Comment by westurner

4 years ago

> JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) has managed to get articles indexed by Google Scholar [rescience_gscholar]. They publish their costs [joss_costs]: $275 Crossref membership, DOIs: $1/paper:

>> Assuming a publication rate of 200 papers per year this works out at ~$4.75 per paper

> [joss_costs]: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24517711

9 comments

westurner

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timkam  4 years ago

Does anyone here have thoughts on JOSS? I've reviewed for them once, had the impression the editors take their job seriously, and think I'll review again in the future. The review approach that the journal facilitates has a strong focus on engineering aspects, i.e. it addresses a weakness of other venues, where it often does not matter how messy, unstable, and poorly documented the code is (or even if it compiles). On the other hand, the JOSS reviewers are typically not experts on the problem that the software is solving.

  • pmyteh  4 years ago

    I'm currently reviewing for JOSS, and have done so before. In many ways they're a very strange journal: the paper is nearly an afterthought, and the review is focused on the code. But I like them. As you say, the editors take their role seriously. And it seems to have two valuable contributions.

    Firstly, encouraging and structuring code review in academia. My own code is almost entirely solo (and messy), so a venue for structured review and an incentive to robustify public code is good. Secondly, the culture in some disciplines is that code is not citable, only papers - and JOSS is an end-run around this. I hope this second situation is changing, but we're not there yet so JOSS has a valuable role for the moment in simply being a 'journal' assigning DOIs basically for code packages.

    • westurner  4 years ago

      [Scholarly] Code review tools; criteria and implementations?

      Does JOSS specify e.g. ReviewBoard, GitHub Pull Request reviews, or Gerrit for code reviews?

      2 replies →

westurner  4 years ago

From https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs :

> Income: JOSS has an experimental collaboration with AAS publishing where authors submitting to one of the AAS journals can also publish a companion software paper in JOSS, thereby receiving a review of their software. For this service, JOSS receives a small donation from AAS publishing. In 2019, JOSS received $200 as a result of this collaboration.

xqcgrek2  4 years ago

A low cost of $1/page just shows how much of a scam even prestigious journals have become for all involved parties.

Referees work for free. Submitting authors pay through the nose for presumably typesetting and proofs whose true cost is closer to $1/page rather than hundreds. Editors are overworked.

Sci-Hub was supposed to disrupt that industry, but it seems all it's done is shift burden to authors and created pay-for publishing.

  • westurner  4 years ago

    Moderation costs money, too.

    Additional ScholarlaryArticle "Journal" costs: moderation, BinderHub / JupyterLite white label SaaS?, hosting data and archived reproducible container images on IPFS and academictorrents and Git LFS, hosting {SQL, SPARQL, GraphQL,} queries and/or a SOLID HTTPS REST API and/or RSS feeds with dynamic content but static feed item URIs and/or ActivityStreams and/or https://schema.org/Action & InteractAction & https://schema.org/ReviewAction & ClaimReview fact check reviews, W3C Web Notifications, CRM + emailing list, keeping a legit cohort of impactful peer reviewers,

    #LinkedData for #LinkedResearch: Dokieli, parsing https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle citation styles,