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openjournals / jose-old

The Journal of Open Source Education (JOSE) is an educator-friendly journal for publishing computational learning modules & educational software.
http://jose.theoj.org
MIT License
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JOSE pre-submission enquiry : Matlab to Octave Porting Guide #29

Closed raamana closed 5 years ago

raamana commented 5 years ago

Project repository URL: To be uploaded

Dear Editors,

JOSE is a great idea, and I support its mission. Congratulations!

We have developed a comprehensive step-by-step guide to encourage academics to share and open source their Matlab code by making it easier to port it to Octave. As the open science and open source movement is picking up steam, the desire to convert existing Matlab codebases (which still occupies a large fraction of biomedical research) into more open Octave is significant. We believe our manual based on covering a large and complex neuroscience pipeline, along with setup and validation scripts , would make future conversions much easier and tolerable than would be otherwise. Does this sound suitable for publication in JOSE?

The guide would be in Markdown and published as a website cross-referring to a code repository.

Thanks, Pradeep

moorepants commented 5 years ago

Pradeep,

Your guide sounds interesting, but as stated I don't see how it is related to education. See http://jose.theoj.org/about to learn about the papers we accept. For example, your submission would have to be either:

raamana commented 5 years ago

Thanks for the response. This is an enquiry to find out its suitability. It is fine if this was judged to be out of scope, but I'd appreciate considering it.

JOSE website has TLDR saying "your course or lesson content must contain or use code to teach". The guide would be targeted towards undergrads and graduate students (or anyone else) entering an academic lab relying on Matlab codebases and teaching how to make Matlab tools more open source (convert to Octave) and verifying the scientific accuracy of the conversion. As it stands, this is a daunting effort for many newcomers, often resulting in subtle errors they are not always equipped to identify or debug.

This can be seen as similar to http://jose.theoj.org/papers/51d19b9c42e3115a548acd4a1cad377b (teaching how to create HTML presentations), with a lot more focus on science, numerical computing and informatics. And as I noted before, we are at the verge of lot of Matlab code getting converted to Octave to join the open science movement in academia, and this guide would likely be well received.

moorepants commented 5 years ago

The EMACs Reveal software is an "open educational software tool". Is your submission a "open educational software tool" or an "open-source learning module"? Please describe how it is one or the other of these. It sounds like the latter to me. If so, then does it fall under this description: "Examples include Jupyter notebooks or plaintext/markup language documents like LaTeX, R Markdown, and ReST for course/lesson content and associated notes, with embedded or associated code snippets/programs."

raamana commented 5 years ago

You are right - it is indeed open-source learning module, and it does fall under the description you noted: markup docs with embedded and associate snippets and code.

moorepants commented 5 years ago

I suggest you submit for a more detailed review then.

raamana commented 5 years ago

Just to clarify, are you approving of this, and suggesting I make a formal submission? I'd love to do that, but only after I get an approval from of the editors here that it is suitable, and will be reviewed.

moorepants commented 5 years ago

I am an editor and it seems to be that your submission may fit based on our criteria. Without going through pre-review with an actual submission I can say no more. I suggest submitting your work to the journal. There are no guarantees of making it through pre-review or the follow up peer review.

raamana commented 5 years ago

Great, thanks. I understand the submission must be accepted by reviewers.

One more question, are we allowed to share the submission on my webiste/blog during peer review? I read something on JOSE website to the effect of "it must not be available elsewhere", so want to clarify. Everything will be public in the future anyways, and my blog post will eventually refer to the JOSE paper and ask them cite it if they used it.

moorepants commented 5 years ago

One more question, are we allowed to share the submission on my webiste/blog during peer review?

This should be fine. I think it refers to that it should not be formally published by another journal.