Should we change the name?

[karthik]

Onboarding has consistently meant adding new employees or volunteers into an organization. Which makes it extra confusing when we are talking about software. Before we make this bigger and more involved, should we consider changing the name to something more apt to this process?

[sckott]

i'm up for it - something stemming from review/reviewing/assessment/appraise/etc. i guess

[karthik]

@craigcitro You're usually good with names. Got any ideas for a software review process/service that is not quite a journal?

[maelle]

something related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceport ?

[cboettig]

Just a question: one thing the 'onboarding' term makes pretty obvious is that the goal is to integrate/transfer the package into the care (and primary hosting of source) into the rOpenSci.org "suite". (and thus also suggests implicitly that the package should "fit" within the theme of what rOpenSci does). We don't want this to sound like a generic review service for R packages, or to have people be surprised when we then ask them to 'transfer' the package in.

I guess when you submit a paper to peer review you also 'transfer' it to the journal (hell, you often sign over the copyright to them too! and I guess it has to fit within the journal's perceived theme). So I'm wondering if it's important that the term reflect the transfer side of the process? Perhaps spinning of the 'journal' term rather than the 'review' terms would be enough, but i dunno.

[maelle]

Also, from a non-native English speaker perspective, I learnt the word "onboarding" from this process, and then for organizations (never been in an onboarding process for humans though). But I might be in a language minority. 😉

[karthik]

@cboettig Since scientific journals have existed for more than 400 years, I think it is pretty obvious that if we agree to review something, it is with the intention of adding it to our suite and also something that fits our scope and mission (both of which we state clearly). I don't think anyone will be surprised when we ask them to transfer a repo, because that is something they are made aware of before a submission.

There is very little here that's different than a journal, other than
a) this is for actual software, not a description of software, and
b) that it's a living contribution, not a one-time transfer.

Could we describe this as a repository of scientific software? One where the barrier to entry is a full review, rather than satisfying a set of arbitrary criteria?

[maelle]

We review software but with the guidelines we have/are adding reg. package maintenance, in a way we onboard package authors...

[maelle]

cf #15

[maelle]

I think I'll soon create a draft of a page for onboarding on the website, so it'd be a good time for changing the name. What about simply going for "peer-review"?

[karthik]

I much prefer and express my strong interest for software review. Peer-review is just vague, and not clear what it is we are peer-reviewing and how that's different from standard journal activities.

[maelle]

@karthik in ropensci-archive/roweb2#332 (draft for a page on the website) it's called software review now.

[maelle]

Official new name: Software Peer Review. software-review as slug, software-peer-review as tag on the website.