Main text
A recent editorial in Nature Methods, “Giving Software its Due,”1 documents barriers to research progress arising from challenges faced by researchers who develop software. In particular, it highlights the challenge of developing research software when it is not recognized in the scholarly record through citation. Software citation2,3 is required for these researchers to build a track record and sustain a career in research.
As the editorial board of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), we share these concerns. JOSS addresses this challenge by providing a novel lightweight publishing process specifically for research software (Figure 1). Unlike existing journals that focus on addressing a research question, JOSS emphasizes a detailed evaluation of the software itself through stringent peer review4: Reviewers, selected for both methodological and domain expertise, ensure that software is shared through a standard license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI)5, that documentation and community support comply with established best practices, that code works as documented, and that any performance claims are justified. The review criteria emphasize the usefulness of the software as a general research tool, and the review process contributes to improving software quality. A published JOSS paper serves as a citable unit of research that directly refers to a specific, reviewed software version. This also means that software can be published separately from the research paper that used it, and can include a different author list, to acknowledge the contributions of software developers to the research program.