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openjournals / paper-JOSS-oneyear

Paper describing design and first-year of JOSS
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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PeerJ R2C7 #14

Closed kyleniemeyer closed 6 years ago

kyleniemeyer commented 6 years ago

Section 2

The motivation of this journal should not be the career of the research software engineers. It should be good scientific practice. As a side effect it could help the career development, but this problem relates more the reward and evaluation system in place in many academic institutions. Having this journal may solve one aspect, but not the actual cause of lack of career perspectives of software engineers in the scientific community. This is to be addressed in the academic system, in particular the leadership of it.

That developers shun away from publishing a citable paper is not a strong argument. They should do so as part of good scientific practice since it contains an independent peer-review quality check, a time stamp and allows for referencing. The notion that a paper is also a time stamp recognizing the original contribution of the author to the scientific process could also be more clearly spelled out.

Note that there are quite a few domain specific journals that do not require new scientific results. From my own personal experience, as an editor of one of them, it is more a problem of culture. The reviewers focus a lot on the scientific results and find it hard to review papers purely based on methodologies and tools.

danielskatz commented 6 years ago

I'm not really sure if we should address this or not, but if so, I suggest:

There are a number of challenges related to the culture of science, including in many fields, how it recognizes digital products, provenance and reproducibility, and many sociologic issues, including recognition of individuals outside publications, diversity, etc. JOSS is not trying to directly solve this complete problem, but focuses on a small part, that of recognition of software and software contributors. If we are successful in our part, this will impact the overall culture of science.

kyleniemeyer commented 6 years ago

I agree with @danielskatz's suggested response.

kyleniemeyer commented 6 years ago

I did not make a change to the paper, but added this in response to the reviewer:

There are a number of challenges related to the culture of science (in many fields): how it recognizes digital products, provenance and reproducibility, and many sociological issues, including recognition of individuals outside publications, diversity, etc. JOSS is not trying to directly solve this complete problem, but focuses on a small part: recognition of software and software contributors. If we are successful in our part, this will impact the overall culture of science.