Astronomy and Computing: A New Peer Reviewed Astronomy Journal

Some of my posts here have expressed my long held view that astronomy needs a journal devoted to the application of computer science/IT to astronomy. There are I think two reasons why such a journal is needed. One is that it reflects the growing importance of computational techniques in this era of “Big Data,” and it provides the practitioners of astronomical computing with a vehicle for developing a strong publication record. So I am delighted to see the inaugural edition of “Astronomy and Computing,” a new journal aimed precisely at meeting these needs. I would be even more delighted to see the journal published as open access, rather than through a subscription to the publisher Elsevier. The first edition can be viewed free of charge at  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/22131337. Here is a screenshot of the table of contents:

An introductory article by the editors states that the journal will focus on ” …computation in support of astronomy, not on the astronomical results obtained using computation.”  Sample topics include:

• Scientific software engineering

• Computational infrastructure

• Computational techniques used for astrophysical simulations

• Visualization

• Data management, archives, and virtual observatory

• Data analysis, data mining, and statistics

• Data processing pipeline and automated systems

• Semantics, data citation, and data preservation

The journal will publish research articles on new computational methods, software release and data release articles (but will not act as a repository), notes on practice, review articles, white papers, and target articles (used as lightning rods to solicit comment on a topic under active debate), as well as occasional special issues.

Volume 1 contains articles on such diverse topics as using GPU’s to accelerate cosmological calculations, an ultra-fast image generator for wide-field astronomy, and a note on practices on source-code sharing. I am very happy to see such a diverse set of papers in Volume 1, as it reflects the broad range of computational work performed in astronomy. I hope that the community gets behind the journal and makes it a big success. I also suspect it may be a rich source of future blog posts …