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 and Reviewer Guides

• Submitting a paper to JOSS
  • Submission requirements
    • What we mean by research software
    • Substantial scholarly effort
    • 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?
    • Questions? Open an issue to ask
  • Typical paper submission flow
  • What should my paper contain?
  • Example paper and bibliography
  • Checking that your paper compiles
    • GitHub Action
    • Docker
  • Submitting your paper
  • No submission fees
  • Preprint Policy
  • Authorship
  • Submissions using proprietary languages/development environments
  • The review process
  • Confidential requests
• 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 I host the repository?
• Review checklist
  • Conflict of interest
  • Code of Conduct
  • General checks
  • Functionality
  • Documentation
  • Software paper
• JOSS Policies
  • Animal research policy
  • Data sharing policy
  • Human participants research policy

Editor Guides

• 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

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