Publishing research software

Many savvy open scholars are working to slash the hurdles for researchers to receive academic credit for all their output, including software and data. The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS, http://joss.theoj.org) is a developer friendly journal for publishing papers about research software. On the face of it, writing papers about software is a weird thing to do, especially if the code is in a public software repository, with documentation and perhaps even a website for users of the software. But writing papers about software is currently the only sure way for authors to gain career credit, as it creates a citable object (a paper) that can be referenced by other authors, and the citations counted by indexing services. The primary purpose of a JOSS paper is to enable citation credit to be given to authors of research software. But its peer-review process, committed editorial board, and reviewers experienced in building and reviewing research software, lead to improving the quality of the submitted software. The JOSS publication process rests on existing infrastructure: the journal lives on GitHub and uses the issue tracker for open peer review; the post-peer-review software archive is deposited in Zenodo or Figshare for archival and a DOI, ORCID provides author identification, a CrossRef membership enables minting DOIs for the published papers, and a custom web app and Ruby bot (all open source) automate many editorial tasks. JOSS is an affiliate of the Open Source Initiative, and it is a fiscally sponsored project of NumFOCUS, a 501(c)3 nonprofit in the US—also home to NumPy, SciPy, Jupyter, Julia, Fenics and several other open-source projects for science. I am both a founding member of the JOSS Editorial Board, and a member of the Board of Directors of NumFOCUS.