[TOS] Peer-reviewed Journal

[Janardhan Iyengar]

Hi all,

I'm Jana Iyengar, a new (freshly-minted) faculty member at Franklin & Marshall College. I was part of the organizing committee for the FOSS symposium at SIGCSE, and I have been (peripherally) attached with Ralph Morelli's HFOSS project, largely because I think Ralph is doing very cool work on that front :-) I hope to have the ability to not only teach an FOSS course at F&M, but to make FOSS a running part of the entire CS curriculum, as we get our CS program off the ground in the next couple years (we're starting a new CS major/dept).

I just got on the list, and although I read (ok, skimmed) the archives, I may be repeating what's already been said; so apologies in advance if that happens.

> For all these reasons, I think we need people who span one or more of 
> these groups.  I find it amazing that a person would do research and not 
> care about seeing it come to the world, but let's assume this to be true 
> for the sake of argument: if the researcher herself doesn't care about 
> this, do we have a person who can understand her research *and* would be 
> willing to advise on implementation?  Or, do we pick work that *does* 
> have someone who cares enough to advise on implementation?  Maybe that's 
> the proper measure of consideration.

As someone who's contributed to open-source projects (ns2, FreeBSD, OpenSER) I deeply care about my research coming into the world. But as it stands, I have to care enough about it that I put in time that I would otherwise be putting into publishable work. Which is precisely why some of our code did not make it into Apache/Firefox after it got us publications (we're still working on getting those mods in).

Some of my code took a while to write: I co-wrote the ns2 module for SCTP (with Armando Caro, now at BBN), which was a feat in itself. We did some *really* interesting things, which found their way into Armando's PhD thesis, but not into any publication venue. So, while we spent about 1.5 years working on this real separate implementation of the SCTP protocol, and continue to maintain it for other researchers, we've not published it anywhere. I eventually got research problems evaluted through the module, which got published, but our module itself did not find a venue.

I could manage that as a grad student, but as a tenure-track faculty member, I'd have to think thrice about getting into a project like that now.

I love for my work to get out there---I work with the IETF for pushing my research into Internet Standards for that very reason, and I have Internet-drafts or RFCs to show as documents at the end of that process---and I need something to add to my tenure file at the end of getting my work into a code-base. 


I think an OSS journal is a great way to go. I don't think we can change any existing Journals to "allow" OSS submissions, or to extend their agenda. I understand the consequences of considering a new Journal (funding, support, reputation, etc.), but it seems to me that a Journal that focuses on the discussion of an artifact, along with its motivation and subsequent impact will be very welcome in the academic and OSS communities. 

If anyone's counting, I'm happy to help with this action item.

- jana

-- 
Janardhan Iyengar
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Franklin & Marshall College
http://www.fandm.edu/jiyengar