In recent years, open source packages such as Astropy and SunPy have been fundamentally changing the way scientific research is done in their respective fields. PlasmaPy is a new openly-developed community Python package that is working to fill this role for plasma physics. This project strives to provide the core functionality that is needed to foster the creation of a fully open source Python ecosystem for heliospheric, laboratory, and astrophysical plasmas that is compatible with Astropy and SunPy. Our first development release includes the calculation of plasma parameters and transport coefficients, methods for accessing atomic data, and the prototype of a class to describe arbitrary plasmas. In this talk, I will present modern best practices for scientific computing that we are adopting in PlasmaPy, describe PlasmaPy’s current and planned capabilities, and discuss how our community can work together to forge an open source software ecosystem to support scientific reproducibility.

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Fusion Energy Sciences under Award Number DE-SC0016363.