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openjournals / joss

The Journal of Open Source Software
https://joss.theoj.org
MIT License
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What is "the software archive"? #182

Closed hadley closed 7 years ago

hadley commented 8 years ago

I don't understand this requirement: "A list of key references including a link to the software archive". What is the software archive? For an R package, is it CRAN? It seems weird to be forced to cite something in the paper that I'm creating so that people can cite the software.

arfon commented 8 years ago

👋 @hadley. Sorry for not making this clearer. We require all authors to archive a copy of their software with a service like figshare or Zenodo. For example https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/79 has an archive of their repository over at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.158941

CRAN or any other package manager doesn't meet the requirements here as it's not designed to be a long-term archiving solution.

hadley commented 8 years ago

If the point of JOSS is to provide something to cite, why wouldn't people just cite the zenodo archive?

What criteria does a long-term archive have to meet? I'd think CRAN would be a strong position because (a) it's already been around for a long time (~15 years), (b) apples LOCKSS principle, and (c) is under the aegis of a non-profit foundation.

arfon commented 8 years ago

If the point of JOSS is to provide something to cite, why wouldn't people just cite the zenodo archive?

Because Zenodo archives/DOIs and citations to them don't count in the same way as a paper with a CrossRef DOI. The goal is for JOSS to be indexed by Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science etc and for these papers (and their associated citations) to result in career credit for the author. BTW, I wrote a bunch about this in this announcement blog post: http://www.arfon.org/announcing-the-journal-of-open-source-software

What criteria does a long-term archive have to meet? I'd think CRAN would be a strong position because (a) it's already been around for a long time (~15 years), (b) apples LOCKSS principle, and (c) is under the aegis of a non-profit foundation.

Primarily it needs to have archiving in its mission. Services such as Zenodo have long-term archiving in their mission (see Preservation of data in https://zenodo.org/policies). While package managers are often very stable I don't believe preservation is their main function.