Re: [Numpy-discussion] SciPy Journal

Anne Archibald wrote:

On 31/05/07, Travis Oliphant wrote:

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2) I think it's scope should be limited to papers that describe algorithms and code that are in NumPy / SciPy / SciKits. Perhaps we could also accept papers that describe code that depends on NumPy / SciPy that is also easily available.

I think there's a place for code that doesn't fit in scipy itself but could be closely tied to it - scikits, for example, or other code that can't go in for license reasons (such as specialization).

I did mention scikits, but your point is well taken.

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3) I'd like to make a requirement for inclusion of new code in SciPy that it have an associated journal article describing the algorithms, design approach, etc. I don't see this journal article as being user-interface documentation for the code. I see this is as a place to describe why the code is organized as it is and to detail any algorithms that are used.

I don't think that's a good idea. It raises the barrier to contributing code (particularly for non-native English speakers), which is not something we need. Certainly every major piece of code warrants a journal article, or at least a short piece, and certainly the author should have first shot, but I think it's not unreasonable to allow the code to go in without the article being written. But (for example) I implemented the Kuiper statistic and would be happy to contribute it to scipy (once it's seen a bit more debugging), but it's quite adequately described in the literature already, so it doesn't seem worth writing an article about it.

What I envision is multiple "levels" of artciles, much like you see full papers and correspondences in the literature. Something like this should take no more than a 1-4 page letter that describes the algorithm used and references available literature. I still would like to see it though as a means to document what is in SciPy. Of course, I'd like to see more code, but right now we have a problem in deciding what code should go into SciPy and there seems to be no clear way to transition the code from the sandbox into SciPy. This would help in that process I think. I'm always open to help somebody who may have difficulty with English. -Travis