[SciPy-user] From the Sage/Jmol lists: "scholarly activity"?

[william ratcliff]

At my workplace a very successful gui for use in diffraction was developed
called EXPGUI.  They published a paper describing it and asked people who
used it to cite it.  It is one of the most highly cited papers of our
facility.  For some utilities such as jmol (or matplotlib), could that
help?   Another approach that I have seen used is to require a registration
(free of course!) for people who want to download the  program (or tracking
of download statistics) to show impact to one's supervisors....Another
question--how would his department have looked upon an E-journal?  Another
question might be is whether or not a funding agency such as the NSF could
offer grants for work on OSS so that faculty who work on it could get more
credit from their departments?

Cheers,
William

On Dec 24, 2007 4:57 PM, Gael Varoquaux <gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org>
wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 24, 2007 at 02:43:51PM -0700, Fernando Perez wrote:
> > Here's something that came up on the jmol list and that William Stein
> > (SAGE lead) forwarded, but which is also a concern to this list.
>
> > Sage has also had discussions on the matter and the idea of a Sage
> > journal (http://sagemath.org/jsage/) exists already, in a similar vein
> > to previous discussions here on a 'scipy journal'.
>
> > I don't have any answer to this at the moment, but I'm pretty sure
> > it's something that will recur.  I personally know of several people
> > who have been bitten by this very same problem.  It's worth noting
> > that the original author of the JMol message is a *tenured* faculty
> > member at U. Wisconsin, so not even tenure seems to be a complete
> > protection against the perception from many academic administrators
> > that contributing to open source scientific projects is "not scholarly
> > work".
>
> Yes, it is a very important problem. Indeed it would be nice to have a
> way of get scholar-like credit for work on open source projects. If this
> means creating a journal dedicated to released scientific code (let us
> just avoid putting "open source" in the title, it's too political), than
> it may be the way to go. I think it should not be restricted to Python
> and friends, a broader could increase its visibility.
>
> Any ideas welcome, there is a Damocles sword hanging above many
> contributions.
>
> Gaël
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