About the Stan Project

Open Code & Reproducible Science

Stan is freedom-respecting, open-source software (new BSD core, some interfaces GPLv3).  Stan is associated with NumFOCUS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit supporting open code and reproducible science, through which you can help support Stan.

Licensing

Stan Development Team

The project is a team effort comprised of full time and volunteer developers from around the world.

Stan Community Forums

  • Stan forums - message board for questions, discussion, and announcements related to Stan for both users and developers.

  • Stan slack - developer discussions

  • GitHub issues - report bugs or suggest new features or enhancements.

How to Report Bugs

The key to a successful bug report is to provide as much context as possible, ideally in the form of a small reproducible example. Useful information includes:

  • A description of what you were trying to do
  • The specific call to Stan that caused the bug
  • The complete error message. If the error message includes references a specific program line, then please include the Stan program.
  • Stan version information, ideally including the core Stan version, and version of the Stan interface.
  • Your compute environment: operating system and C++ compiler.

How to Contribute to Stan

We welcome new Stan contributors!

  • Code - If you’d like to contribute code, please consult the Developer Process Wiki or check out the GitHub issues on the Stan repositories for the tool that you’d like to contribute to and look for issues tagged “good first issue” or “help wanted”. The GitHub issues as well as the Stan Forums and Stan slack channel are all good places to discuss what you want to do beforehand.

  • Write - If you’d like to contribute case studies, tutorials and similar materials, please make a post on the Stan forums publicity category, and tag the @Stan_Development_Team.

  • Host events - If you would like to organize a workshop or hackathon, please reach out to the community at large, via the Stan forums, or contact the Stan Governing Body at board@mc-stan.org.

How to Cite Stan

We appreciate citations for the Stan software because it lets us find out what people have been doing with Stan and motivate further grant funding.

We appreciate citations for the Stan software because it lets us find out what people have been doing with Stan and motivate further grant funding. When citing Stan we recommend citing both Stan itself as well as the particular interface used.

To cite Stan itself you can cite the Stan Reference Manual or Stan User’s Guide taking the year and version from the latest release on the Stan Project’s Github releases page: https://github.com/stan-dev/stan/releases.

  • Stan Development Team. YEAR. Stan Reference Manual, VERSION. https://mc-stan.org
  • Stan Development Team. YEAR. Stan User’s Guide, VERSION. https://mc-stan.org

To cite the interface or post-processing package you used we recommend using the citation conventions for the language (R, Python, Julia, etc.) associated with the interface or package. For example, to cite RStan use the standard conventions for citing R packages.

Help Fund Stan

Stan operates through NumFOCUS, a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that serves open-source software projects including NumPy, Julia, Jupyter, ScikitLearn, and many more.

Shop for Stan Swag

If you’re looking to infer in style, stop by one of our shops for Stan t-shirts and mugs.

Acknowledgements

Stan has grown from a small research project started in 2011 at Columbia University to a global community of developers, researchers, and users. The Stan project owes its success to the contributions from hundreds of developers, researchers, active users, and funders. Individual contributions to the software and documentation can be tracked through GitHub.

We are grateful to all the users who have taken the time to file bug reports and feature requests via the GitHub and the Stan forums; this feedback has greatly improved Stan’s usability and reliability.

Stan has been funded through grants for Stan and its developers, through in-kind donations in the form of companies contributing developer time to Stan and individuals contributing their own time to Stan, and through donations to the open-source scientific software non-profit NumFOCUS. Stan development has been funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, and by gifts from Novartis, Google, and Facebook. Hosting and support for Stan’s continuous integration testing is generously provided by the Simons Foundation.

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