The Journal of Open Source Software: Using Open Source Practices to Build Community and Sustainability

Abstract: The Journal of Open Source Software was created in 2016 as a diamond open-access journal to would enable open source software developers to submit short papers and their software to an open, interactive peer-review process that would improve their work and enable them to publish it, gaining scholarly credit for their software. Eight years of experience has shown us that the choice to run the journal as we would an open-source software project has led to successful publications (~2500 papers), a growing community (~80 editors and ~3500 reviewers), and an organization that can publish papers at about $2.00/per paper because of the generous volunteer community, and the fact that our processes naturally align with the POSI principles. This talk will discuss the journal and its history, how it aligns with open-source software methods, how it has grown community and in turn influenced the practices of the larger scholarly software community, and how its sustainability is aligned with POSI, along with challenges in all of these areas.