[SciPy-Dev] SciPy 1.0 paper writing proposal

[Ralf Gommers]

Hi all,

TL;DR, let's write the long journal paper on SciPy that we've wanted for a
while, let's form a small committee to coordinate, and get it out the door
in 2-3 months.


Motivation
---------------
(credits for most of this text: Evgeni)

Many scipy contributors' day jobs are in academia. Bibliometry -- papers in
refereed journals and citations of papers by other papers -- is one of the
main
performance indicators in most academic establishments. Since we do not
generate papers, scipy contributions are all but invisible for the purposes
of a
contributor's annual report. Of course, details vary wildly; in many cases a
contributor manages to balance their time, or to argue common sense with
their
superiors, or get an approval for scipy work, or just ignores the issue
altogether -- but sooner or later there is a form to be filled or boxes to
be
checked, and scipy contributions simply do not fit in. A peer-reviewed
journal paper on scipy will help contributors get the academic credit they
deserve.

We can write *the* paper for SciPy 1.0, with overall project structure,
goals, etc., and for specific features/modules a focus on say the last 3
years.


History
----------
For SciPy 1.0 we had three targets on the publicity/credits front: an
interesting release announcement, interesting blogs/stories (NumFOCUS blog,
Hacker News, etc.) and a paper. We didn't have the bandwidth for a paper in
the end, the rest was successful.

[1] is a previous announcement on this list about writing (a) paper(s) on
SciPy. We wanted both "short papers" to cover one or two releases (target
journal JOSS) and a full paper as the authoritative reference for SciPy.

We had an earlier attempt for a "short paper", it's mostly written but has
stalled (see [2]). We ran out of steam on that one. To avoid that this time
around, it would be good to have a clear public plan, target dates, and a
small committee rather than one person to drive things forward.


Proposal
------------
Here's a proposal for all aspects of this exercise that I can think about
now. Some parts stolen from the AstroPy paper [3] (because their process
worked quite well).

Form a small coordination committee of 3-5 people that set up the paper
structure, move things along when parts stall, propose/take decisions as
needed, invite co-authors, and organise paper submission/rework.

Paper writing to be done by whoever volunteers for a section, not just the
coordination committee. First outline/structure to be done by committee,
which then asks for review of structure and volunteers for section writing.

Scope: a 6-10 page paper, covering history, package scope and structure,
community/organisational aspects, key features and recent enhancements per
module, and roadmap.

Authorship: anyone who made a substantial contribution in the history of
the project. Here "substantial" is interpreted as anything beyond a
one-line doc fix. Rationale: better to be too inclusive than exclusive.
Sign-up via a web form, we send the link to that form to all email
addresses in the commit history till v1.0.

Author order (details tbd by committee):
1. The SciPy Developers
2. Maintainers, paper writers, other key contributors - in order of
contribution level
3. All other authors - alphabetically ordered

Submission target: mid-April, to either PeerJ Computer Science or Journal
of Open Research Software (tbd by committee).

Comments? Volunteers for committee?


References
----------------
[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/2016-August/021474.html
[2] https://github.com/scipy/scipy-articles/pull/4
[3] https://github.com/astropy/astropy-v2.0-paper

Cheers,
Ralf
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