[1][2][3] The journal was founded in 2016 by editors Arfon Smith, Kyle Niemeyer, Dan Katz, Kevin Moerman, and Karthik Ram.

[1][4] The editor-in-chief is Arfon Smith (Space Telescope Science Institute).

[5] The journal is a sponsored project of NumFOCUS and an affiliate of the Open Source Initiative.

It has been discussed by its editors in several peer-reviewed papers which describe its publishing model and its effectiveness.

[1][8] The journal is abstracted and indexed in the Astrophysics Data System and in the DBLP computer science bibliography online database.