity came along pretty soon (although it’s goal was not to solve Mercury’s orbit, it had bigger issues to address). Newtonian physics survives, but now with limits on its applications (stick to low energies). In the moment, it was hard to see the depth of the problem or the need for radical change.
\n\n\n\nIn any case, us working astronomers immediately recognize this kind of scientific effort; the nuts-and-bolts, thinking about new ideas, new technology, new data – in our own research. Now let’s turn to the dark matter paradigm. For the readers of this blog, I don’t need to discuss the details of the LCDM paradigm. In brief, Oort discrepancy (1960’s), flat rotation curves (1970’s), cluster M/L’s (1980’s), large scale structure (1990’s) and, of course, the capstone CMB+BBN+Omega_Lambda (2000’s). Historically, its important to remember that a great deal of work in the 1980’s eliminated anything made of baryons for CDM (low mass stars, black holes, planets, rocks, etc). In fact, most of us stopped even trying to explain CDM by the launch of HST, there were more interesting problems to address. We just took CDM as a black box solution; those interacting galaxy simulations looked amazing.
\n\n\n\nIn the end, CDM was expected to be a gravitationally interacting, not short-lived, not hot, non-baryonic particle. With the closure of the SSC in 1992, a large number of particle physicists were suddenly out of jobs, dark matter looked like the clearest path to reach new physics (and a paycheck). And astronomers were just as guilty, Fig. 1 is a old plot from an Oemler workshop paper showing the state of the art in 1985. Notice the implication that dark matter could close the Universe (i.e., Omega = 1 all in mass; there was no Lambda back then). And a closed Universe was, for some reason*, a massive desire for the astro theoretical community. And we see the beginnings of how cosmological issues override galaxy issues for the community (there’s a nobility to doing cosmology, galaxies are dirty).
\n\n\n\nThere is also no need to re-iterate the failure of the high energy community to find any dark matter particles. The amount of money and people in CDM makes the Manhattan project look like a garage shop effort (only CDM did not deliver a new weapon by the 2020’s). During this time, a few of us noticed that the baryons in galaxies were strongly tied to the ‘dark matter’. We were told that low mass dwarf galaxies were dark matter dominated, but a few of us mentioned that they are also strongly gas dominated, i.e. how did the dark matter know to dominate in galaxies with the highest gas fractions? These kinds of anomalies began to build up for observers, didn’t really appear in the theory papers.
\n\n\n\nNow let’s consider how PKL would interpret the current status of the dark matter paradigm. The emphasis by all three philosophers was to examine the historical record. This frustrates mainstream philosophers who would, ideally, like apply some criteria to the current state of affairs rather than only look at hindsight. But there may be enough historical record to, at least, determine the current trajectory for the dark matter paradigm.
\n\n\n\nPerhaps the first ‘crisis’ to the LCDM paradigm would be the discovery of the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation. The luminosity Tully-Fisher, which was only a measure of the stellar mass by way of stellar luminosity, was not very surprising to the astro/physics community for a larger galaxy would have more stars and dark matter, thus higher rotation velocities. The mass discrepancy was obvious, vindicating the need for some sort of invisible dark matter, but the scatter was large and the relationship was distinctly non-linear at the low mass end. However, the TF relation was well mapped at the high mass end (early-type cluster galaxies) and was extremely useful at locking down cluster distances and mapping large scale structure.
\n\n\n\nIt was Stacy’s superb observer’s insight to think about adding the gas mass to the stellar mass producing a total baryon mass to compare to the rotational velocity (I helped a little, the so-called BTFR). I say ‘observer insight’ for its one of those things that if you work at optical and radio telescopes you are comfortable thinking in terms of different kinds of data, and at ease turning luminosities into stellar masses (i.e., M/L) and HI fluxes into gas masses (lots of details, but that’s what data reduction and analysis is all about). The scatter was greatly reduced and the relationship was increasingly close to a linear fit in log-log space. Regardless
of your MOND vs dark matter bias, the BTFR quite simply says the total baryon mass is related to the total dark matter mass, which would make sense if you scoped a piece of the early Universe (equal proportions of baryons and dark matter) and made a galaxy.
But that’s not how galaxy formation was suppose to work (you don’t scope a piece of the Universe, those CDM halos form first, baryons fall in later), and this baryon-dark matter relationship varied in a surprising coherent fashion across Hubble types. Stacy being a deep reader of obtuse literature in the 80’s taught us that this type of behavior was exactly predicted by basic MOND, especially for the galaxies in my new LSB catalog (to which I remember responding “You’re using my galaxies to disprove Newton? Only death can save you from my wrath”). While MOND was designed to explain flat rotation curves, its key underlying premise is that there is no dark matter, baryons decide how things move, which is what the BTFR said.
\n\n\n\nNow, in a strictly Popperian methodology, is the BTFR sufficient to falsify the dark matter paradigm? No, of course not, as Kuhn points out, a paradigm that has been so successful in making predictions, and offering research paths, is not simply dropped, that would be intellectually short-sighted. There a lots of historical examples in science to support the continued investigation into dark matter after the discovery of the BTFR. In the field of electromagnetism, one does not actually observe the magnetic fields, we observe its effects and build tools to explore its behavior and derive out rules, theories and models. There is nothing unbalanced about studying invisible dark matter.
\n\n\n\nIn a Popperian fashion, we continued to ‘ruthlessly test’ the BTFR with better samples, improved stellar population models, improved distances. The BTFR survived all this examination, although it risked refutation at every point (for example, many claims that it deviated from a linear power-law fit at the low and high mass ends). The current version by Duey et al. (2026) is by far one of the tightest corrections in astronomy, especially considering all the possible underlying astrophysical processes (e.g., feedback) that could easily distort any kinematic relation. And, as often stated, the slope is 4 and MOND predicted 4, before we looked.
\n\n\n\nBy the time of the BTFR discovery, the CDM community was deep into normal science mode. As Kuhn would state, lots of problem-solving, training students, textbooks and workshops to give. However, MOND was having its breakthroughs. The second crisis will occur with the SPARC sample where Federico Lelli showed that not only does the total baryon mass determine the total dynamical mass (BTFR), but also on the local scale within a galaxy, the baryon density is also correlated with the kinematics point by point within a galaxy’s gravitational potential. This will become the awkwardly phrased radial acceleration relation (RAR).
\n\n\n\nThe smooth change, in acceleration space, displayed by the RAR is well predicted by MOND, but is difficult to explain/reproduce in LCDM without feedback from star formation processes. And the process of adding ‘feedback’ to CDM simulations begins to feel a lot like adding epicycles to ‘save the phenomenon’. Kuhn would say that we need a shift to a new disciplinary matrix, which asks new questions, and will recognize the competence of these new baryon-to-dark matter connection. But to threaten the paradigm, anomalies like RAR and BTFR must persist across different methods, resist easy explanation, and be critical to central themes. Which they seem to do, for many observers, not so much in the theory community.
\n\n\n\nTheorists, understandably, resist the MOND framework for 1) must explain more, 2) make more precise predictions, 3) coordinate research and 4) open new avenues. These criteria were not met. Also, switching to Milgromian physics will require a complete re-training of techniques, tools and students. A huge investment in time and effort that does not immediately appeal to the theory community given the success of decades of galaxy simulations.
\n\n\n\nTo most of the community, the discovery of the BTFR and RAR do not ‘feel’ like a Kuhnian science revolution seen in the historical record (e.g. Galileo discovering the phases of Venus). A better explanation of the state of current affairs is to adopt the ideas of Lakatos. The heart of Lakato’s philosophy is the role of research programs. A research program is a more expansive view of Kuhn’s paradigms that includes much of the day-to-day operation of science; teaching, grants, textbooks, workshops, presentations. For Lakatos, it was all about whether a research area was progressive or degenerate (possibly even in a zombie stage). To be progressive, for Lakatos, the dark matter framework must be predictive, successful, expanding, yet CDM appears to be in ‘zombie’ stage, ceasing to generate novel predictions, responding to failure with ad hoc adjustments, and no clear path to increase its value as a line of thinking.
\n\n\n\nMOND work seems more progressive, clean explanations for new discoveries. But it also is struggling, the path forward is not obvious. The accelerated galaxy formation model is the most interesting discovery, and maps into our newest technology, JWST. However, it has been extremely difficult to acquire funding or observing time to address MOND ideas. It’s surprising how conservative funding and telescope panels have become (let’s do one more H_o project). The risk/reward dynamic is clearly in MOND’s favor, but not until more MOND worker are appointed to review panels. I know what I’m talking about, I ran NASA ADP review for two years. So many smart people in one room, overwhelmed by the work, reduced to the easiest path of proposal ranking.
\n\n\n\nI predict the near future will be one of continued stagnation of CDM research, no progress with many excuses. Some of the excuses looking like new physics, some perhaps even getting the fever that string theory had. The ‘successes’ for CDM have all been indirect (my observations are completely explained by X type of CDM, rather than here are my observations of X type of CDM). And there is still a role for CDM to play in astronomy. Since MOND has a non-linear Poisson equation, it does not lend itself to N-body simulations with ease. And N-body work using CDM has been extremely successful in our understanding of tidal features in interacting galaxies and shell galaxies. It just has to be remembered that when one uses CDM in your simulation, you are basically allowing a proxy for different gravity, and you call it CDM. Kinda of like the softening parameters using early N-body to avoid the wacky math singularities as ‘particles’ in your galaxy simulation got too close.
\n\n\n\n*Inflation. It was Inflationary cosmology that insisted on \u03a9m = 1, and theorists chugged that Kool-Aid hard – Stacy
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/skjf6-7y622","guid":"https://tritonstation.com/?p=13201","image":"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Oemler_1985.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1791244800,"rid":"j69be-04035","summary":"This is a guest post by Prof. Jim Schombert Greetings Stacy's blog readers! My name is Jim Schombert, I've been working with Stacy for about a quarter of a Hubble time. I knew him when his hair was brown.","tags":["Cosmology","Dark Matter","Galaxy Formation","JWST","LCDM"],"title":"CDM, what would Popper do?","updated_at":1791318315,"url":"https://tritonstation.com/2026/10/06/cdm-what-would-popper-do/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/051fd9666","name":"Case Western Reserve University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"McGaugh","given":"Stacy","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9762-0980"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f","created":1713312000,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"A Blog About the Science and Sociology of Cosmology and Dark Matter","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/tritonstation","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://tritonstation.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://tritonstation.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"tritonstation","status":"active","subfield":"3103","title":"Triton Station","updated":1791318047,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Triton Station","blog_slug":"tritonstation","content_html":"A common objection to MOND is that it does not entirely reconcile the mass discrepancy in clusters of galaxies. This can be seen as an offset in the acceleration scale between individual galaxies and clusters. This is widely seen as definitive proof of dark matter, but this is just defaulting to our confirmation bias without checking if it is really any better: just because MOND does something wrong doesn’t automatically mean that LCDM does it right.
\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/accelerationvsbaryonicmass.jpg?resize=700%2C212&ssl=1\")
I do see clusters as a problem for MOND, and there are some aspects of clusters that make good sense in LCDM. Unlike galaxies, cluster mass profiles are generally consistent with the predicted NFW halos (modulo their own core problem). That’s not a contradiction to MOND, which should do the same thing as Newton in the Newtonian regime. But rich clusters also have baryon fractions close to that expected from cosmology. From that perspective, it looks pretty reasonable. This success does not extend to lower mass clusters; in the plot above, the low mass green triangles should be higher than the higher mass gray triangles in order for all clusters to have the cosmic baryon fraction. They should not parallel the prediction of MOND. Within individual clusters, baryons are not as well mixed with dark matter as expected: they tend to have too much unseen mass at small radius, which is basically the same problem encountered by MOND.
\n\n\n\nThere are other tests, one of which is the growth of clusters. Structure is predicted to form hierarchically in LCDM: small objects form first, and pile on to make bigger ones, with the largest clusters being the last to form. So there is a test in how massive a cluster can get as a function of redshift. This is something for which LCDM makes a clear prediction. In MOND, my expectation is that structure forms faster so that massive objects are in place at higher redshift than expected in LCDM. This post is mostly about clusters in LCDM, so henceforth all masses will be conventional masses, including the putative dark matter.
\n\n\n\nLike so many things, there is a long history to this. For example, in the late ’90s, Megan Donahue reported a high temperature of ~ 12 keV for the intracluster gas in the cluster MS1054-0321. This meant that it was massive for its redshift: 7.4 x 1014 h-1 M\u2609 (dark matter and all) at z = 0.829, when the universe was only about half its current age. (Little h is the Hubble constant in units of 100 km/s/Mpc. Since we’re now pretty sure h < 1, the true mass is higher, more like 1015 M\u2609.) That’s a lot of solar masses to assemble in the available time. In 1997, this was another nail in the coffin of SCDM, which was already a zombie theory by then. But the loss of \u03a9m = 1 was still raw for some people, I guess, because she got a lot of grief for it. Can’t be true! Clusters don’t get that big that early! At least they shouldn’t. In SCDM.
\n\n\n\nStructure formation in SCDM was elegant in that in continues perpetually: as the universe expands, bigger and bigger structures continue to form; statistically, later epochs look like scaled-up versions of earlier epochs. In LCDM, this symmetry is broken by the decline in density as the universe expands. Consequently, structure forms earlier in LCDM: the action has to happen when there is still some density to work with, and the accelerated expansion provides some extra time (what’s a few billion years among cosmologists?) for mass to get together. Consequently, MS1054-0321 is not problematic in LCDM.
\n\n\n\nThe attitude persisted, however. In the mid-’00s, Jim Schombert and I started using the wide field near-IR camera NEWFIRM to study high redshift clusters. Jim had a clever way of identifying them, which turned out not to be particularly hard, e.g., MS 1426.9+1052 at z = 1.83. This is about 10 Gyr ago, and made the theorists squirm. That didn’t leave enough time for a cluster to form. On multiple occasions I had the following conversation with different theorists:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nme: Hey, look at this clusters at z = 1.8.
\n\n\n\ntheorist: That isn’t a cluster.
\n\n\n\nme: Sure it is. There’s the central galaxy, which contains a bright radio source (QSO). You can see lots of other galaxies around it. That’s what a cluster looks like.
\n\n\n\ntheorist: Must be a chance projection.
\n\n\n\nme: There are spectra for many of the surrounding galaxies; they’re all at the same redshift.
\n\n\n\ntheorist: …
\n\n\n\nme: So… a cluster at z = 1.8. Pretty cool, huh?
\n\n\n\ntheorist: That isn’t a cluster.
\n
This work became part of Jay Frank’s thesis. He found evidence for more structure at even higher redshift. A lot of this apparent clustering probably is not real… the statistics get worse as you push farther out: fewer galaxies, worse data. But there were still a surprising number of objects in apparent association up to and beyond z > 5. That’s pretty much all of time, leaving a mere Gyr to go from the completely homogeneous universe that we see in the CMB at z = 1090 to the first stars around z ~ 20 to the first galaxies to big galaxies to protoclusters – or whatever we want to call these associations of many galaxies in the same place on the sky at the same redshift.
\n\n\n\nJay did a lot of work to estimate the rate of false positives. Long story short, we expect about 1/3 of the protoclusters he identified to be real structures. That’s both bad and good – lots of chaff, but some wheat too. One thing Jay did was to analyze the Millennium simulation in the same way as the data. This allows us to quantify what we would see if the universe looked like an LCDM simulation.
\n\n\n\nThe plot below shows the characteristic brightness of galaxies at various redshifts. For the pros, this is the knee in the Schechter function fit to the luminosity distribution of galaxies in redshift bins. We saw the same thing in protoclusters and in the field: galaxies were brighter than anticipated in the simulation. Between redshifts 3 < z < 4, the characteristic magnitude is expected to be 23. That’s pretty faint. In the data, it’s more like 21. That’s also faint, but about a factor of 6 brighter than they should be. That’s a lot of stars that have formed before they’re supposed to, in galaxies that are bigger than they should yet be, with some of them already clustering together ahead of their time.
\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Franck_Millenniumcomparison.png?resize=649%2C303&ssl=1\")
This has been the observer’s experience. Donahue wasn’t the first, and Franck won’t be the last. Every time we look, we see more structure in place sooner than had been expected before it was seen. I don’t hear people complaining about our clusters at z = 1.8 anymore; those have been seen enough to become normalized. Perhaps they have even been explained satisfactorily. But they sure weren’t expected, much less predicted.
\n\n\n\nSo, just how big can a cluster get? Mortonson et al. (2011) set out to answer this question. The graph below shows the upper limit they predict for the most massive cluster in the universe as a function of redshift. This declines as redshift increases because we’re looking back in time; high redshift clusters haven’t had time time to assemble more mass than the upper most line. They project this into what would be discovered in an all-sky survey, and more realistic surveys of finite size. Basically nothing should exist above these lines.
\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/elgordomz.jpg?resize=700%2C378&ssl=1\")
Their prediction was almost immediately put to the test by the discovery of El Gordo, a big fat cluster at z = 0.87 reported by Menanteau et al. (2012), who published the X-ray image above. It is currently the record holder for the most massive known object that is thought to be gravitationally bound, weighing in at 2 or 3 x 1015 M\u2609, depending on who you ask. That’s about a thousand Milky Ways, plus a few hundred Andromedas. Give or take.
\n\n\n\nEl Gordo straddles the uppermost line in the graph above. A naive reading of the first mass estimate suggests that it’s roughly a 50/50 proposition whether the entire observable universe should contain exactly one El Gordo. However, El Gordo was discovered in something less than a full sky survey. The appropriate comparison is to the green line, which El Gordo clearly exceeds – by about 3 sigma. This is the case for both of the illustrated mass estimates as the high mass point has a larger error bar. They both exceed the green line by a hair less than 3 sigma. Formally, this means that the chance of finding El Gordo in our universe is only a few percent.
\n\n\n\nA few percent is not good. Neither is it terrible – I’ve often commented here on how the uncertainties are larger than they seem. This is especially true of the tails of the distribution. So maybe a few percent is pessimistic; sometimes that’s how the dice roll. On the other hand, the odds aren’t better than 10%: El Gordo is not likely to exist however we slice the uncertainties. Whether we should be worried about it is just a matter of how surprising it is. A similar situation arises with the collision velocity of the Bullet cluster, which is either absurdly unlikely (about 1 chance in 10 billion) or merely unusual (maybe 1 in 10). So I made the above plot by adding El Gordo to the predictions of Mortonson et al., and filed it away under
\n\n\n![\"\"/](\"https://i0.wp.com/media1.tenor.com/images/e108781d1efa32cb8d696e4ee199d2a3/tenor.gif?w=700&ssl=1\")
Recently, Elena Asencio, Indranil Banik, and Pavel Kroupa have made a more thorough study. They have their own blog post, so I won’t repeat the technical description. Basically, they sift through a really big LCDM simulation to find objects that could be (or become) like El Gordo.
\n\n\n\nThe short answer is that it doesn’t happen, similar to big voids. They estimate that the odds of El Gordo existing are a bit less than one in a billion. I’m sure one can quibble with details, but we’re not going to save LCDM with factors of two in a probability that starts this low. El Gordo just shouldn’t exist.
\n\n\n\nThe probability is lower than in the graph above because it isn’t just a matter of mass. It is also the mass ratio of the merging clumps (both huge clusters in their own right), their collision speed, impact parameter, and morphology. As they are aware, one must be careful not to demand a perfect match, since there is only one reality. But neither is it just a matter of assembling mass; that understates the severity of the problem. This is where simulations are genuinely helpful: one can ask how often does this happen? If the answer is never, one can refine the query to be more lenient. The bottom line here is that you can’t be lenient enough to get something like El Gordo.
\n\n\n\nHere is their money plot. To be like El Gordo, an object would have to be up on the red line. That’s well above 5 sigma, which is the threshold where we traditionally stop quibbling about percentiles and just say Nope. Not an accident.
\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/elgordoprobability.jpeg?resize=700%2C505&ssl=1\")
In principle, this one object falsifies the LCDM structure formation paradigm. We are reluctant to put too much emphasis on a single object (unless it is the bullet cluster and we have clickbait to sell) as its a big universe, so there can always be one unicorn or magnetic monopole somewhere. Ascencio et al note that a similar constraint follows for the Bullet cluster itself, which also should not exist, albeit at a lower significance. That’s two unicorns: we can’t pretend that this is a one-off occurrence. The joint probability of living in a universe with both El Gordo and the Bullet cluster is even lower than either alone.
\n\n\n\nLooking at Ascencio’s figure, it strikes me as odd not only that we find huge things at high redshift, but also that we don’t see still bigger objects at low redshift. There were already these huge clusters ramming into each other when the universe had only expanded to half its present size. This process should continue to build still bigger clusters, as indicated by the lines in the plot. The sweet spot for finding really massive clusters should be about z = 0.5, by which time they could have reached a mass of nearly 1016 M\u2609 as readily (or not!) as El Gordo could reach its mass by its observed redshift. (The lines turn down for the largest expansion factors/lowest redshifts because surveys cover a fixed area on the sky, which is a conical volume in 3D. We reside at the point of the cone, and need to see a ways out before a volume large enough to contain a giant cluster has been covered.)
\n\n\n\nI have never heard a report of a cluster anywhere near to 1016 M\u2609. A big cluster is 1015 M\u2609. While multiple examples of clusters this big are known, to the best of my knowledge, El Gordo is the record holding Fat One at twice or thrice that. The nearest challenger I can readily find is RX J1347.5-1145 at z=0.451 (close to the survey sweet spot) weighing in at 2 x 1015 M\u2609. Clusters just don’t seem to get bigger than that. This mass is OK at low redshift, but at higher z we shouldn’t see things as big as El Gordo. Given that we do see them at z = 0.87 (a = 0.535), why don’t we see still bigger ones at lower redshift? Perhaps structure formation saturates, but that’s not what LCDM predicts. If we can somehow explain El Gordo at high z, we are implicitly predicting still bigger clusters at lower redshift – objects we have yet to discover, if they exist, which they shouldn’t.
\n\n\n\nWhich is the point.
\n\n\n\nThe image featured at top is an X-ray image of the hot gas in the intracluster medium of El Gordo from NASA/CXC/Rutgers/J. Hughes et al.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/s9g52-ytt84","guid":"http://tritonstation.com/?p=7718","image":"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/elgordo_xray.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1612483200,"rid":"v0bz9-n1w20","summary":"A common objection to MOND is that it does not entirely reconcile the mass discrepancy in clusters of galaxies. This can be seen as an offset in the acceleration scale between individual galaxies and clusters.","tags":["LCDM"],"title":"The Fat One \u2013 a test of structure formation with the most massive cluster of galaxies","updated_at":1791316339,"url":"https://tritonstation.com/2021/02/05/the-fat-one-a-test-of-structure-formation-with-the-most-massive-cluster-of-galaxies/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/051fd9666","name":"Case Western Reserve University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"McGaugh","given":"Stacy","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9762-0980"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f","created":1713312000,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"A Blog About the Science and Sociology of Cosmology and Dark Matter","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/tritonstation","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://tritonstation.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://tritonstation.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"tritonstation","status":"active","subfield":"3103","title":"Triton Station","updated":1791318047,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Triton Station","blog_slug":"tritonstation","content_html":"I see that I’ve been posting once a month so far in 2026. I’ve lots to say but no time to say it. Some of it good, some of it bad, maybe sometime I’ll get around to it. No guarantees. On the good side, I’ve been working on a big project or two; may have something to say about those soon. I’ve also been meaning to write about the Planet 9 anomaly for months stretching into years now. Fascinating stuff related to MOND but not something I’ve worked on myself. On the bad side, I’ve been obliged to waste yet more time on my university administration’s insistence on merging our department into physics based on a snap decision made by a disinterested leader who employed all the forethought typically reserved for bombing a random country in the Middle East.
\n\n\n\nSo I have had no time for novel posts lately, and today is no different. However, I thought readers of this blog would appreciate the post Paradigm Shifts in Modern Astrophysics: Applying Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to Dark Matter at Heritage Diner that was pointed out to me by Moti Milgrom. Since I wouldn’t have seen it had he not mentioned it, perhaps that’s the case for you as well. I’m not gonna re-post it verbatim – you can read it there yourself – but I am going to offer a running commentary with a few observations, both personal and historical. So bring it up in a separate browser window and let’s read along…
\n\n\n\nThis post riffs off of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as it pertains to dark matter and MOND. If you’re not familiar with it, Kuhn’s work on the philosophy of science is foundational to the way in which a lot of physical scientists approach their field (whether they realize it or not). Philosophers of science have done a lot more since then, but I’m not going to attempt to go there. I will look back to Popper* to note that I’ve heard Kuhn depicted as being some sort of antithesis to Popper. I don’t see it that way. To be pithy, Popper tells us how science should be done while Kuhn tells us how it is done. Who could have imagined that a human endeavor would be messy in practice and not always live up to its ideal?
\n\n\n\nI’m not sure how to do this; I guess I’ll excerpt relevant quotes and riff off those. The basic thesis is that dark matter is on the brink of a Kuhnian paradigm shift.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWe are living through exactly that moment in modern astrophysics.
\n
I certainly hope so! This moment in the history of science is taking a long damn time. A century ago, we went from “classical physics explains everything” to “quantum mechanics, WTF?’ in the space of about a decade. I’ve been working on matters related to MOND for over thirty years now, dark matter longer than that, and of course Milgrom started more than a decade before I did.
\n\n\n\nThe essay discusses the “cartography of collapse,” which includes crisis and revolution:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe third stage is crisis \u2014 triggered when anomalies accumulate beyond the paradigm's absorptive capacity. And the fourth is revolution, in which a new framework displaces the old not through incremental persuasion but through a gestalt shift, what Kuhn famously described as seeing the same duck-rabbit drawing and suddenly recognizing a rabbit where you had always seen a duck.
\n
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/nopeaceduckgodrabbitgod.png?resize=700%2C781&ssl=1\")
This resonated with me because I had exactly this experience. I started my career as much a believer in dark matter as anyone. I was barely aware that MOND existed (this seems to remain a common condition). But it reared its ugly head in my own data for low surface brightness galaxies. Try as I might – and I tried mighty hard, for a long time – I could not reconcile how the shapes of rotation curves depended on surface brightness as they should according to Newton while simultaneously lying exactly on the Tully-Fisher relation without any hint of dependence on surface brightness+. I could explain one or another, but not both simultaneously – at least, not without engaging in some form of tautology that made it so. I came up with a lot of those, and that has been a full-time occupation for many theorists ever since.
\n\n\n\nFor me, this gradually became a genuine crisis. I pounded my head against the wall for months. Then, as I was wrestling with this problem, I happened to attend a talk by Milgrom. I almost didn’t go. I remember thinking “modified gravity? Who wants to hear about that?” But I did, and in a few short lines on the board, Milgrom derived from MOND exactly the result I found so confusing in terms of dark matter. This chance meeting in Middle Earth (Cambridge, UK) changed how I saw the universe. The change wasn’t immediate – it had to ferment a while – but ultimately I found myself asking myself over and over how this stupid theory could have its predictions come true when there was so much evidence for dark matter. Finally I realized that the evidence for dark matter assumes that gravity is normal; really it was just evidence of a discrepancy, and it could be that the assumption was at fault. That realization was sudden: where I’d always seen a duck, suddenly I could also see a rabbit.
\n\n\n\nMost scientists have not had this experience. What constitutes a crisis serious enough to contemplate a paradigm change is a highly personal matter of judgement. It happened in my data, so I took it seriously, but others didn’t care. So I made predictions for their data. Some of those came true, but they rejected the evidence of their own data. It just could not be so! At what point does a mere problem amount to a true anomaly?
\n\n\n\nPart of the sociological issue is that the dark matter paradigm has been in a constant state of crisis since its inception. The reasons vary over time. Sometimes valid solutions have been found to the crisis du jour, other times we’ve chosen to just live with it. It is much easier to live with a bad solution than to rethink one’s entire world view.
\n\n\n\nThe problem with being in a constant state of crisis makes is that it seems like nothing can ever be a genuine crisis. Every foundational change is just another new normal. We complain, say it can’t be so, argue, offer bad ideas, reject them, get used to them, then eventually accept that one of them maybe isn’t so bad, so that must be what is going on. After a few years It is Known and people convince themselves that we expected just that all along.
\n\n\n\nIt takes a lot of evidentiary weight for a paradigm to change, and it takes a lot of time for that to accumulate. But, as Kuhn recognized, mere facts are not enough. Humans and their attitudes matter. As Feyerabend noted,
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe normal component [i.e. the accepted paradigm and its adherents] is large and well entrenched. Hence, a change of the normal component is very noticeable. So is the resistance of the normal component to change. This resistance becomes especially strong and noticeable in periods where a change seems to be imminent.
\n\n\n\nP. Feyerabend in Criticism and Growth of Knowledge
\n
The post correctly points out that dark matter itself was an anomaly going back to Zwicky in 1933. This is often depicted^ as the first detection of dark matter, but it was also noted by Oort in 1932. Zwicky was aware of Oort’s work and cited him, but they’re very different results. Oort was worried about a factor of ~2 discrepancy in stellar dynamics in our local chunk of the Milky Way; Zwicky discovered a discrepancy of a factor of ~1000 in the Coma cluster of galaxies. These both imply the need for unseen mass, but the results are not at all the same. In retrospect, Oort’s discrepancy is a subtle detection of a flat rotation curve while Zwicky’s discrepancy was (at least) two distinct discrepancies: what we now consider the usual cosmic dark matter, but also missing baryons: most of the normal matter in clusters is in the hot, diffuse intracluster medium, not in the stars in the galaxies that Zwicky could see and account for. The modern discrepancy is only a factor of ~6, which is rather less than 1,000. (The distance scale also played a role in exaggerating Zwicky’s result.)
\n\n\n\nThis all seemed crazy in the 1930s, even in the immediate aftermath of the quantum revolution. Consequently, Zwicky’s work was mostly ignored$. The subject of dark matter didn’t really take off until the 1970s. Considerable credit goes (rightly) to Vera Rubin, though many others made essential contributions – just on the subject of rotation curves, Albert Bosma, Mort Roberts, and Seth Shostak all made important contributions, the relative importance of which depends on who you ask.
\n\n\n\nAn important aspect of scientific revolutions is persistence. Vera was persistent. She was fond of relating the story of showing her first (1970) flat rotation curve of Andromeda to Alan Sandage, only to have him dismiss it as “the effect of looking at a bright galaxy.” What the heck did that mean? Nothing, of course – it is the sort of stupid thing that smart people say when confronted with the inconceivable. So Vera persisted, and by the end of the decade had shown that flat rotation curves were the rule, not some strange exception. They became accepted as a de facto law of nature, and the dark matter interpretation was solidly in place by 1980.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe scientific community absorbed this anomaly not by questioning Newtonian gravity or Einstein's general relativity, but by proposing an invisible scaffolding \u2014 a halo of non-luminous, non-interacting matter surrounding every galaxy. Dark matter became not a crisis but a patch.
\n
Indeed, this seemed the most appropriate (scientifically conservative) course of action at the time, as summarized in this exchange (also from the early 1980s):
\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TohlineRubin.png?resize=586%2C276&ssl=1\")
To emphasize the essence of what is said here:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTohline: I might be so bold as to suggest that the validity of Newton’s law should now be seriously questioned.
\n\n\n\nRubin: The point you raise is worth keeping in mind although I believe most of us would rather alter Newtonian gravitational theory only as a last resort.
\n
This was a very reasonable attitude, at the time. But I’ve heard the phrase “only as a last resort” many times now over the course of many years from many different scientists. At what point have we reached the last resort? In the case of dark matter, once we’ve convinced ourselves that invisible mass has to exist, how can we possibly disabuse ourselves of that notion, should it happen to be wrong?
\n\n\n\nIn Kuhnian terms the last resort is reached when the weight of anomalies in the standard paradigm become too great to sustain. But that point is never reached for many die-hard adherents. Whatever the right answer about dark matter turns out to be, I’m sure many brilliant people will go to their graves in denial. Hence the more cynical phrase
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScience progresses one funeral at a time.%
\n
But does it? What if the adherents of an ingrained but incorrect paradigm breed faster than they go away? I’ve seen True Believers train graduate students who’ve gone on to train students of their own. Each generation seems to accept without serious examination the inadequate explanations for the anomalies made by their antecedents, so the weight of the anomalies doesn’t accumulate; instead, each one gets swept separately under the proverbial rug and forgotten. Forgetting is important: when new anomalies come to light, hands are waved and new explanations are promulgated; no one chekcs if the new explanations contradict the previous generation of explanations. What passed before is a solved problem, and we need never speak of it again.
\n\n\n\nThis is not a recipe for a scientific revolution, but for a thousand years of dark epicycles.
\n\n\n\nReturning to the post,
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy the late 1980s and early 1990s, dark matter had been formally incorporated into the reigning cosmological framework. Lambda-CDM \u2014 where Lambda refers to the cosmological constant (a proxy for dark energy) and CDM stands for Cold Dark Matter \u2014 became the standard model of cosmology.
\n
The essence of this statement is correct but some of the details are not. Dark matter was widely accepted by 1980. That’s still a little before my time, but my impression is that the magnitude of the discrepancy was at first a factor of two, so it could simply have been normal baryons that were hard to see. However, the discrepancy rapidly snowballed to an order of magnitude, so we needed something non-baryonic. This was happening simultaneously with talk of supersymmetry and grand unified theories in particle physics that could readily provide new particles to be candidates for the dark matter, leading to the shotgun marriage of particle physics and cosmology, two communities that had had little to do with each other before then, and which still make an odd couple. Cosmology as traditionally practiced by astronomers needed dark matter but didn’t much care what it was; particle physics was all about the possibility of new particles but didn’t care about the details of the astronomical evidence.
\n\n\n\nTo rephrase the above quote, I think it is fair to say that “by the late 1980s and early 1990s, cold dark matter had been formally incorporated into the reigning cosmological framework.” But that framework was not yet LCDM, it was \u03a9m = 1 SCDM. The Lambda only came to prominence by the end of the 1990s, as I’ve related elsewhere. This process is depicted by many scientists as a revolution in itself, and in many regards it was. The cosmological constant had been very far out of favor; rehabilitating it was a grueling experience and no trivial matter. But it wasn’t really a scientific revolution in the sense that Kuhn meant: our picture didn’t fundamentally change, we just learned to accept a parameter& that was already there but that we didn’t like.
\n\n\n\nThe post goes on to note the absence of dark matter detections:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis silence is itself an anomaly… as the silence deepens, the null result itself becomes harder to dismiss.
\n
This is correct, and yet… Physicists have built many experiments that have achieved extraordinary sensitivities. If cold dark matter was composed of WIMPs as originally hypothesized, we would have detected them long ago. Initially, the reaction was to modify WIMPs. Did we say the cross-section would be 10-39 cm2? We meant 10-44 cm2. When that was excluded, we slid the cross section still lower, but people also started giving themselves permission to think the unthinkable. By unthinkable I mean a particle that can’t be detected, not modified gravity. That’s more unthinkable. So the anomaly isn’t dismissed, but it is treated with less gravity than it should be, and certainly with less import than a positive detection would have been granted. Did we say WIMPs? We didn’t mean just WIMPs. It could be anything. (They damn well meant WIMPs and only WIMPs#. Anyone who tells you otherwise is gaslighting*% you, and probably themselves.)
\n\n\n\nThe post goes on to talk about MOND. It gives me too much credit for the gravitational lensing work. This was done by Tobias Mistele, and our work is based on that of Brouwer et al. But it is correct to note that these data are a problem for the dark matter paradigm. Rotation curves remain flat beyond where dark matter halos should end. If correct, this is a genuine anomaly. Perhaps in some distant future it will be recognized** as such in retrospect; at present it seems mostly to be ignored.
\n\n\n\nIt goes on to talk about the JWST observations. Yeah, that part is correct. The community seems to be in the usual process of gaslighting itself into denial of the anomaly. For the first two years after JWST started returning images of the deep universe, people were aghast. How can this be so? It was all anyone could talk about. But then the unexpected became the new normal. Hands were waved, star formation was accepted to be absurdly efficient, and people accepted the impossible. I no longer hear the talk of how problematic the JWST observations are; this chatter simply stopped.
\n\n\n\nAnomalies don’t weigh a paradigm down if we don’t accept that they’re anomalies. But I’ve lived through the revolution, it’s hard to see a positive outcome while it is still ongoing. For it is certainly true that
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhat waits on the other side of the dark matter revolution \u2014 if that is what is coming \u2014 we cannot yet know.
\n
The future is the unknown territory. We don’t know, and can never know, if dark matter doesn’t exist – it is impossible to prove the negative. But we do know MOND works much better than it should in a universe made of dark matter. That demands a scientific explanation that is still wanting. But MOND by itself is not a complete answer, so we are like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each sensing a different part of reality but as yet unable to see the whole.
\n\n\n\nStill, there is reason for optimism. The article closes by noting that
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKuhn's deepest insight was not that science changes. It is that the change, when it comes, is never merely technical. It is a reorganization of the world itself \u2014 the universe seen suddenly whole in a configuration it has always had, but that we had simply lacked the paradigm to perceive.
\n
Not knowing how things ultimately work out is good, actually. One way or the other, there is still fundamental science to be done. We have not reached the stage of looking for our discoveries in the sixth place of decimals.
\n\n\n\n*Trivia I just learned looking at Popper’s wikipedia page: he was spending his last days in London around the same time I was a postdoc in Cambridge just starting to struggle with the scientific and philosophical implications of the dark matter-MOND miasma.
\n\n\n\nUnrelated trivia: I was at a workshop in Jerusalem early in the century but missed the opportunity to meet Jacob Bekenstein because I was too shy to bother the great man.
\n\n\n\n+If you do not find this confusing, you are not thinking clearly.
\n\n\n\n^A nice, brief summary of this early history is related by Einasto. This is the first place I’ve seen the citation to Opik (1915) written out. I’ve only heard mentioned verbally before, so I’ll have to try looking that up later.
\n\n\n\nThe full story is way more complicated than this sounds, and still gets debated off and on. The amplitude of the Oort discrepancy is much smaller today. Locally, the 3D density of mass seems to be accounted for by known stars, gas, and stellar remnants (which were still a new thing in the 1930s). So this Oort limit shows no discrepancy. There remains a modest discrepancy in the 2D dynamical surface density. It appears to me to boil down to the vertical restoring force having a (sometimes ignored) term that depends on the gradient of the rotation curve. Were that falling in a normal Newtonian way, there would be no discrepancy. But it isn’t; this deviation from Newton in the radial direction leads to the Oort discrepancy in the vertical direction. Instead of being as negative as Newton predicts, dV/dR is close to zero, hence my description of this as an indirect detection of a[n almost] flat rotation curve. (dV/dR = -1.7 km/s/kpc, so not exactly zero, but a lot closer to zero than Newton without dark matter would have it be.) The vertical discrepancy is nevertheless much reduced, now being well below a factor of two.
\n\n\n\n$To his apparently great embitterment. He had some choice things to say about astronomers of his time. I am inclined to suspect that those who praise Zwicky the loudest today would have been among those he had reason to complain about had they been contemporaries.
\n\n\n\n%This is attributed to Planck, but he had a lot more nuanced things to say about it in his Nobel Prize lecture.
\n\n\n\n&Einstein disavowed the cosmological constant as his “greatest blunder,” so one argument against it was (for a long time) that it should never have been a part of the theory of General Relativity in the first place. I wonder how things might have gone had that been the case – that he had never introduced Lambda. Perhaps then the data that led to us accepting Lambda would have required a genuine revolution, but it isn’t obvious that we would have accepted it (we might still be debating it), nor is it apparent that LCDM is what comes out of such a revolution. But we don’t get to do that experiment: the Great Man had suggested Lambda, so it was OK to bring it back: we weren’t wrecking his theory by introducing a crazy new entity, we were just admitting an unlikely (antigravity-like) component thereof.
\n\n\n\n#Or axions! Or warm or self-interacting dark matter. Or macros nee strange nuggets! Or or or… Sure, there have been lots of ideas for what the dark matter could be. But when we say that “by the late 1980s and early 1990s, cold dark matter had been formally incorporated into the reigning cosmological framework” what the vast majority of scientists working on the topic (including myself) meant was that CDM == WIMPs. We were aggressively derisive of other ideas, and these are only dredged up again now because of the experimental non-detection of WIMPs. WIMPs are still a better dark matter candidate than the others for the same reasons that we were derisive of the others back in the day. We haven’t been looking as hard for the others, so comparable experimental limits do not yet exist. To quote myself,
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe concept of dark matter is not falsifiable. If we exclude one candidate, we are free to make up another one. After WIMPs, the next obvious candidate is axions. Should those be falsified, we invent something else. (Particle physicists love to do this. The literature is littered with half-baked dark matter candidates invented for dubious reasons, often to explain phenomena with obvious astrophysical causes. The ludicrous uproar over the ATIC and PAMELA cosmic ray experiments is a good example.)
\n\n\n\nMcGaugh (2008)
\n
*%An easy way to deflate such gaslighting is to ask why so many experiments have been built to search for WIMPs but not all these other allegedly great dark matter candidates. After a pause and dismayed stare, you’ll probably get an answer about “looking under the lamp post” because that’s where it is possible to make detections. That’s sorta true, but it isn’t the real reason. The real reason is that we all drank the Kool-Aid of the WIMP miracle, so genuinely believed that the dark matter had to be WIMPS, not merely that they were a convenient experimental target. (I did not chug the kool-aid as hard as the people who based entire careers on building WIMP detection experiments, but I did buy into the idea to the exclusion of other possibilities for dark matter – as did most everyone else.)
\n\n\n\n**In retrospect, Galileo’s observations of the angular size and phases of Venus were utterly fatal to the geocentric paradigm. That’s easy to say now; at the time it was just another piece of evidence.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/n1xks-n8x42","guid":"https://tritonstation.com/?p=12318","image":"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/nopeaceduckgodrabbitgod.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1773100800,"rid":"reyqc-svw79","summary":"I see that I've been posting once a month so far in 2026. I've lots to say but no time to say it. Some of it good, some of it bad, maybe sometime I'll get around to it. No guarantees. On the good side, I've been working on a big project or two;","tags":["Dark Matter","LCDM","MOND","Personal Experience","Philosophy Of Science"],"title":"Paradigm Shifts in Modern Astrophysics","updated_at":1791315916,"url":"https://tritonstation.com/2026/03/10/paradigm-shifts-in-modern-astrophysics/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/02twcfp32","name":"Crossref"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Montilla","given":"Luis Miguel","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7079-6775"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Crossref Staff"}],"community_id":"093ada45-3a02-4007-b8b6-be28f221e01d","created":1780876800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Recent content in Blog on Crossref","doi":"https://doi.org/10.64000/crossref","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/093ada45-3a02-4007-b8b6-be28f221e01d/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.crossref.org/blog/feed.xml","filter":null,"generator":"Hugo","home_page_url":"https://www.crossref.org/blog/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.64000","relative_url":null,"secure":null,"slug":"crossref","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"Crossref Blog","updated":1791244800,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Crossref Blog","blog_slug":"crossref","content_html":"Crossref members register around 37,000 records daily. All this metadata is openly shared with the global scholarly community through our free APIs. We receive over two billion calls to our API each month, signalling its use by hundreds of tools and services worldwide, supporting the discovery and assessment of scholarly metadata. As part of a new series in our blog, we will spotlight the diversity of tools and integrations that rely on Crossref metadata to serve the scholarly community. In this initial post, we chat to Luca Foppiano, the developer and maintainer of Grobid1, to learn about how Grobid uses Crossref metadata to improve the extraction and enrichment of bibliographic information from scholarly PDFs.
\nIf you've ever tried to extract bibliographic data from a PDF, you know this is not always straightforward. Copying author names, titles, and references by hand is tedious. Often, the layout includes invisible characters that someone has to clean, and even automated extraction often fails because the PDF format was conceived for reading documents across platforms; not for clean, structured metadata. Then, if you are considering doing this in bulk, with long lists of files, the problem grows exponentially. This is the core problem that Grobid was conceived to solve.
\nGrobid is an open-source software library, written by Patrice Lopez, that helps users extract and parse technical and academic text from PDF files. This means you can use a scholarly PDF as input, and Grobid will extract structured bibliographic metadata, including title, abstract, authors, affiliations, keywords, references, and more. Integration with Crossref's metadata allows Grobid to further augment the quality of that metadata and improve the overall accuracy of the process.
\nGrobid is used by integration services like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, HAL Research Archive, the European Patent Office, The Institute of Scientific and Technical Information - French National Centre for Scientific Research (INIST-CNRS), Mendeley, CERN (Invenio), Internet Archive1, and research projects2.
\nDuring the first quarter of 2026, our REST API received more than 100 million requests from Grobid software clients. Grobid queries the REST API and retrieves the metadata for the full reference, adding missing elements and improving the overall accuracy of the process. Additionally, this integration makes full use of Crossref's different API pools2 by letting users make polite requests or include their Metadata Plus API keys in the software if they are already Metadata Plus subscribers3.
\nFor example, an unstructured reference that appears at the end of a scholarly document might look as follows:
\nRada, F, et al. \"Osmotic and turgor relations of three mangrove ecosystem species.\" Australian Journal of Plant Physiology, vol. 16, no. 6, 1 Dec. 1989, pp. 477\u2013486, https://doi.org/10.1071/pp9890477.\nAs we can see, this specific citation style includes only the leading author. Other styles might, for example, use the journal abbreviated name or even skip it entirely. After being processed by Grobid, this reference is reorganized into a specific standard format called Text Encoding Initiative or TEI. Don't be alarmed if it looks complex, these formats aren't intended for humans to read, they're intended for machines and interactions between software. What we want to show is how two lines describing references are tagged and structured (for which having a DOI with rich metadata definitely helps):
\n status=\"consolidated\" source=\"crossref\" xml:id=\"b1\">\n level=\"a\" type=\"main\">Osmotic and Turgor Relations of Three Mangrove Ecosystem Species\n type=\"first\">F\n type=\"first\">G\n type=\"first\">A\n type=\"first\">M\n type=\"first\">O\n type=\"first\">A\n type=\"DOI\">10.1071/pp9890477\n \n level=\"j\">Australian Journal of Plant Physiology\n type=\"ISSN\">0310-7841\n type=\"ISSNe\">1446-5655\n unit=\"volume\">16\n unit=\"issue\">6\n unit=\"page\" from=\"477\" to=\"486\"/>\n type=\"published\" when=\"1989-12-01\"/>\n type=\"raw_reference\">Rada, F., Goldstein, G., Orozco, A., Montilla, M., Zabala,O. & Az\u00f3car, A. Relaciones Osm\u00f3ticas\n \nIn addition, there is another tool that complements API queries with Crossref bulk metadata options. The team behind Grobid also developed Biblio-glutton4, a utility \"dedicated to scientific bibliographic information\" that serves as a local, high-performance cache of Crossref (and other) scholarly metadata. Being local first means you can use it with the public data file5, deploy your own copy of the Crossref database, make updates as needed, and query as many times as you require.
\nGrobid has recently improved its integration with Crossref to make use of the REST API polite pool6 and added more metadata statements, such as the CRediT taxonomy and conflict-of-interest statements, which were requested by users.
\nAnother synergistic aspect of this Crossref integration is that users' outputs can be enriched with funding metadata, identify mentions of datasets (data citation endpoint) and software, and through the use of modules, including other discipline-specific elements like astronomical entities, superconductor materials, and entities identified with Wikidata IDs.
\nHave you used Grobid with the Crossref API? We'd love to hear about your experience or use cases in the comments.
\nCrossref holds over 180 mln records contributed by more that 25,000 member organisations from across the world. We make all the metadata openly available via our REST API. If your tool can also benefit from integrating our open metadata, you can also explore our documentation and test different metadata retrieval options.
\nHouten, S., Hendricks, G., & Polischuk, P. (2024). Rebalancing our REST API traffic. https://doi.org/10.64000/pq6bm-0qs92\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\nBesan\u00e7on, L., Cabanac, G., Labb\u00e9, C., Magazinov, A., di Scala, J., Tkaczyk, D., & Weber-Boer, K. (2025). Detection of metadata manipulations: Finding sneaked references in the scholarly literature (Version 1). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2501.03771\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\nGrobid documentation. https://grobid.readthedocs.io/\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\nBiblio-glutton. https://github.com/kermitt2/biblio-glutton\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\nRittman, M., del Ojo El\u00edas, C., & Montilla, L. (2026). 2026 public data file now available. https://doi.org/10.64000/7s70g-drz77\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\nRittman, M., & Montilla, L. (2025). Announcing changes to REST API rate limits. Crossref. https://doi.org/10.64000/wadve-3tj60\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\n![\"Book](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/9781739771706.jpg\")
I've bumped in to Ken Banks a few times over my career - and he has always been a kind, inspiring, and dedicated chap. How did he get that way?
This book is part autobiography and part an explanation about how people can find purpose in life. It is refreshingly secular on the latter, and curiously impersonal on the former. While Ken's childhood family is recounted in great detail, his wife and children get only a fleeting mention.
\n\nA large part is dedicated to his ancestors:
\n\n\n\nIt's about living up to the expectations of those who came before me, ancestors whose own stories help me understand what makes me who I am today.
I have to say, this is the part that resonated the least with me. I am utterly uninterested in my own family's history. I don't care if I make my forbearers proud - nor do I think their stories matter much to mine.
\n\nIt is refreshing to read an autobiography which acknowledges that luck and privilege play a significant part in the journey. The book is almost a masterclass in how being in the right place at the right time requires one to be often be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
\n\nKen is relentlessly practical. He explains how to examine what works and what doesn't. How to assess whether you're able to solve a problem and what to do in the face of adversity. Whereas an American book might be self-aggrandising and cult-like, Ken's approach is almost ego-less and much more structured around how to build a movement for continual change.
\n\nOne thing that struck me throughout the book is that I think a lot of the yearning we feel for purpose is driven by the rejection of religion.
\n\n\n\nPerhaps you already have everything you need to live a happy, fulfilling, purposeful life, and it just requires a little order or structure. Simply having a set of rules to live by might be closer to what you're looking for, or need.
Once you throw off the shackles of religion, you can feel untethered from society. If all you see is people being fulfilled by an indoctrination of Kinder, K\u00fcche, Kirche, then you are going to feel like your life has no (extrinsic) meaning.
\n\nThis book isn't a powerful wake-up call. It isn't a rallying cry. Nor is it a quick-fix self-help guide. It is a calm and practical observation of one person's (successful) journey through life.
![](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=51084&HTTP_REFERER=DOI\"){kind=small}
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/ava4t-xbk29","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=51084","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/9781739771706.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1720915200,"rid":"ve9xv-7z848","summary":"I've bumped in to Ken Banks a few times over my career - and he has always been a kind, inspiring, and dedicated chap. How did he get that way? This book is part autobiography and part an explanation about how people can find purpose in life. It is refreshingly secular on the latter, and curiously impersonal on the former.","tags":["/etc/","Autobiography","Book Review"],"title":"Book Review: The Pursuit of Purpose - Ken Banks","updated_at":1791308036,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/07/book-review-the-pursuit-of-purpose-ken-banks/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/046ak2485","name":"Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fischer","given":"Georg","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5620-5759"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2","created":1694476800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/oaberlin","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"oaberlin","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Open Research Blog Berlin","updated":1791306819,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Open Research Blog Berlin","blog_slug":"oaberlin","content_html":"Ein Gastbeitrag des Open-Access-Teams der TU Berlin
\nDas dritte Interview zur Open Access Week 2025 f\u00fchrte das Open-Access-Team der TU Berlin mit dem Kommunikationswissenschaftler und wissenschaftlichen Referenten f\u00fcr transdisziplin\u00e4re Lehre an der TU Berlin PD. Dr. Thorsten Philipp. F\u00fcr ihn erleichtert Open Access den Unialltag enorm und er pl\u00e4diert daf\u00fcr, mehr alternative offene Publikationsformen zu f\u00f6rdern, die nicht zu Lasten der Wissenschaftler*innen und Studierenden gehen.
\n![\"\"](\"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/files/2025/10/OA-Week-2025-Thorsten-Philipp-DIN-A1-quer-20251008.jpg\")
Open-Access-Team der TU Berlin: Open Access ist ein strategisches Ziel der TU Berlin und der BUA. Wie sieht das in Ihrem Forschungsalltag aus? In welchen Kontexten nehmen Sie Diskussionen zu Open Access wahr?\u00a0
\nThorsten Philipp: Open Access ist l\u00e4ngst eine bestimmende Norm bei der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Forschungsergebnissen geworden. Die Frage l\u00e4sst sich nicht mehr umgehen. Wann immer ich in den letzten Jahren B\u00fccher oder wissenschaftliche Artikel ver\u00f6ffentlicht habe, war mir klar, dass ich irgendeinen Weg finden muss, die Texte auch Open Access zug\u00e4nglich zu machen.
\n\u00dcber den Interviewpartner: Thorsten Philipp ist Privatdozent f\u00fcr Kommunikationswissenschaft mit Schwerpunkt Politische Kommunikation. Als wissenschaftlicher Referent im Pr\u00e4sidium der TU Berlin besteht seine Mission in der F\u00f6rderung transdisziplin\u00e4rer Lehrprojekte am Begegnungsort von Universit\u00e4t und Gesellschaft.\n
Open Access hat den offenen Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Information zum Ziel. Im letzten Jahr haben Sie sich sehr darum bem\u00fcht, dass Ihre Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen f\u00fcr alle weltweit frei lesbar sind: Wenn sie nicht \u00fcber den Verlag Open Access publiziert wurden, haben Sie die Beitr\u00e4ge noch \u00fcber das TU Repositorium DepositOnce online gestellt. Wie kam es zu der Entscheidung, Ihre Artikel auf diese Weise Open Access zweitzuver\u00f6ffentlichen?
\nEs begann, als ich einmal einen englischsprachigen Beitrag zu einem Sammelband verfasst hatte \u2013 und der fertige Band am Ende zu einem absurden St\u00fcckpreis von 285 USD im Buchhandel angeboten wurde. Wer kann sich solche B\u00fccher leisten? Mir war klar, dass ich eine L\u00f6sung finden musste, um insbesondere Studierenden einen Zugang zu er\u00f6ffnen. Zum Gl\u00fcck gestattete die Policy des Verlags die Archivierung der finalen Verlagsversion auf einem institutionellen Repositorium. Heute ist der Artikel kostenfrei auf DepositOnce abrufbar.
\nGab es bereits konkrete Situationen in Ihrem Forschungsalltag, in denen Open Access hilfreich war?
\nOpen Access hat meinen Alltag in der Lehre enorm vereinfacht. Meine Studierenden k\u00f6nnen unkompliziert und kostenfrei auf alle meine Publikationen zugreifen; das spart Zeit und Ressourcen in der Vorbereitung von Seminarsitzungen und Diskussionen, Referaten und Hausarbeiten.
\nDamit eine fl\u00e4chendeckende Umstellung zu Open Access gelingen kann, sind \u00c4nderungen in ganz verschiedenen Bereichen erforderlich \u2013 u.a. Finanzierungsstrukturen, Kriterien der Forschungsbewertung und Berufungsverfahren, Ausbau von alternativen Publikationsangeboten, Governance von Publikationsorganen… Welche Aspekte sollte die TU Ihrer Meinung nach in den n\u00e4chsten Jahren priorisieren?
\nAlle diese Aspekte sind wichtig. Gerade in der Frage der Bewertung von Forschungsleistung und bei Berufungsverfahren wird nach meiner Erfahrung viel zu wenig gewichtet, inwieweit sich Forscher*innen um eine breite Zug\u00e4nglichkeit ihrer Forschung bem\u00fchen.
\nVor kurzem erst erhielt ich eine Einladung, zu einem englischsprachigen Sammelband beizutragen. Das E-Mail war KI-generiert, und erst auf der Website fand ich im Kleingedruckten den Hinweis, dass ich f\u00fcr die Publikation meines Artikels h\u00e4tte zahlen m\u00fcssen. An solchen unseri\u00f6sen Gesch\u00e4ftsmodellen zeigt sich deutlich, was im Verlagswesen inzwischen alles schiefl\u00e4uft. Es ist h\u00f6chste Zeit, alternative Publikationsformen zu f\u00f6rdern, die nicht zu Lasten der Wissenschaftler*innen und der Studierenden gehen.
\nKurz und knapp in einem Satz: Was finden Sie gut an Open Access?
\nOpen Access tr\u00e4gt dazu bei, die vielf\u00e4ltigen H\u00fcrden und Hierarchien abzubauen, denen der Zugang zu Wissen immer noch unterliegt. Die gro\u00dfen Herausforderungen der Gegenwart l\u00f6sen wir aber nur dann, wenn es uns gelingt, eine Vielzahl an Wissensressourcen in die Problembearbeitung einzubeziehen. Mit Open Access entsteht eine transdisziplin\u00e4re Wissensallmende.
\nGeben Sie uns zum Abschluss einen Einblick in Ihr Forschungsfeld f\u00fcr Disziplinfremde. Mit welchen Fragen und Erkenntnissen besch\u00e4ftigen Sie sich?
\nMeine Forschung untersucht Popmusik als Resonanzraum \u00f6kologischer Krisen \u2013 und als Aushandlungsraum der Nachhaltigkeitsdebatte.
\nZitiervorschlag:\nOpen-Access-Team der TU Berlin (2025, Oktober 22). Thorsten Philipp im Interview: \"Wir m\u00fcssen alternative Publikationsformen f\u00f6rdern.\". Open research office berlin. https://doi.org/10.59350/g9hb6-0m177\n
\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/g9hb6-0m177","guid":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/?p=3590","image":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/files/2025/10/OA-Week-2025-Thorsten-Philipp-DIN-A1-quer-20251008.jpg","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1761091200,"rid":"xfr7y-3mv79","summary":"Ein Gastbeitrag des Open-Access-Teams der TU Berlin Das dritte Interview zur Open Access Week 2025 f\u00fchrte das Open-Access-Team der TU Berlin mit dem Kommunikationswissenschaftler und wissenschaftlichen Referenten f\u00fcr transdisziplin\u00e4re Lehre an der TU Berlin PD. Dr. Thorsten Philipp.","tags":["Allgemein","OAWeek","Interview","Thorsten Philipp","OAWeek-Interview"],"title":"Thorsten Philipp im Interview: \"Wir m\u00fcssen alternative Publikationsformen f\u00f6rdern.\"","updated_at":1791306918,"url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/2025/10/22/interview-thorsten-philipp-open-access-week-2025/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/046ak2485","name":"Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fischer","given":"Georg","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5620-5759"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2","created":1694476800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/oaberlin","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"oaberlin","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Open Research Blog Berlin","updated":1791306819,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Open Research Blog Berlin","blog_slug":"oaberlin","content_html":"
Ein Gastbeitrag des Open-Access-Teams der TU Berlin
\nF\u00fcr die Interviewreihe zur Open Access Week hat sich das Open-Access-Team der TU Berlin mit Lena Herzog-Sounaye, Dr. Melanie Kryst und Nadin Gaasch vom\u00a0TD-Lab der Berlin University Alliance\u00a0unterhalten. Als klaren Vorteil von Open Access benennen sie den Zugang zu Wissen und M\u00f6glichkeiten des Austauschs zwischen Forschenden und anderen gesellschaftlichen Gruppen.
\n![\"\"](\"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/files/2025/10/OA-Week-2025-TD-Lab-DIN-A1-quer-20251008.jpg\")
Open-Access-Team der TU Berlin: Open Access ist ein strategisches Ziel der TU Berlin und der BUA. Wie sieht das in Ihrem Forschungsalltag aus? In welchen Kontexten nehmen Sie Diskussionen zu Open Access wahr?\u00a0
\nLena Herzog-Sounaye: Als TD-Lab \u2013 Labor f\u00fcr transdisziplin\u00e4re Forschung der Berlin University Alliance (BUA) st\u00e4rken wir den multidirektionalen Wissensaustausch zwischen Forschung und Gesellschaft. Gerade f\u00fcr die Praxispartner*innen von Forschungsprojekten, seien es zivilgesellschaftliche Initiativen, die Bezirksverwaltung oder auch Start-Ups, ist es oft essenziell, einen einfachen Zugang zu entsprechenden Fachpublikationen zu haben. Der Austausch von Wissen, Informationen und Daten setzt den Grundstein f\u00fcr gemeinsame Projekte und Kooperationen.
\nNadin Gaasch: Die TU Berlin ist bereits sehr pr\u00e4sent in der Berliner Stadtgesellschaft, insbesondere durch die starke Reallaborforschung. Die BUA sieht es als eine ihrer Kernaufgaben, die Vernetzung aller Verbundpartnerinnen mit der Stadtgesellschaft weiter voranzutreiben. Insofern ist es nur ein logischer Schluss, dass wissenschaftliches Wissen durch Open Access auch dieser Zielgruppe frei zur Verf\u00fcgung steht.
\n\u00dcber die Interviewpartnerinnen\n\nLena Herzog-Sounaye ist Politikwissenschaftlerin und ausgebildete Mediatorin. Bevor sie 2023 zum TD-Lab kam war sie in den Bereichen Wissenstransfer, Wissenschaftskommunikation und \u00d6ffentlichkeitsarbeit am Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient sowie bei Wissenschaft im Dialog t\u00e4tig.\nDr. Melanie Kryst ist promovierte Politikwissenschaftlerin und seit 2021 Referentin im TD-Lab. Sie leitete zuvor partizipative Stadtentwicklungsprojekte in Berlin sowie im internationalen St\u00e4dteaustausch.\nNadin Gaasch hat einen Abschluss in Humangeographie, Soziologie und \u00d6ffentliches Recht. Bevor sie 2020 Referentin im TD-Lab wurde, arbeitetet sie im Wissenschaftsmanagement des Potsdam-Institut f\u00fcr Klimafolgenforschung (PIK) e.V. sowie als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin mit Fokus auf transdisziplin\u00e4re Forschung am Leibniz-Zentrum f\u00fcr Agrarlandschaftsforschung (ZALF) e.V. M\u00fcncheberg.\n\nZum Team des TD-Labs geh\u00f6ren au\u00dferdem noch Dr. Audrey Podann (Projektleitung), Dr. Ina Opitz und Dr. Nikola N\u00f6lle.\n
Open Access hat den offenen Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Information zum Ziel. In den vergangenen beiden Jahren haben Sie sechs Publikationen auf dem Repositorium der TU Berlin, DepositOnce ver\u00f6ffentlicht \u2013 mit weltweit freiem Zugriff. Warum haben Sie sich dazu entschlossen?
\nMelanie Kryst: Eines unserer Ziele mit dem TD-Lab ist es, Formate f\u00fcr partizipative Forschungsans\u00e4tze zu entwickeln und zu erproben. Diese Formate sind auf den Berliner Forschungsraum und die hiesige Stadtgesellschaft zugeschnitten, bieten aber durchaus auch viele Ankn\u00fcpfungspunkte f\u00fcr Vorhaben au\u00dferhalb der Hauptstadt. Uns war es wichtig, mit den Werkstattberichten unsere Methoden und Erfahrungen zu teilen und damit Wissenschaftler*innen in Berlin und dar\u00fcber hinaus hilfreiche Anleitungen an die Hand zu geben, um selbst partizipative und transdisziplin\u00e4re Forschungsprojekte zu initiieren.
\nLena Herzog-Sounaye: Aktuell schreiben wir an zwei weiteren Werkstattberichten. Dar\u00fcber hinaus werden wir diesen Herbst englische Versionen der Werkstattberichte \u00fcber DepositOnce ver\u00f6ffentlichen, um somit sowohl internationale Wissenschaftler*innen in Berlin als auch Interessierte weltweit mit unseren Formaten anzusprechen.
\nGab es bereits konkrete Situationen in Ihrem Forschungsalltag, in denen Open Access hilfreich war?
\nLena Herzog-Sounaye: Bei der Entwicklung unserer Angebote berufen wir uns selbstverst\u00e4ndlich auf wissenschaftliche Literatur zu Themen wie Transdisziplinarit\u00e4t, Partizipation in der Wissenschaft oder Transformation. Da ist es nat\u00fcrlich sehr hilfreich, wenn Publikationen von anderen Universit\u00e4ten und Fach-Communities leicht verf\u00fcgbar sind. Zudem nutzen wir f\u00fcr unsere Pr\u00e4sentationen und Trainingsangebote gerne Grafiken aus der Literatur als Anschauungsmaterial und freuen uns, wenn diese niedrigschwellig genutzt werden k\u00f6nnen.
\nDamit eine fl\u00e4chendeckende Umstellung zu Open Access gelingen kann, sind \u00c4nderungen in ganz verschiedenen Bereichen erforderlich \u2013 u.a. Finanzierungsstrukturen, Kriterien der Forschungsbewertung und Berufungsverfahren, Ausbau von alternativen Publikationsangeboten, Governance von Publikationsorganen… Welche Aspekte sollte die TU Ihrer Meinung nach in den n\u00e4chsten Jahren priorisieren?
\nNadin Gaasch: Damit Open Access in der partizipativen Forschung wirksam werden kann, braucht es nicht nur die klassischen OA-Strukturen (Repositorien, Finanzierung, rechtliche Absicherung), sondern auch spezifische Rahmenbedingungen, die den diversen Beteiligten gerechte Teilhabe, Sichtbarkeit und Verst\u00e4ndlichkeit erm\u00f6glichen.\u00a0Dazu geh\u00f6rt, dass Publikationsprozesse flexibel genug gestaltet werden, um neben wissenschaftsgetriebenen Erkenntnissen auch konkrete Umsetzungsideen von Forschung sichtbar zu machen. Das k\u00f6nnten beispielsweise \u00f6ffentlich nutzbare Datenbanken, konkrete Handlungsleitf\u00e4den f\u00fcr Nachbarschaften oder auch Installationen zum Auffangen von Regenwasser sein. Gleichzeitig m\u00fcssen \u00dcbersetzungs- und Vermittlungsleistungen \u2013 etwa durch verst\u00e4ndliche Sprache, visuelle Aufbereitung oder Mehrsprachigkeit \u2013 systematisch gef\u00f6rdert werden, damit unterschiedliche gesellschaftliche Gruppen Zugang finden.
\nMelanie Kryst: Schlie\u00dflich ist es wichtig, dass Open Access nicht nur als \"Endpunkt\" einer Forschung verstanden wird, sondern als Teil eines kontinuierlichen Dialogs, der Feedback, gemeinsame Reflexion und nachhaltige Wissenszirkulation erm\u00f6glicht. Es sollte auch Aufgabe einer gro\u00dfen und gesellschaftlich vernetzten Universit\u00e4t, wie die TU Berlin es ist, sein, diesen Dialog zu f\u00f6rdern.
\nKurz und knapp in einem Satz: Was finden Sie gut an Open Access?
\nMelanie Kryst: Open Access hei\u00dft: einfacher Zugang zu Wissen. Das er\u00f6ffnet neue M\u00f6glichkeiten f\u00fcr den Austausch zwischen Forschenden und anderen gesellschaftlichen Gruppen.
\nGeben Sie uns zum Abschluss einen Einblick in Ihr Forschungsfeld f\u00fcr Disziplinfremde. Mit welchen Fragen und Erkenntnissen besch\u00e4ftigen Sie sich?
\nNadin Gaasch: Das TD-Lab ist ein Strukturprojekt der BUA. Angesiedelt an der Stabsstelle Science & Society der TU Berlin zielt es darauf ab, transdisziplin\u00e4re und andere partizipative Forschungsmodi im Verbund und in Berlin zu st\u00e4rken \u2013 f\u00fcr eine exzellente Forschung mit der Gesellschaft. Daf\u00fcr entwickelt unser Team innovative Formate, Methoden und Weiterbildungen und formt neue Kooperationen und Netzwerke.
\nLena Herzog-Sounaye: Aktuell treiben wir insbesondere den Austausch zu Wasserthemen voran und veranstalten mit den On Water DIALOGEN angeleitete Networking-Events f\u00fcr Wissenschaftler*innen und Expert*innen aus der Praxis. Des Weiteren bieten wir beispielweise eine Antragsberatung mit Fokus auf transdisziplin\u00e4re bzw. partizipative Elemente in Forschungsvorhaben an und f\u00fchren ein eigenes Seed-Funding-Programm durch.
\nZitiervorschlag:\nOpen-Access-Team der TU Berlin (2025, Oktober 21). Lena Herzog-Sounaye, Dr. Melanie Kryst und Nadin Gaasch im Interview: \"Open Access ist kein Endpunkt, sondern Teil eines kontinuierlichen Dialogs.\". Open research office berlin. https://doi.org/10.59350/tvgsh-byj48\n
\n\n
Ein Gastbeitrag des Open-Access-Teams der TU Berlin
\nBereits seit 2017 nutzt\u00a0das Open-Access-Team der Technischen Universit\u00e4t Berlin die internationale Open Access Week daf\u00fcr, um mit Angeh\u00f6rigen der TU Berlin ins Gespr\u00e4ch zu kommen und Einblicke in die Perspektive von Forschenden auf Open-Access-Praktiken zu erhalten. Die so gewachsene\u00a0Interviewreihe\u00a0ist bislang im Blog \"Publizieren an der TU Berlin\" erschienen.
\nAuch in diesem Jahr haben wir vom Open-Access-Team wieder Wissenschaftler*innen der TU Berlin gefragt: \"Wie halten sie es mit Open Access?\" Und wir freuen uns, die drei Gespr\u00e4che hier im Open Research Blog Berlin ver\u00f6ffentlichen zu k\u00f6nnen.
\nDen Auftakt macht in diesem Jahr Dr. Thies Johannsen vom\u00a0Fachgebiet Konstruktion von Maschinensystemen der TU Berlin\u00a0und\u00a0Open Science Ambassador der Berlin University Alliance. Seiner Ansicht nach tr\u00e4gt Open Access dazu bei, dass wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse nicht nur breiter zug\u00e4nglich, sondern auch besser und sozial robuster werden. Er pl\u00e4diert daf\u00fcr, dass Open Access zur wissenschaftlichen Praxis geh\u00f6ren sollte, wie auch gute wissenschaftliche Standards.
\n ![\"\"](\"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/files/2025/10/OA-Week-2025-Thies-Levsen-Johannsen-DIN-A1-quer-20251008-scaled.jpg\")
Team Open Access der TU Berlin: Open Access ist ein strategisches Ziel der TU Berlin und der BUA. Wie sieht das in Ihrem Forschungsalltag aus? In welchen Kontexten nehmen Sie Diskussionen zu Open Access wahr?\u00a0
\nThies Johannsen: Dass die Berlin University Alliance bereits 2023 ein gemeinsames Leitbild f\u00fcr offene Wissenschaft verabschiedet hat, ist ein wichtiger, richtiger und notwendiger Schritt. Dieses Leitbild wird auf zwei Ebenen gelebt: Nach au\u00dfen wirkt die Allianz mit einer umfassenden Wissenschaftskommunikationskampagne in die Metropolregion Berlin hinein und \u00f6ffnet sich gezielt f\u00fcr gesellschaftliche Akteur*innen. Nach innen wirkt sie durch Initiativen wie das Open Science Ambassador-Programm, an dem ich mitwirken darf. Als Multiplikator*innen setzen wir uns daf\u00fcr ein, Open Science an unseren Institutionen sichtbarer und wirksamer zu machen.
\nDabei konkurrieren wir allerdings mit einer Vielzahl anderer, teils ebenfalls forschungsnaher Initiativen um die knappe Ressource Aufmerksamkeit der Forschenden. In gewisser Weise ist die Berlin University Alliance damit auch Opfer ihres eigenen Erfolgs, weil die hohe Dichte an Aktivit\u00e4ten zu einer gewissen S\u00e4ttigung f\u00fchren kann. Wissenschaftler*innen k\u00f6nnen Open Science im Alltag als zus\u00e4tzliche Aufgabe wahrnehmen \u2013 neben hoher Lehrverpflichtung, dem Anspruch, exzellente Forschung zu betreiben, und einer zunehmend angespannten finanziellen und damit unsicheren Lage. Dies gilt umso mehr, wenn Wissen \u00fcber das Thema fehlt und diese Unsicherheit versch\u00e4rft.
\nDiesen Vorbehalt kenne ich auch aus meiner Arbeit im Wissens- und Technologietransfer sowie in transdisziplin\u00e4ren Forschungskontexten. Dabei lassen sich bereits mit minimalem Aufwand, etwa durch Sichtbarmachung existierender, aber bislang nicht benannter Praktiken, gro\u00dfe Wirkungen erzielen. Ein Beispiel: Am Institut f\u00fcr Konstruktion von Maschinensystemen arbeiten wir h\u00e4ufig an individuell konstruierten Versuchsanlagen. Die Bereitstellung von Daten nach den FAIR-Prinzip \u2013 das Akronym steht f\u00fcr Findable, Accessible, Interoperable und Reusable \u2013 ist hier komplex und erfordert zus\u00e4tzliche Anstrengungen. Das l\u00e4sst sich nicht immer unmittelbar vermitteln. Hier sind strukturelle Anreize erforderlich.
\n\u00dcber den Interviewpartner: Thies Johannsen lehrt und forscht an der Schnittstelle zwischen Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften sowie den MINT-Disziplinen. In seiner Forschung besch\u00e4ftigt er sich mit Kompetenzen f\u00fcr innovationsorientiertes Transferhandeln, f\u00fcr die Zukunftsf\u00e4higkeit von Absolvent*innen und eine ganzheitliche Ingenieur*innenausbildung. Er ber\u00e4t Hochschulen, Unternehmen und Organisationen zu entsprechenden Transformations- und Qualifizierungsprozessen.\n
Gleichzeitig liegt genau darin ein enormes Potenzial: Daten \u00f6ffentlich zug\u00e4nglich zu machen, sie als Preprints zur Diskussion zu stellen, als Open Data anschlussf\u00e4hig zur Verf\u00fcgung zu stellen, kann die eigene Forschung sichtbarer machen und damit auch den individuellen Impact und die Karrierechancen deutlich erh\u00f6hen.
\nAn unserer Fakult\u00e4t verfolgen wir erste Ans\u00e4tze, dieses Thema fr\u00fchzeitig in die Lehre zu integrieren, und zwar nicht durch aufw\u00e4ndige Neukonzeptionen der Curricula, sondern durch gezielte Aktivierung vorhandener Potenziale. So f\u00fchren wir Studierende und angehende Wissenschaftler*innen behutsam an das Thema heran. Open Access und Open Science sind dabei keine blo\u00dfen Add-ons, sondern werden als integrale Bestandteile guter wissenschaftlicher Praxis vermittelt. Wir verbinden damit die Hoffnung, dass sie in das disziplin\u00e4re Selbstverst\u00e4ndnis \u00fcbergehen und entsprechend gelebt werden.
\nOpen Access hat den offenen Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Information zum Ziel. Was haben Sie in der Vergangenheit daf\u00fcr getan, damit Ihre Forschungsergebnisse frei zug\u00e4nglich sind? Wollen Sie das in Zukunft weiter ausbauen? Und was brauchen Sie daf\u00fcr?
\nDie Zug\u00e4nglichkeit wissenschaftlicher Ergebnisse ist f\u00fcr mich nicht nur eine Frage der \u00f6ffentlichen Finanzierung, obwohl auch diese einen wichtigen Rahmen setzt. Ich selbst bin in einem Drittmittelprojekt t\u00e4tig, das zun\u00e4chst vom BMBF und inzwischen vom BMFTR gef\u00f6rdert wird. Daraus ergibt sich f\u00fcr mich eine klare ethische und legitimatorische Verantwortung, meine Forschungsergebnisse zug\u00e4nglich zu machen.
\nAuch pers\u00f6nlich profitiere ich davon. Durch Open Access erreiche ich meine Zielgruppe leichter und kann mit meiner Arbeit eine st\u00e4rkere Wirkung entfalten. Deshalb habe ich im Rahmen meines Projekts unter einer CC BY 4.0-Lizenz publiziert und diese M\u00f6glichkeit auch f\u00fcr mein Team geschaffen.
\nBesonders hervorheben m\u00f6chte ich an dieser Stelle die Rolle der Universit\u00e4tsbibliothek, die mit einem eigenen Fonds f\u00fcr Open-Access-Publikationen sehr konkret unterst\u00fctzt. Das ist ein deutliches Signal f\u00fcr die institutionelle Verankerung von Open Access an der TU Berlin.
\nDar\u00fcber hinaus gibt es niedrigschwellige, aber sehr wirksame Infrastrukturen wie Zenodo. Dabei handelt es sich um ein Repositorium, das von der EU, OpenAIRE und CERN betrieben wird. Es erm\u00f6glicht die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung unter Creative-Commons-Lizenz und stellt dabei einen DOI zur Verf\u00fcgung. Das ist gerade deshalb relevant, weil so auch nicht-klassische Publikationsformate wie Poster, Templates, Lehrmaterialien oder audiovisuelle Beitr\u00e4ge zitierf\u00e4hig werden und damit auf die f\u00fcr wissenschaftliche Karrieren nach wie vor zentrale W\u00e4hrung \"Publikationen\" einzahlen. Auch forschungsnahe Lehrinhalte lassen sich auf diese Weise ver\u00f6ffentlichen.
\nUm eine Open-Access-Kultur nachhaltig zu st\u00e4rken, braucht es meines Erachtens vor allem den R\u00fcckhalt durch die unmittelbaren F\u00fchrungskr\u00e4fte. Open Access darf kein optionales Extra sein, das auf Nachfrage erm\u00f6glicht wird, sondern sollte ebenso selbstverst\u00e4ndlich zur wissenschaftlichen Praxis geh\u00f6ren wie gute wissenschaftliche Standards insgesamt. Das setzt eine klare Positionierung auf Fachgebietsebene voraus.
\nDabei k\u00f6nnen Vorbilder ebenso wie externe Erwartungen eine wichtige Rolle spielen und dazu beitragen, dass nicht nur individuelle Laufbahnen gest\u00e4rkt, sondern auch die gesellschaftliche Relevanz und Verantwortung von Wissenschaft insgesamt sichtbarer wird.
\nGab es bereits konkrete Situationen in Ihrem Forschungsalltag, in denen Open Access hilfreich war?
\nEin besonders anschauliches Beispiel betrifft die systematische Literaturrecherche. Hier sto\u00dfen wir nach wie vor h\u00e4ufig auf Paywalls, und dass trotz zunehmender Open\u2011Access\u2011Anteile. Gerade bei einer strukturierten Literaturanalyse fehlt oft der freie Zugriff auf entscheidende Quellen. Erfreulicherweise nimmt der freie Zugang in den letzten Jahren deutlich zu.
\nEin zweites Beispiel sind die Daten, die das Deutsche Zentrum f\u00fcr Hochschul- und Wissenschaftsforschung (DZHW) erhoben hat und mit denen wir aktuell arbeiten. In der 21. Sozialerhebung wurden knapp 55.000 Studierendenbefragungen ausgewertet, in der 22. Sozialerhebung sogar rund 188.000 Studierende an 250 Hochschulen befragt. Ein solcher Datensatz ist in den meisten Einzelprojekten nicht darstellbar, erm\u00f6glichte aber durch die sekund\u00e4re Auswertung enormen Erkenntnisgewinn.
\nSchlie\u00dflich m\u00f6chte ich auf eine Erhebung hinweisen, die wir in einem unserer eigenen Projekte durchgef\u00fchrt haben. Darin haben wir \u00fcber 1.000 Wissenschaftler*innen zum Thema Transfer befragt und diese Daten im Anschluss aufbereitet und frei zug\u00e4nglich gemacht. Das schafft nicht nur Transparenz, sondern bef\u00e4higt andere Forschungsteams, auf diesen Ergebnissen aufzubauen und Impulse im Diskurs zu setzen. F\u00fcr uns selbst gewinnen die Ergebnisse dadurch zus\u00e4tzlich an Gewicht, weil sie nicht als singul\u00e4rer Beitrag, sondern als Grundlage einer eigenst\u00e4ndigen Debatte in der Community dienen k\u00f6nnen.
\nDamit eine fl\u00e4chendeckende Umstellung zu Open Access gelingen kann, sind \u00c4nderungen in ganz verschiedenen Bereichen erforderlich \u2013 u.a. Finanzierungsstrukturen, Kriterien der Forschungsbewertung und Berufungsverfahren, Ausbau von alternativen Publikationsangeboten, Governance von Publikationsorganen… Welche Aspekte sollte die TU Ihrer Meinung nach in den n\u00e4chsten Jahren priorisieren?
\nUm Open Access tats\u00e4chlich in der Breite zu leben, braucht es an einer gro\u00dfen, komplexen Universit\u00e4t wie der TU Berlin nicht weniger als einen echten Kulturwandel. Das bedeutet, kein einzelner Aspekt kann f\u00fcr sich allein wirken, weder F\u00fchrung, Anreizsetzung, Beteiligung oder Kommunikation. Erst im Zusammenspiel entfalten diese Faktoren ihre transformative Kraft. Gefragt ist also eine \u00fcbergreifende, strategisch geplante und partizipativ sowie iterativ umgesetzte Organisationsentwicklung.
\nWas es daf\u00fcr braucht, ist zun\u00e4chst eine klare Vision. Vorbild k\u00f6nnte die Transferstrategie sein, die wir gemeinsam an der TU Berlin entwickelt und verabschiedet haben. Auch dort ging es darum, ein Querschnittsthema in Forschung und Lehre zu integrieren und strukturell mitzudenken. Eine solche Vision muss auf Leitungsebene verankert und glaubw\u00fcrdig vertreten sein. Es braucht eine authentische Ressortzugeh\u00f6rigkeit im Pr\u00e4sidium, also eine Person, die Open Access mit \u00dcberzeugung lebt, kommuniziert und vorantreibt.
\nGleichzeitig braucht es universit\u00e4tsgem\u00e4\u00dfe Beteiligungsformate f\u00fcr die Fakult\u00e4ten, die zentralen und dezentralen Gremien und letztlich auch f\u00fcr die Fachgebiete selbst. Nur so entsteht echte Mitverantwortung. Dieser Wandel muss zudem strategisch abgesichert werden. Das kann zum Beispiel durch die Integration von Open-Access-Kriterien in Leistungsindikatoren, Forschungsberichten und Berufungsverhandlungen geschehen.
\nEin weiterer entscheidender Punkt sind finanzielle Rahmenbedingungen. Publikationskosten d\u00fcrfen kein Hindernis sein. Das gilt in gleichem Ma\u00dfe f\u00fcr b\u00fcrokratische H\u00fcrden. Hier braucht es schlanke Prozesse, damit Wissenschaftler*innen Zeit f\u00fcr Lehre und Forschung haben. Die Universit\u00e4t beziehungsweise die Berlin University Allianz muss dort gezielt unterst\u00fctzen.
\nNicht zuletzt braucht es Sichtbarkeit. Erfolge m\u00fcssen nach innen wie nach au\u00dfen deutlich gemacht werden. Das kann durch Formate wie den Neujahrsempfang der TU oder durch Beitr\u00e4ge in hochschul\u00fcbergreifenden Publikationsorganen wie dem Magazin der Berlin University Alliance Wir/Vier erfolgen. Auch die Open Science Ambassador-Initiative ist in diesem Kontext ein starkes Signal. Sie schafft Sichtbarkeit f\u00fcr das Thema, vernetzt Akteur*innen, und setzt konkrete Impulse, wie eine gelebte Open-Access-Kultur Realit\u00e4t werden kann.
\nKurz und knapp in einem Satz: Was finden Sie gut an Open Access?
\nWissen wird nicht weniger, wenn es geteilt wird, sondern es wird mehr und es wird besser, weil Open Access dazu beitr\u00e4gt, dass wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse nicht nur breiter zug\u00e4nglich, sondern auch qualitativ besser und sozial robuster werden.
\nGeben Sie uns zum Abschluss einen Einblick in Ihr Forschungsfeld f\u00fcr Disziplinfremde. Mit welchen Fragen und Erkenntnissen besch\u00e4ftigen Sie sich?
\nIch arbeite am Fachgebiet Konstruktion von Maschinensystemen, also an einem klassischen Maschinenbau-Fachgebiet. Hier geht es um Themen wie Bremsenforschung, Konstruktionsmethodik oder zeitgem\u00e4\u00dfe, intelligente Landtechnik. In diesem Umfeld besch\u00e4ftige ich mich mit einer vielleicht unerwarteten Frage, n\u00e4mlich wie Ingenieur*innen so ausgebildet werden k\u00f6nnen, dass sie nicht nur fachlich gut aufgestellt sind, sondern ihre gesellschaftliche Verantwortung wahrnehmen und Technik im Sinne des Gemeinwohls gestalten k\u00f6nnen.
\nMich interessiert dabei besonders, welche Kompetenzen es braucht, um in interdisziplin\u00e4ren und transdisziplin\u00e4ren Kontexten wirksam zu werden oder, mit anderen Worten, was m\u00fcssen unsere Studierenden und Wissenschaftler*innen k\u00f6nnen, um gemeinsam mit Akteur*innen aus Politik, Wirtschaft, Zivilgesellschaft und anderen Wissenschaftsbereichen an L\u00f6sungen zu arbeiten. Denn viele Herausforderungen in Bereichen wie Energie, Mobilit\u00e4t oder Landwirtschaft, vor denen wir heute stehen, sind zu komplex, um sie allein aus der Perspektive einer einzelnen Disziplin zu l\u00f6sen.
\nDarum untersuche ich in Forschungsprojekten, welche Kompetenzen Studierende, insbesondere im Ingenieurwesen, entwickeln m\u00fcssen, um in solchen Konstellationen verantwortungsvoll und wirkungsorientiert handeln zu k\u00f6nnen. Das reicht von kommunikativen und kooperativen F\u00e4higkeiten bis hin zu strategischer Reflexion und ethischer Urteilsf\u00e4higkeit. Dabei arbeite ich eng mit Partnerinnen wie dem Fraunhofer IAO und der Hochschule M\u00fcnchen zusammen und bringe die Ergebnisse in unsere Lehre und unsere Weiterbildungsangebote ein, um diese Transferkompetenz zu f\u00f6rdern. Damit m\u00f6chte ich einen Beitrag leisten, dass Hochschulen wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse nicht nur erzeugen, sondern damit in der Gesellschaft einen konkreten Mehrwert entfalten k\u00f6nnen. Ich bin \u00fcberzeugt, dass es diesen Schulterschluss dringender denn je braucht.
\nZitiervorschlag:\nOpen-Access-Team der TU Berlin (2025, Oktober 20). Thies Johannsen im Interview: \"Wissen wird nicht weniger, wenn es geteilt wird, sondern es wird mehr und es wird besser.\". Open research office berlin. https://doi.org/10.59350/hfnw3-06322\n
\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/hfnw3-06322","guid":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/?p=3566","image":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/files/2025/10/OA-Week-2025-Thies-Levsen-Johannsen-DIN-A1-quer-20251008-550x390.jpg","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1760918400,"rid":"3991f-kgs22","summary":"Ein Gastbeitrag des Open-Access-Teams der TU Berlin Bereits seit 2017 nutzt das Open-Access-Team der Technischen Universit\u00e4t Berlin die internationale Open Access Week daf\u00fcr, um mit Angeh\u00f6rigen der TU Berlin ins Gespr\u00e4ch zu kommen und Einblicke in die Perspektive von Forschenden auf Open-Access-Praktiken zu erhalten. Die so gewachsene Interviewreihe ist bislang im Blog \"Publizieren an der TU Berlin\" erschienen.","tags":["Allgemein","OAWeek","Thies Johannsen","Interview","OAWeek-Interview"],"title":"Thies Johannsen im Interview: \"Wissen wird nicht weniger, wenn es geteilt wird, sondern es wird mehr und es wird besser.\"","updated_at":1791306912,"url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/2025/10/20/thies-johannsen-interview-open-access-week-2025/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/046ak2485","name":"Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fischer","given":"Georg","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5620-5759"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2","created":1694476800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/oaberlin","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"oaberlin","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Open Research Blog Berlin","updated":1791306819,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Open Research Blog Berlin","blog_slug":"oaberlin","content_html":"
Die Hochschule f\u00fcr Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin (HTW) hat Erfreuliches zu berichten: Seit kurzem sind an der HTW vier Ambassadors f\u00fcr Open Science benannt. Wir haben Alessandro D’Arcangeli, der die Aufgabe als Ambassador f\u00fcr Open Access \u00fcbernimmt und in der Bibliothek der HTW besch\u00e4ftigt ist, ein paar Fragen zum Engagement der HTW bez\u00fcglich Open Science gestellt.
\n\nLaut Darstellung auf der eigenen Website hat die HTW vier Ambassadors\u00a0 (zu Deutsch: Botschafter*innen) f\u00fcr Open Science ernannt, um die bisherigen Initiativen zu st\u00e4rken:
\n\nDie HTW Berlin engagiert sich mit Initiativen zu Open Access, Forschungsdatenmanagement, Citizen Science und offener Lehre f\u00fcr eine Kultur des Teilens und der Zusammenarbeit. \u00dcbergeordnetes Ziel ist es, Wissen nachhaltig verf\u00fcgbar zu machen und Innovationen durch Partizipation zu f\u00f6rdern \u2013 ganz im Sinne einer offenen und verantwortungsvollen Wissenschaftspraxis.
Die vier Open Science-Ambassadors an der HTW sind:\n\n\u00b7 Citizen Science Ambassador: Julia Brandt\n\n\u00b7 Open Access Ambassador: Alessandro D'Arcangeli\n\n\u00b7 Open Educational Resources Ambassador: J\u00f6rg Maier-Rothe\n\n\u00b7 Open Data-Ambassador: Dr. Constance Holman\n
Um Genaueres zu erfahren, schickten wir Alessandro D’Arcangeli vier Fragen, die er schriftlich per Mail beantwortete.
\nAlessandro, Du bist zum Ambassador f\u00fcr Open Access ernannt worden: Was m\u00f6chtest Du im Rahmen dieser Aufgabe an der HTW gerne erreichen?\u00a0
\nAls Ambassador f\u00fcr Open Access m\u00f6chte ich dazu beitragen, die Sichtbarkeit und Akzeptanz offener Publikationsformen an unserer Hochschule weiter zu st\u00e4rken. Ein zentrales Ziel ist es, Forschende und Lehrende dabei zu unterst\u00fctzen, ihre wissenschaftlichen Ergebnisse m\u00f6glichst frei zug\u00e4nglich zu machen und sich aktiv mit den Prinzipien von Open Science auseinanderzusetzen. Dar\u00fcber hinaus m\u00f6chte ich den Austausch innerhalb der Hochschule f\u00f6rdern und dazu beitragen, bestehende Initiativen miteinander zu vernetzen.
\nWelche gemeinsamen Aufgaben verfolgen die Ambassadors? Wie greifen ihre Arbeiten ineinander?
\nDie Ambassadors verfolgen das gemeinsame Ziel, Open Science strukturell und kulturell an der Hochschule zu verankern. Dabei fungieren wir zun\u00e4chst als Anlaufstellen bzw. Ansprechpartner*innen f\u00fcr das Thema. Man kann auf uns zukommen, wenn man Fragen oder Ideen dazu hat. Au\u00dferdem bringen wir unsere verschiedenen Perspektiven und Expertisen ein und arbeiten eng zusammen, um Informationsangebote, Beratungsformate und Austauschm\u00f6glichkeiten zu entwickeln. Durch diese Zusammenarbeit entstehen Aktivit\u00e4ten, die sich gegenseitig erg\u00e4nzen und die Sichtbarkeit sowie die praktische Umsetzung von Open Science st\u00e4rken.
\nWelche Rahmenbedingungen braucht es ganz allgemein, um Open Science und Open Research in Berlin voranzubringen?
\nUm Open Science und Open Research nachhaltig zu f\u00f6rdern, braucht es sowohl institutionelle Unterst\u00fctzung als auch engagierte Personen und Netzwerke innerhalb der Wissenschaft. Transparente Richtlinien, geeignete Infrastrukturen und Anreizsysteme f\u00fcr offene Praktiken sind wichtige Voraussetzungen f\u00fcr eine breite Umsetzung. Gleichzeitig spielen Bottom-up-Initiativen eine zentrale Rolle. Ein gutes Beispiel daf\u00fcr ist die \"Interessensgemeinschaft Open Science\" an unserer Hochschule, deren Arbeit wesentlich dazu beigetragen hat, das Thema institutionell zu st\u00e4rken und sichtbar zu machen. Solche Netzwerke sind zentral, weil sie Austausch erm\u00f6glichen, Erfahrungen b\u00fcndeln und die Entwicklung einer offenen Wissenschaftskultur aktiv vorantreiben.
\nAngenommen, ich habe eine Idee oder ein Anliegen zu Open Science und m\u00f6chte mich einbringen: Wie kann ich Kontakt mit den Ambassadors aufnehmen?
\nInteressierte k\u00f6nnen sich jederzeit mit ihren Ideen oder Fragen an die Ambassadors wenden, etwa \u00fcber die auf der Open-Science-Seite der Hochschule genannten Kontaktm\u00f6glichkeiten. Ein zentraler Anlaufpunkt ist zudem die schon erw\u00e4hnte \"Interessensgemeinschaft Open Science\", die verschiedene Initiativen an der Hochschule miteinander vernetzt und den Austausch f\u00f6rdert. Neue Impulse und Beteiligung von den Hochschulangeh\u00f6rigen oder anderen Interessierten sind ausdr\u00fccklich willkommen, da Open Science nur durch gemeinsames Engagement weiterwachsen kann.
\nVielen Dank an Alessandro D’Arcangeli f\u00fcr die Beantwortung der Fragen!
\nThe World Avatar project aspires to model and\nsimulate the real world at the chemical, municipal, and geological scales. Its\ncomputational chemistry ontology,\nontology for chemical kinetic reaction mechanisms,\nand chemical species ontology are\nof particular interest for reuse, extension, and/or harmonization with\nontologies ued by NFDI4Chem and\nNFDI4Cat (see the respective\nNFDI4Chem ontology list and\nNFDI4Cat ontology list). This post\nis about the sequence of open source, open science contributions I made to the\nWorld Avatar project to improve its ontologies and ultimately add them in bulk\nto the Bioregistry/Semanatic Farm.
\nSpecifically, while working with Mario Wolter\nand Robin Str\u00f6hmann to develop an\nontology for basis sets,\nI manually curated mappings in the\nSimple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM)\nformat between basis sets appearing in the\nBasis Set Exchange, the\nGainesville Core Ontology (GC),\nthe\nElementary Multiperspective Material Ontology (EMMO),\nand Wikidata in\nNFDI4Chem/basis-set-exchange-ontology#14.
\nI was also suggested to map to the World Avatar's computational chemistry\nontology, which I wasn't very familiar with, so I went to see what information\nwas available about it in the Semantic Farm. Initially, it had incomplete and\noutdated information, including an Internet Archive link to an old version of\nthe ontology. I searched the web and found that the World Avatar project not\nonly had created a new website in the last few months, but also found that they\nwere maintaining their ontologies via a repository on GitHub\n(TheWorldAvatar/ontology). This\nnot only let me update the three existing World Avatar records in the Semantic\nFarm in\nbiopragmatics/bioregistry#2074,\nbut also got me thinking on how I could systematically construct new records in\nthe Semantic Farm for all World Avatar ontologies, similarly to what I did for\nSWEET (geology\nontologies) and CESSDA\n(humanities ontologies and controlled vocabularies).
\nThis is where the open science story begins. It would have been nice if I could\nhave just written a script to download the repository, parse its ontologies,\nextract their respective metadata, and construct new Semantic Farm records. But,\nthere were many issues that needed addressing first. Because everything was in\nan open-source repository, it was time to make some\ndrive by curations.
\nThe first thing I noticed was that the repository contained OWL files that were\nproduced from CSVs using a custom World Avatar software component called the\nTBox Generator.\nHow to download, install, or use the TBox Generator wasn't clear from the\nontologies repository, so I opened an issue\nasking for clarification.
\nOne of the maintainers for the repository responded promptly and pointed me\ntowards\ndocumentation\ninside the source code for the TBox Generator. I would have never found that!
\nThe documentation said run mvn clean install -DskipTests, which implicitly\nmeant that I should clone the repository and run Maven (mvn) with:
$ git clone https://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/baselib.git\n$ cd baselib\n$ mvn clean install -DskipTests\nThis immediately failed because some of the Java dependencies were distributed\nby GitHub's Maven repository, and this weirdly requires having an access token.\nNeither the documentation nor the error given by Maven made this clear, so I had\nto do some searching to figure it out. This must be something that's easy to\nforget about when in the Java universe after getting it initially set up, but\nnewbies never know it. In the end, I made a GitHub personal access token at\nhttps://github.com/settings/tokens/new and adding into my ~/.m2/settings.xml\nlike:
After I was able to download and build the software, I had to figure out the\nnext step on how to run it. The documentation said\njava -cp jps-base-lib.jar uk.ac.cam.cares.jps.base.converter.TBoxGeneration \nshould work, but again, Java is never so easy. After a lot of troubleshooting, I\nlearned that I additionally needed --add-opens java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED\nincantation to make it work. Honestly, I can't remember why, but this is the\ntypical experience working with Java.
This was an awful lot of work before even making a contribution, but if I didn't\nshare my newfound wisdom, then every other contributor in the future would have\nto go through the same frustrating experience. Naturally, I made a pull request\n(TheWorldAvatar/ontology#44)\nthat encoded the download and build commands and documentation into a justfile\nthat can be run by anyone.
\nIn my first contribution, I realized that the URIs for the traffic incident and\nlandslide ontologies were incorrect, probably due to forgetting to update rows\ncopy/pasted from other ontologies. I was able to update the rows in the template\nCSVs for these two ontologies in\nhttps://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/ontology/pull/40.
\nI actually did this change before figuring out how to rebuild the ontology files\nwith the TBox Generator, so this contribution doesn't have corresponding OWL\nupdates in it. For storytelling purposes, I thought it made sense to explain the\nTBox Generator first.
\nI identified four ontologies that had source CSV files, but no corresponding OWL\nfiles and opened https://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/ontology/issues/41. It\nturns out that these CSV files had syntax and semantic issues, which I figured\nout through a combination of trial-and-error running the TBox Generator and\npattern matching against how other CSVs look. It's a core skill for biocurators\nto be able to do this with their own brain.
\nUltimately, I updated the CSVs until they were able to produce OWL files in PR\nhttps://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/ontology/pull/45.
\nI identified five ontologies that had both source CSV files and OWL output\nfiles, but the CSVs had similar syntax and semantic issues as above. I fixed\nthese in https://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/ontology/pull/47.
\nIn https://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/ontology/pull/48, I extended the justfile\nto run in a loop to rebuild all ontologies. This fixed some inconsistencies and\nalso materialized the updates from my first contribution. Now, the maintainers\ncan easily create release products with a single command!
\nOnce the ontologies had been updated, I was ready to write a script to parse\ntheir respective metadata and construct new Bioregistry/Semantic Farm records.\nThis materialized in https://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry/pull/2051. I\nadded 74 new prefixes on top of the 3 existing ones for World Avatar ontologies,\nwhich can be browsed here.
\nHere are few challenges I had to address along the way:
\n.io/.com domain names.After several iterations of parsing the ontologies, I was able to encode\nrules in a script for auto-generating Bioregistry/Semantic Farm records that\nnormalized and addressed the inconsistencies from the first two points.\nImportantly, because I was able to parse the\nentire ontologies, I was able to extract the URI prefixes and example local\nunique identifiers in most cases. I had to do quite a bit of manual curation\nfor descriptions, examples, and URI format strings in the end, too. Some of it\nrequired cyber-sleuthing, especially for ontologies whose names were acronyms\nlike EMS (which means energy management system, in context).
\nI also had to decide on a systematic way of assigning prefixes to address the\nthird point. The World Avatar's nomenclature scheme Onto + wasn't\nusable - having self-referential or meta components of a prefix or resource name\nis distracting and misleading in some cases. Luckily, the typical solution is to\nsubspace prefixes for projects/series like this, which remove the collisions, so\nOntoCompChem becomes worldavatar.compchem.
After adding a resource to the Semantic Farm, it immediately becomes usable in\npyobo, which downloads, parses,\nstandardizes, and indexes ontologies and\nSSSOM Curator, which uses PyOBO and\nvarious prediction workflows such as lexical matching to predict semantic\nmappings.
\nBecause most World Avatar ontologies focus on object and data properties, I\nwrote a short script to map each against the\nRelation Ontology (RO):
\nimport bioregistry\nfrom biomappings import lexical_prediction_cli\n\nprefixes = {\n resource.prefix\n for resource in bioregistry.resources()\n if resource.part_of_database == \"worldavatar\"\n}\nlexical_prediction_cli(\"ro\", prefixes, identifiers_are_names=True)\nUnfortunately, this script did not produce any mappings on the first try.\nWorld Avatar doesn't typically add labels to its predicates, so I added the\nidentifiers_are_names argument, but I still have a few things to try as\nfollow-up.
While working on this, I realized that there wasn't a good way to navigate the\npart of database relationships, which connect prefixes to a string that\nrepresents a database (or any resource, in the future, it might make sense to\nground these to FAIRsharing or Wikidata QIDs). In\nhttps://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry/pull/2052, I extended the page\nfor navigating keywords to also include part of database relationships, so\nnow, https://semantic.farm/keyword/worldavatar shows the results from this\nwork.
\nThis all just goes to show that when working in an open source setting,\nsometimes good ideas require a lot of tangents. Being a good open source\ncitizen means that all the effort put into this benefits everyone.
\nWhile I came at World Avatar from the NFDI4Chem perspective, its ontologies\ncover several domains relevant for other NFDI consortia. In next steps, I would\nlike to more systematically identify which World Avatar ontologies are relevant\nfor which NFDI consortia and more carefully curate semantic mappings to other\nontologies used by those consortia.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/39nzd-m6998","guid":"https://cthoyt.com/2026/10/02/world-avatar","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790899200,"rid":"z41pp-y2933","summary":"The World Avatar project aspires to model and simulate the real world at the chemical, municipal, and geological scales.","tags":["Ontology","NFDI4Chem","Chemistry","Drive-by Curation","Bioregistry"],"title":"The World Avatar, NFDI, and the Anatomy of an Open Science Contribution","updated_at":1791303304,"url":"https://cthoyt.com/2026/10/02/world-avatar.html","version":"v1"}}],"items":[{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/051fd9666","name":"Case Western Reserve University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"McGaugh","given":"Stacy","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9762-0980"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f","created":1713312000,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"A Blog About the Science and Sociology of Cosmology and Dark Matter","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/tritonstation","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://tritonstation.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://tritonstation.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"tritonstation","status":"active","subfield":"3103","title":"Triton Station","updated":1791318047,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Triton Station","blog_slug":"tritonstation","content_html":"This is a guest post by Prof. Jim Schombert
\n\n\n\nGreetings Stacy’s blog readers! My name is Jim Schombert, I’ve been working with Stacy for about a quarter of a Hubble time. I knew him when his hair was brown.
\n\n\n\nIn any case, I asked him if I could make a contribution to the dark matter discussion. Partly this is motivated by the LUX-ZEPLIN ‘detection’, but also cause there are some clear red flags from a philosophy of science viewpoint. I was a philosophy major in college, switched to astronomy when I 1) realized there was no money in philosophy, and 2) people at parties would talk to an astronomy major, not so much a philosophy major. I never lost my interest in the philosophy of science, tried to keep up with the literature, so how should we view the current MOND vs dark matter debate from a philosophical view? (and for a more sophisticated analysis of the topics below, I direct the reader to Merritt’s superb books and articles on MOND).
\n\n\n\nThere are basically two types of philosophers when it comes to science, one type is heavy in mathematical logic and deep discussions of foundations of science, the other type is more concerned about how science is done, i.e. the history and impact side of science. All of us know the key writers of this second type of philosophy of science; Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos (hereafter PKL). You will know them cause when you read their works you will immediately recognize yourself and colleagues in their descriptions. You basically have this strong sense that we operate on our data and computer simulations just as described by these famous thinkers. In short form, Popper = ‘falsification’, Kuhn = ‘paradigms’, Lakatos = ‘research programs’, we will expand upon this below.
\n\n\n\nWe all know there is no ‘truth’ to our science, you can never prove a scientific idea, you can only test it, hard, in an attempt to falsify it (Popper). The more the idea stands up to testing, the ‘stronger’ it gets, where stronger means more used/accepted by the community. Paradigms (Kuhn) are now thought of more as frameworks (think Newtonian mechanics), and research programs (Lakatos) are like giant factories of ideas that define how we come up with new ideas to test. Key to all this was that PKL insisted that this only worked when discussing the history of science, and the philosophy community was deeply disappointed in the works of PKL because they wanted criteria that could be applied in the moment (i.e., some system to assist the science community in directing science to more productive methods and goals). It’s obvious to all of us (who have been doing science for awhile) that this description is more of an idealization and usually doesn’t work (pick any observing or funding review panel as an example of how this just fails in the moment, but works well in retrospect).
\n\n\n\nLet’s take a very simple example (that almost everyone is familiar with) to see how the methods proposed by PKL work best in hindsight and are fairly useless in the moment. Consider Newtonian gravity in the mid-19th century (by the way, did you know that Ptolemy’s system of epicycles was used by the makers of almanacs into the 20th century? The math was simpler and just as accurate as using Newton. But I digress). So, a wobble in the orbit of Uranus. Abandon Newton? Hell no, the framework/paradigm has solved so many problems. Consider an auxiliary hypothesis, i.e. another planet. Right there, Neptune! Boy, how strong is your paradigm that predicts new planets. Better telescopes, more accurate data, hmm, wobble in Mercury. Obviously, try the same hypothesis (the so-called planet of Vulcan). Nothing found, fortunately relativity came along pretty soon (although it’s goal was not to solve Mercury’s orbit, it had bigger issues to address). Newtonian physics survives, but now with limits on its applications (stick to low energies). In the moment, it was hard to see the depth of the problem or the need for radical change.
\n\n\n\nIn any case, us working astronomers immediately recognize this kind of scientific effort; the nuts-and-bolts, thinking about new ideas, new technology, new data – in our own research. Now let’s turn to the dark matter paradigm. For the readers of this blog, I don’t need to discuss the details of the LCDM paradigm. In brief, Oort discrepancy (1960’s), flat rotation curves (1970’s), cluster M/L’s (1980’s), large scale structure (1990’s) and, of course, the capstone CMB+BBN+Omega_Lambda (2000’s). Historically, its important to remember that a great deal of work in the 1980’s eliminated anything made of baryons for CDM (low mass stars, black holes, planets, rocks, etc). In fact, most of us stopped even trying to explain CDM by the launch of HST, there were more interesting problems to address. We just took CDM as a black box solution; those interacting galaxy simulations looked amazing.
\n\n\n\nIn the end, CDM was expected to be a gravitationally interacting, not short-lived, not hot, non-baryonic particle. With the closure of the SSC in 1992, a large number of particle physicists were suddenly out of jobs, dark matter looked like the clearest path to reach new physics (and a paycheck). And astronomers were just as guilty, Fig. 1 is a old plot from an Oemler workshop paper showing the state of the art in 1985. Notice the implication that dark matter could close the Universe (i.e., Omega = 1 all in mass; there was no Lambda back then). And a closed Universe was, for some reason*, a massive desire for the astro theoretical community. And we see the beginnings of how cosmological issues override galaxy issues for the community (there’s a nobility to doing cosmology, galaxies are dirty).
\n\n\n\nThere is also no need to re-iterate the failure of the high energy community to find any dark matter particles. The amount of money and people in CDM makes the Manhattan project look like a garage shop effort (only CDM did not deliver a new weapon by the 2020’s). During this time, a few of us noticed that the baryons in galaxies were strongly tied to the ‘dark matter’. We were told that low mass dwarf galaxies were dark matter dominated, but a few of us mentioned that they are also strongly gas dominated, i.e. how did the dark matter know to dominate in galaxies with the highest gas fractions? These kinds of anomalies began to build up for observers, didn’t really appear in the theory papers.
\n\n\n\nNow let’s consider how PKL would interpret the current status of the dark matter paradigm. The emphasis by all three philosophers was to examine the historical record. This frustrates mainstream philosophers who would, ideally, like apply some criteria to the current state of affairs rather than only look at hindsight. But there may be enough historical record to, at least, determine the current trajectory for the dark matter paradigm.
\n\n\n\nPerhaps the first ‘crisis’ to the LCDM paradigm would be the discovery of the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation. The luminosity Tully-Fisher, which was only a measure of the stellar mass by way of stellar luminosity, was not very surprising to the astro/physics community for a larger galaxy would have more stars and dark matter, thus higher rotation velocities. The mass discrepancy was obvious, vindicating the need for some sort of invisible dark matter, but the scatter was large and the relationship was distinctly non-linear at the low mass end. However, the TF relation was well mapped at the high mass end (early-type cluster galaxies) and was extremely useful at locking down cluster distances and mapping large scale structure.
\n\n\n\nIt was Stacy’s superb observer’s insight to think about adding the gas mass to the stellar mass producing a total baryon mass to compare to the rotational velocity (I helped a little, the so-called BTFR). I say ‘observer insight’ for its one of those things that if you work at optical and radio telescopes you are comfortable thinking in terms of different kinds of data, and at ease turning luminosities into stellar masses (i.e., M/L) and HI fluxes into gas masses (lots of details, but that’s what data reduction and analysis is all about). The scatter was greatly reduced and the relationship was increasingly close to a linear fit in log-log space. Regardless
of your MOND vs dark matter bias, the BTFR quite simply says the total baryon mass is related to the total dark matter mass, which would make sense if you scoped a piece of the early Universe (equal proportions of baryons and dark matter) and made a galaxy.
But that’s not how galaxy formation was suppose to work (you don’t scope a piece of the Universe, those CDM halos form first, baryons fall in later), and this baryon-dark matter relationship varied in a surprising coherent fashion across Hubble types. Stacy being a deep reader of obtuse literature in the 80’s taught us that this type of behavior was exactly predicted by basic MOND, especially for the galaxies in my new LSB catalog (to which I remember responding “You’re using my galaxies to disprove Newton? Only death can save you from my wrath”). While MOND was designed to explain flat rotation curves, its key underlying premise is that there is no dark matter, baryons decide how things move, which is what the BTFR said.
\n\n\n\nNow, in a strictly Popperian methodology, is the BTFR sufficient to falsify the dark matter paradigm? No, of course not, as Kuhn points out, a paradigm that has been so successful in making predictions, and offering research paths, is not simply dropped, that would be intellectually short-sighted. There a lots of historical examples in science to support the continued investigation into dark matter after the discovery of the BTFR. In the field of electromagnetism, one does not actually observe the magnetic fields, we observe its effects and build tools to explore its behavior and derive out rules, theories and models. There is nothing unbalanced about studying invisible dark matter.
\n\n\n\nIn a Popperian fashion, we continued to ‘ruthlessly test’ the BTFR with better samples, improved stellar population models, improved distances. The BTFR survived all this examination, although it risked refutation at every point (for example, many claims that it deviated from a linear power-law fit at the low and high mass ends). The current version by Duey et al. (2026) is by far one of the tightest corrections in astronomy, especially considering all the possible underlying astrophysical processes (e.g., feedback) that could easily distort any kinematic relation. And, as often stated, the slope is 4 and MOND predicted 4, before we looked.
\n\n\n\nBy the time of the BTFR discovery, the CDM community was deep into normal science mode. As Kuhn would state, lots of problem-solving, training students, textbooks and workshops to give. However, MOND was having its breakthroughs. The second crisis will occur with the SPARC sample where Federico Lelli showed that not only does the total baryon mass determine the total dynamical mass (BTFR), but also on the local scale within a galaxy, the baryon density is also correlated with the kinematics point by point within a galaxy’s gravitational potential. This will become the awkwardly phrased radial acceleration relation (RAR).
\n\n\n\nThe smooth change, in acceleration space, displayed by the RAR is well predicted by MOND, but is difficult to explain/reproduce in LCDM without feedback from star formation processes. And the process of adding ‘feedback’ to CDM simulations begins to feel a lot like adding epicycles to ‘save the phenomenon’. Kuhn would say that we need a shift to a new disciplinary matrix, which asks new questions, and will recognize the competence of these new baryon-to-dark matter connection. But to threaten the paradigm, anomalies like RAR and BTFR must persist across different methods, resist easy explanation, and be critical to central themes. Which they seem to do, for many observers, not so much in the theory community.
\n\n\n\nTheorists, understandably, resist the MOND framework for 1) must explain more, 2) make more precise predictions, 3) coordinate research and 4) open new avenues. These criteria were not met. Also, switching to Milgromian physics will require a complete re-training of techniques, tools and students. A huge investment in time and effort that does not immediately appeal to the theory community given the success of decades of galaxy simulations.
\n\n\n\nTo most of the community, the discovery of the BTFR and RAR do not ‘feel’ like a Kuhnian science revolution seen in the historical record (e.g. Galileo discovering the phases of Venus). A better explanation of the state of current affairs is to adopt the ideas of Lakatos. The heart of Lakato’s philosophy is the role of research programs. A research program is a more expansive view of Kuhn’s paradigms that includes much of the day-to-day operation of science; teaching, grants, textbooks, workshops, presentations. For Lakatos, it was all about whether a research area was progressive or degenerate (possibly even in a zombie stage). To be progressive, for Lakatos, the dark matter framework must be predictive, successful, expanding, yet CDM appears to be in ‘zombie’ stage, ceasing to generate novel predictions, responding to failure with ad hoc adjustments, and no clear path to increase its value as a line of thinking.
\n\n\n\nMOND work seems more progressive, clean explanations for new discoveries. But it also is struggling, the path forward is not obvious. The accelerated galaxy formation model is the most interesting discovery, and maps into our newest technology, JWST. However, it has been extremely difficult to acquire funding or observing time to address MOND ideas. It’s surprising how conservative funding and telescope panels have become (let’s do one more H_o project). The risk/reward dynamic is clearly in MOND’s favor, but not until more MOND worker are appointed to review panels. I know what I’m talking about, I ran NASA ADP review for two years. So many smart people in one room, overwhelmed by the work, reduced to the easiest path of proposal ranking.
\n\n\n\nI predict the near future will be one of continued stagnation of CDM research, no progress with many excuses. Some of the excuses looking like new physics, some perhaps even getting the fever that string theory had. The ‘successes’ for CDM have all been indirect (my observations are completely explained by X type of CDM, rather than here are my observations of X type of CDM). And there is still a role for CDM to play in astronomy. Since MOND has a non-linear Poisson equation, it does not lend itself to N-body simulations with ease. And N-body work using CDM has been extremely successful in our understanding of tidal features in interacting galaxies and shell galaxies. It just has to be remembered that when one uses CDM in your simulation, you are basically allowing a proxy for different gravity, and you call it CDM. Kinda of like the softening parameters using early N-body to avoid the wacky math singularities as ‘particles’ in your galaxy simulation got too close.
\n\n\n\n*Inflation. It was Inflationary cosmology that insisted on \u03a9m = 1, and theorists chugged that Kool-Aid hard – Stacy
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/skjf6-7y622","guid":"https://tritonstation.com/?p=13201","image":"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Oemler_1985.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1791244800,"rid":"j69be-04035","summary":"This is a guest post by Prof. Jim Schombert Greetings Stacy's blog readers! My name is Jim Schombert, I've been working with Stacy for about a quarter of a Hubble time. I knew him when his hair was brown.","tags":["Cosmology","Dark Matter","Galaxy Formation","JWST","LCDM"],"title":"CDM, what would Popper do?","updated_at":1791318315,"url":"https://tritonstation.com/2026/10/06/cdm-what-would-popper-do/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/051fd9666","name":"Case Western Reserve University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"McGaugh","given":"Stacy","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9762-0980"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f","created":1713312000,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"A Blog About the Science and Sociology of Cosmology and Dark Matter","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/tritonstation","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://tritonstation.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://tritonstation.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"tritonstation","status":"active","subfield":"3103","title":"Triton Station","updated":1791318047,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Triton Station","blog_slug":"tritonstation","content_html":"A common objection to MOND is that it does not entirely reconcile the mass discrepancy in clusters of galaxies. This can be seen as an offset in the acceleration scale between individual galaxies and clusters. This is widely seen as definitive proof of dark matter, but this is just defaulting to our confirmation bias without checking if it is really any better: just because MOND does something wrong doesn’t automatically mean that LCDM does it right.
\n\n\nI do see clusters as a problem for MOND, and there are some aspects of clusters that make good sense in LCDM. Unlike galaxies, cluster mass profiles are generally consistent with the predicted NFW halos (modulo their own core problem). That’s not a contradiction to MOND, which should do the same thing as Newton in the Newtonian regime. But rich clusters also have baryon fractions close to that expected from cosmology. From that perspective, it looks pretty reasonable. This success does not extend to lower mass clusters; in the plot above, the low mass green triangles should be higher than the higher mass gray triangles in order for all clusters to have the cosmic baryon fraction. They should not parallel the prediction of MOND. Within individual clusters, baryons are not as well mixed with dark matter as expected: they tend to have too much unseen mass at small radius, which is basically the same problem encountered by MOND.
\n\n\n\nThere are other tests, one of which is the growth of clusters. Structure is predicted to form hierarchically in LCDM: small objects form first, and pile on to make bigger ones, with the largest clusters being the last to form. So there is a test in how massive a cluster can get as a function of redshift. This is something for which LCDM makes a clear prediction. In MOND, my expectation is that structure forms faster so that massive objects are in place at higher redshift than expected in LCDM. This post is mostly about clusters in LCDM, so henceforth all masses will be conventional masses, including the putative dark matter.
\n\n\n\nLike so many things, there is a long history to this. For example, in the late ’90s, Megan Donahue reported a high temperature of ~ 12 keV for the intracluster gas in the cluster MS1054-0321. This meant that it was massive for its redshift: 7.4 x 1014 h-1 M\u2609 (dark matter and all) at z = 0.829, when the universe was only about half its current age. (Little h is the Hubble constant in units of 100 km/s/Mpc. Since we’re now pretty sure h < 1, the true mass is higher, more like 1015 M\u2609.) That’s a lot of solar masses to assemble in the available time. In 1997, this was another nail in the coffin of SCDM, which was already a zombie theory by then. But the loss of \u03a9m = 1 was still raw for some people, I guess, because she got a lot of grief for it. Can’t be true! Clusters don’t get that big that early! At least they shouldn’t. In SCDM.
\n\n\n\nStructure formation in SCDM was elegant in that in continues perpetually: as the universe expands, bigger and bigger structures continue to form; statistically, later epochs look like scaled-up versions of earlier epochs. In LCDM, this symmetry is broken by the decline in density as the universe expands. Consequently, structure forms earlier in LCDM: the action has to happen when there is still some density to work with, and the accelerated expansion provides some extra time (what’s a few billion years among cosmologists?) for mass to get together. Consequently, MS1054-0321 is not problematic in LCDM.
\n\n\n\nThe attitude persisted, however. In the mid-’00s, Jim Schombert and I started using the wide field near-IR camera NEWFIRM to study high redshift clusters. Jim had a clever way of identifying them, which turned out not to be particularly hard, e.g., MS 1426.9+1052 at z = 1.83. This is about 10 Gyr ago, and made the theorists squirm. That didn’t leave enough time for a cluster to form. On multiple occasions I had the following conversation with different theorists:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nme: Hey, look at this clusters at z = 1.8.
\n\n\n\ntheorist: That isn’t a cluster.
\n\n\n\nme: Sure it is. There’s the central galaxy, which contains a bright radio source (QSO). You can see lots of other galaxies around it. That’s what a cluster looks like.
\n\n\n\ntheorist: Must be a chance projection.
\n\n\n\nme: There are spectra for many of the surrounding galaxies; they’re all at the same redshift.
\n\n\n\ntheorist: …
\n\n\n\nme: So… a cluster at z = 1.8. Pretty cool, huh?
\n\n\n\ntheorist: That isn’t a cluster.
\n
This work became part of Jay Frank’s thesis. He found evidence for more structure at even higher redshift. A lot of this apparent clustering probably is not real… the statistics get worse as you push farther out: fewer galaxies, worse data. But there were still a surprising number of objects in apparent association up to and beyond z > 5. That’s pretty much all of time, leaving a mere Gyr to go from the completely homogeneous universe that we see in the CMB at z = 1090 to the first stars around z ~ 20 to the first galaxies to big galaxies to protoclusters – or whatever we want to call these associations of many galaxies in the same place on the sky at the same redshift.
\n\n\n\nJay did a lot of work to estimate the rate of false positives. Long story short, we expect about 1/3 of the protoclusters he identified to be real structures. That’s both bad and good – lots of chaff, but some wheat too. One thing Jay did was to analyze the Millennium simulation in the same way as the data. This allows us to quantify what we would see if the universe looked like an LCDM simulation.
\n\n\n\nThe plot below shows the characteristic brightness of galaxies at various redshifts. For the pros, this is the knee in the Schechter function fit to the luminosity distribution of galaxies in redshift bins. We saw the same thing in protoclusters and in the field: galaxies were brighter than anticipated in the simulation. Between redshifts 3 < z < 4, the characteristic magnitude is expected to be 23. That’s pretty faint. In the data, it’s more like 21. That’s also faint, but about a factor of 6 brighter than they should be. That’s a lot of stars that have formed before they’re supposed to, in galaxies that are bigger than they should yet be, with some of them already clustering together ahead of their time.
\n\n\nThis has been the observer’s experience. Donahue wasn’t the first, and Franck won’t be the last. Every time we look, we see more structure in place sooner than had been expected before it was seen. I don’t hear people complaining about our clusters at z = 1.8 anymore; those have been seen enough to become normalized. Perhaps they have even been explained satisfactorily. But they sure weren’t expected, much less predicted.
\n\n\n\nSo, just how big can a cluster get? Mortonson et al. (2011) set out to answer this question. The graph below shows the upper limit they predict for the most massive cluster in the universe as a function of redshift. This declines as redshift increases because we’re looking back in time; high redshift clusters haven’t had time time to assemble more mass than the upper most line. They project this into what would be discovered in an all-sky survey, and more realistic surveys of finite size. Basically nothing should exist above these lines.
\n\n\nTheir prediction was almost immediately put to the test by the discovery of El Gordo, a big fat cluster at z = 0.87 reported by Menanteau et al. (2012), who published the X-ray image above. It is currently the record holder for the most massive known object that is thought to be gravitationally bound, weighing in at 2 or 3 x 1015 M\u2609, depending on who you ask. That’s about a thousand Milky Ways, plus a few hundred Andromedas. Give or take.
\n\n\n\nEl Gordo straddles the uppermost line in the graph above. A naive reading of the first mass estimate suggests that it’s roughly a 50/50 proposition whether the entire observable universe should contain exactly one El Gordo. However, El Gordo was discovered in something less than a full sky survey. The appropriate comparison is to the green line, which El Gordo clearly exceeds – by about 3 sigma. This is the case for both of the illustrated mass estimates as the high mass point has a larger error bar. They both exceed the green line by a hair less than 3 sigma. Formally, this means that the chance of finding El Gordo in our universe is only a few percent.
\n\n\n\nA few percent is not good. Neither is it terrible – I’ve often commented here on how the uncertainties are larger than they seem. This is especially true of the tails of the distribution. So maybe a few percent is pessimistic; sometimes that’s how the dice roll. On the other hand, the odds aren’t better than 10%: El Gordo is not likely to exist however we slice the uncertainties. Whether we should be worried about it is just a matter of how surprising it is. A similar situation arises with the collision velocity of the Bullet cluster, which is either absurdly unlikely (about 1 chance in 10 billion) or merely unusual (maybe 1 in 10). So I made the above plot by adding El Gordo to the predictions of Mortonson et al., and filed it away under
\n\n\nRecently, Elena Asencio, Indranil Banik, and Pavel Kroupa have made a more thorough study. They have their own blog post, so I won’t repeat the technical description. Basically, they sift through a really big LCDM simulation to find objects that could be (or become) like El Gordo.
\n\n\n\nThe short answer is that it doesn’t happen, similar to big voids. They estimate that the odds of El Gordo existing are a bit less than one in a billion. I’m sure one can quibble with details, but we’re not going to save LCDM with factors of two in a probability that starts this low. El Gordo just shouldn’t exist.
\n\n\n\nThe probability is lower than in the graph above because it isn’t just a matter of mass. It is also the mass ratio of the merging clumps (both huge clusters in their own right), their collision speed, impact parameter, and morphology. As they are aware, one must be careful not to demand a perfect match, since there is only one reality. But neither is it just a matter of assembling mass; that understates the severity of the problem. This is where simulations are genuinely helpful: one can ask how often does this happen? If the answer is never, one can refine the query to be more lenient. The bottom line here is that you can’t be lenient enough to get something like El Gordo.
\n\n\n\nHere is their money plot. To be like El Gordo, an object would have to be up on the red line. That’s well above 5 sigma, which is the threshold where we traditionally stop quibbling about percentiles and just say Nope. Not an accident.
\n\n\nIn principle, this one object falsifies the LCDM structure formation paradigm. We are reluctant to put too much emphasis on a single object (unless it is the bullet cluster and we have clickbait to sell) as its a big universe, so there can always be one unicorn or magnetic monopole somewhere. Ascencio et al note that a similar constraint follows for the Bullet cluster itself, which also should not exist, albeit at a lower significance. That’s two unicorns: we can’t pretend that this is a one-off occurrence. The joint probability of living in a universe with both El Gordo and the Bullet cluster is even lower than either alone.
\n\n\n\nLooking at Ascencio’s figure, it strikes me as odd not only that we find huge things at high redshift, but also that we don’t see still bigger objects at low redshift. There were already these huge clusters ramming into each other when the universe had only expanded to half its present size. This process should continue to build still bigger clusters, as indicated by the lines in the plot. The sweet spot for finding really massive clusters should be about z = 0.5, by which time they could have reached a mass of nearly 1016 M\u2609 as readily (or not!) as El Gordo could reach its mass by its observed redshift. (The lines turn down for the largest expansion factors/lowest redshifts because surveys cover a fixed area on the sky, which is a conical volume in 3D. We reside at the point of the cone, and need to see a ways out before a volume large enough to contain a giant cluster has been covered.)
\n\n\n\nI have never heard a report of a cluster anywhere near to 1016 M\u2609. A big cluster is 1015 M\u2609. While multiple examples of clusters this big are known, to the best of my knowledge, El Gordo is the record holding Fat One at twice or thrice that. The nearest challenger I can readily find is RX J1347.5-1145 at z=0.451 (close to the survey sweet spot) weighing in at 2 x 1015 M\u2609. Clusters just don’t seem to get bigger than that. This mass is OK at low redshift, but at higher z we shouldn’t see things as big as El Gordo. Given that we do see them at z = 0.87 (a = 0.535), why don’t we see still bigger ones at lower redshift? Perhaps structure formation saturates, but that’s not what LCDM predicts. If we can somehow explain El Gordo at high z, we are implicitly predicting still bigger clusters at lower redshift – objects we have yet to discover, if they exist, which they shouldn’t.
\n\n\n\nWhich is the point.
\n\n\n\nThe image featured at top is an X-ray image of the hot gas in the intracluster medium of El Gordo from NASA/CXC/Rutgers/J. Hughes et al.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/s9g52-ytt84","guid":"http://tritonstation.com/?p=7718","image":"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/elgordo_xray.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1612483200,"rid":"v0bz9-n1w20","summary":"A common objection to MOND is that it does not entirely reconcile the mass discrepancy in clusters of galaxies. This can be seen as an offset in the acceleration scale between individual galaxies and clusters.","tags":["LCDM"],"title":"The Fat One \u2013 a test of structure formation with the most massive cluster of galaxies","updated_at":1791316339,"url":"https://tritonstation.com/2021/02/05/the-fat-one-a-test-of-structure-formation-with-the-most-massive-cluster-of-galaxies/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/051fd9666","name":"Case Western Reserve University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"McGaugh","given":"Stacy","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9762-0980"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f","created":1713312000,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"A Blog About the Science and Sociology of Cosmology and Dark Matter","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/tritonstation","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://tritonstation.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://tritonstation.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"tritonstation","status":"active","subfield":"3103","title":"Triton Station","updated":1791318047,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Triton Station","blog_slug":"tritonstation","content_html":"I see that I’ve been posting once a month so far in 2026. I’ve lots to say but no time to say it. Some of it good, some of it bad, maybe sometime I’ll get around to it. No guarantees. On the good side, I’ve been working on a big project or two; may have something to say about those soon. I’ve also been meaning to write about the Planet 9 anomaly for months stretching into years now. Fascinating stuff related to MOND but not something I’ve worked on myself. On the bad side, I’ve been obliged to waste yet more time on my university administration’s insistence on merging our department into physics based on a snap decision made by a disinterested leader who employed all the forethought typically reserved for bombing a random country in the Middle East.
\n\n\n\nSo I have had no time for novel posts lately, and today is no different. However, I thought readers of this blog would appreciate the post Paradigm Shifts in Modern Astrophysics: Applying Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to Dark Matter at Heritage Diner that was pointed out to me by Moti Milgrom. Since I wouldn’t have seen it had he not mentioned it, perhaps that’s the case for you as well. I’m not gonna re-post it verbatim – you can read it there yourself – but I am going to offer a running commentary with a few observations, both personal and historical. So bring it up in a separate browser window and let’s read along…
\n\n\n\nThis post riffs off of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as it pertains to dark matter and MOND. If you’re not familiar with it, Kuhn’s work on the philosophy of science is foundational to the way in which a lot of physical scientists approach their field (whether they realize it or not). Philosophers of science have done a lot more since then, but I’m not going to attempt to go there. I will look back to Popper* to note that I’ve heard Kuhn depicted as being some sort of antithesis to Popper. I don’t see it that way. To be pithy, Popper tells us how science should be done while Kuhn tells us how it is done. Who could have imagined that a human endeavor would be messy in practice and not always live up to its ideal?
\n\n\n\nI’m not sure how to do this; I guess I’ll excerpt relevant quotes and riff off those. The basic thesis is that dark matter is on the brink of a Kuhnian paradigm shift.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWe are living through exactly that moment in modern astrophysics.
\n
I certainly hope so! This moment in the history of science is taking a long damn time. A century ago, we went from “classical physics explains everything” to “quantum mechanics, WTF?’ in the space of about a decade. I’ve been working on matters related to MOND for over thirty years now, dark matter longer than that, and of course Milgrom started more than a decade before I did.
\n\n\n\nThe essay discusses the “cartography of collapse,” which includes crisis and revolution:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe third stage is crisis \u2014 triggered when anomalies accumulate beyond the paradigm's absorptive capacity. And the fourth is revolution, in which a new framework displaces the old not through incremental persuasion but through a gestalt shift, what Kuhn famously described as seeing the same duck-rabbit drawing and suddenly recognizing a rabbit where you had always seen a duck.
\n
This resonated with me because I had exactly this experience. I started my career as much a believer in dark matter as anyone. I was barely aware that MOND existed (this seems to remain a common condition). But it reared its ugly head in my own data for low surface brightness galaxies. Try as I might – and I tried mighty hard, for a long time – I could not reconcile how the shapes of rotation curves depended on surface brightness as they should according to Newton while simultaneously lying exactly on the Tully-Fisher relation without any hint of dependence on surface brightness+. I could explain one or another, but not both simultaneously – at least, not without engaging in some form of tautology that made it so. I came up with a lot of those, and that has been a full-time occupation for many theorists ever since.
\n\n\n\nFor me, this gradually became a genuine crisis. I pounded my head against the wall for months. Then, as I was wrestling with this problem, I happened to attend a talk by Milgrom. I almost didn’t go. I remember thinking “modified gravity? Who wants to hear about that?” But I did, and in a few short lines on the board, Milgrom derived from MOND exactly the result I found so confusing in terms of dark matter. This chance meeting in Middle Earth (Cambridge, UK) changed how I saw the universe. The change wasn’t immediate – it had to ferment a while – but ultimately I found myself asking myself over and over how this stupid theory could have its predictions come true when there was so much evidence for dark matter. Finally I realized that the evidence for dark matter assumes that gravity is normal; really it was just evidence of a discrepancy, and it could be that the assumption was at fault. That realization was sudden: where I’d always seen a duck, suddenly I could also see a rabbit.
\n\n\n\nMost scientists have not had this experience. What constitutes a crisis serious enough to contemplate a paradigm change is a highly personal matter of judgement. It happened in my data, so I took it seriously, but others didn’t care. So I made predictions for their data. Some of those came true, but they rejected the evidence of their own data. It just could not be so! At what point does a mere problem amount to a true anomaly?
\n\n\n\nPart of the sociological issue is that the dark matter paradigm has been in a constant state of crisis since its inception. The reasons vary over time. Sometimes valid solutions have been found to the crisis du jour, other times we’ve chosen to just live with it. It is much easier to live with a bad solution than to rethink one’s entire world view.
\n\n\n\nThe problem with being in a constant state of crisis makes is that it seems like nothing can ever be a genuine crisis. Every foundational change is just another new normal. We complain, say it can’t be so, argue, offer bad ideas, reject them, get used to them, then eventually accept that one of them maybe isn’t so bad, so that must be what is going on. After a few years It is Known and people convince themselves that we expected just that all along.
\n\n\n\nIt takes a lot of evidentiary weight for a paradigm to change, and it takes a lot of time for that to accumulate. But, as Kuhn recognized, mere facts are not enough. Humans and their attitudes matter. As Feyerabend noted,
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe normal component [i.e. the accepted paradigm and its adherents] is large and well entrenched. Hence, a change of the normal component is very noticeable. So is the resistance of the normal component to change. This resistance becomes especially strong and noticeable in periods where a change seems to be imminent.
\n\n\n\nP. Feyerabend in Criticism and Growth of Knowledge
\n
The post correctly points out that dark matter itself was an anomaly going back to Zwicky in 1933. This is often depicted^ as the first detection of dark matter, but it was also noted by Oort in 1932. Zwicky was aware of Oort’s work and cited him, but they’re very different results. Oort was worried about a factor of ~2 discrepancy in stellar dynamics in our local chunk of the Milky Way; Zwicky discovered a discrepancy of a factor of ~1000 in the Coma cluster of galaxies. These both imply the need for unseen mass, but the results are not at all the same. In retrospect, Oort’s discrepancy is a subtle detection of a flat rotation curve while Zwicky’s discrepancy was (at least) two distinct discrepancies: what we now consider the usual cosmic dark matter, but also missing baryons: most of the normal matter in clusters is in the hot, diffuse intracluster medium, not in the stars in the galaxies that Zwicky could see and account for. The modern discrepancy is only a factor of ~6, which is rather less than 1,000. (The distance scale also played a role in exaggerating Zwicky’s result.)
\n\n\n\nThis all seemed crazy in the 1930s, even in the immediate aftermath of the quantum revolution. Consequently, Zwicky’s work was mostly ignored$. The subject of dark matter didn’t really take off until the 1970s. Considerable credit goes (rightly) to Vera Rubin, though many others made essential contributions – just on the subject of rotation curves, Albert Bosma, Mort Roberts, and Seth Shostak all made important contributions, the relative importance of which depends on who you ask.
\n\n\n\nAn important aspect of scientific revolutions is persistence. Vera was persistent. She was fond of relating the story of showing her first (1970) flat rotation curve of Andromeda to Alan Sandage, only to have him dismiss it as “the effect of looking at a bright galaxy.” What the heck did that mean? Nothing, of course – it is the sort of stupid thing that smart people say when confronted with the inconceivable. So Vera persisted, and by the end of the decade had shown that flat rotation curves were the rule, not some strange exception. They became accepted as a de facto law of nature, and the dark matter interpretation was solidly in place by 1980.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe scientific community absorbed this anomaly not by questioning Newtonian gravity or Einstein's general relativity, but by proposing an invisible scaffolding \u2014 a halo of non-luminous, non-interacting matter surrounding every galaxy. Dark matter became not a crisis but a patch.
\n
Indeed, this seemed the most appropriate (scientifically conservative) course of action at the time, as summarized in this exchange (also from the early 1980s):
\n\n\nTo emphasize the essence of what is said here:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTohline: I might be so bold as to suggest that the validity of Newton’s law should now be seriously questioned.
\n\n\n\nRubin: The point you raise is worth keeping in mind although I believe most of us would rather alter Newtonian gravitational theory only as a last resort.
\n
This was a very reasonable attitude, at the time. But I’ve heard the phrase “only as a last resort” many times now over the course of many years from many different scientists. At what point have we reached the last resort? In the case of dark matter, once we’ve convinced ourselves that invisible mass has to exist, how can we possibly disabuse ourselves of that notion, should it happen to be wrong?
\n\n\n\nIn Kuhnian terms the last resort is reached when the weight of anomalies in the standard paradigm become too great to sustain. But that point is never reached for many die-hard adherents. Whatever the right answer about dark matter turns out to be, I’m sure many brilliant people will go to their graves in denial. Hence the more cynical phrase
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScience progresses one funeral at a time.%
\n
But does it? What if the adherents of an ingrained but incorrect paradigm breed faster than they go away? I’ve seen True Believers train graduate students who’ve gone on to train students of their own. Each generation seems to accept without serious examination the inadequate explanations for the anomalies made by their antecedents, so the weight of the anomalies doesn’t accumulate; instead, each one gets swept separately under the proverbial rug and forgotten. Forgetting is important: when new anomalies come to light, hands are waved and new explanations are promulgated; no one chekcs if the new explanations contradict the previous generation of explanations. What passed before is a solved problem, and we need never speak of it again.
\n\n\n\nThis is not a recipe for a scientific revolution, but for a thousand years of dark epicycles.
\n\n\n\nReturning to the post,
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy the late 1980s and early 1990s, dark matter had been formally incorporated into the reigning cosmological framework. Lambda-CDM \u2014 where Lambda refers to the cosmological constant (a proxy for dark energy) and CDM stands for Cold Dark Matter \u2014 became the standard model of cosmology.
\n
The essence of this statement is correct but some of the details are not. Dark matter was widely accepted by 1980. That’s still a little before my time, but my impression is that the magnitude of the discrepancy was at first a factor of two, so it could simply have been normal baryons that were hard to see. However, the discrepancy rapidly snowballed to an order of magnitude, so we needed something non-baryonic. This was happening simultaneously with talk of supersymmetry and grand unified theories in particle physics that could readily provide new particles to be candidates for the dark matter, leading to the shotgun marriage of particle physics and cosmology, two communities that had had little to do with each other before then, and which still make an odd couple. Cosmology as traditionally practiced by astronomers needed dark matter but didn’t much care what it was; particle physics was all about the possibility of new particles but didn’t care about the details of the astronomical evidence.
\n\n\n\nTo rephrase the above quote, I think it is fair to say that “by the late 1980s and early 1990s, cold dark matter had been formally incorporated into the reigning cosmological framework.” But that framework was not yet LCDM, it was \u03a9m = 1 SCDM. The Lambda only came to prominence by the end of the 1990s, as I’ve related elsewhere. This process is depicted by many scientists as a revolution in itself, and in many regards it was. The cosmological constant had been very far out of favor; rehabilitating it was a grueling experience and no trivial matter. But it wasn’t really a scientific revolution in the sense that Kuhn meant: our picture didn’t fundamentally change, we just learned to accept a parameter& that was already there but that we didn’t like.
\n\n\n\nThe post goes on to note the absence of dark matter detections:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis silence is itself an anomaly… as the silence deepens, the null result itself becomes harder to dismiss.
\n
This is correct, and yet… Physicists have built many experiments that have achieved extraordinary sensitivities. If cold dark matter was composed of WIMPs as originally hypothesized, we would have detected them long ago. Initially, the reaction was to modify WIMPs. Did we say the cross-section would be 10-39 cm2? We meant 10-44 cm2. When that was excluded, we slid the cross section still lower, but people also started giving themselves permission to think the unthinkable. By unthinkable I mean a particle that can’t be detected, not modified gravity. That’s more unthinkable. So the anomaly isn’t dismissed, but it is treated with less gravity than it should be, and certainly with less import than a positive detection would have been granted. Did we say WIMPs? We didn’t mean just WIMPs. It could be anything. (They damn well meant WIMPs and only WIMPs#. Anyone who tells you otherwise is gaslighting*% you, and probably themselves.)
\n\n\n\nThe post goes on to talk about MOND. It gives me too much credit for the gravitational lensing work. This was done by Tobias Mistele, and our work is based on that of Brouwer et al. But it is correct to note that these data are a problem for the dark matter paradigm. Rotation curves remain flat beyond where dark matter halos should end. If correct, this is a genuine anomaly. Perhaps in some distant future it will be recognized** as such in retrospect; at present it seems mostly to be ignored.
\n\n\n\nIt goes on to talk about the JWST observations. Yeah, that part is correct. The community seems to be in the usual process of gaslighting itself into denial of the anomaly. For the first two years after JWST started returning images of the deep universe, people were aghast. How can this be so? It was all anyone could talk about. But then the unexpected became the new normal. Hands were waved, star formation was accepted to be absurdly efficient, and people accepted the impossible. I no longer hear the talk of how problematic the JWST observations are; this chatter simply stopped.
\n\n\n\nAnomalies don’t weigh a paradigm down if we don’t accept that they’re anomalies. But I’ve lived through the revolution, it’s hard to see a positive outcome while it is still ongoing. For it is certainly true that
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhat waits on the other side of the dark matter revolution \u2014 if that is what is coming \u2014 we cannot yet know.
\n
The future is the unknown territory. We don’t know, and can never know, if dark matter doesn’t exist – it is impossible to prove the negative. But we do know MOND works much better than it should in a universe made of dark matter. That demands a scientific explanation that is still wanting. But MOND by itself is not a complete answer, so we are like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each sensing a different part of reality but as yet unable to see the whole.
\n\n\n\nStill, there is reason for optimism. The article closes by noting that
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKuhn's deepest insight was not that science changes. It is that the change, when it comes, is never merely technical. It is a reorganization of the world itself \u2014 the universe seen suddenly whole in a configuration it has always had, but that we had simply lacked the paradigm to perceive.
\n
Not knowing how things ultimately work out is good, actually. One way or the other, there is still fundamental science to be done. We have not reached the stage of looking for our discoveries in the sixth place of decimals.
\n\n\n\n*Trivia I just learned looking at Popper’s wikipedia page: he was spending his last days in London around the same time I was a postdoc in Cambridge just starting to struggle with the scientific and philosophical implications of the dark matter-MOND miasma.
\n\n\n\nUnrelated trivia: I was at a workshop in Jerusalem early in the century but missed the opportunity to meet Jacob Bekenstein because I was too shy to bother the great man.
\n\n\n\n+If you do not find this confusing, you are not thinking clearly.
\n\n\n\n^A nice, brief summary of this early history is related by Einasto. This is the first place I’ve seen the citation to Opik (1915) written out. I’ve only heard mentioned verbally before, so I’ll have to try looking that up later.
\n\n\n\nThe full story is way more complicated than this sounds, and still gets debated off and on. The amplitude of the Oort discrepancy is much smaller today. Locally, the 3D density of mass seems to be accounted for by known stars, gas, and stellar remnants (which were still a new thing in the 1930s). So this Oort limit shows no discrepancy. There remains a modest discrepancy in the 2D dynamical surface density. It appears to me to boil down to the vertical restoring force having a (sometimes ignored) term that depends on the gradient of the rotation curve. Were that falling in a normal Newtonian way, there would be no discrepancy. But it isn’t; this deviation from Newton in the radial direction leads to the Oort discrepancy in the vertical direction. Instead of being as negative as Newton predicts, dV/dR is close to zero, hence my description of this as an indirect detection of a[n almost] flat rotation curve. (dV/dR = -1.7 km/s/kpc, so not exactly zero, but a lot closer to zero than Newton without dark matter would have it be.) The vertical discrepancy is nevertheless much reduced, now being well below a factor of two.
\n\n\n\n$To his apparently great embitterment. He had some choice things to say about astronomers of his time. I am inclined to suspect that those who praise Zwicky the loudest today would have been among those he had reason to complain about had they been contemporaries.
\n\n\n\n%This is attributed to Planck, but he had a lot more nuanced things to say about it in his Nobel Prize lecture.
\n\n\n\n&Einstein disavowed the cosmological constant as his “greatest blunder,” so one argument against it was (for a long time) that it should never have been a part of the theory of General Relativity in the first place. I wonder how things might have gone had that been the case – that he had never introduced Lambda. Perhaps then the data that led to us accepting Lambda would have required a genuine revolution, but it isn’t obvious that we would have accepted it (we might still be debating it), nor is it apparent that LCDM is what comes out of such a revolution. But we don’t get to do that experiment: the Great Man had suggested Lambda, so it was OK to bring it back: we weren’t wrecking his theory by introducing a crazy new entity, we were just admitting an unlikely (antigravity-like) component thereof.
\n\n\n\n#Or axions! Or warm or self-interacting dark matter. Or macros nee strange nuggets! Or or or… Sure, there have been lots of ideas for what the dark matter could be. But when we say that “by the late 1980s and early 1990s, cold dark matter had been formally incorporated into the reigning cosmological framework” what the vast majority of scientists working on the topic (including myself) meant was that CDM == WIMPs. We were aggressively derisive of other ideas, and these are only dredged up again now because of the experimental non-detection of WIMPs. WIMPs are still a better dark matter candidate than the others for the same reasons that we were derisive of the others back in the day. We haven’t been looking as hard for the others, so comparable experimental limits do not yet exist. To quote myself,
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe concept of dark matter is not falsifiable. If we exclude one candidate, we are free to make up another one. After WIMPs, the next obvious candidate is axions. Should those be falsified, we invent something else. (Particle physicists love to do this. The literature is littered with half-baked dark matter candidates invented for dubious reasons, often to explain phenomena with obvious astrophysical causes. The ludicrous uproar over the ATIC and PAMELA cosmic ray experiments is a good example.)
\n\n\n\nMcGaugh (2008)
\n
*%An easy way to deflate such gaslighting is to ask why so many experiments have been built to search for WIMPs but not all these other allegedly great dark matter candidates. After a pause and dismayed stare, you’ll probably get an answer about “looking under the lamp post” because that’s where it is possible to make detections. That’s sorta true, but it isn’t the real reason. The real reason is that we all drank the Kool-Aid of the WIMP miracle, so genuinely believed that the dark matter had to be WIMPS, not merely that they were a convenient experimental target. (I did not chug the kool-aid as hard as the people who based entire careers on building WIMP detection experiments, but I did buy into the idea to the exclusion of other possibilities for dark matter – as did most everyone else.)
\n\n\n\n**In retrospect, Galileo’s observations of the angular size and phases of Venus were utterly fatal to the geocentric paradigm. That’s easy to say now; at the time it was just another piece of evidence.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/n1xks-n8x42","guid":"https://tritonstation.com/?p=12318","image":"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/nopeaceduckgodrabbitgod.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1773100800,"rid":"reyqc-svw79","summary":"I see that I've been posting once a month so far in 2026. I've lots to say but no time to say it. Some of it good, some of it bad, maybe sometime I'll get around to it. No guarantees. On the good side, I've been working on a big project or two;","tags":["Dark Matter","LCDM","MOND","Personal Experience","Philosophy Of Science"],"title":"Paradigm Shifts in Modern Astrophysics","updated_at":1791315916,"url":"https://tritonstation.com/2026/03/10/paradigm-shifts-in-modern-astrophysics/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/02twcfp32","name":"Crossref"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Montilla","given":"Luis Miguel","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7079-6775"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Crossref Staff"}],"community_id":"093ada45-3a02-4007-b8b6-be28f221e01d","created":1780876800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Recent content in Blog on Crossref","doi":"https://doi.org/10.64000/crossref","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/093ada45-3a02-4007-b8b6-be28f221e01d/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.crossref.org/blog/feed.xml","filter":null,"generator":"Hugo","home_page_url":"https://www.crossref.org/blog/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.64000","relative_url":null,"secure":null,"slug":"crossref","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"Crossref Blog","updated":1791244800,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Crossref Blog","blog_slug":"crossref","content_html":"Crossref members register around 37,000 records daily. All this metadata is openly shared with the global scholarly community through our free APIs. We receive over two billion calls to our API each month, signalling its use by hundreds of tools and services worldwide, supporting the discovery and assessment of scholarly metadata. As part of a new series in our blog, we will spotlight the diversity of tools and integrations that rely on Crossref metadata to serve the scholarly community. In this initial post, we chat to Luca Foppiano, the developer and maintainer of Grobid1, to learn about how Grobid uses Crossref metadata to improve the extraction and enrichment of bibliographic information from scholarly PDFs.
\nIf you've ever tried to extract bibliographic data from a PDF, you know this is not always straightforward. Copying author names, titles, and references by hand is tedious. Often, the layout includes invisible characters that someone has to clean, and even automated extraction often fails because the PDF format was conceived for reading documents across platforms; not for clean, structured metadata. Then, if you are considering doing this in bulk, with long lists of files, the problem grows exponentially. This is the core problem that Grobid was conceived to solve.
\nGrobid is an open-source software library, written by Patrice Lopez, that helps users extract and parse technical and academic text from PDF files. This means you can use a scholarly PDF as input, and Grobid will extract structured bibliographic metadata, including title, abstract, authors, affiliations, keywords, references, and more. Integration with Crossref's metadata allows Grobid to further augment the quality of that metadata and improve the overall accuracy of the process.
\nGrobid is used by integration services like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, HAL Research Archive, the European Patent Office, The Institute of Scientific and Technical Information - French National Centre for Scientific Research (INIST-CNRS), Mendeley, CERN (Invenio), Internet Archive1, and research projects2.
\nDuring the first quarter of 2026, our REST API received more than 100 million requests from Grobid software clients. Grobid queries the REST API and retrieves the metadata for the full reference, adding missing elements and improving the overall accuracy of the process. Additionally, this integration makes full use of Crossref's different API pools2 by letting users make polite requests or include their Metadata Plus API keys in the software if they are already Metadata Plus subscribers3.
\nFor example, an unstructured reference that appears at the end of a scholarly document might look as follows:
\nRada, F, et al. \"Osmotic and turgor relations of three mangrove ecosystem species.\" Australian Journal of Plant Physiology, vol. 16, no. 6, 1 Dec. 1989, pp. 477\u2013486, https://doi.org/10.1071/pp9890477.\nAs we can see, this specific citation style includes only the leading author. Other styles might, for example, use the journal abbreviated name or even skip it entirely. After being processed by Grobid, this reference is reorganized into a specific standard format called Text Encoding Initiative or TEI. Don't be alarmed if it looks complex, these formats aren't intended for humans to read, they're intended for machines and interactions between software. What we want to show is how two lines describing references are tagged and structured (for which having a DOI with rich metadata definitely helps):
\n status=\"consolidated\" source=\"crossref\" xml:id=\"b1\">\n level=\"a\" type=\"main\">Osmotic and Turgor Relations of Three Mangrove Ecosystem Species\n type=\"first\">F\n type=\"first\">G\n type=\"first\">A\n type=\"first\">M\n type=\"first\">O\n type=\"first\">A\n type=\"DOI\">10.1071/pp9890477\n \n level=\"j\">Australian Journal of Plant Physiology\n type=\"ISSN\">0310-7841\n type=\"ISSNe\">1446-5655\n unit=\"volume\">16\n unit=\"issue\">6\n unit=\"page\" from=\"477\" to=\"486\"/>\n type=\"published\" when=\"1989-12-01\"/>\n type=\"raw_reference\">Rada, F., Goldstein, G., Orozco, A., Montilla, M., Zabala,O. & Az\u00f3car, A. Relaciones Osm\u00f3ticas\n \nIn addition, there is another tool that complements API queries with Crossref bulk metadata options. The team behind Grobid also developed Biblio-glutton4, a utility \"dedicated to scientific bibliographic information\" that serves as a local, high-performance cache of Crossref (and other) scholarly metadata. Being local first means you can use it with the public data file5, deploy your own copy of the Crossref database, make updates as needed, and query as many times as you require.
\nGrobid has recently improved its integration with Crossref to make use of the REST API polite pool6 and added more metadata statements, such as the CRediT taxonomy and conflict-of-interest statements, which were requested by users.
\nAnother synergistic aspect of this Crossref integration is that users' outputs can be enriched with funding metadata, identify mentions of datasets (data citation endpoint) and software, and through the use of modules, including other discipline-specific elements like astronomical entities, superconductor materials, and entities identified with Wikidata IDs.
\nHave you used Grobid with the Crossref API? We'd love to hear about your experience or use cases in the comments.
\nCrossref holds over 180 mln records contributed by more that 25,000 member organisations from across the world. We make all the metadata openly available via our REST API. If your tool can also benefit from integrating our open metadata, you can also explore our documentation and test different metadata retrieval options.
\nHouten, S., Hendricks, G., & Polischuk, P. (2024). Rebalancing our REST API traffic. https://doi.org/10.64000/pq6bm-0qs92\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\nBesan\u00e7on, L., Cabanac, G., Labb\u00e9, C., Magazinov, A., di Scala, J., Tkaczyk, D., & Weber-Boer, K. (2025). Detection of metadata manipulations: Finding sneaked references in the scholarly literature (Version 1). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2501.03771\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\nGrobid documentation. https://grobid.readthedocs.io/\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\nBiblio-glutton. https://github.com/kermitt2/biblio-glutton\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\nRittman, M., del Ojo El\u00edas, C., & Montilla, L. (2026). 2026 public data file now available. https://doi.org/10.64000/7s70g-drz77\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\nRittman, M., & Montilla, L. (2025). Announcing changes to REST API rate limits. Crossref. https://doi.org/10.64000/wadve-3tj60\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
\nI've bumped in to Ken Banks a few times over my career - and he has always been a kind, inspiring, and dedicated chap. How did he get that way?
This book is part autobiography and part an explanation about how people can find purpose in life. It is refreshingly secular on the latter, and curiously impersonal on the former. While Ken's childhood family is recounted in great detail, his wife and children get only a fleeting mention.
\n\nA large part is dedicated to his ancestors:
\n\n\n\nIt's about living up to the expectations of those who came before me, ancestors whose own stories help me understand what makes me who I am today.
I have to say, this is the part that resonated the least with me. I am utterly uninterested in my own family's history. I don't care if I make my forbearers proud - nor do I think their stories matter much to mine.
\n\nIt is refreshing to read an autobiography which acknowledges that luck and privilege play a significant part in the journey. The book is almost a masterclass in how being in the right place at the right time requires one to be often be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
\n\nKen is relentlessly practical. He explains how to examine what works and what doesn't. How to assess whether you're able to solve a problem and what to do in the face of adversity. Whereas an American book might be self-aggrandising and cult-like, Ken's approach is almost ego-less and much more structured around how to build a movement for continual change.
\n\nOne thing that struck me throughout the book is that I think a lot of the yearning we feel for purpose is driven by the rejection of religion.
\n\n\n\nPerhaps you already have everything you need to live a happy, fulfilling, purposeful life, and it just requires a little order or structure. Simply having a set of rules to live by might be closer to what you're looking for, or need.
Once you throw off the shackles of religion, you can feel untethered from society. If all you see is people being fulfilled by an indoctrination of Kinder, K\u00fcche, Kirche, then you are going to feel like your life has no (extrinsic) meaning.
\n\nThis book isn't a powerful wake-up call. It isn't a rallying cry. Nor is it a quick-fix self-help guide. It is a calm and practical observation of one person's (successful) journey through life.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/ava4t-xbk29","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=51084","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/9781739771706.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1720915200,"rid":"ve9xv-7z848","summary":"I've bumped in to Ken Banks a few times over my career - and he has always been a kind, inspiring, and dedicated chap. How did he get that way? This book is part autobiography and part an explanation about how people can find purpose in life. It is refreshingly secular on the latter, and curiously impersonal on the former.","tags":["/etc/","Autobiography","Book Review"],"title":"Book Review: The Pursuit of Purpose - Ken Banks","updated_at":1791308036,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/07/book-review-the-pursuit-of-purpose-ken-banks/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/046ak2485","name":"Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fischer","given":"Georg","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5620-5759"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2","created":1694476800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/oaberlin","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"oaberlin","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Open Research Blog Berlin","updated":1791306819,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Open Research Blog Berlin","blog_slug":"oaberlin","content_html":"Ein Gastbeitrag des Open-Access-Teams der TU Berlin
\nDas dritte Interview zur Open Access Week 2025 f\u00fchrte das Open-Access-Team der TU Berlin mit dem Kommunikationswissenschaftler und wissenschaftlichen Referenten f\u00fcr transdisziplin\u00e4re Lehre an der TU Berlin PD. Dr. Thorsten Philipp. F\u00fcr ihn erleichtert Open Access den Unialltag enorm und er pl\u00e4diert daf\u00fcr, mehr alternative offene Publikationsformen zu f\u00f6rdern, die nicht zu Lasten der Wissenschaftler*innen und Studierenden gehen.
\n
Open-Access-Team der TU Berlin: Open Access ist ein strategisches Ziel der TU Berlin und der BUA. Wie sieht das in Ihrem Forschungsalltag aus? In welchen Kontexten nehmen Sie Diskussionen zu Open Access wahr?\u00a0
\nThorsten Philipp: Open Access ist l\u00e4ngst eine bestimmende Norm bei der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Forschungsergebnissen geworden. Die Frage l\u00e4sst sich nicht mehr umgehen. Wann immer ich in den letzten Jahren B\u00fccher oder wissenschaftliche Artikel ver\u00f6ffentlicht habe, war mir klar, dass ich irgendeinen Weg finden muss, die Texte auch Open Access zug\u00e4nglich zu machen.
\n\u00dcber den Interviewpartner: Thorsten Philipp ist Privatdozent f\u00fcr Kommunikationswissenschaft mit Schwerpunkt Politische Kommunikation. Als wissenschaftlicher Referent im Pr\u00e4sidium der TU Berlin besteht seine Mission in der F\u00f6rderung transdisziplin\u00e4rer Lehrprojekte am Begegnungsort von Universit\u00e4t und Gesellschaft.\n
Open Access hat den offenen Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Information zum Ziel. Im letzten Jahr haben Sie sich sehr darum bem\u00fcht, dass Ihre Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen f\u00fcr alle weltweit frei lesbar sind: Wenn sie nicht \u00fcber den Verlag Open Access publiziert wurden, haben Sie die Beitr\u00e4ge noch \u00fcber das TU Repositorium DepositOnce online gestellt. Wie kam es zu der Entscheidung, Ihre Artikel auf diese Weise Open Access zweitzuver\u00f6ffentlichen?
\nEs begann, als ich einmal einen englischsprachigen Beitrag zu einem Sammelband verfasst hatte \u2013 und der fertige Band am Ende zu einem absurden St\u00fcckpreis von 285 USD im Buchhandel angeboten wurde. Wer kann sich solche B\u00fccher leisten? Mir war klar, dass ich eine L\u00f6sung finden musste, um insbesondere Studierenden einen Zugang zu er\u00f6ffnen. Zum Gl\u00fcck gestattete die Policy des Verlags die Archivierung der finalen Verlagsversion auf einem institutionellen Repositorium. Heute ist der Artikel kostenfrei auf DepositOnce abrufbar.
\nGab es bereits konkrete Situationen in Ihrem Forschungsalltag, in denen Open Access hilfreich war?
\nOpen Access hat meinen Alltag in der Lehre enorm vereinfacht. Meine Studierenden k\u00f6nnen unkompliziert und kostenfrei auf alle meine Publikationen zugreifen; das spart Zeit und Ressourcen in der Vorbereitung von Seminarsitzungen und Diskussionen, Referaten und Hausarbeiten.
\nDamit eine fl\u00e4chendeckende Umstellung zu Open Access gelingen kann, sind \u00c4nderungen in ganz verschiedenen Bereichen erforderlich \u2013 u.a. Finanzierungsstrukturen, Kriterien der Forschungsbewertung und Berufungsverfahren, Ausbau von alternativen Publikationsangeboten, Governance von Publikationsorganen… Welche Aspekte sollte die TU Ihrer Meinung nach in den n\u00e4chsten Jahren priorisieren?
\nAlle diese Aspekte sind wichtig. Gerade in der Frage der Bewertung von Forschungsleistung und bei Berufungsverfahren wird nach meiner Erfahrung viel zu wenig gewichtet, inwieweit sich Forscher*innen um eine breite Zug\u00e4nglichkeit ihrer Forschung bem\u00fchen.
\nVor kurzem erst erhielt ich eine Einladung, zu einem englischsprachigen Sammelband beizutragen. Das E-Mail war KI-generiert, und erst auf der Website fand ich im Kleingedruckten den Hinweis, dass ich f\u00fcr die Publikation meines Artikels h\u00e4tte zahlen m\u00fcssen. An solchen unseri\u00f6sen Gesch\u00e4ftsmodellen zeigt sich deutlich, was im Verlagswesen inzwischen alles schiefl\u00e4uft. Es ist h\u00f6chste Zeit, alternative Publikationsformen zu f\u00f6rdern, die nicht zu Lasten der Wissenschaftler*innen und der Studierenden gehen.
\nKurz und knapp in einem Satz: Was finden Sie gut an Open Access?
\nOpen Access tr\u00e4gt dazu bei, die vielf\u00e4ltigen H\u00fcrden und Hierarchien abzubauen, denen der Zugang zu Wissen immer noch unterliegt. Die gro\u00dfen Herausforderungen der Gegenwart l\u00f6sen wir aber nur dann, wenn es uns gelingt, eine Vielzahl an Wissensressourcen in die Problembearbeitung einzubeziehen. Mit Open Access entsteht eine transdisziplin\u00e4re Wissensallmende.
\nGeben Sie uns zum Abschluss einen Einblick in Ihr Forschungsfeld f\u00fcr Disziplinfremde. Mit welchen Fragen und Erkenntnissen besch\u00e4ftigen Sie sich?
\nMeine Forschung untersucht Popmusik als Resonanzraum \u00f6kologischer Krisen \u2013 und als Aushandlungsraum der Nachhaltigkeitsdebatte.
\nZitiervorschlag:\nOpen-Access-Team der TU Berlin (2025, Oktober 22). Thorsten Philipp im Interview: \"Wir m\u00fcssen alternative Publikationsformen f\u00f6rdern.\". Open research office berlin. https://doi.org/10.59350/g9hb6-0m177\n
\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/g9hb6-0m177","guid":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/?p=3590","image":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/files/2025/10/OA-Week-2025-Thorsten-Philipp-DIN-A1-quer-20251008.jpg","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1761091200,"rid":"xfr7y-3mv79","summary":"Ein Gastbeitrag des Open-Access-Teams der TU Berlin Das dritte Interview zur Open Access Week 2025 f\u00fchrte das Open-Access-Team der TU Berlin mit dem Kommunikationswissenschaftler und wissenschaftlichen Referenten f\u00fcr transdisziplin\u00e4re Lehre an der TU Berlin PD. Dr. Thorsten Philipp.","tags":["Allgemein","OAWeek","Interview","Thorsten Philipp","OAWeek-Interview"],"title":"Thorsten Philipp im Interview: \"Wir m\u00fcssen alternative Publikationsformen f\u00f6rdern.\"","updated_at":1791306918,"url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/2025/10/22/interview-thorsten-philipp-open-access-week-2025/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/046ak2485","name":"Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fischer","given":"Georg","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5620-5759"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2","created":1694476800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/oaberlin","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"oaberlin","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Open Research Blog Berlin","updated":1791306819,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Open Research Blog Berlin","blog_slug":"oaberlin","content_html":"
Ein Gastbeitrag des Open-Access-Teams der TU Berlin
\nF\u00fcr die Interviewreihe zur Open Access Week hat sich das Open-Access-Team der TU Berlin mit Lena Herzog-Sounaye, Dr. Melanie Kryst und Nadin Gaasch vom\u00a0TD-Lab der Berlin University Alliance\u00a0unterhalten. Als klaren Vorteil von Open Access benennen sie den Zugang zu Wissen und M\u00f6glichkeiten des Austauschs zwischen Forschenden und anderen gesellschaftlichen Gruppen.
\n
Open-Access-Team der TU Berlin: Open Access ist ein strategisches Ziel der TU Berlin und der BUA. Wie sieht das in Ihrem Forschungsalltag aus? In welchen Kontexten nehmen Sie Diskussionen zu Open Access wahr?\u00a0
\nLena Herzog-Sounaye: Als TD-Lab \u2013 Labor f\u00fcr transdisziplin\u00e4re Forschung der Berlin University Alliance (BUA) st\u00e4rken wir den multidirektionalen Wissensaustausch zwischen Forschung und Gesellschaft. Gerade f\u00fcr die Praxispartner*innen von Forschungsprojekten, seien es zivilgesellschaftliche Initiativen, die Bezirksverwaltung oder auch Start-Ups, ist es oft essenziell, einen einfachen Zugang zu entsprechenden Fachpublikationen zu haben. Der Austausch von Wissen, Informationen und Daten setzt den Grundstein f\u00fcr gemeinsame Projekte und Kooperationen.
\nNadin Gaasch: Die TU Berlin ist bereits sehr pr\u00e4sent in der Berliner Stadtgesellschaft, insbesondere durch die starke Reallaborforschung. Die BUA sieht es als eine ihrer Kernaufgaben, die Vernetzung aller Verbundpartnerinnen mit der Stadtgesellschaft weiter voranzutreiben. Insofern ist es nur ein logischer Schluss, dass wissenschaftliches Wissen durch Open Access auch dieser Zielgruppe frei zur Verf\u00fcgung steht.
\n\u00dcber die Interviewpartnerinnen\n\nLena Herzog-Sounaye ist Politikwissenschaftlerin und ausgebildete Mediatorin. Bevor sie 2023 zum TD-Lab kam war sie in den Bereichen Wissenstransfer, Wissenschaftskommunikation und \u00d6ffentlichkeitsarbeit am Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient sowie bei Wissenschaft im Dialog t\u00e4tig.\nDr. Melanie Kryst ist promovierte Politikwissenschaftlerin und seit 2021 Referentin im TD-Lab. Sie leitete zuvor partizipative Stadtentwicklungsprojekte in Berlin sowie im internationalen St\u00e4dteaustausch.\nNadin Gaasch hat einen Abschluss in Humangeographie, Soziologie und \u00d6ffentliches Recht. Bevor sie 2020 Referentin im TD-Lab wurde, arbeitetet sie im Wissenschaftsmanagement des Potsdam-Institut f\u00fcr Klimafolgenforschung (PIK) e.V. sowie als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin mit Fokus auf transdisziplin\u00e4re Forschung am Leibniz-Zentrum f\u00fcr Agrarlandschaftsforschung (ZALF) e.V. M\u00fcncheberg.\n\nZum Team des TD-Labs geh\u00f6ren au\u00dferdem noch Dr. Audrey Podann (Projektleitung), Dr. Ina Opitz und Dr. Nikola N\u00f6lle.\n
Open Access hat den offenen Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Information zum Ziel. In den vergangenen beiden Jahren haben Sie sechs Publikationen auf dem Repositorium der TU Berlin, DepositOnce ver\u00f6ffentlicht \u2013 mit weltweit freiem Zugriff. Warum haben Sie sich dazu entschlossen?
\nMelanie Kryst: Eines unserer Ziele mit dem TD-Lab ist es, Formate f\u00fcr partizipative Forschungsans\u00e4tze zu entwickeln und zu erproben. Diese Formate sind auf den Berliner Forschungsraum und die hiesige Stadtgesellschaft zugeschnitten, bieten aber durchaus auch viele Ankn\u00fcpfungspunkte f\u00fcr Vorhaben au\u00dferhalb der Hauptstadt. Uns war es wichtig, mit den Werkstattberichten unsere Methoden und Erfahrungen zu teilen und damit Wissenschaftler*innen in Berlin und dar\u00fcber hinaus hilfreiche Anleitungen an die Hand zu geben, um selbst partizipative und transdisziplin\u00e4re Forschungsprojekte zu initiieren.
\nLena Herzog-Sounaye: Aktuell schreiben wir an zwei weiteren Werkstattberichten. Dar\u00fcber hinaus werden wir diesen Herbst englische Versionen der Werkstattberichte \u00fcber DepositOnce ver\u00f6ffentlichen, um somit sowohl internationale Wissenschaftler*innen in Berlin als auch Interessierte weltweit mit unseren Formaten anzusprechen.
\nGab es bereits konkrete Situationen in Ihrem Forschungsalltag, in denen Open Access hilfreich war?
\nLena Herzog-Sounaye: Bei der Entwicklung unserer Angebote berufen wir uns selbstverst\u00e4ndlich auf wissenschaftliche Literatur zu Themen wie Transdisziplinarit\u00e4t, Partizipation in der Wissenschaft oder Transformation. Da ist es nat\u00fcrlich sehr hilfreich, wenn Publikationen von anderen Universit\u00e4ten und Fach-Communities leicht verf\u00fcgbar sind. Zudem nutzen wir f\u00fcr unsere Pr\u00e4sentationen und Trainingsangebote gerne Grafiken aus der Literatur als Anschauungsmaterial und freuen uns, wenn diese niedrigschwellig genutzt werden k\u00f6nnen.
\nDamit eine fl\u00e4chendeckende Umstellung zu Open Access gelingen kann, sind \u00c4nderungen in ganz verschiedenen Bereichen erforderlich \u2013 u.a. Finanzierungsstrukturen, Kriterien der Forschungsbewertung und Berufungsverfahren, Ausbau von alternativen Publikationsangeboten, Governance von Publikationsorganen… Welche Aspekte sollte die TU Ihrer Meinung nach in den n\u00e4chsten Jahren priorisieren?
\nNadin Gaasch: Damit Open Access in der partizipativen Forschung wirksam werden kann, braucht es nicht nur die klassischen OA-Strukturen (Repositorien, Finanzierung, rechtliche Absicherung), sondern auch spezifische Rahmenbedingungen, die den diversen Beteiligten gerechte Teilhabe, Sichtbarkeit und Verst\u00e4ndlichkeit erm\u00f6glichen.\u00a0Dazu geh\u00f6rt, dass Publikationsprozesse flexibel genug gestaltet werden, um neben wissenschaftsgetriebenen Erkenntnissen auch konkrete Umsetzungsideen von Forschung sichtbar zu machen. Das k\u00f6nnten beispielsweise \u00f6ffentlich nutzbare Datenbanken, konkrete Handlungsleitf\u00e4den f\u00fcr Nachbarschaften oder auch Installationen zum Auffangen von Regenwasser sein. Gleichzeitig m\u00fcssen \u00dcbersetzungs- und Vermittlungsleistungen \u2013 etwa durch verst\u00e4ndliche Sprache, visuelle Aufbereitung oder Mehrsprachigkeit \u2013 systematisch gef\u00f6rdert werden, damit unterschiedliche gesellschaftliche Gruppen Zugang finden.
\nMelanie Kryst: Schlie\u00dflich ist es wichtig, dass Open Access nicht nur als \"Endpunkt\" einer Forschung verstanden wird, sondern als Teil eines kontinuierlichen Dialogs, der Feedback, gemeinsame Reflexion und nachhaltige Wissenszirkulation erm\u00f6glicht. Es sollte auch Aufgabe einer gro\u00dfen und gesellschaftlich vernetzten Universit\u00e4t, wie die TU Berlin es ist, sein, diesen Dialog zu f\u00f6rdern.
\nKurz und knapp in einem Satz: Was finden Sie gut an Open Access?
\nMelanie Kryst: Open Access hei\u00dft: einfacher Zugang zu Wissen. Das er\u00f6ffnet neue M\u00f6glichkeiten f\u00fcr den Austausch zwischen Forschenden und anderen gesellschaftlichen Gruppen.
\nGeben Sie uns zum Abschluss einen Einblick in Ihr Forschungsfeld f\u00fcr Disziplinfremde. Mit welchen Fragen und Erkenntnissen besch\u00e4ftigen Sie sich?
\nNadin Gaasch: Das TD-Lab ist ein Strukturprojekt der BUA. Angesiedelt an der Stabsstelle Science & Society der TU Berlin zielt es darauf ab, transdisziplin\u00e4re und andere partizipative Forschungsmodi im Verbund und in Berlin zu st\u00e4rken \u2013 f\u00fcr eine exzellente Forschung mit der Gesellschaft. Daf\u00fcr entwickelt unser Team innovative Formate, Methoden und Weiterbildungen und formt neue Kooperationen und Netzwerke.
\nLena Herzog-Sounaye: Aktuell treiben wir insbesondere den Austausch zu Wasserthemen voran und veranstalten mit den On Water DIALOGEN angeleitete Networking-Events f\u00fcr Wissenschaftler*innen und Expert*innen aus der Praxis. Des Weiteren bieten wir beispielweise eine Antragsberatung mit Fokus auf transdisziplin\u00e4re bzw. partizipative Elemente in Forschungsvorhaben an und f\u00fchren ein eigenes Seed-Funding-Programm durch.
\nZitiervorschlag:\nOpen-Access-Team der TU Berlin (2025, Oktober 21). Lena Herzog-Sounaye, Dr. Melanie Kryst und Nadin Gaasch im Interview: \"Open Access ist kein Endpunkt, sondern Teil eines kontinuierlichen Dialogs.\". Open research office berlin. https://doi.org/10.59350/tvgsh-byj48\n
\n\n
Ein Gastbeitrag des Open-Access-Teams der TU Berlin
\nBereits seit 2017 nutzt\u00a0das Open-Access-Team der Technischen Universit\u00e4t Berlin die internationale Open Access Week daf\u00fcr, um mit Angeh\u00f6rigen der TU Berlin ins Gespr\u00e4ch zu kommen und Einblicke in die Perspektive von Forschenden auf Open-Access-Praktiken zu erhalten. Die so gewachsene\u00a0Interviewreihe\u00a0ist bislang im Blog \"Publizieren an der TU Berlin\" erschienen.
\nAuch in diesem Jahr haben wir vom Open-Access-Team wieder Wissenschaftler*innen der TU Berlin gefragt: \"Wie halten sie es mit Open Access?\" Und wir freuen uns, die drei Gespr\u00e4che hier im Open Research Blog Berlin ver\u00f6ffentlichen zu k\u00f6nnen.
\nDen Auftakt macht in diesem Jahr Dr. Thies Johannsen vom\u00a0Fachgebiet Konstruktion von Maschinensystemen der TU Berlin\u00a0und\u00a0Open Science Ambassador der Berlin University Alliance. Seiner Ansicht nach tr\u00e4gt Open Access dazu bei, dass wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse nicht nur breiter zug\u00e4nglich, sondern auch besser und sozial robuster werden. Er pl\u00e4diert daf\u00fcr, dass Open Access zur wissenschaftlichen Praxis geh\u00f6ren sollte, wie auch gute wissenschaftliche Standards.
\n
Team Open Access der TU Berlin: Open Access ist ein strategisches Ziel der TU Berlin und der BUA. Wie sieht das in Ihrem Forschungsalltag aus? In welchen Kontexten nehmen Sie Diskussionen zu Open Access wahr?\u00a0
\nThies Johannsen: Dass die Berlin University Alliance bereits 2023 ein gemeinsames Leitbild f\u00fcr offene Wissenschaft verabschiedet hat, ist ein wichtiger, richtiger und notwendiger Schritt. Dieses Leitbild wird auf zwei Ebenen gelebt: Nach au\u00dfen wirkt die Allianz mit einer umfassenden Wissenschaftskommunikationskampagne in die Metropolregion Berlin hinein und \u00f6ffnet sich gezielt f\u00fcr gesellschaftliche Akteur*innen. Nach innen wirkt sie durch Initiativen wie das Open Science Ambassador-Programm, an dem ich mitwirken darf. Als Multiplikator*innen setzen wir uns daf\u00fcr ein, Open Science an unseren Institutionen sichtbarer und wirksamer zu machen.
\nDabei konkurrieren wir allerdings mit einer Vielzahl anderer, teils ebenfalls forschungsnaher Initiativen um die knappe Ressource Aufmerksamkeit der Forschenden. In gewisser Weise ist die Berlin University Alliance damit auch Opfer ihres eigenen Erfolgs, weil die hohe Dichte an Aktivit\u00e4ten zu einer gewissen S\u00e4ttigung f\u00fchren kann. Wissenschaftler*innen k\u00f6nnen Open Science im Alltag als zus\u00e4tzliche Aufgabe wahrnehmen \u2013 neben hoher Lehrverpflichtung, dem Anspruch, exzellente Forschung zu betreiben, und einer zunehmend angespannten finanziellen und damit unsicheren Lage. Dies gilt umso mehr, wenn Wissen \u00fcber das Thema fehlt und diese Unsicherheit versch\u00e4rft.
\nDiesen Vorbehalt kenne ich auch aus meiner Arbeit im Wissens- und Technologietransfer sowie in transdisziplin\u00e4ren Forschungskontexten. Dabei lassen sich bereits mit minimalem Aufwand, etwa durch Sichtbarmachung existierender, aber bislang nicht benannter Praktiken, gro\u00dfe Wirkungen erzielen. Ein Beispiel: Am Institut f\u00fcr Konstruktion von Maschinensystemen arbeiten wir h\u00e4ufig an individuell konstruierten Versuchsanlagen. Die Bereitstellung von Daten nach den FAIR-Prinzip \u2013 das Akronym steht f\u00fcr Findable, Accessible, Interoperable und Reusable \u2013 ist hier komplex und erfordert zus\u00e4tzliche Anstrengungen. Das l\u00e4sst sich nicht immer unmittelbar vermitteln. Hier sind strukturelle Anreize erforderlich.
\n\u00dcber den Interviewpartner: Thies Johannsen lehrt und forscht an der Schnittstelle zwischen Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften sowie den MINT-Disziplinen. In seiner Forschung besch\u00e4ftigt er sich mit Kompetenzen f\u00fcr innovationsorientiertes Transferhandeln, f\u00fcr die Zukunftsf\u00e4higkeit von Absolvent*innen und eine ganzheitliche Ingenieur*innenausbildung. Er ber\u00e4t Hochschulen, Unternehmen und Organisationen zu entsprechenden Transformations- und Qualifizierungsprozessen.\n
Gleichzeitig liegt genau darin ein enormes Potenzial: Daten \u00f6ffentlich zug\u00e4nglich zu machen, sie als Preprints zur Diskussion zu stellen, als Open Data anschlussf\u00e4hig zur Verf\u00fcgung zu stellen, kann die eigene Forschung sichtbarer machen und damit auch den individuellen Impact und die Karrierechancen deutlich erh\u00f6hen.
\nAn unserer Fakult\u00e4t verfolgen wir erste Ans\u00e4tze, dieses Thema fr\u00fchzeitig in die Lehre zu integrieren, und zwar nicht durch aufw\u00e4ndige Neukonzeptionen der Curricula, sondern durch gezielte Aktivierung vorhandener Potenziale. So f\u00fchren wir Studierende und angehende Wissenschaftler*innen behutsam an das Thema heran. Open Access und Open Science sind dabei keine blo\u00dfen Add-ons, sondern werden als integrale Bestandteile guter wissenschaftlicher Praxis vermittelt. Wir verbinden damit die Hoffnung, dass sie in das disziplin\u00e4re Selbstverst\u00e4ndnis \u00fcbergehen und entsprechend gelebt werden.
\nOpen Access hat den offenen Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Information zum Ziel. Was haben Sie in der Vergangenheit daf\u00fcr getan, damit Ihre Forschungsergebnisse frei zug\u00e4nglich sind? Wollen Sie das in Zukunft weiter ausbauen? Und was brauchen Sie daf\u00fcr?
\nDie Zug\u00e4nglichkeit wissenschaftlicher Ergebnisse ist f\u00fcr mich nicht nur eine Frage der \u00f6ffentlichen Finanzierung, obwohl auch diese einen wichtigen Rahmen setzt. Ich selbst bin in einem Drittmittelprojekt t\u00e4tig, das zun\u00e4chst vom BMBF und inzwischen vom BMFTR gef\u00f6rdert wird. Daraus ergibt sich f\u00fcr mich eine klare ethische und legitimatorische Verantwortung, meine Forschungsergebnisse zug\u00e4nglich zu machen.
\nAuch pers\u00f6nlich profitiere ich davon. Durch Open Access erreiche ich meine Zielgruppe leichter und kann mit meiner Arbeit eine st\u00e4rkere Wirkung entfalten. Deshalb habe ich im Rahmen meines Projekts unter einer CC BY 4.0-Lizenz publiziert und diese M\u00f6glichkeit auch f\u00fcr mein Team geschaffen.
\nBesonders hervorheben m\u00f6chte ich an dieser Stelle die Rolle der Universit\u00e4tsbibliothek, die mit einem eigenen Fonds f\u00fcr Open-Access-Publikationen sehr konkret unterst\u00fctzt. Das ist ein deutliches Signal f\u00fcr die institutionelle Verankerung von Open Access an der TU Berlin.
\nDar\u00fcber hinaus gibt es niedrigschwellige, aber sehr wirksame Infrastrukturen wie Zenodo. Dabei handelt es sich um ein Repositorium, das von der EU, OpenAIRE und CERN betrieben wird. Es erm\u00f6glicht die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung unter Creative-Commons-Lizenz und stellt dabei einen DOI zur Verf\u00fcgung. Das ist gerade deshalb relevant, weil so auch nicht-klassische Publikationsformate wie Poster, Templates, Lehrmaterialien oder audiovisuelle Beitr\u00e4ge zitierf\u00e4hig werden und damit auf die f\u00fcr wissenschaftliche Karrieren nach wie vor zentrale W\u00e4hrung \"Publikationen\" einzahlen. Auch forschungsnahe Lehrinhalte lassen sich auf diese Weise ver\u00f6ffentlichen.
\nUm eine Open-Access-Kultur nachhaltig zu st\u00e4rken, braucht es meines Erachtens vor allem den R\u00fcckhalt durch die unmittelbaren F\u00fchrungskr\u00e4fte. Open Access darf kein optionales Extra sein, das auf Nachfrage erm\u00f6glicht wird, sondern sollte ebenso selbstverst\u00e4ndlich zur wissenschaftlichen Praxis geh\u00f6ren wie gute wissenschaftliche Standards insgesamt. Das setzt eine klare Positionierung auf Fachgebietsebene voraus.
\nDabei k\u00f6nnen Vorbilder ebenso wie externe Erwartungen eine wichtige Rolle spielen und dazu beitragen, dass nicht nur individuelle Laufbahnen gest\u00e4rkt, sondern auch die gesellschaftliche Relevanz und Verantwortung von Wissenschaft insgesamt sichtbarer wird.
\nGab es bereits konkrete Situationen in Ihrem Forschungsalltag, in denen Open Access hilfreich war?
\nEin besonders anschauliches Beispiel betrifft die systematische Literaturrecherche. Hier sto\u00dfen wir nach wie vor h\u00e4ufig auf Paywalls, und dass trotz zunehmender Open\u2011Access\u2011Anteile. Gerade bei einer strukturierten Literaturanalyse fehlt oft der freie Zugriff auf entscheidende Quellen. Erfreulicherweise nimmt der freie Zugang in den letzten Jahren deutlich zu.
\nEin zweites Beispiel sind die Daten, die das Deutsche Zentrum f\u00fcr Hochschul- und Wissenschaftsforschung (DZHW) erhoben hat und mit denen wir aktuell arbeiten. In der 21. Sozialerhebung wurden knapp 55.000 Studierendenbefragungen ausgewertet, in der 22. Sozialerhebung sogar rund 188.000 Studierende an 250 Hochschulen befragt. Ein solcher Datensatz ist in den meisten Einzelprojekten nicht darstellbar, erm\u00f6glichte aber durch die sekund\u00e4re Auswertung enormen Erkenntnisgewinn.
\nSchlie\u00dflich m\u00f6chte ich auf eine Erhebung hinweisen, die wir in einem unserer eigenen Projekte durchgef\u00fchrt haben. Darin haben wir \u00fcber 1.000 Wissenschaftler*innen zum Thema Transfer befragt und diese Daten im Anschluss aufbereitet und frei zug\u00e4nglich gemacht. Das schafft nicht nur Transparenz, sondern bef\u00e4higt andere Forschungsteams, auf diesen Ergebnissen aufzubauen und Impulse im Diskurs zu setzen. F\u00fcr uns selbst gewinnen die Ergebnisse dadurch zus\u00e4tzlich an Gewicht, weil sie nicht als singul\u00e4rer Beitrag, sondern als Grundlage einer eigenst\u00e4ndigen Debatte in der Community dienen k\u00f6nnen.
\nDamit eine fl\u00e4chendeckende Umstellung zu Open Access gelingen kann, sind \u00c4nderungen in ganz verschiedenen Bereichen erforderlich \u2013 u.a. Finanzierungsstrukturen, Kriterien der Forschungsbewertung und Berufungsverfahren, Ausbau von alternativen Publikationsangeboten, Governance von Publikationsorganen… Welche Aspekte sollte die TU Ihrer Meinung nach in den n\u00e4chsten Jahren priorisieren?
\nUm Open Access tats\u00e4chlich in der Breite zu leben, braucht es an einer gro\u00dfen, komplexen Universit\u00e4t wie der TU Berlin nicht weniger als einen echten Kulturwandel. Das bedeutet, kein einzelner Aspekt kann f\u00fcr sich allein wirken, weder F\u00fchrung, Anreizsetzung, Beteiligung oder Kommunikation. Erst im Zusammenspiel entfalten diese Faktoren ihre transformative Kraft. Gefragt ist also eine \u00fcbergreifende, strategisch geplante und partizipativ sowie iterativ umgesetzte Organisationsentwicklung.
\nWas es daf\u00fcr braucht, ist zun\u00e4chst eine klare Vision. Vorbild k\u00f6nnte die Transferstrategie sein, die wir gemeinsam an der TU Berlin entwickelt und verabschiedet haben. Auch dort ging es darum, ein Querschnittsthema in Forschung und Lehre zu integrieren und strukturell mitzudenken. Eine solche Vision muss auf Leitungsebene verankert und glaubw\u00fcrdig vertreten sein. Es braucht eine authentische Ressortzugeh\u00f6rigkeit im Pr\u00e4sidium, also eine Person, die Open Access mit \u00dcberzeugung lebt, kommuniziert und vorantreibt.
\nGleichzeitig braucht es universit\u00e4tsgem\u00e4\u00dfe Beteiligungsformate f\u00fcr die Fakult\u00e4ten, die zentralen und dezentralen Gremien und letztlich auch f\u00fcr die Fachgebiete selbst. Nur so entsteht echte Mitverantwortung. Dieser Wandel muss zudem strategisch abgesichert werden. Das kann zum Beispiel durch die Integration von Open-Access-Kriterien in Leistungsindikatoren, Forschungsberichten und Berufungsverhandlungen geschehen.
\nEin weiterer entscheidender Punkt sind finanzielle Rahmenbedingungen. Publikationskosten d\u00fcrfen kein Hindernis sein. Das gilt in gleichem Ma\u00dfe f\u00fcr b\u00fcrokratische H\u00fcrden. Hier braucht es schlanke Prozesse, damit Wissenschaftler*innen Zeit f\u00fcr Lehre und Forschung haben. Die Universit\u00e4t beziehungsweise die Berlin University Allianz muss dort gezielt unterst\u00fctzen.
\nNicht zuletzt braucht es Sichtbarkeit. Erfolge m\u00fcssen nach innen wie nach au\u00dfen deutlich gemacht werden. Das kann durch Formate wie den Neujahrsempfang der TU oder durch Beitr\u00e4ge in hochschul\u00fcbergreifenden Publikationsorganen wie dem Magazin der Berlin University Alliance Wir/Vier erfolgen. Auch die Open Science Ambassador-Initiative ist in diesem Kontext ein starkes Signal. Sie schafft Sichtbarkeit f\u00fcr das Thema, vernetzt Akteur*innen, und setzt konkrete Impulse, wie eine gelebte Open-Access-Kultur Realit\u00e4t werden kann.
\nKurz und knapp in einem Satz: Was finden Sie gut an Open Access?
\nWissen wird nicht weniger, wenn es geteilt wird, sondern es wird mehr und es wird besser, weil Open Access dazu beitr\u00e4gt, dass wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse nicht nur breiter zug\u00e4nglich, sondern auch qualitativ besser und sozial robuster werden.
\nGeben Sie uns zum Abschluss einen Einblick in Ihr Forschungsfeld f\u00fcr Disziplinfremde. Mit welchen Fragen und Erkenntnissen besch\u00e4ftigen Sie sich?
\nIch arbeite am Fachgebiet Konstruktion von Maschinensystemen, also an einem klassischen Maschinenbau-Fachgebiet. Hier geht es um Themen wie Bremsenforschung, Konstruktionsmethodik oder zeitgem\u00e4\u00dfe, intelligente Landtechnik. In diesem Umfeld besch\u00e4ftige ich mich mit einer vielleicht unerwarteten Frage, n\u00e4mlich wie Ingenieur*innen so ausgebildet werden k\u00f6nnen, dass sie nicht nur fachlich gut aufgestellt sind, sondern ihre gesellschaftliche Verantwortung wahrnehmen und Technik im Sinne des Gemeinwohls gestalten k\u00f6nnen.
\nMich interessiert dabei besonders, welche Kompetenzen es braucht, um in interdisziplin\u00e4ren und transdisziplin\u00e4ren Kontexten wirksam zu werden oder, mit anderen Worten, was m\u00fcssen unsere Studierenden und Wissenschaftler*innen k\u00f6nnen, um gemeinsam mit Akteur*innen aus Politik, Wirtschaft, Zivilgesellschaft und anderen Wissenschaftsbereichen an L\u00f6sungen zu arbeiten. Denn viele Herausforderungen in Bereichen wie Energie, Mobilit\u00e4t oder Landwirtschaft, vor denen wir heute stehen, sind zu komplex, um sie allein aus der Perspektive einer einzelnen Disziplin zu l\u00f6sen.
\nDarum untersuche ich in Forschungsprojekten, welche Kompetenzen Studierende, insbesondere im Ingenieurwesen, entwickeln m\u00fcssen, um in solchen Konstellationen verantwortungsvoll und wirkungsorientiert handeln zu k\u00f6nnen. Das reicht von kommunikativen und kooperativen F\u00e4higkeiten bis hin zu strategischer Reflexion und ethischer Urteilsf\u00e4higkeit. Dabei arbeite ich eng mit Partnerinnen wie dem Fraunhofer IAO und der Hochschule M\u00fcnchen zusammen und bringe die Ergebnisse in unsere Lehre und unsere Weiterbildungsangebote ein, um diese Transferkompetenz zu f\u00f6rdern. Damit m\u00f6chte ich einen Beitrag leisten, dass Hochschulen wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse nicht nur erzeugen, sondern damit in der Gesellschaft einen konkreten Mehrwert entfalten k\u00f6nnen. Ich bin \u00fcberzeugt, dass es diesen Schulterschluss dringender denn je braucht.
\nZitiervorschlag:\nOpen-Access-Team der TU Berlin (2025, Oktober 20). Thies Johannsen im Interview: \"Wissen wird nicht weniger, wenn es geteilt wird, sondern es wird mehr und es wird besser.\". Open research office berlin. https://doi.org/10.59350/hfnw3-06322\n
\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/hfnw3-06322","guid":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/?p=3566","image":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/files/2025/10/OA-Week-2025-Thies-Levsen-Johannsen-DIN-A1-quer-20251008-550x390.jpg","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1760918400,"rid":"3991f-kgs22","summary":"Ein Gastbeitrag des Open-Access-Teams der TU Berlin Bereits seit 2017 nutzt das Open-Access-Team der Technischen Universit\u00e4t Berlin die internationale Open Access Week daf\u00fcr, um mit Angeh\u00f6rigen der TU Berlin ins Gespr\u00e4ch zu kommen und Einblicke in die Perspektive von Forschenden auf Open-Access-Praktiken zu erhalten. Die so gewachsene Interviewreihe ist bislang im Blog \"Publizieren an der TU Berlin\" erschienen.","tags":["Allgemein","OAWeek","Thies Johannsen","Interview","OAWeek-Interview"],"title":"Thies Johannsen im Interview: \"Wissen wird nicht weniger, wenn es geteilt wird, sondern es wird mehr und es wird besser.\"","updated_at":1791306912,"url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/2025/10/20/thies-johannsen-interview-open-access-week-2025/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/046ak2485","name":"Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fischer","given":"Georg","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5620-5759"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2","created":1694476800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/oaberlin","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"oaberlin","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Open Research Blog Berlin","updated":1791306819,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Open Research Blog Berlin","blog_slug":"oaberlin","content_html":"
Die Hochschule f\u00fcr Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin (HTW) hat Erfreuliches zu berichten: Seit kurzem sind an der HTW vier Ambassadors f\u00fcr Open Science benannt. Wir haben Alessandro D’Arcangeli, der die Aufgabe als Ambassador f\u00fcr Open Access \u00fcbernimmt und in der Bibliothek der HTW besch\u00e4ftigt ist, ein paar Fragen zum Engagement der HTW bez\u00fcglich Open Science gestellt.
\n\nLaut Darstellung auf der eigenen Website hat die HTW vier Ambassadors\u00a0 (zu Deutsch: Botschafter*innen) f\u00fcr Open Science ernannt, um die bisherigen Initiativen zu st\u00e4rken:
\n\nDie HTW Berlin engagiert sich mit Initiativen zu Open Access, Forschungsdatenmanagement, Citizen Science und offener Lehre f\u00fcr eine Kultur des Teilens und der Zusammenarbeit. \u00dcbergeordnetes Ziel ist es, Wissen nachhaltig verf\u00fcgbar zu machen und Innovationen durch Partizipation zu f\u00f6rdern \u2013 ganz im Sinne einer offenen und verantwortungsvollen Wissenschaftspraxis.
Die vier Open Science-Ambassadors an der HTW sind:\n\n\u00b7 Citizen Science Ambassador: Julia Brandt\n\n\u00b7 Open Access Ambassador: Alessandro D'Arcangeli\n\n\u00b7 Open Educational Resources Ambassador: J\u00f6rg Maier-Rothe\n\n\u00b7 Open Data-Ambassador: Dr. Constance Holman\n
Um Genaueres zu erfahren, schickten wir Alessandro D’Arcangeli vier Fragen, die er schriftlich per Mail beantwortete.
\nAlessandro, Du bist zum Ambassador f\u00fcr Open Access ernannt worden: Was m\u00f6chtest Du im Rahmen dieser Aufgabe an der HTW gerne erreichen?\u00a0
\nAls Ambassador f\u00fcr Open Access m\u00f6chte ich dazu beitragen, die Sichtbarkeit und Akzeptanz offener Publikationsformen an unserer Hochschule weiter zu st\u00e4rken. Ein zentrales Ziel ist es, Forschende und Lehrende dabei zu unterst\u00fctzen, ihre wissenschaftlichen Ergebnisse m\u00f6glichst frei zug\u00e4nglich zu machen und sich aktiv mit den Prinzipien von Open Science auseinanderzusetzen. Dar\u00fcber hinaus m\u00f6chte ich den Austausch innerhalb der Hochschule f\u00f6rdern und dazu beitragen, bestehende Initiativen miteinander zu vernetzen.
\nWelche gemeinsamen Aufgaben verfolgen die Ambassadors? Wie greifen ihre Arbeiten ineinander?
\nDie Ambassadors verfolgen das gemeinsame Ziel, Open Science strukturell und kulturell an der Hochschule zu verankern. Dabei fungieren wir zun\u00e4chst als Anlaufstellen bzw. Ansprechpartner*innen f\u00fcr das Thema. Man kann auf uns zukommen, wenn man Fragen oder Ideen dazu hat. Au\u00dferdem bringen wir unsere verschiedenen Perspektiven und Expertisen ein und arbeiten eng zusammen, um Informationsangebote, Beratungsformate und Austauschm\u00f6glichkeiten zu entwickeln. Durch diese Zusammenarbeit entstehen Aktivit\u00e4ten, die sich gegenseitig erg\u00e4nzen und die Sichtbarkeit sowie die praktische Umsetzung von Open Science st\u00e4rken.
\nWelche Rahmenbedingungen braucht es ganz allgemein, um Open Science und Open Research in Berlin voranzubringen?
\nUm Open Science und Open Research nachhaltig zu f\u00f6rdern, braucht es sowohl institutionelle Unterst\u00fctzung als auch engagierte Personen und Netzwerke innerhalb der Wissenschaft. Transparente Richtlinien, geeignete Infrastrukturen und Anreizsysteme f\u00fcr offene Praktiken sind wichtige Voraussetzungen f\u00fcr eine breite Umsetzung. Gleichzeitig spielen Bottom-up-Initiativen eine zentrale Rolle. Ein gutes Beispiel daf\u00fcr ist die \"Interessensgemeinschaft Open Science\" an unserer Hochschule, deren Arbeit wesentlich dazu beigetragen hat, das Thema institutionell zu st\u00e4rken und sichtbar zu machen. Solche Netzwerke sind zentral, weil sie Austausch erm\u00f6glichen, Erfahrungen b\u00fcndeln und die Entwicklung einer offenen Wissenschaftskultur aktiv vorantreiben.
\nAngenommen, ich habe eine Idee oder ein Anliegen zu Open Science und m\u00f6chte mich einbringen: Wie kann ich Kontakt mit den Ambassadors aufnehmen?
\nInteressierte k\u00f6nnen sich jederzeit mit ihren Ideen oder Fragen an die Ambassadors wenden, etwa \u00fcber die auf der Open-Science-Seite der Hochschule genannten Kontaktm\u00f6glichkeiten. Ein zentraler Anlaufpunkt ist zudem die schon erw\u00e4hnte \"Interessensgemeinschaft Open Science\", die verschiedene Initiativen an der Hochschule miteinander vernetzt und den Austausch f\u00f6rdert. Neue Impulse und Beteiligung von den Hochschulangeh\u00f6rigen oder anderen Interessierten sind ausdr\u00fccklich willkommen, da Open Science nur durch gemeinsames Engagement weiterwachsen kann.
\nVielen Dank an Alessandro D’Arcangeli f\u00fcr die Beantwortung der Fragen!
\nThe World Avatar project aspires to model and\nsimulate the real world at the chemical, municipal, and geological scales. Its\ncomputational chemistry ontology,\nontology for chemical kinetic reaction mechanisms,\nand chemical species ontology are\nof particular interest for reuse, extension, and/or harmonization with\nontologies ued by NFDI4Chem and\nNFDI4Cat (see the respective\nNFDI4Chem ontology list and\nNFDI4Cat ontology list). This post\nis about the sequence of open source, open science contributions I made to the\nWorld Avatar project to improve its ontologies and ultimately add them in bulk\nto the Bioregistry/Semanatic Farm.
\nSpecifically, while working with Mario Wolter\nand Robin Str\u00f6hmann to develop an\nontology for basis sets,\nI manually curated mappings in the\nSimple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM)\nformat between basis sets appearing in the\nBasis Set Exchange, the\nGainesville Core Ontology (GC),\nthe\nElementary Multiperspective Material Ontology (EMMO),\nand Wikidata in\nNFDI4Chem/basis-set-exchange-ontology#14.
\nI was also suggested to map to the World Avatar's computational chemistry\nontology, which I wasn't very familiar with, so I went to see what information\nwas available about it in the Semantic Farm. Initially, it had incomplete and\noutdated information, including an Internet Archive link to an old version of\nthe ontology. I searched the web and found that the World Avatar project not\nonly had created a new website in the last few months, but also found that they\nwere maintaining their ontologies via a repository on GitHub\n(TheWorldAvatar/ontology). This\nnot only let me update the three existing World Avatar records in the Semantic\nFarm in\nbiopragmatics/bioregistry#2074,\nbut also got me thinking on how I could systematically construct new records in\nthe Semantic Farm for all World Avatar ontologies, similarly to what I did for\nSWEET (geology\nontologies) and CESSDA\n(humanities ontologies and controlled vocabularies).
\nThis is where the open science story begins. It would have been nice if I could\nhave just written a script to download the repository, parse its ontologies,\nextract their respective metadata, and construct new Semantic Farm records. But,\nthere were many issues that needed addressing first. Because everything was in\nan open-source repository, it was time to make some\ndrive by curations.
\nThe first thing I noticed was that the repository contained OWL files that were\nproduced from CSVs using a custom World Avatar software component called the\nTBox Generator.\nHow to download, install, or use the TBox Generator wasn't clear from the\nontologies repository, so I opened an issue\nasking for clarification.
\nOne of the maintainers for the repository responded promptly and pointed me\ntowards\ndocumentation\ninside the source code for the TBox Generator. I would have never found that!
\nThe documentation said run mvn clean install -DskipTests, which implicitly\nmeant that I should clone the repository and run Maven (mvn) with:
$ git clone https://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/baselib.git\n$ cd baselib\n$ mvn clean install -DskipTests\nThis immediately failed because some of the Java dependencies were distributed\nby GitHub's Maven repository, and this weirdly requires having an access token.\nNeither the documentation nor the error given by Maven made this clear, so I had\nto do some searching to figure it out. This must be something that's easy to\nforget about when in the Java universe after getting it initially set up, but\nnewbies never know it. In the end, I made a GitHub personal access token at\nhttps://github.com/settings/tokens/new and adding into my ~/.m2/settings.xml\nlike:
After I was able to download and build the software, I had to figure out the\nnext step on how to run it. The documentation said\njava -cp jps-base-lib.jar uk.ac.cam.cares.jps.base.converter.TBoxGeneration \nshould work, but again, Java is never so easy. After a lot of troubleshooting, I\nlearned that I additionally needed --add-opens java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED\nincantation to make it work. Honestly, I can't remember why, but this is the\ntypical experience working with Java.
This was an awful lot of work before even making a contribution, but if I didn't\nshare my newfound wisdom, then every other contributor in the future would have\nto go through the same frustrating experience. Naturally, I made a pull request\n(TheWorldAvatar/ontology#44)\nthat encoded the download and build commands and documentation into a justfile\nthat can be run by anyone.
\nIn my first contribution, I realized that the URIs for the traffic incident and\nlandslide ontologies were incorrect, probably due to forgetting to update rows\ncopy/pasted from other ontologies. I was able to update the rows in the template\nCSVs for these two ontologies in\nhttps://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/ontology/pull/40.
\nI actually did this change before figuring out how to rebuild the ontology files\nwith the TBox Generator, so this contribution doesn't have corresponding OWL\nupdates in it. For storytelling purposes, I thought it made sense to explain the\nTBox Generator first.
\nI identified four ontologies that had source CSV files, but no corresponding OWL\nfiles and opened https://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/ontology/issues/41. It\nturns out that these CSV files had syntax and semantic issues, which I figured\nout through a combination of trial-and-error running the TBox Generator and\npattern matching against how other CSVs look. It's a core skill for biocurators\nto be able to do this with their own brain.
\nUltimately, I updated the CSVs until they were able to produce OWL files in PR\nhttps://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/ontology/pull/45.
\nI identified five ontologies that had both source CSV files and OWL output\nfiles, but the CSVs had similar syntax and semantic issues as above. I fixed\nthese in https://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/ontology/pull/47.
\nIn https://github.com/TheWorldAvatar/ontology/pull/48, I extended the justfile\nto run in a loop to rebuild all ontologies. This fixed some inconsistencies and\nalso materialized the updates from my first contribution. Now, the maintainers\ncan easily create release products with a single command!
\nOnce the ontologies had been updated, I was ready to write a script to parse\ntheir respective metadata and construct new Bioregistry/Semantic Farm records.\nThis materialized in https://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry/pull/2051. I\nadded 74 new prefixes on top of the 3 existing ones for World Avatar ontologies,\nwhich can be browsed here.
\nHere are few challenges I had to address along the way:
\n.io/.com domain names.After several iterations of parsing the ontologies, I was able to encode\nrules in a script for auto-generating Bioregistry/Semantic Farm records that\nnormalized and addressed the inconsistencies from the first two points.\nImportantly, because I was able to parse the\nentire ontologies, I was able to extract the URI prefixes and example local\nunique identifiers in most cases. I had to do quite a bit of manual curation\nfor descriptions, examples, and URI format strings in the end, too. Some of it\nrequired cyber-sleuthing, especially for ontologies whose names were acronyms\nlike EMS (which means energy management system, in context).
\nI also had to decide on a systematic way of assigning prefixes to address the\nthird point. The World Avatar's nomenclature scheme Onto + wasn't\nusable - having self-referential or meta components of a prefix or resource name\nis distracting and misleading in some cases. Luckily, the typical solution is to\nsubspace prefixes for projects/series like this, which remove the collisions, so\nOntoCompChem becomes worldavatar.compchem.
After adding a resource to the Semantic Farm, it immediately becomes usable in\npyobo, which downloads, parses,\nstandardizes, and indexes ontologies and\nSSSOM Curator, which uses PyOBO and\nvarious prediction workflows such as lexical matching to predict semantic\nmappings.
\nBecause most World Avatar ontologies focus on object and data properties, I\nwrote a short script to map each against the\nRelation Ontology (RO):
\nimport bioregistry\nfrom biomappings import lexical_prediction_cli\n\nprefixes = {\n resource.prefix\n for resource in bioregistry.resources()\n if resource.part_of_database == \"worldavatar\"\n}\nlexical_prediction_cli(\"ro\", prefixes, identifiers_are_names=True)\nUnfortunately, this script did not produce any mappings on the first try.\nWorld Avatar doesn't typically add labels to its predicates, so I added the\nidentifiers_are_names argument, but I still have a few things to try as\nfollow-up.
While working on this, I realized that there wasn't a good way to navigate the\npart of database relationships, which connect prefixes to a string that\nrepresents a database (or any resource, in the future, it might make sense to\nground these to FAIRsharing or Wikidata QIDs). In\nhttps://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry/pull/2052, I extended the page\nfor navigating keywords to also include part of database relationships, so\nnow, https://semantic.farm/keyword/worldavatar shows the results from this\nwork.
\nThis all just goes to show that when working in an open source setting,\nsometimes good ideas require a lot of tangents. Being a good open source\ncitizen means that all the effort put into this benefits everyone.
\nWhile I came at World Avatar from the NFDI4Chem perspective, its ontologies\ncover several domains relevant for other NFDI consortia. In next steps, I would\nlike to more systematically identify which World Avatar ontologies are relevant\nfor which NFDI consortia and more carefully curate semantic mappings to other\nontologies used by those consortia.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/39nzd-m6998","guid":"https://cthoyt.com/2026/10/02/world-avatar","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790899200,"rid":"z41pp-y2933","summary":"The World Avatar project aspires to model and simulate the real world at the chemical, municipal, and geological scales.","tags":["Ontology","NFDI4Chem","Chemistry","Drive-by Curation","Bioregistry"],"title":"The World Avatar, NFDI, and the Anatomy of an Open Science Contribution","updated_at":1791303304,"url":"https://cthoyt.com/2026/10/02/world-avatar.html","version":"v1"}],"out_of":57736,"page":1,"per_page":10,"total-results":57736}