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Astronomy Publishing¤

Unlike some sciences, astronomy has a pretty healthy publishing ecosystem, without the same prevalence of predatory journals, paywalls, and high rejection rates. Here are some of the basics on publishing in astronomy.

Astrophysics Data System (ADS)¤

You can find almost any paper in astronomy using the powerful search engine ADS, the Astrophysics Data System.

There is a lot of cool functionality here! You can search by first author, other authors, year, words in the title or abstract - but also remember to create libraries (eg this one of all my papers) to help organize things. The number one use case is finding papers - and the number two is creating BibTeX citation refs to go in your papers.

arXiv¤

For two decades now, nearly all physics and astronomy papers (and an increasing range of other sciences) have been uploaded to arXiv, and for astronomy in particular, to the subsection of arXiv called astro-ph. They are all free to access, from anywhere you are, and typically linked to ADS pages with all the metadata you would ever want.

There are six subsections of astro-ph for different subject areas; three are directly relevant to my research, and I usually check the new round of papers every weekday at 2pm Brisbane time for

Journals¤

The first point is you'll probably rarely read journals - you'll find papers through ADS or arXiv!

Most astronomy papers are handled in one of three sets of journals, more by geographic origin of the researchers than anything else.

These all have subsidiaries including Letters for short high impact papers, or Supplements for big data releases, et cetera. I tend to publish in ApJ or sometimes MNRAS. All three have basically quite high acceptance rates; you're unlikey to get a decent paper rejected, but peer reviewers will rigorously ask for detail and revisions.

Prestige journals like Nature, Nature Astronomy and Science do have higher-profile results, correspondingly high rejection rates, and sometimes the results can be too good to be true!

There are also regional journals, often dedicated to observatories, such as Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia or PASA, and an American journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific or PASP with a big emphasis on methods.

We will be doing a lot of software development, and the Journal of Open Source Software is a great place to submit short papers documenting the cool open source software tools we make.

Hardware papers are often in SPIE, which is the exception to all the above rules and can be paywalled or hard to access, or in JATIS.

We also do interdisciplinary work, and my favourite journal for this is Proceedings of the Royal Society A, who publish lots of really cool applied mathematics and physics.