Authors should review our AAS Journal software and computational notebook policies, which change substantially the recommended practice for including software in your article. Software and notebooks should be published, placed in a persistent archive, and cited in the manuscript to appear in the formal reference list of your final article. See ‘Using Repositories‘ above and our GitHub Tutorial. We are strongly discouraging the practice of embedding tar or zip archives of code material in the final published article.
If authors insist upon including any of their relevant source code with their article, then the following guidelines on its content, metadata, and licensing should be followed. The code can be written in any language, but extremely long and complex programs with numerous subroutines are not appropriate; again such codes should be published in a persistent repository. Executable files are not accepted.
Authors choosing to submit source codes as a part of their article need to be aware of the following:
- Codes often change, but the published materials in the journal do not. Authors cannot update their code or fix bugs for codes published in support of their AAS Journal article. However, authors may include a URL in the article to link to updated versions of the code.
- Source codes that use copyrighted material cannot be published with the copyrighted material included (e.g., a code that uses Numerical Recipes subroutines of Press et al.). In these cases, the author must exclude any copyrighted material and include a statement explaining where and how the missing material can be obtained and implemented into the code.
- Authors must license their code.
Authors should attach the following metadata header to their source code. The metadata header provides information to the code users to help them compile and use the code. Authors should provide information, when appropriate, for each line of the metadata header given below. The information between the “[ ]”s provides instructions and examples for the author and should be removed before submission.
Title:
Authors:
Code names: [e.g., program.f]
Language: [e.g., Fortran 77]
License: [e.g. MIT License]
Code tested under the following compilers/operating systems: [e.g., gcc/Linux]
Description of input data: [include units and formatting]
Description of output data: [include units]
System requirements: [e.g., minimum floating point precision]
Calls to external routines: [e.g., SIMPLX.F from “Numerical Recipes” by Press et al.1992]
Additional comments: [e.g., Program calculates the minimum of a function]
The AAS gives permission to anyone who wishes to use these subroutines to run their own calculations.
Permission to republish or reuse these routines should be directed to permissions@aas.org.
Note that the AAS does not take responsibility for the content of the source code. Potential users should be wary of applying the code to conditions that the code was not written to model and the accuracy of the code may be affected when compiled and executed on different systems.
