Best Practices for Data Publication in the Astronomical Literature
Tracy X. Chen, Marion Schmitz, Joseph M. Mazzarella, Xiuqin Wu, Julian C. van Eyken, Alberto Accomazzi, Rachel L. Akeson, Mark Allen, Rachael Beaton, G. Bruce B… 展开作者
Tracy X. Chen, Marion Schmitz, Joseph M. Mazzarella, Xiuqin Wu, Julian C. van Eyken, Alberto Accomazzi, Rachel L. Akeson, Mark Allen, Rachael Beaton, G. Bruce Berriman, Andrew W. Boyle, Marianne Brouty, Ben Chan, Jessie L. Christiansen, David R. Ciardi, David Cook, Raffaele D'Abrusco, Rick Ebert, Cren Frayer, Benjamin J. Fulton, Christopher Gelino, George Helou, Calen B. Henderson, Justin Howell, Joyce Kim, Gilles Landais, Tak Lo, Cecile Loup, Barry Madore, Giacomo Monari, August Muench, Anais Oberto, Pierre Ocvirk, Joshua E. G. Peek, Emmanuelle Perret, Olga Pevunova, Solange V. Ramirez, Luisa Rebull, Ohad Shemmer, Alan Smale, Raymond Tam, Scott Terek, Doug Van Orsow, Patricia Vannier, Shin-Ywan Wang
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19 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables, accepted for publication in ApJS
We present an overview of best practices for publishing data in astronomy and astrophysics journals. These recommendations are intended as a reference for authors to help prepare and publish data in a way that will better represent and support science results, enable better data sharing, improve reproducibility, and enhance the reusability of data. Observance of these guidelines will also help to streamline the extraction, preservation, integration and cross-linking of valuable data from astrophysics literature into major astronomical databases, and consequently facilitate new modes of science discovery that will better exploit the vast quantities of panchromatic and multi-dimensional data associated with the literature. We encourage authors, journal editors, referees, and publishers to implement the best practices reviewed here, as well as related recommendations from international astronomical organizations such as the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for publication of nomenclature, data, and metadata. A convenient Checklist of Recommendations for Publishing Data in the Literature is included for authors to consult before the submission of the final version of their journal articles and associated data files. We recommend that publishers of journals in astronomy and astrophysics incorporate a link to this document in their Instructions to Authors.
The paper presents the basic principles of formation of a database (DB) with information about objects and their physical characteristics from observations carried out at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory (CrAO) and published in "Izvestiya Krymskoi Astrofizicheskoi Observatorii" and other publications. The emphasis is placed on DBs that are not present in the most complete global library catalogs and data tables - VizieR (supported by the Strasbourg ADC). Separately, we consider the formation of a digital archive of observational data obtained at CrAO - as the interactive DB related to the…
In this contribution, we present WebPlotDigitizer, a polyvalent and free software developed to facilitate easy and accurate data extraction from a variety of plot types. We describe the numerous features of this numerical tool and present its relevance when applied to astrophysical archival research. We exploit WebPlotDigitizer to extract ultraviolet spectropolarimetric spectra from old publications that used the Hubble Space Telescope, Lick Observatory 3m Shane telescope and Astro-2 mission to observe the Seyfert-2 AGN NGC 1068. By doing so, we compile all the existing ultraviolet polarimetri…
For decades, perhaps even centuries, the exchange of publications between observatories was the most important source of information on new astronomical results, either in the form of observational data or new scientific theories. In particular, small observatories or institutions used this method. The exchange of physical material between observatories has now been replaced by the exchange of information via the Internet. Yet much of the ancient material has never been digitized and can only be found in the few existing collections of observatory publications. A recent donation of such a coll…
Information on the creation of the index-catalogue for articles published in the journal "Izvestia of the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory" ("Izvestiya Krymskoj Astrofizicheskoj Observatorii" from ADS Bibliographic Codes: Journal Abbreviation - IzKry) is presented. A brief history of the accumulation of references for the catalog, its structure and the scheme of interaction with the basic world astronomical databases are described.
European Southern Observatory（欧洲南方天文台）；ALMA Santiago Central Offices（ALMA圣地亚哥中央办公室）；National Radio Astronomy Observatory（美国国家射电天文台）；National Astronomical Observatory of Japan（日本国立天文台）
One of the Birds of a Feather (BoF) discussion sessions at ADASS XX considered whether a new journal is needed to serve the astronomical computing community. In this paper we discuss the nature and requirements of that community, outline the analysis that led us to propose this as a topic for a BoF, and review the discussion from the BoF session itself. We also present the results from a survey designed to assess the suitability of astronomical computing papers of different kinds for publication in a range of existing astronomical and scientific computing journals. The discussion in the BoF se…
Astronomical software is now a fact of daily life for all hands-on members of our community. Purpose-built software for data reduction and modeling tasks becomes ever more critical as we handle larger amounts of data and simulations. However, the writing of astronomical software is unglamorous, the rewards are not always clear, and there are structural disincentives to releasing software publicly and to embedding it in the scientific literature, which can lead to significant duplication of effort and an incomplete scientific record. We identify some of these structural disincentives and sugges…
We analyze the role of first (leading) author gender on the number of citations that a paper receives, on the publishing frequency and on the self-citing tendency. We consider a complete sample of over 200,000 publications from 1950 to 2015 from five major astronomy journals. We determine the gender of the first author for over 70% of all publications. The fraction of papers which have a female first author has increased from less than 5% in the 1960s to about 25% today. We find that the increase of the fraction of papers authored by females is slowest in the most prestigious journals such as …
This article summarizes a workshop held on March, 2014, on the potential of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to revolutionize our knowledge of the physical properties of exoplanets through transit observations. JWST's unique combination of high sensitivity and broad wavelength coverage will enable the accurate measurement of transits with high signal-to-noise. Most importantly, JWST spectroscopy will investigate planetary atmospheres to determine atomic and molecular compositions, to probe vertical and horizontal structure, and to follow dynamical evolution, i.e. exoplanet weather. JWST w…
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is becoming the de-facto standard for astronomical data publication. However, the number of radio astronomical archives is still low in general, and even lower is the number of radio astronomical data available through the VO. In order to facilitate the building of new radio astronomical archives, easing at the same time their interoperability with VO framework, we have developed a VO-compliant data model which provides interoperable data semantics for radio data. That model, which we call the Radio Astronomical DAta Model for Single-dish (RADAMS) has been built us…
We report the outcomes of a survey that explores the current practices, needs and expectations of the astrophysics community, concerning four research aspects: open science practices, data access and management, data visualization, and data analysis. The survey, involving 329 professionals from several research institutions, pinpoints significant gaps in matters such as results reproducibility, availability of visual analytics tools and adoption of Machine Learning techniques for data analysis. This research is conducted in the context of the H2020 NEANIAS project.
DevOps is the contemporary term for a software development culture that purposefully blurs distinction between software development and IT operations by treating "infrastructure as code." DevOps teams typically implement practices summarised by the colloquial directive to "eat your own dogfood;" meaning that software tools developed by a team should be used internally rather thrown over the fence to operations or users. We present a brief overview of how DevOps techniques bring proven software engineering practices to IT operations. We then discuss the application of these practices to astrono…
Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology can provide for deformable mirrors (DMs) with excellent performance within a favorable economy of scale. Large MEMS-based astronomical adaptive optics (AO) systems such as the Gemini Planet Imager are coming on-line soon. As MEMS DM end-users, we discuss our decade of practice with the micromirrors, from inspecting and characterizing devices to evaluating their performance in the lab. We also show MEMS wavefront correction on-sky with the "Villages" AO system on a 1-m telescope, including open-loop control and visible-light imaging. Our work d…
As research datasets and analyses grow in complexity, data that could be valuable to other researchers and to support the integrity of published work remain uncurated across disciplines. These data are especially concentrated in the Long Tail of funded research, where curation resources and related expertise are often inaccessible. In the domain of astronomy, it is undisputed that uncurated dark data exist, but the scope of the problem remains uncertain. The Astrolabe Project is a collaboration between University of Arizona researchers, the CyVerse cyberinfrastructure environment, and American…
astroquery is a collection of tools for requesting data from databases hosted on remote servers with interfaces exposed on the internet, including those with web pages but without formal application program interfaces (APIs). These tools are built on the Python requests package, which is used to make HTTP requests, and astropy, which provides most of the data parsing functionality. astroquery modules generally attempt to replicate the web page interface provided by a given service as closely as possible, making the transition from browser-based to command-line interaction easy. astroquery has …
X-ray mirrors are usually built in the Wolter I (paraboloid-hyperboloid) configuration. This design exhibits no spherical aberration on-axis but suffers from field curvature, coma and astigmatism, therefore the angular resolution degrades rapidly with increasing off-axis angles. Different mirror designs exist in which the primary and secondary mirror profiles are expanded as a power series in order to increase the angular resolution at large off-axis positions, at the expanses of the on-axis performances. Here we present the design and global trade off study of an X-ray mirror systems based on…
We present a bibliographic analysis of Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer publications. We find (a) archival data are used in >60% of the publication output and (b) archives for these missions enable a much broader set of institutions and countries to scientifically use data from these missions. Specifically, we find that authors from institutions that have published few papers from a given mission publish 2/3 archival publications, while those with many publications typically have 1/3 archival publications. We also show that countries with lower GDP per capita overwhelmingly produce archival public…
From Timbuktu to SKA: Who owns the Astronomy knowledge Africa produces?
North-West University（西北大学）；Centre for Higher Education Professional Development (CHEPD)（高等教育专业发展中心）；The Education and Human Rights in Diversity Research Unit (Edu-HRight)（教育与人权多样性研究单元）；Centre for Space Research（空间研究中心）；National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS)（理论与计算科学国家研究所）
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) Journals are a vital asset of our professional society. With the push towards open access, page charges are a viable and sustainable option for continuing to effectively fund and publish the AAS Journals. However, the existing page charge model, which requires individual authors to pay page charges out of their grants or even out of pocket, is already challenging to some researchers and could be exacerbated in the Open Access (OA) era if charges increase. A discussion of alternative models for funding page charges and publishing costs should be part of t…
Several different controlled vocabularies have been developed and used by the astronomical community, each designed to serve a specific need and a specific group. The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) attempts to provide a highly structured controlled vocabulary that will be relevant and useful across the entire discipline, regardless of content or platform. As two major use cases for the UAT include classifying articles and data, we examine the UAT in comparison with the Astronomical Subject Keywords used by major publications and the JWST Science Keywords used by STScI's Astronomer's Proposa…
Innovative developments in data processing, archiving, analysis, and visualization are nowadays unavoidable to deal with the data deluge expected in next-generation facilities for radio astronomy, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and its precursors. In this context, the integration of source extraction and analysis algorithms into data visualization tools could significantly improve and speed up the cataloguing process of large area surveys, boosting astronomer productivity and shortening publication time. To this aim, we are developing a visual analytic platform (CIRASA) for advanced …
Standardizing and incentivizing the use of digital object identifiers (DOIs) to aggregate and identify both data analyzed and data generated by a research project will advance the field of astronomy to match best practices in other research fields like geosciences and medicine. Increase in the use of DOIs will prepare the discipline for changing expectations among funding agencies and publishers, who increasingly expect accurate and thorough data citation to accompany scientific outputs. The use of DOIs ensures a robust, sustainable, and interoperable approach to data citation in which due cre…
(Un)conscious bias affects every aspect of the astronomical profession, from scientific activities (e.g., invitations to join collaborations, proposal selections, grant allocations, publication review processes, and invitations to attend and speak at conferences) to activities more strictly related to career advancement (e.g., reference letters, fellowships, hiring, promotion, and tenure). For many, (un)conscious bias is still the main hurdle to achieving excellence, as the most diverse talents encounter bigger challenges and difficulties to reach the same milestones than their more privileged…
The Atacama Large mm and sub-mm Array (ALMA) radio observatory is one of the world's largest astronomical projects. After the very successful conclusion of the first observation cycles Early Science Cycles 0 and 1, the ALMA project can report many successes and lessons learned. The science data taken interleaved with commissioning tests for the still continuing addition of new capabilities has already resulted in numerous publications in high-profile journals. The increasing data volume and complexity are challenging but under control. The radio-astronomical data analysis package "Common Astro…
Archives of Photographic PLates for Astronomical USE (APPLAUSE) Digitisation of astronomical plates and their integration into the International Virtual Observatory
The principle that research output should be open has, in recent years, been in-creasingly applied to data and software. Licensing is a key aspect to openness. Navi-gating the landscape of open source licenses can lead to complex discussions.During ADASS XXIX in 2019 it became clear that several groupsworldwide areworking on formalising the licensing of software and other digital assets. In this article,we summarise a discussion we had at ADASS XXX on the application of licensesto astronomical scientific software, and summarise the questionnaire we distributed inpreparation. We conclude that t…
Astronomy has entered the big data era and Machine Learning based methods have found widespread use in a large variety of astronomical applications. This is demonstrated by the recent huge increase in the number of publications making use of this new approach. The usage of machine learning methods, however is still far from trivial and many problems still need to be solved. Using the evaluation of photometric redshifts as a case study, we outline the main problems and some ongoing efforts to solve them.
(Un)conscious bias affects every aspect of the astronomical profession, from scientific activities (e.g., invitations to join collaborations, proposal selections, grant allocations, publication review processes, and invitations to attend and speak at conferences) to activities more strictly related to career advancement (e.g., reference letters, fellowships, hiring, promotion, and tenure). For many, (un)conscious bias is still the main hurdle to achieving excellence, as the most diverse talents encounter bigger challenges and difficulties to reach the same milestones than their more privileged…
Constructing Impactful Machine Learning Research for Astronomy: Best Practices for Researchers and Reviewers
SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research（SRON荷兰空间研究所）；Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学安东·潘涅库克天文研究所）；Space Telescope Science Institute（空间望远镜科学研究所）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Max Plank Institute for Astronomy（马克斯·普朗克天文研究所）；Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory（费米国家加速器实验室）；Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago（芝加哥大学卡夫利宇宙物理研究所）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
A High-Throughput AES-GCM Implementation on GPUs for Secure, Policy-Based Access to Massive Astronomical Catalogs
Light Bridges S.L.（Light Bridges 有限公司）；Observatorio Astronómico del Teide（泰德天文台）；Universidad de La Laguna (ULL)（拉古纳大学）；Instituto Tecnológico y de Energías Renovables (ITER)（技术与可再生能源研究所）；Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC)（加那利天体物理研究所）
During more than 17 years of operation in space INTEGRAL telescope has accumulated large data set that contains records of hard X-ray and soft gamma-ray astronomical sources. These data can be re-used in the context of multi-wavelength or multi-messenger studies of astronomical sources and have to be preserved on long time scales. We present a scientific validation of an interactive online INTEGRAL data analysis system for multi-wavelength studies of hard X-ray and soft gamma-ray sources. The online data analysis system generates publication-quality high-level data products: sky images, spectr…
While software and algorithms have become increasingly important in astronomy, the majority of authors who publish computational astronomy research do not share the source code they develop, making it difficult to replicate and reuse the work. In this paper we discuss the importance of sharing scientific source code with the entire astrophysics community, and propose that journals require authors to make their code publicly available when a paper is published. That is, we suggest that a paper that involves a computer program not be accepted for publication unless the source code becomes public…
In this work, we identify elements of effective machine learning datasets in astronomy and present suggestions for their design and creation. Machine learning has become an increasingly important tool for analyzing and understanding the large-scale flood of data in astronomy. To take advantage of these tools, datasets are required for training and testing. However, building machine learning datasets for astronomy can be challenging. Astronomical data is collected from instruments built to explore science questions in a traditional fashion rather than to conduct machine learning. Thus, it is of…
Even though modern service-oriented and data-oriented architectures promise to deliver loosely coupled control systems, they are inherently brittle as they commonly depend on a priori agreed interfaces and data models. At the same time, the Semantic Web and a whole set of accompanying standards and tools are emerging, advocating ontologies as the basis for knowledge exchange. In this paper we aim to identify a number of key ideas from the myriad of knowledge-based practices that can readily be implemented by control systems today. We demonstrate with a practical example (a three-channel imager…
