New Journal: Open Research Computation

[nilshomer]

I find this extremely exciting for those writing and supporting software tools:!

Journal:

http://www.openresearchcomputation.com/

Editor's blog:

http://cameronneylon.net/blog/open-research-computation-an-ordinary-journal-with-extraordinary-aims/

[simonandrews]

That's a really interesting take on a computational biology journal. We've been talking for a while now about how there is a lack of suitable places to publish research software.

I'll be interested to see how strictly they adhere to their rules about documentation and unit tests, and how many high profile projects meet those standards.

[dawe]

Nice, thanks!
Let's see what they propose, as they accepting many things, from code snippets to full software...

[dawe]

I'm a bit scared about the note in the editor's blog:

The submission criteria for ORC Software Articles are stringent. The source code must be available, on an appropriate public repository under an OSI compliant license. Running code, in the form of executables, or an instance of a service must be made available. Documentation of the code will be expected to a very high standard, consistent with best practice in the language and research domain, and it must cover all public methods and classes. Similarly code testing must be in place covering, by default, 100% of the code. Finally all the claims, use cases, and figures in the paper must have associated with them test data, with examples of both input data and the outputs expected.

according to this, more than half of the software I've seen couldn't be published :-)

d

[nilshomer]

It's a high standard, but when one software group starts meeting those standards and promotes itself as the only one that does, others will follow.

[dawe]

It's a high standard, but when one software group starts meeting those standards and promotes itself as the only one that does, others will follow.

I do agree but... take a widely used software for NGS, such as samtools, the code is poorly documented (and commented)... I guess that won't be accepted as is... Also, I think I will spend the next two weeks in commenting and documenting my code to submit it :-)

[cameronneylon]

Hi All. Glad that you find the journal exciting. The standard is deliberately set pretty high. Our aim is to raise standards across computational research and in many cases (some more than others obviously) there is a long way to raise them.

The basic requirement that we've set is that testing and documentation has to be at least equal to best practice in the language or research domain. At the end of the day the editors will have to make a judgement as to what this means in practice but you can expect that it means pretty top notch documentation and good coverage for automated tests. We know that some things can't really be tested easily or productively and we won't make people jump through hoops for no reason but at the same time we fully intend that the requirements to be tougher than the majority of current research software reaches.

The idea is to make publishing with us a mark of the highest quality. That way, you guys want to publish, that helps us to help you to raise standards and we all work together to make research software better than it is at the moment and work towards it being as good as it can be.

Cheers

Cameron [ORC Editor in Chief]

[kmcarr]

So it appears this journal is not going to happen. From their website:

Important notice to authors:

It is with regret that we wish to inform you that Open Research Computation will no longer be launching as a journal within its own right. Instead, it will be launching as an ongoing thematic series within another BMC journal Source Code for Biology and Medicine.

This thematics series will aim to continue to promote the innovative ideas central to Open Research Computation, and to provide a platform for the discussion of these ideas.

If you wish to submit your manuscript to this thematic series, please click here, and clearly indicate within your cover letter that you wish your manuscript to be considered as part of the Open Research Computation thematic series. If you have any queries, please contact the Editor-in-Chief, Cameron Neylon.

Open Research Computation is due to close on 8th May 2012.