Call for editors

Lorena A. Barba, Daniel S. Katz, Kyle Niemeyer, Arfon M. Smith

Following our call for editors late last year, once again we’re looking to grow our editorial team.

Over the past ~40 months, our existing editorial team has handled close to 800 submissions (665 accepted at the time of writing, 101 under review) and the demand from the community continues to grow. The last three months have been our busiest yet, with JOSS publishing a little over one paper every day, and we see no sign of this demand dropping.

In order for JOSS to be able to continues to thrive, we think the time is right to bring on another cohort of editors.

Background on JOSS

If you think you might be interested, take a look at our editorial guide which describes the editorial workflow at JOSS and also some of the reviews for recently accepted papers. Between these two, you should be able to get a good overview of what editing for JOSS looks like.

Further background about JOSS can be found in our PeerJ paper which summarizes our first year and our Editor-in-Chief’s original blog post announcing the journal describes some of the core motivations for starting the journal.

More recently we’ve also written in detail about the costs related with running JOSS and scaling our editorial processes.

How to apply

Firstly, we especially welcome applications from prospective editors who will contribute to the diversity (ethnic, gender, and geographical) of our board.

We’re especially interested in growing our editorial team in the following subject areas although all are welcome to apply:

  • Applied mathematics
  • Bioinformatics
  • Computational chemistry
  • Ecology
  • Geoscience/earth sciences
  • Material science
  • R/stats

✨✨✨ If you’re interested in applying please fill in this short form by 4th September 2019. ✨✨✨

Selection process

The JOSS editorial team will review your applications and make their recommendations. Candidates ranking highly will then have a short (~30 minute) phone call/video conference interview with the editor-in-chief(s). Successful candidates will then join the JOSS editorial team for a probational period of 3 months before becoming a full member of the editorial team. You will get an onboarding “buddy” from the experienced editors to help you out during that time.

References

Smith AM. Call for editors. Published online December 21, 2018. doi:10.59349/546tr-5p719

Smith AM, Niemeyer KE, Katz DS, et al. Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS): design and first-year review. PeerJ Computer Science. 2018;4:e147. doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.147

Smith A. Announcing The Journal of Open Source Software - Arfon Smith. Published online May 5, 2016. Accessed August 20, 2019. https://www.arfon.org/announcing-the-journal-of-open-source-software

Katz DS, Barba LA, Niemeyer K, Smith AM. Cost models for running an online open journal. Published online June 4, 2019. doi:10.59349/g4fz2-1cr36

Katz DS, Barba LA, Niemeyer K, Smith AM. Scaling the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). Published online July 8, 2019. doi:10.59349/gsrcb-qsd74