PeerJ R3C2

[kyleniemeyer]

The purpose of the paper - which is to present the design of a new journal targetted at giving software "proxy" papers in a lightweught way and review its first year of operation - is clearly stated and presented. The case for such a journal is convincingly made. Section 3.1 (goals and principles) clearly presents the principles and justifications, and the mechanics of the Journal submission system and workflow are described in some detail in sections 3.2 and 4.

1. However, the design from the reader's experience is almost entirely missing. Journals have authors, editors/reviewers and readers, and it seems that the design for the reader experience is overlooked. The Journal does not seem to have, for example, search functions and at over 246 articles (at time of access) a list without tags or labels is hard to navigate. Section 6 (the next year) focuses on automation of the submission process, including handling versions of previous submissions, but offers little in the way of features for readers.

It seems that the focus is on assigning a marker for software rather than a journal for seeking software articles. If this is an explicit design decision this should be stated.

The article focuses its design decisions on the editorial and reviewing ease of use. It would be instructive to have some feedback on the author and reader experience.

[danielskatz]

As I've mentioned elsewhere ( #2 #8 ), I think a key fact about JOSS is that we don't really care about readers as a primary user group. Our primary user group is authors. We need to say this.

(Note that this is also the point of #28 )

Also, do we have any feedback on author experiences? Maybe we can collect some retweets from authors about papers as anecdotes?

[kyleniemeyer]

I have been seeing tweets here and there about positive experiences from authors... would be fun to include those in the paper somehow. Perhaps we can screenshot them, and cite/link?

[kyleniemeyer]

(or quote the authors and cite the tweets)

[kyleniemeyer]

We do have a blog post from Titus on the author experience, worth mentioning either in the response or paper itself.

[kyleniemeyer]

Also from J K Tauber: https://jktauber.com/2016/05/19/pyuca-published-journal-open-source-software/

[kyleniemeyer]

How about adding this sentence to the end of the Goals and Principles section (3.1):

Unlike most journals, which ease discoverability of new research and findings, JOSS serves primarily as a mechanism for software developers\slash authors to improve and publish their research software. Thus, software discovery is a secondary feature.

and then for the response:

As you point out, JOSS is designed primarily for the authors\slash software developers, not readers---the primary services are providing authors with a mechanism to receive credit for their software, and to improve the quality of this research software via peer review. We have clarified this by adding the following sentence to Section 3.1 on page 4: ``\add{Unlike most journals, which ease discoverability of new research and findings, \joss{} serves primarily as a mechanism for software developers\slash authors to improve and publish their research software. Thus, software discovery is a secondary feature.}''

Regarding author experiences, we have added links to (positive) blog posts from authors to page 18 (references 38 and 39), but do not have any additional feedback on author experiences.

[danielskatz]

ok

[kyleniemeyer]

@arfon?

[arfon]

👍