JOSS is an adventure in next generation publishing, made possible by the volunteer work of many people. Our editors, of course, guide the style and the content of the journal. And our reviewers make a uniquely valuable contribution, both to the software they’ve reviewed and to the broader community of open-source research software. Some reviewers have been extra generous in contributing. Today, we want to say thank you to all our reviewers, but especially our most prolific ones.
Two reviewers take the top spot for the number of reviews they have contributed to JOSS: Bryce Mecum and Luiz Irber, who have each completed nine JOSS reviews!
Bryce (@amoeba on GitHub) is a scientific software engineer at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). He works on linked open data, semantics, ontologies, science metadata, and reproducible research. He has a B.S. in Biology and an M.S. in Fisheries, he dotes on his dog, and he lives in Juneau, Alaska. Thank you, Bryce!
Luiz (@luizirber on GitHub) is a PhD student in computer science at UC Davis. He works at the Lab for Data Intensive Biology with C. Titus Brown, focusing on sketches, streaming, and online approaches for biological data analysis. Luiz is from Brazil, where he worked for more than three years at the National Institute for Space Research, developing tools for a coupled general circulation model. Obrigado, Luiz!
Both Bryce and Luiz are hereby named Top JOSS Reviewers for our first three years of existence. They are being rewarded with a cozy and geeky JOSS hoodie.
We also would like to acknowledge with an honorable mention the following JOSS reviewers, each of whom has contributed 5 or 6 software reviews: Kristian Rother (@krother, Maurizio Tomasi (@ziotom78), Philipp S. Sommer (@Chilipp), Kevin Mattheus Moerman (@Kevin-Mattheus-Moerman), and Nicolás Guarín-Zapata (@nicoguaro).
On a not-so-celebratory note, we have to acknowledge the lack of diversity on this list: not a single woman is among the group of highlighted reviewers. We understand that women and members of minority groups are asked to take on an outsized workload when it comes to contributing to diversity in technology. But we nevertheless want to extend an invitation to everyone to join our reviewer team, and let us know how we can support you. We will be happy to connect you with an experienced reviewer who can be your onboarding “buddy.”
Editor’s note: JOSS recently had its third birthday. In the first three years we’ve published 557 papers (now 570 at the time of writing). I’m hugely grateful to all of our volunteer editors and reviewers for making this experiment in low-cost community-run journals possible! – Arfon Smith