Science of Computer Programming

Research is becoming more and more computer-driven with many fields developing code, software and computational tools to further their science. Currently these valuable research artifacts are not systematically organized, curated, indexed nor exposed in the academic literature, making them difficult for readers in the wider scientific community to discover, evaluate, re-use, further build upon, or reliably reference versions used whilst conducting their own research. Software developers struggle to get academic recognition for their work as authors, often reverting to proxies like regular papers, manuals or books to expose their work in the mainstream academic body of literature.

We believe Software is scientific method executed by a machine, and therefore should be an integral part of the scientific communication ecosystem. Even though some journals have been experimenting, we feel software itself is currently not systematically treated as a full and equal academic citizen.

Elsevier intends take open science to a next level and make software itself a fully-fledged academic publication by making code, pieces of software or complete tools as findable, indexable, archivable, searchable, citable, referable as the trusted papers we're used to. To this end specific editorial support, version management of the software published, and a tailor made review process that extends to multiple software and code releases will be offered.

OVERVIEW OF ORIGINAL SOFTWARE PUBLICATIONS (OSP)

Elsevier is working with software development platforms like GitHub to create a new academic content class: Original Software Publications (OSP). These are short overviews that only describe major/significant software and code artefacts, including post publication updates (versions) and systematically capture all metadata needed to expose this work to interested readers and users. The OSP, as well as subsequent updates thereof, will be peer reviewed and considered "one body of work" for citation and indexing purposes, creating the canonical academic reference point for your body of software work including all its versions/ releases.