
Announcing the Journal of Open Source Software - simoncoggins
http://www.arfon.org/announcing-the-journal-of-open-source-software
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Mizza
This seems like a great idea, but I think it could be vastly helped by some
examples about the format should be, what kind of software is acceptable, etc.

For instance: When I was in school, I wrote a MATLAB program to simulate grid
cells in a rat hippocampus. Is that acceptable? I've also written numerous
packages for Django - are those? And so on..

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rcthompson
They have a list of requirements on the about page that basically boils down
to "any open source software that you authored which has a research
application". There's more detail about the requirements in the reviewer
guidelines, which mostly have to do with the development best practices:
documentation, test suite, contributor-friendliness, etc. And they also give
Fidgit as an example paper on the about page.

For your particular examples, I would say the rat hippocampus simulation
almost certainly fits their guidelines, and the Django packages probably
don't, unless they're doing some sort of scientific computation or data
visualization.

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tkt
This journal also is also encouraging and rewarding good software development
practices, such as documentation, licensing, having the code in version
control and testing. These practices are sadly not common in scientific
software, partly because there is little academic reward.

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kriro
This is a very important observation. There are plenty of academic "we build
software X" papers there's even a method specifically for these types of
papers: design science, Hevner et al. etc. but almost all of them never
mention how to get the software, how it's licensed etc...theoretically that
software couldn't exist and I'd be none the wiser.

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gravypod
I would personally love for one of these groups to succeed. I'd love to pitch
in any way I can.

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bronxbomber92
Since writing the paper is expected to take no more than an hour, given the
software is already written, I wonder if they're worried about receiving a
flood of submissions. Perhaps it's less of a problem since reviewing a paper
should take much less time given their length?

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a_bonobo
I feel it may be a problem for them since it looks like they try to reproduce
the program's setup/workflow, which is (in my experience) more than
bioinformatics reviewers usually do:

>Authors are strongly encouraged to include an automated test suite covering
the core functionality of their software.

> OK: Documented manual steps that can be followed to check the expected
> functionality of the software (e.g. a sample input file to assert behaviour)

You can see the checklist reviewers go through in any of the issues here:

[https://github.com/openjournals/joss-
reviews/issues](https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues)

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sktrdie
If the only point of this is for credits and reputation, than I find it
useless as there are a variety of ways for one to get credit. The number of
citations means nothing compared to how many users are actually using the
software everyday.

Also, a paper is inherently different from a piece of open source software - a
paper is set to present facts about something observed in nature; software on
the other hand is used to accomplish a specific task.

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Blahah
I believe the idea is to create a minimal citeable entity for a piece of
software. It's currently hard to cite software in journals in any coherent way
- this gives a DOI and a human-friendly landing page, as well as a system for
conducting basic peer review of (scientific) software.

~~~
privong
I guess such things are not very widespread, but there is an Astrophysics
Source Code Library[0] that is citeable. I am not sure how
hiring/tenure/promotion committees weigh those citations, though.

[http://ascl.net/](http://ascl.net/)

