Publishing software is gaining traction in the CSE community. This article discusses possible venues and methods to publish CSE software.
| Resource information | Details |
|---|---|
| Resource name | Assorted venues to publish CSE software |
| Websites | SSI's list of publication journals, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, ReScience C, CoScience/The Self-Journals of Science, Zenodo, FigShare |
| Focus | Software publishing and citation |
CSE software is used to generate many significant results in scientific literature. The articles that present these results should have a way to acknowledge the work that went into developing the software, ideally via the same citation mechanism used to acknowledge previous articles. At the same time, making software visible to searches of scientific literature will help potential users discover software they may benefit from using. As a community, we are still experimenting with various methods of citing software while trying to keep up with the rapidly accelerating scale, pace, and visibility of scientific software development.
Software Sustainability Institute's Listing of Journals
The Software Sustainability Institute in UK (SSI) maintains a webpage titled "In which journals should I publish my software?". This webpage provides a good list of current journals, divided into different categories such as "General journals", "Engineering", "Image Processing" etc.
Journals that Publish CSE Software
Listed below are some additional journals (which are not present in the above SSI's list), that specialize, to varying degrees, in presenting a scientific software package as a piece of scientific literature that can be cited by later works.
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS): A well-established journal, which deals more with applications, their impact and results, as well as their methodology (e.g., verification and validation).
ReScience C: ReScience C is an open-access peer-reviewed journal that encourages the explicit replication of already published research, promoting new and open-source implementations in order to ensure that the original research is reproducible. The journal focuses mostly on computational research.
Collective Science Platform (CoScience)/The Self-Journals of Science (SJS): This is a open curation platform, that allows scholars to freely curate published scientific articles (from any source) into SJS's self-journal tool. The tool provides a way for scholars to share their analysis of scientific output in a structured and comprehensive way, and thus enabling them to express their personal values and thoughts which cannot be usually expressed through traditonal publication channels.
Moving away from journals that require a manuscript and/or peer review, there are also sites which can provide a DOI for your software with little to no review:
- Zenodo Like JOSS, Zenodo can provide a DOI for your software. Unlike JOSS, it does not require a review of the software, and can generate a DOI for each release of your package via GitHub integration. Zenodo also allows users to upload data, and obtain a DOI for their data, while also acting as a hosting/distribution platform for others to access that data.
- FigShare Like Zenodo, figshare can provide a DOI for a snapshot of your software that you upload, although figshare is more commonly used to upload data such that it can also be cited from a journal article that produced or used said data. It is also often used to upload slides and posters in a way that makes them citeable.
