Software Paper Discussion

One of the promises of preprints is to expand the types of science objects that are publicly available, including, potentially, null results, confirmations of the validity of other research, and software papers. All of these need to pass muster as "real science". But none of them need to be sexy or fit into a narrow topic for "this issue of X". Perhaps now is a good time for the users of EarthArXiv to begin the conversation on how to expand this platform to meet its promise. IMHO.

I agree. To repeat my previous comment:

"Also in general I would advocate being more open rather than more closed with respect to types of scientific contributions than traditional journals. That is one of the strengths of repositories and one of its gifts to open science."

Would be neat to also explicitly solicit papers focused on replications of software, like ReScience

I created a shared Google Doc at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zOTQAvF7jj7wz1lIUyKZK4TtTNuSiFclyFM0lYHcl_M/edit?usp=sharing Please take a look when you have time and let's collaboratively revise the EarthArXiv software paper submission guidelines.

Thanks @tomnarock1. I added some comments, although software isn't my area of expertise. @danielnust may have some thoughts.

Thanks Chris. I reached out to Gavin (who commented on our policy in his blog post) and he is interested in contributing as well. I believe @leonardouieda is also interested.

Perhaps peripheral, but may be of interest here: https://github.com/duecredit/duecredit

Sorry for dropping the ball on this. I got this started and then it got away from me. I'd like to propose a deadline for any additional comments revising our software paper policy - say mid-June? Then we can turn it over to the Advisory Council for vote and hopefully put it into place later this summer.

To review where we are see: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zOTQAvF7jj7wz1lIUyKZK4TtTNuSiFclyFM0lYHcl_M/edit?usp=sharing

The general idea is to modify the software paper portion of the moderation policy to begin accepting software papers akin to other Earth science publication venues

I've updated our Moderation Policy based on the positive responses in the poll. I added text to indicate we welcome software papers - https://eartharxiv.github.io/moderation.html

Great! Let's see if that encourages some software papers.