[Numpy-discussion] SciPy Journal

[Anne Archibald]

On 31/05/07, Travis Oliphant <oliphant.travis at ieee.org> wrote:

> 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).

> 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.

Anne M. Archibald