Journal of Open Source Software: bot-assisted open peer review and publication

This was a talk given for an invited seminar for the Information Science & Technology Institute at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Abstract: The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is an open-access, no-fee scholarly journal that publishes quality open-source research software based on open peer review. JOSS was founded in 2016 with the dual objectives of giving traditional academic publication credit for software work and improving the quality of research software. Since its founding, JOSS has published over 2500 software papers—and counting!—with over 80 active editors spread across seven topic-area tracks. To handle this level of submissions and publishing, relying on a fully volunteer team, JOSS relies on GitHub and a system of open tools for reviewing and publishing submissions, driven by chatbot commands. Authors submit short Markdown papers along with links to their software's repository, which are compiled to PDF via Pandoc. JOSS’s editorial bot performs automated health checks on submissions, and reviews take place in GitHub issues, with authors, editors, and reviewers issuing bot commands via comments. This talk will describe the publication experience of JOSS and its machinery, and how it can be adapted by other communities.