[Neuroimaging] Journal articles based on PRs

[Ariel Rokem]

Hi everyone,

In a conversation I had with Rafael recently, he mentioned to me the
Journal of Open Research Software (http://openresearchsoftware.metajnl.com/)
that publishes articles about open-source research software, and proposed
this as a good place to publish software contributions in our community.
This is a good thing because it provides a venue for articles specifically
focused on software implementations, even in cases where the methods have
previously been published as scientific articles. This provides a standard
reference for the software, and an opportunity for researchers who spend
time writing open-source software to get credit for the work they are doing.

I propose to submit articles to JORS, based on newer additions to libraries
(particularly Dipy, but maybe others as well?), a PR, or series of PRs that
contribute substantial new features, or a substantial upgrade to previous
features. This addresses two major challenges:

The first is the challenge we face in incentivizing new contributors to
join us. This is because if a standard reference article has already been
published for the software, their newer contributions might not get them
credit when this standard reference is cited. For example, Dipy
contributors who joined the project after 2014 get no credit when that
paper is cited.

Two recent examples from Dipy are the work that Stephan Meesters has done
on contextual enhancement and fiber-to-bundle coherence measures (still in
progress in #828), and the work Rutger Fick is doing implementing Laplacian
regularization for MAP (#740). These are both implementations of previously
published scientific work (in these cases, work that these contributors
have been involved in). As you can all appreciate, the effort of
implementing these methods in Dipy is substantial, and we want to
incentivize these efforts and reward them. A journal article that other
researchers can cite is common currency for that.

Another challenge we face is incentivizing code review. This is a serious
bottle-neck for progress. I propose to add code reviewers as authors to
these papers. This will incentivize the substantial effort that goes into
reviewing code. JORS allows author contributions to be specified and we
would clearly designate these kinds of contributions, so as to not diminish
from the effort made by the primary author of the code. But I would like to
include the people doing code review (if only because I have spent a lot my
own time in code review...). I hope that this will allow people to justify
spending time doing this crucial part of the work, and energize our code
review process a bit.

I'd be happy to hear what people think about this idea.

Cheers,

Ariel
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