THURSDAY, 11 JANUARY 2018
Special Session: Astronomy Software Publishing: Community Roles and Services
10:00 am – 11:30 am
National Harbor 2

The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) and Astronomical Data Group at the Flatiron Institute have organized a Special Session at January’s AAS meeting. The session, Astronomy Software Publishing: Community Roles and Services, will be moderated by Peter Teuben (University of Maryland).

The importance of software to astronomy research is well-established, and excellent arguments to reveal these computational methods to support the research record have been advanced and much discussed in recent years. But what avenues are open to software authors to publish their codes, and what roles and services exist in the community to support their efforts? This session answers these questions. It builds on previous AAS special sessions and brings together a panel of experts to present various avenues for publishing codes and the pros and cons of these avenues, the roles of authors, data editors, and publication indexers in software publication, the benefits of publication to authors and the discipline, and efforts of related community projects to improve aspects of software publication. After the presentations, the floor will be open for discussion and questions. The presenters and topics covered are:

Matteo Cantiello (Flatiron Institute), The Evolution of Software Publication in Astronomy
Chris Lintott (AAS Journals), Software papers and citation in the AAS Journals
Leslie J. Sage (Nature), Software policies and guidelines at Nature
Ramon Khanna (Springer), SpringerNature data and software policies for astrophysics journals
Arfon M. Smith (STScI/JOSS), Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS): Design and first-year review
Karen Collins (Center for Astrophysics), Lessons Learned through the Development and Publication of AstroImageJ
August Muench (AAS Journals), The roles of the AAS Journals’ Data Editors
Alberto Accomazzi (NASA Astrophysics Data System), The role of the ADS in software discovery and citation
Alice Allen (ASCL/UMD), The Astrophysics Source Code Library: Supporting software publication and citation

And you, astro software authors and users, are as always important participants in the discussion. Please come with your questions, observations, and comments; I hope to see you there!