Subscribe Now: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, RSS We’re thrilled to announce the launch of “JOSSCast: Open Source for Researchers” - a podcast exploring new ways open source can accelerate your work. Hosted by Arfon Smith and Abby Cabunoc Mayes, each episode features an interview with different authors of published papers in JOSS. There are 3 episodes available for you to listen to today!

Subscribe Now: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, RSS In this episode of Open Source for Researchers hosts Abby and Arfon explore the world of open source software in astronomy with Dr. Taylor James Bell, a BAER Institute postdoc at NASA Ames. Eureka! is an end-to-end pipeline designed for JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) time series observations.

Subscribe Now: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, RSS In the first episode of Open Source for Researchers, hosts Arfon and Abby sit down with Eva Maxfield Brown to discuss Speakerbox, an open source speaker identification tool. Originally part of the Council Data Project, Speakerbox was used to train models to identify city council members speaking in transcripts, starting with cities like Seattle.

Once again, we’re looking to grow our editorial team at JOSS! Since our launch in May 2016, our existing editorial team has handled nearly 3000 submissions (2182 published at the time of writing, 265 under review) and the demand from the community continues to be strong. JOSS now consistently publishes a little over one paper per day, and we see no sign of this demand dropping.

This week JOSS reached a big milestone – publishing our 2000th paper! It also happens to be our 7th birthday, and we thought we’d take this opportunity to review our submission stats from the last few years, discuss some of the changes to JOSS we’ve made of late, and reflect on some of the challenges we have faced as a journal.

Once again, we’re looking to grow our editorial team at JOSS! Since our launch in May 2016, our existing editorial team has handled over 2000 submissions (1838 published at the time of writing, 215 under review) and the demand from the community continues to be strong. JOSS now consistently publishes a little over one paper per day, and we see no sign of this demand dropping.

JOSS is continuing to grow, and we are looking to add more editors with expertise in the area of astronomy & astrophysics. Since our launch in May 2016, our existing editorial team has handled nearly 1900 submissions (1684 published at the time of writing, 205 under review) and the demand from the community continues to grow. In particular, we have seen an increase in the number of astronomy &

JOSS is continuing to grow, and we are looking to add more editors again. We’re especially interested in recruiting editors with expertise in bioinformatics, neuroinformatics/neuroimaging, material science, ecology, machine learning & data science, and the social sciences.

The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is committed to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and here we summarize our status in doing so, followed by a more detailed discussion of how we do so, as well as explaining some when we do not, and some work in progress.

Today we reached a huge milestone at JOSS – we published our 1000 ^th paper! JOSS is a developer friendly, free-to-publish, open-access journal for research software packages. Publishing 1000 papers (and reviewing the corresponding 1000 software packages) over the past ~4 years has been no small feat.

tl;dr – JOSS is introducing new submission criteria whereby submissions under 1000 lines of code will automatically be flagged as potentially being out of scope, and those under 300 lines desk-rejected. This blog post describes some of the motivations behind this decision. Sometime in 2020, JOSS will publish its 1000th paper – an incredible achievement by a volunteer team of editors and reviewers. Since its inception a little over four years ago, the primary goal of JOSS has always been to provide credit for authors of research software. Quoting from the original blog post announcing JOSS: The primary purpose of a JOSS paper is to enable citation credit to be given to authors of research software. One challenge we’ve always struggled with as an editorial team is defining clear guidelines for submissions allowed (and not allowed) in JOSS. Our current submission criteria are available online and include language about software having to be a significant contribution, feature complete, and having an obvious research application. In these criteria we also explicitly exclude a category of software we generally call “minor utilities”. The challenge of defining a unit of publication credit We think of JOSS essentially granting “1 publication credit” for each software package that is reviewed and published in the journal. In empirical research, a publication is often the result of years of work. In engineering research, rarely does a paper represent less than one year of work. Other fields may vary, but let’s say that a scientific paper resulting from work measured in just months is rare or exceptional. Since the earliest days of the journal, there has been a range of views within the editorial team on what level of effort we should require from authors for a submission to be allowed in JOSS – some JOSS editors feeling that every useful piece of software should be considered, others believing that the “bar” for publishing in JOSS should be higher than it currently is. Building trust in JOSS As an editorial team we want JOSS papers to count the same as any other publication in the CV of researchers who write software. With career credit the stated primary reason for starting JOSS, if this isn’t true then the mission of the journal is at risk. In reality this means that our editorial policy requires us to balance two competing needs: Providing an excellent service to authors by offering peer-review of their software and the opportunity to receive career credit for their work. Building the trust of an existing academic culture to accept a JOSS paper as equal to any peer-reviewed journal paper. These two aspects are in tension with each other because while we would dearly love to publish any and all research software in JOSS regardless of size/scale and level of effort to implement, part of building and maintaining that trust with the community relies on us ensuring that our published authors can continue to expect JOSS papers to “count” in their future merit reviews and promotions. Updates to our submission requirements and scope-checking procedures Over the past couple of years, as the number of submissions to JOSS has grown, we’ve found that our existing submission criteria and protocol for rejecting papers as out of scope have been taking a significant fraction of our editorial team time. With a volunteer team of editors, it’s essential that we use their time carefully and an update to our procedures for handling scope assessments is long overdue. Going forward we’re going to adopt the following new process: Automatically flagging small submissions As part of the pre-review process, incoming submissions that are under 1000 lines of code1 (LOC) will be automatically flagged as potentially out of scope by the EiC on rotation. Submissions under 300 lines2 of code will be desk rejected with no further review. Mandatory “Statement of need” section in JOSS papers While this has always been preferred, a clear Statement of need section in the JOSS paper is usually extremely valuable in helping the editorial team understand the rationale for the development of the software. Gauging the scholarly content of the software as part of the review Reviewers will be asked if the software under review is a “substantial scholarly effort” and guidelines will be provided on how they can make that assessment. A streamlined editorial review process Rather than each paper that is potentially out-of-scope being discussed in a separate thread on our editorial mailing list, JOSS is going to move to a weekly review of such papers by our editorial team. Topic editors will be asked to review papers flagged as potentially out of scope in their area and help the EiC team make a decision. References Smith A. Announcing The Journal of Open Source Software - Arfon Smith. Published online May 5, 2016. Accessed July 7, 2020. https://www.arfon.org/announcing-the-journal-of-open-source-software In a high-level language such as Python or R. More verbose languages such as Java, C++, Fortran etc. will require more LOC. ↩ We realize that introducing numerical thresholds may encourage some authors to unnecessarily “pad” their submissions with additional lines of code to meet our thresholds. As reviewers are already asked to judge the standard of the implementation as part of their review we expect that situations like these will usually be flagged during the review. ↩