Astropy Paper III

Scope of the Paper

Our goal is to produce a brief and informative description of major updates about the Astropy Project, drawing on relevant changes or news since 2018 (the last paper).

Journal

The paper will be jointly submitted to the software section of the Astrophysical Journal and the Journal of Open Source Software.

Coordinators

Please feel free to reach out with comments or feedback by creating issues in this repository, or by messaging any of the Paper Coordinators:

• Adrian Price-Whelan
• Nicholas Earl
• Pey Lian Lim

If you are contributing text to the paper, please see the Contributing document.

Rules for Authorship

We invite you to become a co-author if any of the following applies to you:

• You have an official role in the project, as defined on http://www.astropy.org/team.html
• You are a Voting Member, as listed on https://www.astropy.org/team.html#votingmembers
• You have contributed code to the core package
• You have contributed to Astropy Project infrastructure, including:
  • Sphinx plugins (within the Astropy organization)
  • Pytest plugins (within the Astropy organization)
  • Astropy package template
  • Astropy Website
  • Learn Astropy
• You have contributed to one of the following Astropy coordinated packages (see http://affiliated.astropy.org/):
  • astropy-healpix
  • astroquery
  • ccdproc
  • photutils
  • regions
  • reproject
  • specutils / specreduce

If you would like to be a co-author, please complete the Google form here. If the above does not apply to you but you feel that you should still be considered for co-authorship, please complete the form and your application will be reviewed.

The author order will be 'The Astropy Collaboration' as the first author, followed by people who have contributed significantly to the paper, in order of contribution level (or alphabetically where contribution levels are similar), and all other authors will then be listed alphabetically. A note will be included to indicate the author list and how it was determined.

Building the paper locally

This paper and project uses showyourwork to build the article. This is a new tool that aims to improve the reproducibility of scientific articles. Under the hood, this ultimately uses Latex to generate the rendered PDF, but also uses Snakemake to enable constructing a pipeline of dependencies that generate build components (e.g., figures, tables, datasets, etc.) automatically during the paper build process. Importantly, this means that you can not simply change directory into the src path and use pdflatex to build the paper. To build the PDF of the article, you need to use the Makefile at the repository root. Building locally required having anaconda, snakemake, and a Latex installation on your machine.

To generate the figures, you also need to have some environment variables set. You must have a local clone of the astropy/astropy repository and set the env variable ASTROPY_REPO_PATH to the path of the cloned repository (required). You also should generate an ADS developer key and set the env variable ADS_DEV_KEY to this key (optional).

With these, in the repository root, run:

make

This should automatically install all of the required dependencies into a conda environment and build the paper with this environment. If this fails for you, please open an issue.