I hate academic publishing, deeply. It is one of the central reasons why I never chased the “become a professor” track of academia - the incentives are all wrong, the format has barely changed in 100 years (despite science changing fundamentally in that period), it is more often than not an annoying, miserable process for authors and reviewers alike.
Even worse, it is extremely scam-adjacent. Sometimes in very overt ways (“we will publish essentially whatever you write as long as you pay us” or “I will write a paper that cites 50 of my own papers for the metrics”), but more commonly in fundamental structural ways. In a pure labor-value kind of way, you have a lot of monetary value being extracted from a tiny amount of paid labor and a HUMONGOUS amount of voluntary labor. And often the monetary value is being extracted from the same people who provide voluntary labor. It only takes one look at revenue and profit margins from the Elseviers or Springer Natures of the world to be radicalized.
So for my whole career I more or less refused to engage with the whole thing. Yes, I have papers published in for-profit journals, largely due to decisions that were out of my hands. Every time I could actually decide, my written work was a blog post, or a preprint, or just a forum post on https://forum.image.sc. Very often I never bothered turning other kinds of work into words. The few times I was asked to review for a for-profit journal, I refused. There’s a certain degree of privilege here - none of the jobs I’ve had in the last decade relied on publications as an important metric.
Which leads me to tell you I am becoming an editor at the Journal of Open Source Software.
What is JOSS?
Ok, hear me out. JOSS is an academic journal by any standard you choose to apply. It has an ISSN, it provides DOIs, it has a formal peer review process. It 100% exists in the world we live in; a world where sometimes just producing research software is not seen as “good enough” in academia, and you need an actual publication to go with it.
But is it actually different?
So obviously, if JOSS was Yet Another Journal and nothing more than that I would not have actively applied to volunteer my time and become an editor. There has to be something different about it, right? Well, yes. Almost everything, in fact. I’ll focus on three things in particular.
It’s software developer-friendly.
People whose main research output is software often feel out of place in academia, and I think this is particularly the case when it comes to publishing and when it comes to seeing those outputs as valid and as enough to “justify” your work. Very commonly what happens is that you write software, you make it public, and at some arbitrary point in the software lifecycle you decide it’s “good enough” or “popular enough” to write a paper out of it. Writing a paper out of software is hard, and it is often not a particularly useful output. Sometimes it leads to useful work being done (benchmarking, “cleaning up” code), but commonly it is an exercise in frustration.
JOSS’ stance is that “after you’ve done the hard work of writing great software, it shouldn’t take weeks and months to write a paper about your work”. Their goal is that submitting well-documented software to JOSS should take about an hour. The process is well-documented, the review work is all done through github. It’s taking the good things that can come out of the peer-review process (an extra set of eyes looking at what you’ve done and asking intelligent, informed questions) and ditching all the busywork that doesn’t contribute to the work of research software.
Fully non-profit
More importantly, it is not enriching a faceless corporation elsewhere. There are no submission fees. No subscription fees. No open-access fees. Which is what you would expect from a process where almost all the work is voluntary, right? Their costs outside volunteer work are less than $1000 a year (!!!) - which really puts in perspective how absurd academic publishing is when often a single paper will cost THE AUTHORS (who are also providing all the work they put in their research) multiple times that. Knowing my spare time is not putting money in the pockets of someone who cares nothing about research was a huge plus.
Response to the AI slop concerns
That is something I had no access to when I applied to become an editor, but JOSS’ blogpost adapting their policies for AI usage was very well thought out and appropriate, in my opinion. Under their previous guidelines there was the concept of “significant scholarly effort”, which came down to a rule of thumb of three months of developer time, as a minimal barrier. In a world where the Word Extruder can spit out infinite amount of code in no time, that rule of thumb becomes ineffective. So JOSS changed the phrasing on the things they will look for and value in software. In their words,
the irreplaceable human contributions to software become clearer: understanding context, collaboration with others, making design tradeoffs, creating abstractions that capture domain expertise, and building conceptual foundations and following sustainable software practices that enable future discovery.
So regardless of how much you love the plagiarism machine, you will still need to do actual, human work to get published at JOSS. “It is software” and “it is used in research” are not enough by themselves any longer: it needs to be software that was built thoughfully, that follows good open-source software practice, and that has impact and significance, even if niche.
Better things are possible
I think overall I decided to volunteer my time at JOSS because it shows me things could be better. It doesn’t need to be fundamentally revolutionary, sometimes; in a perfect world, research software developers wouldn’t need to have a Citable Research Output on top of their basic work to be seen as valuable members of academia, but that is the world we live in right now. This is still something I feel passionately about, and do the little bit I can to push things towards a better world there as well, but in the meantime I think we can do academic publishing better. Publishing is already mostly volunteer work by volume; the extra step to completely remove profit motivations and companies from the loop is surprisingly small, and it results in an easier, cheaper, more enjoyable process for everyone involved. I’m super excited to get started!