AcadAbout AcadGIS
AcadGIS exists to make one of the most common — and most painful — figures in research effortless: the study-area map. Today it means hours in QGIS or ArcGIS, or a hundred lines of fiddly plotting code. It shouldn't.
AcadGIS is two things sharing one engine: an open-source Python package for researchers who code, and a free no-code web app (app.acadgis.com) for everyone else. Both turn a place name and a data table into a publication-ready map — boundaries, choropleths, terrain, rivers, locator insets and sampling points included.
Built for researchers, by a researcher
AcadGIS is created by Ripon Chandra Malo, a PhD researcher who got tired of remaking the same map for every paper. It's designed around what journals and reviewers actually expect: reproducible, publication-ready figures from a few lines of code.
Free and open source
AcadGIS is free and open source under the permissive Apache-2.0 license — free to use, modify and redistribute, including in academic and commercial work. The full source lives on GitHub, and contributions, issues and ideas are genuinely welcome. If AcadGIS helps your research, a citation or a ⭐ on GitHub is appreciated.
Part of Matily — an open-source software studio
AcadGIS is built under Matily (matily.org), a non-profit software studio founded by Ripon Chandra Malo in Salt Lake City that builds free, open-source, privacy-first tools — from developer utilities to research software like AcadGIS. If you like this project, come see what else we're building at matily.org.
Cite AcadGIS
AcadGIS is described in a paper on arXiv, arXiv:2607.10017 (Malo, Roy & Qiu, 2026). If AcadGIS helps your research, please cite it:
@misc{malo2026acadgis,
title = {{AcadGIS}: A Single-Import Python Package for Reproducible, Publication-Ready Academic Maps},
author = {Malo, Ripon Chandra and Roy, Shatabdi and Qiu, Tong},
year = {2026}, eprint = {2607.10017}, archivePrefix = {arXiv},
primaryClass = {cs.MS}, doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2607.10017}
}
Open data, properly cited
Boundaries come from GADM; terrain from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers, water and world layers from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap. AcadGIS tells you exactly what to cite.