For anyone who analyses some simple truths about astronomical publishing, it should be obvious that there is a crisis in publishing which must soon explode. The crisis is that far more papers are being published than any astronomer could ever possibly read. Even in narrow subdisciplines of astronomy, the rate of publication is relentlessly increasing far beyond our ability to read the published output. As a result, many papers are probably never read by anyone other than the author and perhaps the referee, many only have the abstract skimmed by a few people, and many are never cited in other works. The present practice of many astronomers publishing several refereed papers a year is simply unsustainable. Let’s look at some numbers.

Today I saw my first dodo. Sure, it was just a stuffed model at the Rajiv Ghandi Science Centre in Port Louis, the capital city of Mauritius. But the famous lugubrious-looking bird endemic to this island, but now extinct for about two centuries, was a sight to behold, even if behind a glass museum case. It looked like a fat blue duck with an enormous bulging bill, about 50 cm high. What an amazing creature!

I have just been to the opening ceremony of Boötes-3, which is a fully robotic 60-cm telescope installed by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain and located in Blenheim, New Zealand. The whole project is under the guidance of Dr Alberto Castro-Tirado and it marks a new level of collaboration between astronomers in Spain and New Zealand. The opening was on 27 February.

At times in the Cosmic Diary blog I will feature interesting events in my life in recent past years. This blog is about astronomy in the Republic of Mongolia. I visited Mongolia for one week in mid-March 2004 as chairperson of the IAU Commission 46 Program Group for the World-wide Development of Astronomy (PGWWDA). The purpose of my visit was to assess the current situation in Mongolia concerning astronomical teaching and research and to make appropriate recommendations to the IAU on possible future development of astronomy in that country.