Astronomy & Astrophysics

• 1. Introduction

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  Astronomy & Astrophysics, known to the scientific community simply as A&A, is a journal built on an act of collective ambition. In the 1960s, European astronomers looked around and saw a fragmented landscape: national journals written in French, German, Dutch, and other languages, each with limited readership, each publishing work that went largely uncited outside its home country. The research was real, often excellent, but its influence barely crossed borders. So a group of scientists decided to do something about it.

  What happened next was not a simple magazine launch. It was a years-long diplomatic negotiation between nations, a reckoning with language, and a bet that a unified voice could carry European astronomy to the world. How did a meeting in Leiden in 1968 turn into one of the four major astronomical journals on the planet? Who were the people who made it work? And what does it mean today, when A&A handles over two thousand papers a year and counts member countries from South America to Eastern Europe? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Leiden Moment

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  On the 8th of April 1968, leading astronomers from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries gathered at Leiden University. The conversations that brought them there had begun five years earlier, in 1963, when European astronomers first formally assessed the need for a shared publication. What they discussed in Leiden was a merger of some of the principal existing journals into a single European outlet.

  The proposed name was straightforward: Astronomy and Astrophysics, A European Journal. Its governing structure was designed to reflect the collaborative spirit behind it. A Board of Directors made up of senior astronomers or government representatives from each sponsoring country would hold ultimate authority. The board would appoint editors-in-chief responsible for scientific content. The European Southern Observatory was brought in as an additional body to handle administrative, financial, and legal matters, giving the enterprise institutional backbone beyond any single nation.

  A second meeting in Brussels in July 1968 turned the Leiden discussions into firm commitments. Each participating nation agreed to an annual monetary contribution and named its delegates to the board. At that same gathering, the journal's first two editors-in-chief were chosen: Stuart Pottasch and Jean-Louis Steinberg. The official founding of the board came that autumn, when a meeting on the 11th of October 1968 in Paris was designated the first formal session. Adriaan Blaauw was named the first chairman, and the contract with publisher Springer Science+Business Media was signed.

• 3. Journals Absorbed

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  Five national publications disappeared into the first issue of A&A when it appeared in January 1969. The oldest was the Bulletin Astronomique from France, which had been publishing since 1884. Alongside it came the Bulletin of the Astronomical Institutes of the Netherlands, established in 1921; the Journal des Observateurs from France, dating to 1915; the Annales d'Astrophysique, also French, founded in 1938; and the Zeitschrift für Astrophysik from Germany, established in 1930.

  The merger was not instant and complete. Sweden's Arkiv för Astronomi, established in 1948, was incorporated in 1973. Then in 1992 the Bulletin of the Astronomical Institutes of Czechoslovakia, which had been running since 1947, joined the fold. Each absorbed journal carried its own scientific tradition and readership; the consolidation did not simply erase those histories but redirected their communities into a single shared enterprise.

  That first year, 1969, produced only four issues rather than a monthly cadence. The journal quickly settled into monthly publication and built out its format. Early on, articles could be submitted in English, French, or German. A data point that reshaped editorial thinking emerged: for a given author, papers written in English were cited roughly twice as often as those in other languages. The multilingual policy was not immediately abandoned, but the trajectory was clear. A Supplement Series was launched in 1970 specifically to accommodate extensive tabular material and catalogs that did not fit the main publication.

• 4. A Shifting Membership

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  The original sponsoring countries were the four nations whose journals had merged to form A&A: France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Belgium, Denmark, Finland, and Norway joined at the outset as well, though Norway later withdrew. The 1970s and 1980s brought a second wave: Austria, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland all joined during that period.

  The 1990s saw Eastern Europe enter the picture. The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia all became members during that decade. By 2001, the journal had grown enough in scope that the phrase "A European Journal" was removed from the front cover. That same year Argentina was admitted as an observer country, the first nation from outside Europe to be formally associated.

  In 2004 the Board of Directors made the shift explicit in policy terms: the journal would henceforth accept sponsoring membership from any country with well-documented, excellent astronomical research, regardless of geography. Argentina took full membership in 2005. Brazil and Chile followed in 2006, though Brazil later withdrew in 2016. Portugal, Croatia, and Bulgaria joined during the 2010s, as did Armenia, Lithuania, a returning Norway, Serbia, and Ukraine. The journal that was born as a European consolidation project now spans multiple continents, with the current membership of 27 countries plus the European Southern Observatory reflected in its board.

• 5. Publishing Transformed

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  A new contract signed in 2001 with EDP Sciences replaced Springer as publisher, and with it came a series of changes that would define the modern journal. English language editing was introduced that same year as a service to authors across the now-diverse membership. The Supplement Series, which had run independently since 1970, was folded into the main journal in 2001 as electronic publishing made separate volumes less practical.

  The editorial structure was substantially reorganized in 2003 and 2005 to bring more countries into the process and to manage a growing volume of submissions. In 2004, precise criteria for publication were formally articulated. Special Issues became a regular feature, focusing on results from major astronomical surveys and space missions including XMM-Newton, Planck, Rosetta, and Gaia. An author survey in 2007 found broad satisfaction with the journal's direction, though structured abstracts generated more debate than most other changes.

  The printed edition came to an end in 2016, the same year the Research Notes section was discontinued. In 2023, A&A introduced links between articles and the corresponding datasets held by the European Southern Observatory, connecting published findings directly to the underlying observational records. The journal's editorial office sits at the Paris Observatory, where it processes over two thousand papers each year. Archived material is maintained by the Centre de données astronomiques de Strasbourg.

• 6. Open Access Path

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  Before 2022, A&A operated a hybrid model. The most recent issue was available free to readers, and authors in certain sections faced no charges at all; Letters to the Editor and articles in sections 12 through 15 were freely accessible at no cost to contributors. Articles in other sections became freely available twelve months after publication through both the publisher's site and the Astrophysics Data System. Authors who wanted immediate permanent open access could pay an article processing charge.

  At the start of 2022, A&A moved to full open access under a model called Subscribe to Open, or S2O. Under this arrangement, the journal's entire output became freely available without the patchwork of conditions that had governed access before. The 2022 impact factor, as reported by the Journal Citation Reports, stood at 6.5.

  The journal also runs Scientific Writing Schools aimed at postgraduate students and early-career researchers. The purpose is practical: teaching young scientists how to communicate their results clearly on the page. By 2025, six such schools had been organized, held in Belgium in 2008 and 2009, Hungary in 2014, Chile in 2016, China in 2019, and Portugal in 2025. The Portugal school marks the first time the program returned to a founding member nation after more than a decade of hosting it elsewhere.