Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS): design and first-year review

Abstract

This article describes the motivation, design, and progress of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). JOSS is a free and open-access journal that publishes articles describing research software. It has the dual goals of improving the quality of the software submitted and providing a mechanism for research software developers to receive credit. While designed to work within the current merit system of science, JOSS addresses the dearth of rewards for key contributions to science made in the form of software. JOSS publishes articles that encapsulate scholarship contained in the software itself, and its rigorous peer review targets the software components: functionality, documentation, tests, continuous integration, and the license. A JOSS article contains an abstract describing the purpose and functionality of the software, references, and a link to the software archive. The article is the entry point of a JOSS submission, which encompasses the full set of software artifacts. Submission and review proceed in the open, on GitHub. Editors, reviewers, and authors work collaboratively and openly. Unlike other journals, JOSS does not reject articles requiring major revision; while not yet accepted, articles remain visible and under review until the authors make adequate changes (or withdraw, if unable to meet requirements). Once an article is accepted, JOSS gives it a digital object identifier (DOI), deposits its metadata in Crossref, and the article can begin collecting citations on indexers like Google Scholar and other services. Authors retain copyright of their JOSS article, releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. In its first year, starting in May 2016, JOSS published 111 articles, with more than 40 additional articles under review. JOSS is a sponsored project of the nonprofit organization NumFOCUS and is an affiliate of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

Challenges of measuring software impact through citations: An examination of the lme4 R package

“…However, one disadvantage of citing software papers is that the paper might provide citation contexts that are beyond the software per se. A software paper inevitably provides information not just about the software package, but also about its underlying theories and methods 3 , and sometimes even original results (Smith et al, 2018). This makes it possible for software papers to be cited for reasons other than using the software.…”

On the evaluation of research software: the CDUR procedure

“…In Netherlands, the NL-RSE (Netherlands Research Software Engineer community) 24 was formed in April 2017, an initiative launched by the Netherlands eScience Center 25 and ePLAN 26 and had its first meeting in 2017. In Germany, the deRSE 27 organized its first Conference for Research Software Engineers in 2019 28 .…”

A Project-Based Course on Software Development for (Engineering) Research

“…The first offering of this 10-week course on software development for engineering research completed successfully in June 2018, with all 17 students releasing the first version of their software developed during the course. At least four of the software packages have been developed further after the conclusion of the course, and at least one package is being prepared for submission to the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) [24].…”