TL;DR: There’s a new journal from the ASA on data science with imaging data, specifically soliciting submissions on statistical research for analysis of astronomical imaging data for a forthcoming special issue. Of particular note: this is a new open-access journal in the prestigious ASA publications family, and during the journal’s launch period (including for this special issue), accepted papers will have no publication charges.
The American Statistical Society (ASA) is the counterpart to the AAS for the statistical sciences. Just as the AAS publishes flagship journals in astronomy, so too does the ASA in statistics, including the Journal of the ASA (know affectionately as JASA) , one of the premier statistics journals.
The ASA recently launched a new journal of potential interest to members of the Rubin community who do astrostatistics/astroinformatics work with imaging data, SDSI:
- Statistics and Data Science in Imaging (SDSI) - An open access journal
- Announcement: NEW Journal: Statistics and Data Science in Imaging | ASA Connect
To accelerate growth of the journal, SDSI has issued a few calls for papers for special topical issues, including Statistics for Astronomical Imaging Data:
The lead special issue editor is David Stenning, an astrostatistician at Simon Fraser U. who many of us working in astrostatistics know via his participation in SAMSI astrostatistics programs and his research in exoplanets and other areas. With David’s help, SDSI recruited a panel of astrostatisticians to develop the Call for Papers and to manage the issue: Yang Chen (UMich), Vinay Kashyap (CfA), Aneta Siemiginowska (CfA), and yours truly (Cornell U.). Marina Vannucci (Rice U.), SDSI Editor in Chief, is helping us manage the issue. Note that Vinay, Aneta, and I are ISSC members. In particular, I joined the team with the specific goal of soliciting contributions from Rubin and Roman astrostatistics/astroinformatics researchers.
If you are doing work involving significant statistical or statistical machine learning research with Rubin imaging data, and expect your work to be at the publication stage this year, please check out the Call for Papers and consider submitting. Note that SDSI accepts papers of different scope—research papers, discussion papers, reviews, case studies, etc.—though all are expected to involve substantive statistical research and will be reviewed by both statistician and astronomer reviewers. The call is open through 2026 (submission deadline is 31 Dec 2026). To help bootstrap this new journal, the ASA has decided to cover publication charges for all papers accepted for the journal’s early issues, including for this special issue—accepted papers will have no publication charges.
Our editorial team is rather small; if you anticipate submitting a paper, it would be helpful (but completely optional) for you to notify me or one of the other guest editors, to help us monitor the scope of this SDSI special issue.