JOSS's Commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure

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

The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is committed to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and here we summarize our status in doing so, followed by a more detailed discussion of how we do so, as well as explaining some when we do not, and some work in progress.

This document was assembled by Daniel S. Katz, Arfon Smith, Kyle E. Niemeyer, Kathryn D. Huff, and Lorena A. Barba, and reviewed and approved by the active JOSS editorial board and topic editors, and the Open Journals Steering Council.

Summary

Governance
💛 Coverage across the research enterprise
💛 Stakeholder Governed
💚 Non-discriminatory membership
💚 Transparent operations
💚 Cannot lobby
💛 Living will
💚 Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down

Sustainability
💚 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
💛 Goal to generate surplus
💛 Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months
💚 Mission-consistent revenue generation
💚 Revenue based on services, not data

Insurance
💚 Open source
💚 Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)
💚 Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)
💚 Patent non-assertion

(💚 = good, 💛 = less good)

Discussion

Governance

💛 Coverage across the research enterprise

  • It is increasingly clear that research transcends disciplines, geography, institutions and stakeholders. The infrastructure that supports it needs to do the same.

Research software is essential to all types of research, and in response, JOSS’s coverage includes research software in any discipline, from any place, and from any institution.

The scope of what we publish is only limited by a few guidelines. JOSS publications must be research software of sufficient scholarly effort, which means that some software essential to research is excluded because it is either not research software, (e.g., a C compiler) or too small (e.g., a few hundred lines of Python that implement an existing tool or that provides a wrapper to access a fine-grained data source.)

JOSS strives for broad coverage of research disciplines in its editorial board, to better serve a broad community of authors.

💛 Stakeholder Governed

  • A board-governed organisation drawn from the stakeholder community builds more confidence that the organisation will take decisions driven by community consensus and consideration of different interests.

Open Journals is fiscally sponsored by NumFOCUS, and has a documented governance structure. The steering council, being a small group, is limited in its representation, in terms of geographic, ethnic, gender, and organizational diversity. The editorial board members mostly represent North America and Europe, are mostly white, are mostly male, and are mostly hands-on researchers, primarily from universities and national laboratories.

💚 Non-discriminatory membership

  • We see the best option as an “opt-in” approach with a principle of non-discrimination where any stakeholder group may express an interest and should be welcome. The process of representation in day to day governance must also be inclusive with governance that reflects the demographics of the membership.

Additions to the editorial board, which is the first layer of governance, are made via selections from responses to open calls and are non-discriminatory.

💚 Transparent operations

  • Achieving trust in the selection of representatives to governance groups will be best achieved through transparent processes and operations in general (within the constraints of privacy laws).

JOSS is publicly transparent, much more so than most other journals. Few issues are not publicly open, but these are generally open to all editors, including initial discussions about potential changes to the journal and discussions about the scope of submissions that may or may not be accepted for review. Even though some of these discussions may not occur in the open, we do publish the decisions themselves, along with an explanation.

💚 Cannot lobby

  • The community, not infrastructure organisations, should collectively drive regulatory change. An infrastructure organisation’s role is to provide a base for others to work on and should depend on its community to support the creation of a legislative environment that affects it.

The vast majority of time and effort used at JOSS is operational, with improvements of JOSS next, and finally some publicity about JOSS, which could be considered lobbying. However, this lobbying is mostly done by the JOSS editors because they think it is important to them, not to JOSS. The fact that they are also JOSS editors is a consequence of their feelings about the importance of recognizing contributions to research software, which also leads them to talk about this with others.

💛 Living will

  • A powerful way to create trust is to publicly describe a plan addressing the condition under which an organisation would be wound down, how this would happen, and how any ongoing assets could be archived and preserved when passed to a successor organisation. Any such organisation would need to honour this same set of principles.

As discussed below, there are circumstances in which we would consider the mission of JOSS fulfilled and the journal no-longer necessary. While we have not documented a plan for winding down JOSS, we believe that the core assets associated with the journal (software, article metadata, papers) are appropriately preserved as part of our ongoing operations. The articles published in JOSS are persistently archived such that an end of the journal will not affect the scholarly record.

💚 Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down

  • Infrastructures exist for a specific purpose and that purpose can be radically simplified or even rendered unnecessary by technological or social change. If it is possible the organisation (and staff) should have direct incentives to deliver on the mission and wind down.

JOSS views itself as a temporary solution to provide a means for software developers and maintainers to receive credit for their work, and to have this work (research software) improved by the process of open peer review. We look forward to a time when software papers are not needed, when software is directly recognized and cited, and when software peer review (potentially using a future version of our criteria and processes) is more widespread. JOSS is volunteer-run as a service to the community, and most of the volunteers will be happy when a solution like JOSS is no longer needed, because software has found a more direct avenue to be valued and counted in the scholarly record.

Sustainability

💚 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities

  • Day to day operations should be supported by day to day sustainable revenue sources. Grant dependency for funding operations makes them fragile and more easily distracted from building core infrastructure.

JOSS does not depend on grants for regular operations, but has attracted grant funding for specific activities to improve the tooling that facilitates running JOSS. We make effective use of time-limited funds such as grants to support enhancements to our services.

💛 Goal to generate surplus

  • Organisations which define sustainability based merely on recovering costs are brittle and stagnant. It is not enough to merely survive, it has to be able to adapt and change. To weather economic, social and technological volatility, they need financial resources beyond immediate operating costs.

As described in our blog post on the topic, our operational costs are deliberately very low. We currently do not generate a surplus and have no plans to. We also do not employ any staff and so “economic, social and technological volatility” would be expected to have limited impact on JOSS.

💛 Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months

  • A high priority should be generating a contingency fund that can support a complete, orderly wind down (12 months in most cases). This fund should be separate from those allocated to covering operating risk and investment in development.

We have sufficient funds available today to support our operations for substantially longer than 12 months. Allocating some of these to a formal contingency fund is something we are considering but have not yet done. As a fiscally sponsored project of NumFOCUS, JOSS can receive donations from individuals, and we can kick off a fund-raising campaign at short notice. JOSS can also apply for NumFOCUS Small Development Grants, which are awarded several times per year.

💚 Mission-consistent revenue generation

  • Potential revenue sources should be considered for consistency with the organisational mission and not run counter to the aims of the organisation. For instance…

JOSS revenue comes from three sources: a small amount from donations, a small amount from the American Astronomical Society (AAS) as fees for reviews of the software linked to AAS publications, and a larger amount from grants to the journal related to demonstrating its effectiveness, promoting the importance of research software, and recognizing research software’s contributors. These sources of revenue are fully consistent with the mission of JOSS.

💚 Revenue based on services, not data

  • Data related to the running of the research enterprise should be a community property. Appropriate revenue sources might include value-added services, consulting, API Service Level Agreements or membership fees.

JOSS receives no revenue for its data, which is completely open, but rather receives revenue for its services and for its community impact.

Insurance

💚 Open source

  • All software required to run the infrastructure should be available under an open source license. This does not include other software that may be involved with running the organisation.

All of JOSS’ tools are open source and available on GitHub under the Open Journals organization. This includes the JOSS website, our editorial bot Whedon, and the document production toolchain. Some of the collaboration tools we use as an editorial team are not open (e.g., GitHub, Slack, Google Docs), but these are not critical to the functioning of the journal and could be replaced by open alternatives.

💚 Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)

  • For an infrastructure to be forked it will be necessary to replicate all relevant data. The CC0 waiver is best practice in making data legally available. Privacy and data protection laws will limit the extent to which this is possible

Our papers and the (Crossref DOI) metadata associated with them are available on GitHub, with an open license. We deposit open citations with Crossref, and archive papers and our reviews with Portico.

💚 Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)

  • It is not enough that the data be made “open” if there is not a practical way to actually obtain it. Underlying data should be made easily available via periodic data dumps.

Our papers and the (Crossref DOI) metadata associated with them are available on GitHub, with an open license. These data are easily accessible to all motivated to make use of them.

We could potentially create data exports of the JOSS web application database; however this would just be an alternative representation of the data already available.

💚 Patent non-assertion

  • The organisation should commit to a patent non-assertion covenant. The organisation may obtain patents to protect its own operations, but not use them to prevent the community from replicating the infrastructure.

JOSS has no interest in patents, other than resisting the creation of patents that might prevent us from operating freely.

References

POSI. The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure. The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure. Accessed February 21, 2021. https://openscholarlyinfrastructure.org/