News
Astronomy & Astrophysics to remain in Open Access under Subscribe to Open model in 2023
- Details
- Published on 03 May 2023
Paris, France, 3 May 2023: Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) is pleased to announce that it will continue to publish its research in open access for the second consecutive year under the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model. In contrast to other core astronomy journals that have transitioned or will transition to open access via the Gold (APC) route, A&A has chosen a different approach to achieve immediate open access while minimizing any potential disruption to authors or subscribers. This decision reaffirms A&A's commitment to making its high-quality research easily accessible to the global scientific community, while also ensuring sustainability and financial stability for the journal.
Call for new Associate Editors
- Details
- Published on 20 March 2023
The Board of Directors of Astronomy & Astrophysics invites applications for three positions of Associate Editors. The positions to fill are in the following broad research areas:
- Theoretical astrophysics
- Extragalactic astrophysics
- Stellar populations
The new Associate Editors are expected to have a broad and recognized expertise in their domain of specialization, as witnessed by a strong record of influential published research. Some familiarity with additional fields of astrophysics will be considered a plus for all three positions. The theoretician, ideally, will be familiar with a broad span of theoretical astrophysics. Candidates from underrepresented groups and geographical areas are particularly encouraged to apply.
Candidates should be prepared to commit the time needed to handle the peer review of about hundred and fifty papers per year. Limited support for office equipment, as well as an annual indemnity, are provided for this position. The initial term of appointment is four years.
Applicants should submit a curriculum vitae, a list of publications, and a concise letter that summarizes the candidate’s qualifications and their motivations for seeking an Associate Editor position. They should in particular describe their experience as a referee and/or journal editor. Possible support for the task from their home institute should also be discussed in the application.
Applications should be e-mailed as a single PDF file to the Vice-Chairperson of the Board of Directors, Vassilis Charmandaris and to the Executive Committee member Birgitta Nordström, who will send back an acknowledgment of receipt. Interviews for shortlisted candidates are expected to be held in person on the 29 & 30th of May 2023 and we encourage the applicants to reserve their availability for those dates.
Vice-Chairperson of the Board Pr. Vassilis Charmandaris e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Member of the Executive Committee of the Board
Pr. Birgitta Nordström,
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Applications received by April 30, 2023 will receive full consideration.
Informal inquiries about the positions may be directed by e-mail to Vassilis Charmandaris or to Birgitta Nordström, as well as to the Editor in Chief (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) or any of the other current editors.
Astronomy & Astrophysics Subscribe to Open 2022 Transparency Report published
- Details
- Published on 08 December 2022
We are pleased to share the Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) Subscribe to Open (S2O) 2022 Transparency Report. This is the first transparency report and provides a range of information related to the A&A Subscribe to Open program including:
Astronomy & Astrophysics Awards 2023
- Details
- Published on 24 October 2022
The Board of Directors of A&A attributes two yearly awards for outstanding research published in A&A by individuals in the initial stages of their careers. With these two awards, the Board wishes to express its appreciation, and contribute to the enthusiasm, of the new generation of researchers who will be shaping astronomy for the decades to come.
New subscriber benefits announced for 2023 as A&A’s subscribe-to-open program evolves
- Details
- Published on 18 August 2022
In 2023, Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) will continue to be published under a Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) open access model.
Whether or not A&A’s content will be open access in 2023 depends on the level of subscriptions. This will be announced in the first quarter of 2023. If the level of subscriptions is insufficient to continue publishing A&A in open access, only subscribers will retain uninterrupted access to A&A.
2021 Impact Factor – over 6 again and the highest ever
- Details
- Published on 30 June 2022
We are pleased to report that Astronomy & Astrophysics’ impact factor has increased to 6.240 – its highest ever impact factor. It is ranked 12 in the Astronomy & Astrophysics category (Q1) and is clearly held in high regard by its community (its CiteScore also increased significantly this year). We look forward to further success following A&A’s transition to the Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) open access model in 2022.
New CiteScore for Astronomy & Astrophysics shows a significant increase
- Details
- Published on 24 June 2022
Following the release of the latest CiteScores by Scopus, we are pleased to report that the 2021 CiteScore for Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) is 9.9 – an increase from 8.3 in 2020. It is now ranked 11/101 in Space and Planetary Science and 11/91 in Astronomy and Astrophysics (Q1). We are delighted to see the high-quality content published by A&A continuing to make an impact in the astronomy and astrophysics community. We look forward to further success following A&A’s transition to the Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) open access model in 2022.
A&A confirms open access in 2022 through Subscribe-to-Open
- Details
- Published on 04 April 2022
Paris, France, 4 April 2022: Following the announcement made in October 2021 that Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) would move to the Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) open access model in 2022, the A&A board of directors and EDP Sciences are pleased to announce that A&A has now received the required level of support and will be published open access in 2022 under the terms of this transformative model.
Statement of the A&A Board of Directors and Editors
- Details
- Published on 07 March 2022
The Board of Directors and the Editors of Astronomy & Astrophysics are deeply appalled by and concerned with the recent events in Ukraine where the sovereignty and independence of the country and the freedom and the lives of its citizens are suffering direct and brutal military threat by an act of war from its neighbour.
We condemn this reckless act of aggression by the Russian Federation on independent Ukraine, and ask for an immediate cease-fire. No political narrative can justify the loss of lives of innocent people. All disagreements can and must be solved by diplomatic means rather than bombing.
The Board of Directors and the Editors stand united with our Ukrainian colleagues and all Ukrainian people. Ukraine is part of the A&A community and one of the 27 sponsoring countries of Astronomy & Astrophysics. Ukrainians are fighting to defend the independence of their country and democracy. We appeal to our colleagues worldwide to immediately act and support every effort to help stop the atrocities and help the Ukrainian people.
Open Access Transformation for Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Details
- Published on 19 October 2021
With the continued support of subscribers, Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) journal will be published open access in 2022 under a Subscribe-to-Open model.
Paris, 19 October 2021: The A&A Board of Directors has announced that their journal will move to a Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) model. If libraries renew their subscriptions, A&A will be published in full open access in 2022. Since its launch in 1969, A&A has been publishing pioneering, peer reviewed scientific content. The transition to open access will extend access of its high-quality research to a worldwide audience – furthering the field of astronomy and astrophysics. Library subscriptions, together with substantial contributions from the A&A sponsoring countries, will cover publication and editorial costs and enable content to become open access.
Appendices published as camera-ready material
- Details
- Published on 05 October 2021
Dear Colleagues,
The success of the A&A journal brings with it a rapid growth in the number of articles and pages which we have to process in production.
As a consequence of this success and to keep down production costs, we have decided to typeset the Appendices as camera-ready material. This means that our publisher (EDP Sciences) will no longer modify the Latex layout of the appendices.
However, some cases, such as an Appendix starting with a title followed by
a blank page, still need to be handled, and we then have to ask you a small
extra effort. As many of these issues are recurring ones that we have identified,
or are in the process of identifying, we have produced a short document to guide you through these changes.
Sincerely,
Thierry Forveille (Editor in Chief), David Elbaz (Managing Editor)
Astronomy & Astrophysics Awards 2022
- Details
- Published on 30 September 2021
The Board of Directors of A&A attributes two yearly awards for outstanding research published in A&A by individuals in the initial stages of their careers. With these two awards, the Board wishes to express its appreciation, and contribute to the enthusiasm, of the new generation of researchers who will be shaping astronomy for the decades to come.
A&A policy on name changes
- Details
- Published on 19 July 2021
A&A embraces open, inclusive, and fair practices that reflect the culture and values of the worldwide community of astronomers. As such, the A&A Board of the Directors, at their June 2021 meeting, has supported a new policy for name changes. The Board recognizes that authors may change their names for many reasons, including gender identity change, marriage or divorce, religious conversion, or purely personal reasons, and supports the best practices put forth by COPE. A&A can and will change names by request from an author in all web versions of the author’s papers and their associated metadata. A&A will not be able to change names on paper-printed articles already disseminated in libraries across the world but it can and will change names on the PDF version of papers produced under the current production contract. Authors that request name changes should contact SAO/NASA ADS to make sure the name change propagates to their databases. A&A recommends that authors register with ORCID, which will identify their work independently of their name. For more details, please see the full EDP author name change policy.
2021 A&A awards
- Details
- Published on 28 June 2021
The two winners of the first edition of the A&A awards for individuals in the initial stages of their careers were announced at the annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society.
PhD prize
Miriam Keppler
After undergraduate studies at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Miriam Keppler moved to MPIA in Heidelberg, where she completed both her master’s degree, which included an ERASMUS year in Grenoble, and her PhD, and where she is now a postdoc. She is probably best known for her discovery of a (proto)planet in a gap of a protoplanetary disk, which is the first such detection and something that planetary astronomers had been seeking for a long time. Protoplanetary disks and planets have both been imaged for over a decade, and gravitational interaction with an embedded planet has always been one leading explanation for the gaps that are observed in some of those disks, but Miriam Keppler's 2018 A&A paper first closed this loop by finding an uncontroverted observational example. Miriam Keppler has since built on this work by characterizing both disks, through ALMA and near-IR high contrast imaging, and planets, through near-IR spectrophotometry. The broad scope of her work is impressive for someone who completed her PhD less than a year ago and bodes very well for her future career.
Early career prize
Joanna Drazkowska
After undergraduate studies and a master’s degree at the Copernicus University in Torun, Joanna Drazkowska moved to the Institute for Theoretical Astronomy in Heidelberg for her PhD, and she has since been a postdoc, first at the Institute for Computational Science in Zurich and now at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Her work is on the theoretical side of planet formation in protoplanetary disks; she develops models of the growth of the solid phase from micron-size dust grains to Earth-size (and larger) planets. The 2016 A&A article for which she is receiving the A&A early career award is a milestone in that field as it was the first to overcome the fragmentation barrier, or meter-size barrier, which had blocked all previous planet formation models. Joanna Drazkowska showed that the "traffic-jam effect" (a local drop in the radial speed of the particles) that results from the radial drift of the solids can locally enhance the solid/gas density ratio to the point where planetesimals can form via a particle-gas hydrodynamical effect known as streaming instability, hence removing the previous decimeter limit to growth. This trailblazing study triggered many follow-up studies on mechanisms for dust pileup, both by Joanna Drazkowska and her collaborators and by others, and has been extremely influential.
Winners of the first edition of the A&A awards for "Best PhD Thesis" and "Early Career" to be announced very soon!
- Details
- Published on 23 June 2021
The winners of the first edition of the A&A awards for "Best PhD Thesis" and "Early Career" will be announced very soon!
The ceremony will take place during the Opening Ceremony of European Astronomical Society (EAS) Annual Meeting (https://eas.unige.ch/EAS2021/) on Monday 28 June, at 14:20. https://eas.kuoni-congress.info/2021/programme/
Astronomy & Astrophysics Awards 2021
- Details
- Published on 14 December 2020
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A), the Board of Directors of A&A is establishing two awards for outstanding research published in A&A by individuals in the initial stages of their careers. With these awards, the Board wishes to express its appreciation, and contribute to the enthusiasm, of the new generation of researchers who will be shaping astronomy for the decades to come.
Congratulations to the 2020 Nobel prize in physics Laureates
- Details
- Published on 08 October 2020
The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to astronomers Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for their parallel discoveries of the supermassive compact object at the center of our Galaxy, and to mathematical physicist Roger Penrose for his theoretical work on black holes.
Over the past 30 years, the teams led by Genzel and Ghez have used telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, respectively, to track the orbits of stars around the very center of the Milky Way. This has shown that its central ~100 astronomical units contain 4 million solar masses and yet have very low luminosity; this result is extremely hard to explain with anything but a black hole. Recently, Reinhard Genzel's team spearheaded the development of the GRAVITY instrument for the Very Large Telescope Interferometer to improve the tracking precision of the Galactic center stars by an order of magnitude. In a series of A&A articles, the team used the exquisite GRAVITY measurements to pinpoint the properties of the central mass, measure the variable gravitational redshift it inflicts on passing stars, observe the Schwarzschild precession of their orbits, and measure the motions of gas clouds near the last stable orbit.
A&A warmly congratulates all three recipients of the prize, and thanks Reinhard Genzel and the GRAVITY team for choosing our journal to present their spectacular results. A very nice summary of those results, presented by GRAVITY team member Guy Perrin at the 50th anniversary celebration of A&A, can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQCauze-A8.
A&A special issue (October 2020) : The Solar Orbiter mission
- Details
- Published on 30 September 2020
Astronomy & Astrophysics, published by EDP Sciences, presents a series of articles on the Solar Orbiter space mission and its ten instruments.
Solar Orbiter, an ESA-NASA collaboration, was launched on February 10, 2020. It carries the most comprehensive payload flown in the inner heliosphere to date, with six remote-sensing instruments that image the Sun and its surroundings as well as four in situ instruments for monitoring the immediate environment of the spacecraft. A series of Venus and Earth gravity assists will adjust the probe’s perihelion to a minimum of 0.28 AU and raise the inclination of the orbital plane to over 33 degrees. This will allow the first-ever look at the solar poles. Thus, Solar Orbiter is the conceptual combination of two missions: an out-of-ecliptic in situ probe (like Ulysses) and one that brings state-of-the-art telescopes (which are an improvement over those of, e.g., SOHO and SDO) closer to the Sun than ever before as well as over the solar poles. Solar Orbiter will address the most pressing open questions of solar physics, and its results will remain unique for at least the next decade.
All calibrated science data will be made available three months after their reception on the ground, in line with the open-data philosophy of the mission. This publication is coordinated with the release of the first data from the four in situ instruments through the public ESA Solar Orbiter archive. This special feature was coordinated by Yannis Zouganelis and the Solar Orbiter teams.
To read the Solar Orbiter mission special issue, please click here.
Françoise Combes receives the CNRS 2020 Gold Medal
- Details
- Published on 15 September 2020
We are delighted to announce that Françoise Combes, one of the associate editors of Astronomy & Astrophysics, has been awarded the CNRS 2020 Gold Medal. Françoise is a professor at the Collège de France and hold its chair in “Galaxies and Cosmology”. She is also an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
This is a significant achievement. Not only does the CNRS, the French research agency, only award one Gold Medal a year across all academic fields, but, apart from the physicists Alain Brillet et Thibault Damour who received the Gold Medal for their contribution to the detection of gravitational waves in 2017, the last recipient in astronomy was Evry Schatzman in 1983. Previous Gold Medal recipients include most post-1950 French Nobel Prize laureates, so there is every reason to extend our congratulations for this very special moment.
This Gold Medal builds on the CNRS Silver Medal Françoise received in 2001. She has been an associate editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2003, so it is our great honour and pleasure to work closely with Françoise on one of the leading original research journals in its field.
Read the CNRS article “The astrophysicist Françoise Combes receives the CNRS 2020 Gold Medal” or read the CNRS press release.
A&A special issue (September 2020) : Planck 2018 results
- Details
- Published on 14 September 2020
Astronomy & Astrophysics, published by EDP Sciences, has published a special feature on the results from the ESA Planck mission, based on data released by ESA and the Planck Collaboration in July 2018.
This 2018 data release has significantly lower systematic residuals for both Planck instruments, LFI and HFI, and a more accurate photometric calibration for HFI. These calibration improvements are most significant over the largest angular scales and for the polarized emission. The resulting frequency maps were used to separate the diffuse sky emission into maps of the cosmic microwave background, the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, the cosmic infrared background, and the Galactic thermal dust, carbon monoxide, anomalous dust, free-free, and synchrotron emission.
The 12 articles in the special issue describe the released data products and present scientific results extracted by the Planck Collaboration from this data. The six-parameter ΛCDM model continues to provide an excellent fit to the cosmic microwave background data at high and low redshift. Planck measures five of those six parameters to better than 1%, and together with external datasets, sets tight limits to many possible extensions of the model. Beyond those immediate results, the Planck 2018 dataset constitutes an essential treasure trove and will have lasting importance for both cosmology and foreground astrophysics. This special feature was coordinated by Jan Tauber and the Planck Science Team.
To read the Planck 2018 results special issue, please click here.