Brian Granger wrote:
Thanks Fernando for spending so much time thinking about this.
There is another pitfall that I see lurking here that is relevant if we want to create something that the bean counters will count.
I am guessing that the reason the everyone has been so enthusiastic about the idea (including myself) is that we want such a journal to exist because we want to publish articles in it. But this won't work very well if all of us are also the journal's primary organizers/editors/reviewers.
I can see your point, and we definitely want to make it as broadly interesting as possible. But, naturally, it will self-select those who are interested in using Python for scientific computing. Having reviewers be publishers is not the problem. We will need more reviewers than "editors" (used in the sense of assigning reviewers to submissions).
Because of this, no matter what we do, I think it is important to build something that people outside scipy-dev@scipy.org will want to i) read and ii) publish in. The question is how to go about this.
Outside of scipy-dev definitely, outside of scipy-user? maybe, outside of both scipy-user and numpy-discussions? I don't think so. The point is to grow both scipy-user and numpy-discussions. Perhaps they become an integral part of the review process. I don't know. Maybe a forum page is better for that.
One way would be to find sponsors - organizations and individuals that could get behind the effort and provide publicity, manpower and resources.
This is a great idea.
Another thing that might be important is to have a rolling publication model like that of the physics arxiv or boost - rather than a traditional model of having issues/volumes published at regular intervals.
I'm not sure what the difference is between the arxiv "rolling" model and the traditional model modified only to the point that you publish each submission as it gets "accepted" as an issue. I haven't studied the arxiv model though. -Travis