This talk describes the motivation and progress of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a free, open-access journal designed to publish brief papers about research software. The primary purpose of JOSS is to enable developers of research software to receive citation credit equivalent to typical archival publications. Rather than a review of a lengthy software paper (including, e.g., methodology, validation, sample results), JOSS submissions undergo rigorous peer review of both the abstract and software itself, including documentation, tests, continuous integration, and licensing. The JOSS review process is modeled on the established approach of the rOpenSci collaboration. The entire submission and review process occurs openly on GitHub; papers not yet accepted remain visible and under review until the authors make appropriate changes for acceptance---unlike other journals, papers requiring major revision are not rejected. Since its public release in May 2016, JOSS has published 87 papers as of March 2017, with an additional 38 currently under review.
This talk describes the motivation and progress of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a free, open-access journal designed to publish brief papers about research software. The primary purpose of JOSS is to enable developers of research software to receive citation credit equivalent to typical archival publications.
JOSS papers are deliberately short, and are required to include a short abstract describing the purpose and functionality of the software, authors and their affiliations, and key references, as well as link to an archived version of the software (e.g., DOI obtained from Zenodo). Upon acceptance, papers receive a CrossRef DOI. Rather than a review of a lengthy software paper (including, e.g., methodology, validation, sample results), JOSS submissions undergo rigorous peer review of both the abstract and software itself, including documentation, tests, continuous integration, and licensing. The JOSS review process is modeled on the established approach of the rOpenSci collaboration. The entire submission and review process occurs openly on GitHub; papers not yet accepted remain visible and under review until the authors make appropriate changes for acceptance---unlike other journals, papers requiring major revision are not rejected. Since its public release in May 2016, JOSS has published 88 papers as of March 2017, with an additional 37 currently under review. These figures show the growth of JOSS since its release, via the numbers of submitted and accepted papers.
The JOSS source code is availably openly at a GitHub repository under the MIT license. In addition, all JOSS-related spaces are governed by a Code of Conduct, based on the Contributor Covenant code of conduct. As of March 2017, JOSS is an affiliate member of the Open Source Initiative.
This talk will be a collaborative contribution from the JOSS Editorial Board, presented by Kyle Niemeyer. The current board includes:
- Arfon M. Smith (editor-in-chief), Data Science Mission Office, Space Telescope Science Institute
- Lorena A. Barba, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, George Washington University
- George Githinji, KEMRI–Wellcome Trust Research Programme
- Melissa Gymrek, Departments of Computer Science and Engineering & Medicine, University of California, San Diego
- Kathryn Huff, Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
- Daniel S. Katz, NCSA, CS, ECE, iSchool, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
- Christopher R. Madan, Department of Psychology, Boston College
- Abigail Cabunoc Mayes, Mozilla Foundation
- Kevin M. Moerman, MIT Media Lab
- Kyle E. Niemeyer, School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering, Oregon State University
- Pjotr Prins, Health Science Center, University of Tennessee, & University Medical Centre Utrecht
- Karthik Ram, Institute for Data Science, University of California, Berkeley
- Ariel Rokem, eScience Institute, University of Washington
- Tracy K. Teal, Data Carpentry & Michigan State University
- Jake Vanderplas, eScience Institute, University of Washington
The talk will further describe the motivation behind JOSS, the review process, submission and acceptance rates, the business model, and future plans.
The requirements for submitting to JOSS are minimal:
- Your software should be open source as per the OSI definition
- Your software should have a research application (i.e., be research software)
- You should be a major contributor to the software you are submitting
- Your software should be a significant contribution to the available open-source software that either enables some new research challenges to be addressed or makes addressing research challenges significantly better (e.g., faster, easier, simpler)
- Your software should be feature complete—no half-baked solutions
If you've already licensed your code and have good documentation, then we expect it should take less than an hour to prepare and submit your paper to JOSS.
Authors submit papers to JOSS by writing a brief Markdown paper, then filling out a short form. Upon submission, the editor-in-chief assigns an appropriate topic editor, who assigns one or more reviewers to review the submission. The review occurs openly as a GitHub issue. Reviewers comment and raise issues on the submitted software's issue tracker, following the JOSS reviewer guidelines. Authors then fix these issues or respond, and this process iterates until the reviewers and editor are satisfied with the submission. Then, the editor accepts the paper, and the authors archive the associated version of the software with an archiving service like Zenodo or Figshare. At that point, JOSS publishes the paper, deposits the metadata in CrossRef, and the paper receives a JOSS DOI.
As an example, the review for the Optlang paper can be found in joss-reviews Issue #139. The full paper, along with links to the package repository, paper, and review issue, can be reached via its doi: https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00139. This review shows an example of a review where the JOSS reviewer provided feedback, followed by some interaction between two authors, the reviewer, and the editor. Thanks to the open nature of the review, an observer also jumped in to provide some additional feedback to the authors.
JOSS welcomes submissions from all areas of research and science---the only requirements are those described above. As such, we believe everyone developing software in the Scientific Python community may be interested in submitting a paper.
This looks pretty good. A couple of minor comments: