Journal of Open Research Software

Journal of Open Research Software
Title	Journal of Open Research Software
Discipline	Research software, Computational science, Software engineering
Abbreviation	JORS
Publisher	Ubiquity Press
Country	United Kingdom
History	2013–present
Frequency	Continuous
License	CC BY

Journal of Open Research Software

The Journal of Open Research Software is an open access, peer-reviewed venue publishing scholarly articles on research software, scholarly tools, and software best practices, associated with computational reproducibility, research data management, and scientific workflows. The journal serves communities that overlap with Software Carpentry, ReproZip, Zenodo, GitHub, GitLab, Jupyter Notebook, and Docker users, and it intersects with organizations such as FORCE11, OpenAIRE, DataCite, ORCID, and Crossref.

Overview

The journal focuses on software as a primary research output, addressing topics relevant to developers at institutions like University of Oxford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Imperial College London, and University of Cambridge, while engaging funders and initiatives such as Wellcome Trust, National Institutes of Health, European Commission Horizon 2020, National Science Foundation, and UK Research and Innovation. It publishes software papers, software metapapers, and reviews that are relevant to projects like SciPy, RStudio, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and NumPy, linking to community standards promoted by FAIR Data Principles, Open Researcher and Contributor ID, Research Data Alliance, CODATA, and Committee on Publication Ethics.

Scope and Aims

The scope includes submissions about research software development, maintenance, documentation, licensing, and citation that intersect with platforms and initiatives such as Bitbucket, Figshare, Dryad Digital Repository, CKAN, EUDAT, and globus. Aims emphasize reproducibility across domains represented by institutions like CERN, NASA, European Space Agency, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Max Planck Society, and encourage contributions that relate to tools such as MATLAB, R (programming language), Julia (programming language), LaTeX, and Emacs.

History and Development

Established in 2013 by an editorial initiative connected to open science advocates from groups such as Software Sustainability Institute, Bodleian Libraries, The Alan Turing Institute, Digital Curation Centre, and Jisc, the journal emerged alongside movements represented by Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, SPARC, and Public Knowledge Project. Early development drew on lessons from journals like PLOS Computational Biology, PeerJ Computer Science, Nature Methods, and ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, and from conferences such as SC Conference, International Conference on Software Engineering, SciPy Conference, and Open Repositories.

Editorial Board and Peer Review

The editorial board has included researchers affiliated with University of Edinburgh, University of Manchester, University College London, ETH Zurich, and Princeton University, and editors have collaborated with societies like Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE Computer Society, Royal Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Peer review practices align with guidelines from COPE and engage reviewers drawn from projects such as Galaxy Project, Bioconductor, KNIME, OpenStack, and Kubernetes, emphasizing reproducibility checks that reference tools like Travis CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, and Conda.

Publication Model and Open Access Policy

Published by Ubiquity Press, the journal operates under a gold open access model and Creative Commons licensing similar to journals published by PLOS, BMC, eLife, Frontiers Media, and PeerJ. The model supports metadata registration with Crossref and persistent identifiers through Digital Object Identifier and DataCite DOI systems, and encourages linking with researcher identifiers such as ORCID and repositories like Zenodo and Figshare for software and data preservation.

Indexing and Abstracting

The journal is abstracted and indexed in services and databases that include Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, Directory of Open Access Journals, BASE (search engine), and institutional discovery services used by libraries such as British Library and Library of Congress, and it integrates with scholarly infrastructures like OpenAIRE and SHERPA/RoMEO.

Reception and Impact

The journal has been cited and discussed in contexts involving reproducible research promoted by Nature, Science, The Lancet, PNAS, and policy discussions at OECD, European Commission, UNESCO, and funding bodies including Horizon Europe and Gates Foundation. Community endorsements have come from initiatives such as Software Carpentry, Mozilla Science Lab, Open Science Framework, Center for Open Science, and Repositories Support Project, influencing software citation practices debated at meetings of Research Data Alliance and documented in reports by UK Research and Innovation.

Notable Articles and Special Issues

Notable contributions have addressed software citation, sustainability, and reproducibility with papers connected to projects like JupyterHub, Binder (service), ReproZip, Singularity (software), and libraries such as scikit-learn, pandas (software), matplotlib, SymPy, and HDF5. Special issues and themed collections have involved collaborations with conferences and organizations including International Conference on Research Software Engineering, Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE), OpenCon, and thematic initiatives supported by Mozilla Foundation and Google Summer of Code.

Category:Open access journals Category:Computer science journals Category:Academic journals established in 2013