On 5/31/07, Travis Oliphant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi everybody, > > I'm sorry for the cross posting, but I wanted to reach a wide audience > and I know not everybody subscribes to all the lists. > > I've been thinking more about the "SciPy Journal" that we discussed > before and I have some thoughts. > > 1) I'd like to get it going so that we can push out an electronic issue > after the SciPy conference (in September) > > 2) I think it's scope should be limited to papers that describe > algorithms and code that are in NumPy / SciPy / SciKits. Perhaps we > could also accept papers that describe code that depends on NumPy / > SciPy that is also easily available. > > 3) I'd like to make a requirement for inclusion of new code in SciPy > that it have an associated journal article describing the algorithms, > design approach, etc. I don't see this journal article as being > user-interface documentation for the code. I see this is as a place to > describe why the code is organized as it is and to detail any algorithms > that are used. > > 4) The purpose of the journal as I see it is to > > a) provide someplace to document what is actually done in SciPy and > related software. > b) provide a teaching tool of numerical methods with actual "people > use-it" code that would be > useful to researchers, students, and professionals. > c) hopefully clever new algorithms will be developed for SciPy by > people using Python > that could be show-cased here > d) provide a peer-review publication opportunity for people who > contribute to open-source > software > > 5) We obviously need associate editors and people willing to review > submitted articles as well as people willing to submit articles. I > have two articles that can be submitted within the next two months. > What do other people have? > > > As an example of the kind of thing a SciPy Journal would be useful for. > I have recently over-hauled the interpolation.py file for SciPy by > incorporating the B-spline stuff that is partly in fitpack. In the > process I noticed two things: > > 1) I have (what seems to me) a different recursive algorithm for > calculating derivatives of B-splines than I could find in fitpack. > 2) I have developed a different way to determine the K-1 extra degrees > of freedom for Kth-order spline fitting than I have seen before. > > The SciPy Journal would be a great place to document both of these > things while describing the spline interpolation design of scipy.interpolate > > It is true that I could submit this stuff to other journals, but it > seems like that doing that makes the information harder to find in the > future and not easier. I'm also dissatisfied with how information > exclusionary academic journals seem to be. They are catching up, but > they are still not as accessible as other things available on the internet. > > Given the open nature of most scientific research, it is remarkable that > getting access to the information is not as easy as it should be with > modern search engines (if your internet domain does not subscribe to the > e-journal). > > Comments and feedback is welcome.
An implementation oriented journal/newsletter in the vain of RNews (<http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/>) would be great. [Note: I remember seeing some mentions of the R project in various comments, but I am not sure anyone brought RNews as a model. Please excuse me if it was already brought up.] About R News R News is the newsletter of the R project for statistical computing and features short to medium length articles covering topics that might be of interest to users or developers of R, including * Changes in R: new features of the latest release * Changes on CRAN: new add-on packages, manuals, binary distributions, mirrors,... * Add-on packages: short introductions to or reviews of R extension packages * Programmer's Niche: nifty hints for programming in R (or S) * Hints for newcomers: Explaining sides of R that might not be so obvious from reading the manuals and FAQs. * Applications: Examples of analyzing data with R Of course, any write-up of library code should also be distributed with/in the code (doc strings) as well. Such a publication would provide a great outlet for people to write about how they implemented their research and would make a great companion to the publication of the analysis and results. Additionally, the development of a good document template and commendable examples from other contributors would likely encourage better communication as with leading journals. A lot of the material could be culled from the mailing lists and should be written up in a way (and in a format) that would allow it to be dropped into the wiki (e.g. the cookbook page) as well as included in the publication. _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
