Journal of Open Source Software

The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is a developer friendly journal for research software packages.

JOSS is an academic journal (ISSN 2475-9066) with a formal peer-review process that is designed to improve the quality of the software submitted. Upon acceptance into JOSS, we mint a CrossRef DOI for your paper and we list it on the JOSS website.

About this site

This site contains documentation for authors interested in submitting to JOSS, reviewers who have generously volunteered their time to review submissions, and editors who manage the JOSS editorial process.

If you’re interested in learning more about JOSS, you might want to read:

• Our announcement blog post describing some of the motivations for starting a new journal

• The paper in Computing in Science and Engineering introducing JOSS

• The paper in PeerJ CS describing the first year of JOSS

• The about page on the main JOSS site

Submitting a paper to JOSS

If you’d like to submit a paper to JOSS, please read the author submission guidelines in the Submitting a paper to JOSS section.

Sponsors and affiliates

JOSS is a proud affiliate of the Open Source Initiative. As such, we are committed to public support for open source software and the role OSI plays therein. In addition, Open Journals (the parent entity behind JOSS) is a NumFOCUS-sponsored project.

Author Guides

• Submitting a paper to JOSS
  • Submission requirements
    • What we mean by research software
    • Substantial scholarly effort
      • A note on web-based software
    • Co-publication of science, methods, and software
      • Other venues for reviewing and publishing software packages
    • Should I write my own software or contribute to an existing package?
  • Policies
    • Conflict of Interest policy for authors
    • Preprint Policy
    • Authorship
    • Submissions using proprietary languages/development environments
  • Submission Process
    • Submitting your paper
    • No submission fees
  • Review Process
  • Confidential requests
• JOSS Paper Format
  • What should my paper contain?
  • Article metadata
    • Names
      • Name parts
      • Particles
      • Literal names
      • Example
    • Date
  • Affiliations
  • Internal references
    • Tables and figures
    • Equations
  • Markdown
    • Inline markup
    • Links
    • Grid Tables
    • Figures and Images
    • Citations
    • Mathematical Formulæ
    • Footnotes
    • Blocks
      • Headings
        • Deeper nesting
    • Lists
  • Checking that your paper compiles
    • GitHub Action
    • Docker
    • Locally
  • Behind the scenes
• Example Paper
• JOSS Policies
  • Animal research policy
  • Data sharing policy
  • Human participants research policy

Reviewer Guides

• Reviewing for JOSS
  • Guiding principles
  • JOSS Conflict of Interest Policy
• Review criteria
  • The JOSS paper
  • Review items
    • Software license
    • Substantial scholarly effort
    • Documentation
      • A statement of need
      • Installation instructions
      • Example usage
      • API documentation
      • Community guidelines
    • Functionality
    • Tests
  • Other considerations
    • Authorship
    • An important note about ‘novel’ software and citations of relevant work
    • What happens if the software I’m reviewing doesn’t meet the JOSS criteria?
    • What about submissions that rely upon proprietary languages/development environments?
    • Where can the repository be hosted?
• Review checklist
  • Conflict of interest
  • Code of Conduct
  • General checks
  • Functionality
  • Documentation
  • Software paper

Editor Guides

• Editorial Guide
  • Overview of editorial process
  • Pre-review
  • Review
  • Post-review
  • Rejecting a paper
  • JOSS Collaborations
• Expectations on JOSS editors
  • Editorial load
  • Completing the trial period
  • Responding to editorial assignments
  • Continued attention to assigned submissions
  • Out of office
  • Voting on papers flagged as potentially out of scope
• Editor Onboarding
  • Onboarding a new JOSS editor
  • Editorial buddy
  • Managing notifications
• Top tips for JOSS editors
• Sample messages for authors and reviewers
  • Sample email to potential reviewers
  • Query scope of submission
  • GitHub invite to potential reviewers
  • Message to reviewers at the start of a review
  • Message to authors at the end of a review
  • Rejection due to out of scope/failing substantial scholarly effort test

The Editorial Bot

• Interacting with EditorialBot
  • Author and reviewers commands
  • Reviewers checklist command
  • Editorial commands
  • EiC-only commands
  • The complete list of available commands

Developer Guides

• Installing the JOSS application
  • Setting up a local development environment
  • Deploying your JOSS application
  • Making modifications to launch your own site
  • Deploying your Buffy Application
  • Modifying your Buffy deployment