On 8 April 1968, leading astronomers from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries met in Leiden University to prepare a possible merging of some of the principal existing journals.

[3] The main policy-making body of the new journal was to be the "Board of Directors", consisting of senior astronomers or government representatives of the sponsoring countries.

The European Southern Observatory was chosen as an additional body that acts on behalf of the board and handles the administrative, financial, and legal matters of the journal.

The publishing of Astronomy & Astrophysics was further extended in 1992 by the incorporation of Bulletin of the Astronomical Institutes of Czechoslovakia (ISSN 0004-6248), established in 1947.

Special Issues featuring results of astronomical surveys and space missions such as XMM-Newton, Planck, Rosetta, and Gaia were introduced.

[8] An extensive survey of authors conducted in 2007 [9] showed widespread satisfaction with the new directions of the journal, although the use of structured abstracts [10] proved more controversial.

The evolution of electronic publishing resulted in the extinction of the Supplement Series, which was incorporated in the main journal in 2001, and of the printed edition in 2016.

In 2004 the board of directors decided that the journal "will henceforth consider applications for sponsoring membership from any country in the world with well-documented active and excellent astronomical research".

Other European countries also joined during the 21st century: Portugal, Croatia, and Bulgaria during the 2010s, and  Armenia, Lithuania, Norway, Serbia and Ukraine in the 2010s.

Articles in the other sections of the journal were made freely available 12 months after publication (delayed open-access), through the publisher's site and via the Astrophysics Data System.

The purpose of these schools is to teach young authors how to express their scientific results through adequate and efficient science writing.