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.

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.

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.

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 User and Developer 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

Licensing

Citing 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.

Support Stan

Contribute Money

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.

Contribute Expertise

We welcome new Stan contributors!

  • Code

  • Write

  • Host events

Shop for Stan Swag

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

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