Collaboration

The current phase of SDSS, like all previous phases, is carried out by an international collaboration of hundreds of scientists at dozens of institutions. The scientific achievements of the SDSS have been enabled by the technical and financial contributions, and the collective scientific expertise, of this vibrant collaboration.

The active operational phase of the SDSS-IV project began at Apache Point Observatory on the night of July 1, 2014 and ran through the night of August 23, 2020, and began at Las Campanas Observatory on the night of February 15, 2017 and ran through the night of January 20, 2021. The final data release for SDSS-IV (DR17) occurred in December 2021.

SDSS-IV is being followed by SDSS-V, which began taking data in October 2020. Policies for joining SDSS-V can be found in the SDSS-V Joining Document.

The SDSS-IV Advisory Council is the collaboration's governing body, formulating recommendations on project scope and budget to the Board of Governors of the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC), which has responsibility for all activities at Apache Point Observatory. Collaboration policies are developed and implemented by the SDSS-IV Collaboration Council (CoCo), which has a representative from all of the full and associate institutional partners. The CoCo is chaired by the SDSS-IV Spokesperson, who is elected by the collaboration for a 3-year term.

For more detailed information about the SDSS-IV collaboration and how it operates, please see the important policy documents below. Equivalent documents for SDSS-V can be found on the SDSS-V Website.

The top-level governing policy for SDSS-IV is the Principles of Operation document. This was updated from the SDSS-III Principles of Operation. The SDSS-V Principles of Operation are also available.

More detailed implementation policies, most importantly the Publication Policy and the External Collaborator Policy, are developed by the CoCo and approved by the Advisory Council.

The three main collaboration policies used within the SDSS-IV project are described below. Similar but distinct documents exist for SDSS-V. SDSS-IV policies remain active after the final SDSS-IV data release, for projects/publications which began before the data release.

Each of the individual surveys has its own Survey Science Team (SST), which acts as the highest level of working group (WG) for science associated with that survey.

Additional information on SSTs and WGs can be found in the Publication Policy and on this page.

As described in the Principles of Operation and the Publication Policy, all science projects using non-public SDSS data must be announced to the Collaboration via the project-list web page when they are initiated. At a level above these individual projects, which will typically encompass one or several papers led by a few active team members, scientists may wish to collaborate and coordinate in larger groupings and thus create a "working group" (WG) for the sharing of common knowledge, facilities and information.

The SDSS also maintains an active Committee on Inclusiveness (COINS).

We provide a useful guide to getting started in the SDSS-IV collaboration.

New members of SDSS-V should look at information for that project on the SDSS-V Collaboration Starting Guide.

We request that the following be added to the acknowledgment section of any paper using data from the SDSS-IV.

Funding for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and the Participating Institutions. SDSS acknowledges support and resources from the Center for High-Performance Computing at the University of Utah. The SDSS web site is www.sdss4.org.

SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS Collaboration including the Brazilian Participation Group, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), the Chilean Participation Group, the French Participation Group, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, The Johns Hopkins University, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) / University of Tokyo, the Korean Participation Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Leibniz Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP), Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (MPIA Heidelberg), Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik (MPA Garching), Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE), National Astronomical Observatories of China, New Mexico State University, New York University, University of Notre Dame, Observatório Nacional / MCTI, The Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, United Kingdom Participation Group, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, University of Arizona, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Oxford, University of Portsmouth, University of Utah, University of Virginia, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University.

Find out more about how to cite SDSS-IV and earlier phases of SDSS, as well as a LaTeX template at How to Cite SDSS.