open source software

Daniel S. Katz from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois

This talk will discuss the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a diamond OA journal for open source research software. JOSS depends on volunteers for almost all of its functions, and most of these volunteers are those who do research software engineering (RSEng) as part of their job, and many of these people who do it for more than half of their job consider themselves research software engineers (RSEs). The talk will discuss how JOSS is run as an open-source community project, and how it interacts with the RSEng community. This includes that JOSS: runs on GitHub using a helpful bot to automate actions; has reviews that are open, collaborative, and constructive; and uses typical open-source mechanisms for communication. While JOSS reviews are checklist-driven, some of the checklist items are not purely binary; instead, they have values of bad, ok, and good, where ok and good are both sufficient to pass, but good is used to push the community to better
practices that those that are merely ok. JOSS communication using GitHub issues for discussion of reviews, Slack for internal team discussions, and traditional software project mechanisms including social media to announce publications and news, and the new JOSSCast to provide interviews with some paper authors. JOSS has been demonstrated to scale successfully in terms of both people and costs, and we look forward to continuing to support the research software community move towards more recognition and better practices.

You can find the slides from all the previous talks from the HiRSE Seminar series on zenodo and there’s a feedback form for you to tell us what you think about the seminar series and what other topics we should cover.

Institutions

• National Center for Supercomputing Applications