A closer look into the astrophysics community: mapping the research landscape.

Projects like NEANIAS are meant to guide the astrophysics community in the transition toward the Open Science paradigm. By promoting Open Science practices, delivering innovative services and tools, and enriching workflows for data management, visualisation and analysis, NEANIAS will lay solid scientific and technological foundations to face the challenges of future astronomy. And that is only possible if we see the big picture first: where we are right now, and where we want to go.

To accomplish that, we have designed a targeted survey to gather first-hand inputs from experts all across Europe, about the current practices, barriers and trends in astrophysics research. The survey covers four thematic blocks:

  • Open Science, to assess the degree of adoption of practices such as data sharing, open-source development and collaborative work.
  • Data access and management,to address the main issues regarding data findability, accessibility and storage.
  • Data visualisation, dealing with new trends in data visualisation and the availability of workflows to facilitate multi-wavelength astronomy.
  • Data analysis and machine learning,to explore the use possibilities of machine learning techniques for astronomical data analysis.

Each block is composed of three types of questions: first, participants are asked to grade how frequently they incur in certain practices, such as sharing their code in public repositories or using specific visualisation tools; secondly, they are asked to identify the most urgent need from a list of potential issues; and finally, they are asked to grade their agreement with a series of statements about current trends and future expectations in the sector.

The survey has been distributed among some of the most relevant Astrophysics Research institutions in Europe. The gathered feedback will provide valuable insights for NEANIAS, allowing us to polish our services and fulfil the requirements of the community. 

The results of this study will be presented in the 30th edition of the prestigious ADASS conference (Astronomical Data Analysis Software & System), which will be (virtually) held in November.

 

 

EU Flag  NEANIAS is a Research and Innovation Action funded by European Union under Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme via grant agreement No.863448.