[SciPy-dev] Online SciPy Journal

[Travis Oliphant]

Brian Granger wrote:

>Thanks Fernando for spending so much time thinking about this.
>
>There is another pitfall that I see lurking here that is relevant if
>we want to create something that the bean counters will count.
>
>I am guessing that the reason the everyone has been so enthusiastic
>about the idea (including myself) is that we want such a journal to
>exist because we want to publish articles in it.  But this won't work
>very well if all of us are also the journal's primary
>organizers/editors/reviewers. 
>
I can see your point, and we definitely want to make it as broadly 
interesting as possible.  But, naturally, it will self-select those who 
are interested in using Python for scientific computing.  Having 
reviewers be publishers is not the problem.   We will need more 
reviewers than "editors" (used in the sense of assigning reviewers to 
submissions).

>Because of this, no matter what we do, I think it is important to
>build something that people outside scipy-dev at scipy.org will want to
>i) read and ii) publish in.  The question is how to go about this.
>  
>
Outside of scipy-dev definitely, outside of scipy-user?  maybe, outside 
of both scipy-user and numpy-discussions?  I don't think so.    The 
point is to grow both scipy-user and numpy-discussions.  Perhaps they 
become an integral part of the review process.  I don't know.   Maybe a 
forum page is better for that.


>One way would be to find sponsors - organizations and individuals that
>could get behind the effort and provide publicity, manpower and
>resources.
>  
>
This is a great idea. 

>Another thing that might be important is to have a rolling publication
>model like that of the physics arxiv or boost - rather than a
>traditional model of having issues/volumes published at regular
>intervals.  
>
I'm not sure what the difference is between the arxiv "rolling" model 
and the traditional model modified only to the point that you publish 
each submission as it gets "accepted" as an issue.   I haven't studied 
the arxiv model though.

-Travis