On Dec 25, 2007 1:38 AM, root <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >I just noticed this email on the jmol developer mailing list. See below. > > > >if anybody has any thoughts or ideas -- long or short term -- about how to > >structure or restructure sage development so the same sort of thing doesn't > >happen to us, please speak up. I think something like JSAGE > >(http://sagemath.org/jsage/) > >-- if it were to take off -- would really help. > > > > > >Dear Jmol team: > >This letter is to notify you that I will not be able to continue > >participating in Jmol development. I hope this situation will only > >be temporary. However, my rejoining the project depends on my > >institution being convinced to give me some kind of credit for these > >activities. Since my contributions to the Jmol project were not > >deemed a "form of off-campus, peer reviewed scholarly or artistic > >product", I cannot afford to put any more time into the project. As > >it stands, I have been told that my scholarly activity level has not > >been adequate recently. To help me increase my scholarly output, I > >will have to teach 3-6 hours more of classes each week, and will be > >responsible for grading additional work from 20-60 more students. > >Somehow that is supposed to increase my scholarly activity:) Put > >simply, this means I will not have time to devote to Jmol or most of > >my other scholarly activities. Since Jmol is the scholarly activity > >that doesn't presently count, I need to drop that and use any time I > >can eke out for scholarship of other kinds. If I can convince my > >department to include contributions to projects like Jmol on a list > >of creditable activity, I will be able to rejoin the project. This > >is likely to take a semester. Thus I hope to be able to rejoin the > >project next spring, about May. > > I've been presenting Axiom development at various locations, usually > at conferences or requested talks. At almost every conference where > I've spoken there was a later "birds of a feather" discussion. The > primary issue is academic credit. > > The key problem is that the most active developers are likely to > be doctoral or recent-degree holders, likely in tenure track positions. > The issues seem to be that > (a) open source is NOT considered publishing > (b) code development is not considered research > (c) only published, peer-reviewed papers count at the tenure review. > > Thus, a tenure-sensitive professor who develops a great algorithm or > program, which takes a tremendous amount of time and effort, gets no > credit at the tenure review. Worse, since the time spent on the program > takes away from the publications pile, it actually works against the > possibility of tenure. > > Partially the problem is that computational mathematics is not yet > considered a separate department from mathematics. Another partial > cause of the problem is that the tenure committee is composed of > professors who are not well aware of, or being "mathematicians", > look down upon programming as "not really research". Yet another > issue is that peer-review rarely, if ever, involves a peer-review > of the code. > > This has come up in at least 6 venues, with a total meeting representation > of over 40 professors from many different locations. Thus the issue is not > some local problem but fairly systemic. > > Carlo Traverso, head of the Department of Mathematica, in Pisa, Italy > and I have been looking at creating a new kind of journal to address > this problem. The journal would accept only "literate papers", that is, > papers which contain both the research results and the associated source > code. The programs would be published in a peer-reviewed journal with a > requirement that the program could be run by an independent party and > reproduce the reported research results (similar to other sciences). > > While this would not address the time involved in writing and debugging > a program, it would at least give a venue for presenting open source > code in a reproducible, peer-reviewed (and therefore tenure-approved) > format.
There is already such a journal, where I am going to publish some of my opensource codes - Computer Physics Communications: www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00104655/ impact factor is around 0.6, so not big, but it still counts as a publication. Ondrej _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
