New information for ALMA Principal Investigators (PIs) in Cycle 13: Starting with Cycle 13, Phase 2 information for approved programs will be shown to PIs through the Snooping Project Interface (SnooPI) after the Scheduling Blocks (SBs) have been created. SnooPI now provides field and spectral information for every science target in each SB (e.g., target coordinates and radial velocities, spectral window frequencies, and correlator setups). Additionally, spatial and spectral visualizers to facilitate displaying this information will also be available in SnooPI after 29 September, 2026. These capabilities are similar to what was previously provided through the Phase 2 Observing Tool (OT). More detailed information can be found in the SnooPI User Manual.

As a consequence, ALMA will no longer provide a Phase 2 version of the OT and PIs will need to check SB information through SnooPI.

ALMA has analysed the refereed ALMA publications in the period from 2012 to 2024. The study analyses publication statistics related to various aspects, e.g., science categories, geographical distribution, archival research, time to publication, publication fraction, and citations. Among other results, the analysis shows that about 70% of observed projects were used in at least one publication, and ALMA publications so far were written by more than 9400 unique authors. The median time to first publication since data delivery is 2.1 years, and about 40% of publications made use of archival data in 2024.

The publication evolution follows that of other high impact observatories as the Hubble  Space Telescope and Very Large Telescope. In 2024, the impact factor for ALMA publications, defined as the total number of citations received in a given year stemming from publications of the previous two years, is larger than that of all other major astronomical facilities. Links to the full publication (Stoehr et al. 2026, PASP) can be found here.

The ALMA Science Archive has received substantial feature upgrades, some of which have been worked on for years.

The ALMA Science Archive Query Interface now allows users to search for lines that have been detected by ADMiT in the public ALMA data products. Users can not only search for molecules and transitions, but redshifts and source velocities or line intensities. Previews are also included for the detected lines. The Request Handler download interface has also received an upgrade - it now shows the hierarchy of the data structure in a modern, intelligently scrollable way where the displayed information can be easily expanded and collapsed. A new powerful search bar at the top allows users to filter the displayed rows by text-, unix-pattern or regular-expression search. The output can be sorted, and a quick-select menu allows users to perform the most-used selections. 

On June 27th, ALMA and its scientific community reached a major scientific milestone with the publication of the 5000th refereed paper based on ALMA data. This achievement comes just 14 years after the start of Early Science operations and reflects ALMA’s extraordinary scientific impact. All of these ALMA publications and data are accessible through the ALMA Science Archive at almascience.org/aq.

ALMA would like to thank and congratulate the many scientific teams and individuals who have made excellent use of ALMA observations in these publications to advance the understanding of our cosmic origins. The scientific impact of ALMA continues to grow. Publications based on ALMA data have accumulated more than 210,000 citations, establishing ALMA as one of the most productive and scientifically impactful astronomical facilities in the world.

Since 2021, ALMA has used a distributed peer review model instead of traditional panel-based review. In a recent study, John Carpenter and Andrea Corvillon analysed more than 20,000 proposals and over 160,000 individual reviews over 13 ALMA cycles (Cycles 0–12) to examine whether the statistical patterns of proposal evaluation changed. Overall, the study finds that the outcomes of distributed peer review are statistically consistent with those of traditional panel review. You can read a summary of the result on the ALMA website and the paper accepted for publication in PNAS.