[SciPy-Dev] SciPy 1.0 paper writing proposal

[Evgeni Burovski]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2018 at 9:14 AM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 22, 2018 at 9:26 AM, Andrew Nelson <andyfaff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'm obviously up for being on the paper :-), but I'd prefer to contribute
>> by writing small sections/editing of a paper rather than coordinating.
>
>
> No worries, help of any kind is welcome, and no obligations of course.
>
>>
>> On 21 January 2018 at 14:08, Tyler Reddy <tyler.je.reddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Sounds good -- I'd be up for committee work. Definitely +1 on a paper for
>>> time justification, etc.
>
>
> Thanks Tyler!
>
> Ralf
>
>
>>>
>>> On 20 January 2018 at 14:03, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 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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>>>> SciPy-Dev at python.org
>>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-dev
>>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> _____________________________________
>> Dr. Andrew Nelson
>>
>>


Thanks Ralf for pushing this forward!
Count me in --- even though I have to publicly admit that I fell flat
on my face on the previous attempt.

Cheers,

Evgeni