Publishing data at the CDS

By contract with the Journal, the CDS archives the primary data that are published in A&A and puts them at the disposal of the global community. The data are also linked to the general purpose data-mining tools developed at the CDS. These archived data can be primary observational material, catalogs, theoretical tables of lasting values, etc.

The CDS requires the data tables to be in ascii format. Each table is accompanied by a readme.txt file that describes the table's content. The readme file format defines a standard that is used by all major astronomy journals. Again by contract with the Journal, the CDS provides help to A&A authors in order to prepare the files. Primary data can also be archived at the CDS as graphics files in FITS format. This is of particular interest for spectrograms.

Tables made available in electronic form at the CDS should be prepared according to the conventions explained below and they should be sent to the CDS upon acceptance of the paper, preferably using the submission form proposed on the CDS web site. Alternatively, the tabular material can be sent by e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , or by ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr.

The electronic versions of the tables are systematically checked for consistency at the CDS, and the author may have to communicate with the CDS about missing descriptions or detected inconsistencies.

Preparation of the electronic tables 

Tables to be published in electronic form at the CDS should preferably be prepared as plain ASCII files, one file per table; the description of all table layouts and contents should be gathered into a file named ReadMe, a template of which can be copied from ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/pub/J/A+A/ReadMe.txt. In addition to the description of the tabular material, the role of the ReadMe file is to supply minimal details about the context and the history of the data. Detailed instructions for the preparation and the submission of the tabular data can be found at
http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/submit/; specific questions can be addressed to
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Reference to the material published electronically should appear in the printed text, including a description of the column headings of tabular material. The following text is an example of such a description: "Table 1, available at the CDS, contains the following information. Column 1 lists the name of the source, Column 2 gives the bolometric luminosity...". Alternatively, an excerpt from the table (a few lines) can be provided in the printed version.

Retrieving electronic tables

For all papers, including old papers that do not have an electronic version, the online tables can be obtained from the CDS: 

• by ftp:
  password: (type your electronic address)
  cd pub/A+A/<volume>/<page>
  mget * (to get all files)
  
  
• by web access from:
  http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/A+A.htx
  http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/A+AS.ht
  
  

Publishing data at the publisher

In principle, all information that is not crucial for understanding the paper can be published only in the electronic edition of the Journal, following the Editor-in-Chief's decision. For instance, such online material can be: observation logs, tables of properties that are also reproduced in figures, long mathematical derivations, redundant figures when only one example is needed to understand the discussion, etc. Movies can also be published in the electronic edition.

Access to the online material is only granted to subscribers. At the request of the Editor-in-Chief, they may be published both electronically and as hard copy. The material is displayed as HTML pages, if necessary including links to files under other formats, i.e. MPEG. Whenever the format of the online material allows it (text appendix, tables, etc.), it can be included in the .pdf version of the article as a separate section at the end. This section has special page numbering independent of that in the paper copy.

From 1 January 2007, the articles published in sections 13 and 14 are published mainly online. The first page of these papers, comprising the title, author names and affiliations, and abstract, will be printed. The electronic edition of the journal, which is now the reference version of A&A since the printed edition is no longer complete, will contain the full papers and nothing will distinguish online papers from printed ones in this electronic edition.