dot-sean / about

The Open Astrophysics Bookshelf organization repo

the Open Astrophysics Bookshelf

What is it?

The Open Astrophysics Bookshelf is a collection of astrophysics textbooks that are open-licensed and open to contribution for others.

Books are written in LaTeX and licensed using a creative-commons license. Each text will be its own repo under the OAB organization page. Texts would be free to adopt whatever style they want, but should accept contributions from the community (via pull-requests). Contributions should be noted through a hierarchical author lists with the lead author/curator being the one who started and wrote most of the text and guides the theme of the text, contributing authors who wrote chapters or large sections, and then community authors who fixed typos or made smaller changes. In addition to explicit acknowledgements of contributions in the texts themselves, the git log will always keep track of contributions.

The books would be living, in the sense that they'd continually evolve. Different texts could either stamp editions (via a git tag) from time to time or just record the git hash in the PDF. With the source available, we could also produce versions optimized for tablets vs. screen vs. printed-page from the same source.

How can I contribute?

You can add to an existing text by forking it, making corrections, improving some discussion, or writing a new chapter, and then issue a pull request to have your changes incorporated into the main repo.

If you have your own book that you would like to add to this bookshelf that create an Issue under the about repo requesting that a new repository for your text be created.