  This article describes the motivation, design, and progress of the Journal of
Open Source Software (JOSS). JOSS is a free and open-access journal that
publishes articles describing research software. It has the dual goals of
improving the quality of the software submitted and providing a mechanism for
research software developers to receive credit. While designed to work within
the current merit system of science, JOSS addresses the dearth of rewards for
key contributions to science made in the form of software. JOSS publishes
articles that encapsulate scholarship contained in the software itself, and its
rigorous peer review targets the software components: functionality,
documentation, tests, continuous integration, and the license. A JOSS article
contains an abstract describing the purpose and functionality of the software,
references, and a link to the software archive. The article is the entry point
of a JOSS submission, which encompasses the full set of software artifacts.
Submission and review proceed in the open, on GitHub. Editors, reviewers, and
authors work collaboratively and openly. Unlike other journals, JOSS does not
reject articles requiring major revision; while not yet accepted, articles
remain visible and under review until the authors make adequate changes (or
withdraw, if unable to meet requirements). Once an article is accepted, JOSS
gives it a DOI, deposits its metadata in Crossref, and the article can begin
collecting citations on indexers like Google Scholar and other services.
Authors retain copyright of their JOSS article, releasing it under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. In its first year, starting in
May 2016, JOSS published 111 articles, with more than 40 additional articles
under review. JOSS is a sponsored project of the nonprofit organization
NumFOCUS and is an affiliate of the Open Source Initiative.
