JOSE, pronounced [hoe-zay], is a sibling journal to the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), which publishes open-source research software. JOSE relies on the journal management infrastructure and tools developed for JOSS.
JOSE publishes two types of articles that describe:
- open-source educational materials
- open-source educational software tools
Why is this journal needed?
Currently, academia lacks a mechanism for crediting efforts to develop software for assisting teaching and learning or open-source educational content and materials. As a result, beyond personal motivation, there is little incentive to develop and share such material.
The Journal of Open Source Education (JOSE) is a scholarly journal with a formal peer review process designed to improve the quality of the software or content submitted. Upon acceptance into JOSE, a CrossRef DOI is minted and we list your paper on the JOSE website.
Who is behind this journal?
This is an initiative led directly by the Editorial Board on a purely volunteer basis. There is no publisher seeking revenue through the journal. JOSE runs on the efforts of the editors, authors, and reviewers, to communicate scholarly work to the open-source community without intermediaries.
What do you mean by "open-source educational materials"?
"Open-source" implies that there are source files that are converted and rendered into a final learner-presentable form. Examples include Jupyter notebooks or plaintext/markup language documents like LaTeX, Markdown, ReStructuredText, AsciiDoc, and R Markdown. These documents should contain the lesson content and be designed to be reusable by other instructors. Lastly, the course content should make use of computation for learning with embedded or associated code snippets/programs.
We do not mean openly available slides, lecture notes, or YouTube videos, though these may be acceptable as supplementary materials. In addition, course syllabi by themselves are not suitable for submission (Syllabus may be more appropriate).
tl;dr: your course or lesson content must contain or use code to teach. We are not focused exclusively on learning to code, but coding to learn.
What do you mean by "educational software tools"?
Open-source software that serves as educational technology; examples include (but are not limited to) alternatives to learning management systems, autograders, cloud systems for lesson delivery, student collaboration tools. For these tools, peer review will follow a similar process as JOSS.
Scope & submission requirements
We consider submissions from all areas of academia, although our computational focus may result in more natural submissions from STEM fields—but all are welcome!
Submissions must be "feature complete" to the extent that another educator could adopt, reuse, and/or extend for their purposes.
The ideal submission size is a course module, although entire courses are also acceptable.
JOSE submissions must:
JOSE submissions must be fully open, under the Open Definition. This means that any text content or graphical objects should be under a Creative Commons license (ideally CC-BY) and code components should be under an OSI-approved license.
Computational learning modules should be complete and immediately usable for self-learning or adoption by other instructors. They should make a clear contribution to teaching and learning of any subject, supported by computing. JOSE is not focused in OER for "learning to code" as much as "coding to learn."
Software submissions should make a clear contribution to the available open-source software that supports teaching and learning, or makes an educational process better (e.g., faster, easier, simpler). Examples include software to auto-grade student work, learning management systems, and student collaboration frameworks. Software should be feature-complete (no half-baked solutions).
Authors wishing to make a pre-submission enquiry can email us or open an issue.
Editorial Board
Lorena Barba (@labarba)
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the George Washington University, leading a research group in computational fluid dynamics, computational physics and high-performance computing. Member of the Board for NumFOCUS, a non-profit in support of open-source scientific software.
Kyle Niemeyer (@kyleniemeyer)
Mechanical engineer in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. Computational researcher in combustion, fluid dynamics, and chemical kinetics, with an interest in numerical methods and GPU computing strategies.
Topic Editors
Ian Hawke (@IanHawke)
Ian Hawke is an Associate Professor in Applied Mathematics at the University of Southampton. His research focuses on relativistic fluid dynamics to compute the gravitational waves from neutron star mergers. He teaches numerical methods and mathematical computing across STEM subjects, with particular interest in postgraduate training.
Kathryn Huff (@katyhuff)
Kathryn Huff is an Assistant Professor in Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on modeling and simulation of advanced nuclear reactors and fuel cycles. She also advocates for best practices in open, reproducible scientific computing.
Juan Klopper (@juanklopper)
Attending surgeon at Groote Schuur Hospital, Head of Postgradute Surgical Research. and Head of Surgical Education in the Department of Surgery at The University of Cape Town. He serves as the Health Sciences Faculty member on the University Senate Committee on online education. His research and educational passions include machine learning and data science, open science, open source software, and open educational resource development.
Erin McKiernan (@emckiernan)
Erin McKiernan is a professor in the Department of Physics, Biomedical Physics Program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, specializing in experimental and theoretical neuroscience and cellular biophysics. She teaches several courses, including biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology, and human physiology. She is currently developing electrophysiology laboratory practicals as open educational resources.
Jason Moore (@moorepants)
Jason K. Moore is an assistant professor of BioMechanical Engineering at Delft University of Technology, where he leads the Bicycle Lab and teaches multibody dynamics and engineering computation. He is active in the Scientific Python community where he is a core developer of the SymPy and PyDy projects.
Shannon Quinn (@magsol)
Shannon Quinn is an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia, jointly appointed in the Departments of Computer Science and Cellular Biology. His research focuses on modeling diseases at the cellular level using a variety of imaging and machine learning techniques. He also advocates for best practices in open and reproducible research and education.
Charles Severance (@csev)
Charles is a Clinical Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He also works on developing standards for teaching and learning technology. Previously, he was the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation and the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project. He has written several books including Using the Google App Engine, Python for Informatics, High Performance Computing, and Sakai: Free as in Freedom.
Rachel Thomas (@racheltho)
Rachel Thomas is a is a deep learning researcher, and co-founder of fast.ai, which offers free courses in deep learning, a software library and conducts research in AI. She is Director of Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco Data Institute, has developed many popular courses, and is a prolific speaker and writer.
Tiffany Timbers (@ttimbers)
Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Statistics and Co-Director for the Master of Data Science program (Vancouver Option) at the University of British Columbia. She develops curriculum and teaches on responsible application of data science, collaborative software development and creating R and Python packages using modern tools and workflows. Co-author of two open textbooks: Data Science: A First Introduction and Python Packages.
Bryan Weber (@bryanwweber)
Bryan is teaching faculty and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Connecticut. He specializes in all areas related to Mechanical Engineering, especially thermodynamics, combustion, chemistry, and fluids. Bryan is interested in applications of Jupyter Notebooks to educational materials. He is also the co-lead developer of Cantera, https://cantera.org, the largest open-source software package for thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, and transport calculations.
Jason J. Williams (@JasonJWilliamsNY)
Jason Williams is Assistant Director of External Collaborations at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s DNA Learning Center. He has been the Education, Outreach, and Training lead for CyVerse (A US national life science cyberinfrastructure funded by NSF), and he organizes, instructs, and speaks at a variety of bioinformatics-related workshops, conferences, and meetings. He is an active Carpentries instructor, and a former Chair of the Software Carpentry foundation (an international organization of researchers that promote training and education in software development, scientific data management, and open science).
Carol Willing (@willingc)
Research Software Engineer at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo working full-time on Project Jupyter; Python Software Foundation Fellow and former Director; core developer on CPython, Jupyter, AnitaB.org’s open source projects, and PyLadies.
Editors Emeritus
Robert Talbert (@RobertTalbert)
Associate Professor in the Mathematics Department at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan USA. In this position he teaches 2-3 classes a semester, conducts research (mostly in the teaching and learning of undergraduate mathematics, but sometimes in pure mathematics), and serves the university and broader community in a number of ways.
Tracy Teal (@tracykteal)
Executive Director of Data Carpentry and Adjunct Professor in the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action at Michigan State University. Her research background in is microbial metagenomics and bioinformatics, and she has been a developer and contributor to several open source bioinformatics projects. She also focuses on best practices in data analysis software development.
Contact JOSE
- To suggest a feature or report a bug in JOSE, please open a GitHub Issue
- To contact the JOSE staff, please email us
Code of Conduct
Although spaces may feel informal at times, we want to remind authors and reviewers (and anyone else) that this is a professional space. As such, the JOSE community adheres to a code of conduct adapted from the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.
Authors and reviewers will be required to confirm they have read our code of conduct, and are expected to adhere to it in all JOSE spaces and associated interactions.
Ethics Guidelines
We also want to remind authors and reviewers (and anyone else) that we expect and require ethical behavior. Some examples are:
- All authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of any mistakes of which they become aware.
- Plagiarism (e.g., violation of another author's copyright), for both software and papers, is not allowed.
- Self-plagiarism (repeated publication of the same work) is not allowed.
- Author lists must be correct and complete. All listed authors must have made a contribution to the work, and all significant contributors should be included in the author list.
- Reviews should be accurate and non-fraudulent. Examples of concerns are: Authors should not suggest reviewers who are not real people or have conflicts. Reviewers and editors must disclose conflicts. Bribes for authors, reviewers, editors are not permitted.
Any potentially unethical behavior should be brought to the attention of the JOSE staff. See Contacting JOSE.
The JOSE Editors will track any concerns and respond to the submitter with a resolution, which will range from doing nothing if the editors disagree about the issue to withdrawing papers and notifying authors' institutions.
JOSE Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
Editorial Board- The JOSE editorial board's members are recognized experts in the field. The full names and affiliations of the members are provided on the journal’s website (see editorial board). The individual editors' contact information are provided on that site, via their GitHub pages, and general contact information for the editorial office also on the journal’s website.
- JOSE does not charge any fees for manuscript processing and/or publishing materials, as is stated on the journal's website.
- Authors are obliged to participate in peer review process, as described in submission guidelines.
- All authors have significantly contributed to the research. The submitting author is required to be a major contributor to the software they are submitting and the review process includes a check that ‘the full list of paper authors seems appropriate and complete?’.
- All authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes (see ethics and what should my paper contain?).
- JOSE papers are required to have a list of references, and financial support.
- Forbidden to publish same research in more than one journal (see ethics).
- All of JOSE's content is subjected to peer-review (see about and docs).
- JOSE peer-review is defined as obtaining advice on individual manuscripts from reviewers expert in the field. This advice is public, and is given to both the editor(s) and the author(s), with the aim of pointing out issues the reviewers believe are insufficiently addressed for publication.
- The JOSE review process is clearly described on the journal’s website.
- Judgments should be objective.
- JOSE reviewers should ideally have no conflict of interest. In practice, this is not always possible. If a reviewer has a conflict of interest, it must be declared and recorded, and the editors may choose to waive it if this is in the best interest of the review process.
- Reviewers should point out relevant published work which is not yet cited.
- JOSE reviews are public and non-anonymous while in progress and post-review, as they take place via GitHub issues in a public repository.
- All authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of any mistakes of which they become aware.
- Plagiarism (e.g., violation of another author's copyright), for both software and papers, is not allowed.
- Self-plagiarism (repeated publication of the same work) is not allowed.
- Author lists must be correct and complete. All listed authors must have made a contribution to the work, and all significant contributors should be included in the author list.
- Reviews should be accurate and non-fraudulent. Examples of concerns are: Authors should not suggest reviewers who are not real people or have conflicts. Reviewers and editors must disclose conflicts. Bribes for authors, reviewers, editors are not permitted.
- JOSE copyright and licensing information is clearly described on the journal’s website.
- The journal and all individual articles are freely available to all readers.
- JOSE articles, metadata, and reviews are archived with Portico.
- Information about the ownership and/or management of a journal is clearly indicated on the journal’s website (see http://www.theoj.org).
- JOSE and the Open Journals do not use organizational names that would mislead potential authors and editors about the nature of the journal’s owner.
- The JOSE website (see https://jose.theoj.org and https://jose.theoj.org/about), including the text that it contains, demonstrates that care has been taken to ensure high ethical and professional standards.
- JOSE immediately publishes accepted articles; it is not a serial publication.
- As far as we know, the journal name (Journal of Open Source Education (JOSE)) is unique and not one that is easily confused with another journal or that might mislead potential authors and readers about the journal’s origin or association with other journals.
Cost and Sustainability Model
Journal of Open Source Education is an open access journal committed to running at minimal costs, with zero publication fees (article processing charges) or subscription fees.
Under the NumFOCUS nonprofit umbrella, JOSE is now eligible to seek grants for sustaining its future. With an entirely volunteer team, JOSE is seeking to sustain its operations via donations and grants, keeping its low cost of operation and free service for authors.
In the spirit of transparency, below is an outline of our current running costs:
- Annual Crossref membership: $275 / year
- JOSE paper DOIs: $1 / accepted paper
- JOSE website hosting (Heroku): $19 / month
Assuming a publication rate of 200 papers per year this works out at ~$3.50 per paper ((19*12) + 200 + 275) / 200.
A more detailed analysis of our running costs is available on our blog.
Content Licensing & Open Access
JOSE is an open access journal. Copyright of JOSE papers is retained by submitting authors and accepted papers are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Any code snippets included in JOSE papers are subject to the MIT license regardless of the license of the submitted software package under review.
