[PRE REVIEW]: AskCI Server: Collaborative and version controlled documentation

[whedon]

Submitting author: @vsoch (Vanessa Sochat)
Repository: https://github.com/vsoch/askci
Version: 0.0.1
Editor: Pending
Reviewer: Pending

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[whedon]

Attempting to check references...

[whedon]

Attempting PDF compilation. Reticulating splines etc...

[whedon]

OK DOIs

- None

MISSING DOIs

- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3936-0_6 may be missing for title: Docker Compose

INVALID DOIs

- None

[whedon]

👉 Check article proof 📄 👈

[vsoch]

Based on language familiarity (Python) and specialty, I will suggest @atrisovic, @fabianomenegidio, and @dvanic.

[vsoch]

@whedon generate pdf

[whedon]

Attempting PDF compilation. Reticulating splines etc...

[whedon]

👉 Check article proof 📄 👈

[kyleniemeyer]

Hi @vsoch, thanks for your (continued!) interest in JOSS—unfortunately, the editorial board found that this submission falls outside our scope of research software, though it does look useful in general.

[vsoch]

Can the board share their rationale? Documentation is central to absolutely everything - in the same way that containers are a "meta" topic but not research in and of themselves (and I've done a lot of work for containers on JoSS) this is software that is really important for the community to work together to document software, technology, etc. As a research software engineer that makes these meta tools for researchers - this is exactly research software, and JoSS has historically been the only place that is interested because I'm not answering a research question, but empowering researchers. It seems like the criteria are that the software must be for a specific research domain, which seems off. If you've published simple user interfaces to tools, a PDF renderer, or something to render docs for machine learning models, or a literature parsing API this is really no different, the knowledge just comes from people, and it's the whole package - web interface, GitHub integration, and APIs :/

[kyleniemeyer]

@vsoch thanks for your input. One of our rules of thumb about software being in scope is whether someone might cite it, and if so who. Can you give any thoughts on that?

[vsoch]

Sure thing! In that it's a knowledge base for however the implementer desires it (and comes with an API) there are several examples I can think of:

• a researcher uses the API to parse the provided knowledge, and does an analysis with it (e.g., an AskCI Server branded as a software metadata repository getting updates from the software repositories could say something about software development in the domain).
• a researcher / rse deploys an AskCI server to serve as a knowledge database for others, and creates a supporting tool to (also use the API) to update content and derive some kind of interesting metrics.
• The AskCI Server is used for some educational purpose, and the different articles become classes / semesters or topics. An interested researcher looks at change in the course content over time.
• The AskCI Server is used to describe machine learning models. Someone does a text analysis to compare similarity of models, or parses references to create a citation graph.

In that it serves as a programmatic way to organize and then access information, and is linked with GitHub, it's really optimized for helping researchers. I'm not great at asking interested questions (hence why I'm not a researcher) but even I can think of the general examples above.

[kyleniemeyer]

Hi @vsoch, thanks for your patience for our response. I brought your response back to the editorial board for some more discussion, and then I was on break. Unfortunately, the consensus is still that this submission falls outside our scope of research software (using our definition). We don't question that it looks useful for researchers, but fundamentally it doesn't appear to be a tool that would be directly used for scholarly research and likely to be cited as part of the research process.