Several months ago, I stumbled upon [the journal they call Joss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4eKWN_eAxM). Well, actually, [JOSS - the Journal of Open Source Software, "a developer friendly, open access journal for research software packages"](https://joss.theoj.org/). It's a completely free, open-source and open-access alternative to established, [for-(often-a-lot-of)-profit](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science) journals such as those by Reed-Elsevier or Springer. And a few days ago, [I've been called into service](https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/2133#issuecomment-618617823) to review [VlaPy, "1D-1V Vlasov-Poisson(-Fokker-Planck) Plasma Physics Simulation Tool"](https://github.com/joglekara/VlaPy). While I'm digging into that code, I thought I'd write something up about JOSS in general! JOSS, as a software-centric journal, is mostly managed via GitHub. Reviewers sign up [here](https://joss.theoj.org/reviewer-signup.html) (which is a link I'd like to recommend that you follow!). It's mostly meant to solve one issue: ## Research software attribution Acknowledgement and funding for developing and maintaining research software tends to be sparse. Remember the black hole image from last year? To quote [Andreas Mueller on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amuellerml/status/1117455802598662144):
Slightly ironic that in the same week @NSF rejects a grant to fund the scipy ecosystem saying that working on it is not impactful enough and hiring developers to work on it is too expensive. Cc @thisgreyspirit (Katie doesn't seem to be on Twitter?)
— Andreas Mueller (@amuellerml) April 14, 2019