Community, Standardisation, and Reproducibility: does open-source software help advancing high-energy astrophysics?

In this talk, I will discuss how high-energy astrophysics, and gamma-ray astronomy in particular, are being transformed by several community-based efforts to develop standardised data and open-source software both for statistical analysis and physical modelling.

In the first part of the talk, I will focus my attention on the Data Formats for Gamma-ray Astronomy (GADF) initiative, which proposes a standardised format for gamma-ray astronomical data. This format has been successfully adopted by the current generation of gamma-ray instruments; making, for the first time, their data analysable with open-source science tools such as Gammapy. I will present some examples of technical results achieved by adopting these standardised data and tools, and argue for their potential in facilitating future multi-instruments analyses.

In the second part of the talk, I will discuss the endeavor to develop open-source tools for modelling the emission of astrophysical sources, which are effectively opening the possibility to perform physical interpretation to the community, a task previously performed by a few groups with proprietary software.

I will conclude by discussing the potential impact this new philosophy of open-source development can have on our increasingly digital science.