It has been too long. After an unexpected hiatus of about 1.5 years, I’m thrilled to announce that the Star Formation Newsletter is back.

The pause wasn’t planned. When I took over from Bo in 2020, I underestimated how the workload at A&A would grow dramatically as we transitioned to open access, and I hadn’t anticipated the friction involved in maintaining both a hand-made website and a LaTeX-generated PDF. Each month meant hours wrestling with undeclared definitions in authors’ LaTeX code, fixing formatting issues, and managing a cumbersome workflow. The vision was good, but the execution was unsustainable.

During this hiatus, several colleagues reached out with support and encouragement. They reminded me why the SFN matters. It’s not just about listing papers; it’s about maintaining a community, about giving young researchers a broad view of the field of star and planet formation during their coffee break or journal club, about keeping us connected across continents and career stages.

So we’re back, redesigned from the ground up for sustainability. The new SFN is web-first, open source, and hosted on GitHub. Authors submit abstracts exactly as before: just paste an arXiv ID or URL into a simple form, and we pull the abstract directly and generate a curated list of monthly abstracts. No more LaTeX headaches. No more paid platforms. No more manual formatting marathons.

We’ve eliminated the traditional PDF, but, in case you need it, the web version prints cleanly to PDF through any modern browser. It won’t have the polish of a typeset document, at least for now, but it requires a fraction of the work, and that matters. Sustainability matters. The SFN can only serve the community if it doesn’t consume those running it.

The SFN mission remains unchanged. We’re here to connect the star and planet formation community, to combat hyper-specialization, to welcome young researchers into the field, and to preserve the broad perspective that makes our field of research richer. The SFN will continue featuring News, Abstracts, New PhDs, Meetings, and Interviews that capture both scientific achievements and the human stories behind them.

This return wouldn’t be possible without the new SFN team: Emily Hunt, Lilly Kormann, and Moa Huppenkothen from the University of Vienna. They are the reason the Newsletter lives on. Their enthusiasm, technical skills, and commitment to community work made this revival possible. I’m deeply grateful to them.

To everyone who encouraged us to continue, to those who understood the challenges and offered support, thank you. The SFN is yours. It’s built by the community, for the community. Submit your papers, share your ideas, contribute to the effort and help us grow this resource into a community meeting point. As you’ll see if you visit the SFN new webpage at starformationnews.org, we are in the build-up phase. Over time, we plan to close the 18 months gap, as well as incorporating all past abstract listings and Interviews. Your ideas on how to develop the SFN are not only welcome, they are critical for the future of the SFN. Feel free to reach out.

The Newsletter is back. Let’s keep the conversation going, one coffee break at a time.

João Alves