On March 12th of this year, we suspended new submissions to JOSS in order to reduce the load on our volunteer team of editors and reviewers. We revisited this suspension in early April and decided to continue the pause on new submissions for at least another month. Over the past two weeks, we’ve been reviewing our current status and discussing what it might look like to reopen JOSS.

Once again we’re looking to grow our editorial team at JOSS. We’re especially interested in recruiting editors with expertise in bioinformatics, material science, physics, R/statistics, and the social sciences. Since our launch in May 2016, our existing editorial team has handled over 800 submissions (830 published at the time of writing, 119 under review) and the demand from the community continues to grow.

2019 has been a big year for JOSS: This year, we’ve already published 300 papers and are on target to reach ~360 papers by the end of the calendar year. We’ve substantially improved our website and made a number of important changes to our editorial team to help us scale further.

Following our call for editors late last year, once again we’re looking to grow our editorial team. Over the past ~40 months, our existing editorial team has handled close to 800 submissions (665 accepted at the time of writing, 101 under review) and the demand from the community continues to grow. The last three months have been our busiest yet, with JOSS publishing a little over one paper every day, and we see no sign of this demand dropping.

The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) started with one editor-in-chief (EiC) and 10 topic editors, and in our first year, we published about 100 papers. Three years later, the rate of publication has increased to 300 papers per year. How did we scale up to this point, and how can we continue scaling the journal? Scaling to-date Today, we have one editor-in-chief (EiC), three associate editors-in-chief (AEiCs), and 23 topic editors.

The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is a free, open-access online journal, with no article processing charge (APC). We are committed to operating as a free service to our community, and we do so thanks to the volunteer labor of editors and reviewers, and by taking advantage of existing infrastructure.

JOSS is an adventure in next generation publishing, made possible by the volunteer work of many people. Our editors, of course, guide the style and the content of the journal. And our reviewers make a uniquely valuable contribution, both to the software they’ve reviewed and to the broader community of open-source research software. Some reviewers have been extra generous in contributing.

JOSS is expanding its editorial board and we’re opening this opportunity to the open source research software community at large. If you think you might be interested, take a look at our editorial guide which describes the editorial workflow at JOSS and also some of the reviews for recently accepted papers. Between these two, you should be able to get a good overview of what editing for JOSS looks like.

Today we’re starting something new at JOSS: we’re collaborating with American Astronomical Society (AAS) Journals to offer software reviews for some of the papers submitted to their journals. As part of this process, AAS Publishing will make a small contribution to our parent organization NumFOCUS to support the running costs of JOSS.