Foreman-Mackey and I got very close today to finishing a note for arXiv on his super-fast, parallel, ensemble sampler that we have been using in a range of projects (see recent papers by Lang and Bovy). We will put it up as an arXiv-only paper, which is something I love to do. But the fact that this is not a typical or normal kind of publication—for example, there is nowhere that it could appear in the peer-reviewed literature—is crazy: A great implementation of a good algorithm that enables lots of science is itself an extremely important contribution to science, just like a telescope or a camera or a spectrograph. How can we make these things count like publications? And how can we change the language we all use that separates these contributions out into categories that are always contrasted with the category "science"? Enough spouting; watch the arXiv this week for some block-busting code.
[Note added a week later: Here is the arXiv paper.]
If the code has been used for research that has been peer-reviewed, it can be listed in the Astrophysics Source Code Library, which is indexed by ADS.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we should examine the "software instrument" angle. A good start would be to review a few papers of (probably smaller) instruments. What goes into those papers, and where do they get published?
ReplyDeleteA&A has a section for computer codes. They have also removed "A European Journal" from their name and welcome good papers from all over the world.
ReplyDeleteI think changing the language is key. After explaining the scientific research I do for the Gaia project I always get the question: so what is your science interest? The answer should be "Gaia!" but I find myself talking about specific astronomical questions I am interested in. Science requires tools which themselves require research to develop and implement. We should insist on referring to these enabling activities as science.
ReplyDeleteI was going to say, why not submit it to A&A in Section 15? If it's short, you could publish it as a Research Note (still in section 15), which doesn't *have* to have important science results in itself, but is still useful to many people.
ReplyDeleteOr Open Research Computation? (http://www.openresearchcomputation.com/)
I'd say that the codes should not only be citeable, but should customarily be made publicly available and peer-reviewed as well.
ReplyDeleteHey all y'all, we published it in PASP in the end: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/670067
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