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.
- Submitting a paper to JOSS
- Submission requirements
- Conflict of Interest policy for authors
- Typical paper submission flow
- What should my paper contain?
- How should my paper be formatted?
- Example paper and bibliography
- Checking that your paper compiles
- Submitting your paper
- No submission fees
- Preprint Policy
- Authorship
- Submissions using proprietary languages/development environments
- The review process
- Confidential requests
- Reviewing for JOSS
- Review criteria
- Review checklist
- JOSS Policies
- Editorial Guide
- Pre-review
- Review
- After reviewers recommend acceptance
- Handling of papers published together with AAS publishing
- Processing of rOpenSci-reviewed or pyOpenSci-reviewed and accepted submissions
- Rejecting a paper
- Sample messages for authors and reviewers
- Overview of editorial process
- Visualization of editorial flow
- Expectations on JOSS editors
- Out of office
- Editorial buddy
- Managing notifications
- Top tips for JOSS editors
- Onboarding a new JOSS editor