Should I publish in the Journal of Open Source Software?

“Make software count as your scientific output!” is what we keep recommending to people, both inside and outside of FZJ. One great way to do this is to talk about your software in a submission to the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) and HiRSE has covered this topic in one of the seminars.

(Yes, there are other steps which need to be taken first).

The scientific system likes actual papers the most, so having a peer-reviewed publication about your software (and that actually contains and reviews it) is appealing. There is a catch, though: JOSS is not listed on the commercial indexing services Web of Science Core Collection or Scopus, despite trying hard for quite a while now.

While this may not need to stop you from publishing there, the Helmholtz Association only counts journals listed there as relevant for the program-oriented funding (PoF) key performance indicators (and, technically, publications listed on Open Research Europe). All JOSS publications thus do not count for PoF.

We believe this is a blatant mismatch between Helmholtz’ commitment to Open Science and the commercially contaminated practice, which, admittedly, is not limited to the Helmholtz Association. Helmholtz, though, could lead the way here, showing that they do endorse modern, free, independent publication formats like JOSS. JuRSE will continue to advocate for this and already started a discussion with the Helmholtz Open Science Office and the newly established Task Group Research Assessment.

However, as with all mindset changes, this will take time. If publishing in commercially listed journals matters to you (and it usually does, we fully understand this), we cannot recommend publishing in JOSS for this purpose at the moment. There are a few alternatives out there, ranging from research software journals with a commercial publisher in the back or domain-specific journals with a focus on research software, such as ACM TOMS which are listed on Scopus and/or Web of Science, thus counting for PoF. See this article for a good discussion on this.

In turn, if you can live with one of your publications not listed on these commercial lists, please go ahead and continue to support JOSS wherever you can. Publish, review, endorse, advocate, and help us to make Helmholtz a better place for research software and the people creating it. Remember: Talking about your research software is always a good thing. And JOSS is a good place for this.

Author: Robert Speck