Unlike other Julia ecosystems, there is no publication associated to packages of the JuliaStats ecosystem. It would be nice to have the software citable
For packages which would not be considered worth a paper, a DOI through services like zenodo.org could be interesting.
Potentially interesting journals would be:
A nice thing with zenodo is that you can integrate with github so all contributors to a package end up getting credit in the citation.
That’s a valid point, the pain with a paper is that you cannot put all committers, but you can explain a bit more the structure of the package, cite related work and foundations on top of which it lies
I agree it’s better with a paper for sure.
I really like the format of the Journal of Statistical Software. The papers can act like a nice tutorial to the package. I’ve never submitted there, but I have heard that reviews can be a little strict (which is not necessarily a bad thing).
Agreed, some strict reviews can increase the attention on some details of the paper, this can make it a more general tutorial, rather than a readme for people already familiar with other Julia packages
One thing that can be done is to register the package to zenodo along with the paper submission, so that all committers are still recognized
Here’s a post on how to cite open-source projects with many contributors using zenodo. However, when you see the size of the list of authors, it’s understandable that it’s also a struggle for publishers.
They could accept such list and go for the truncated form in the published manuscript (firstAutor., secondAuthor., ... lastAuthors., 2042) but I’m afraid that in this scenario, the google scholar bots would not detect all the contributors, which will not be credited either.
I believe the developpment of such large-scale collaborative projects will eventually push for the creation of a new system for citations, but for now it seems complicated…
Thanks Dominique, I opened an issue on Distributions to get up and running with zenodo.
In the meantime, we will start a draft manuscript for Distributions.jl. If people are interested, ping me here or on Slack 