JOSS submission appeal #7
Description
I created an appeal issue of the recent rejection decision for our submission to JOSS for sdstudio, but that issue was immediately closed with instructions to instead open a new issue in the software repository associated with the submission, hence why I'm posting this issue.
Here is what I wrote in the appeal issue:
I searched the JOSS docs and found no documented approach for appealing an editorial decision to reject a submission. Most journals have documented approaches for appeals, and my apologies if JOSS has one that I am missing, but since I could not find one I decided to start a new issue as I don't know how else to have this conversation.
I am writing to ask for a re-consideration of our submission #9231 , which was rejected by @crvernon with the following justification: "we have decided to reject this submission in-part on the grounds of the code provided mainly being a GUI that wraps existing software."
This was a rather quick decision with no opportunity provided to the authors to clarify any misunderstanding about the software or the amount of scholarly effort that went into making it. The software in fact does much more than wrap existing software, as we noted in our reply to the rejection. And when we look at five most similar historical JOSS papers that the editorial bot found, I am even more surprised that our submission was rejected as the software matches closely to nature of contribution that those submissions make. This is probably our fault in not explaining the distinct contributions the software makes in the written summary, which we could certainly improve by going through a review process. But we were not provided that opportunity, hence why I opened this issue.
When I look at the guildelines for what constitutes substantial scholarly effort, it is important to understand that our software is quite young. The underlying surveydown survey platform is only one year old (with it's own publication), yet the source code repository has 158 stars with an increasing number of contributors and a rich discussion board.
Our submission to JOSS, sdstudio, is naturally even younger and has not yet had time to grow and reach the broader community of surveydown users. But that is it's intent. The surveydown package requires experience using R, shiny, and Quarto for users to be comfortable using it. The sdstudio package provides an opportunity to access the surveydown platform without having that experience, which could be transformative for introducing reproducible surveys to a much broader community of survey researchers. We expect the package will very much be a broad interest package and not just "narrowly focused around the needs of an individual researcher or lab" (from the guildelines). We also could further magnify that impact by hosting the software inside a separate server where users could log in, develop surveys, etc. all in a web-based GUI, but we have not yet implemented this because we wanted to further improve the studio itself first, which is what motivated our submission to JOSS.
I have developed multiple open source packages, but this was my first ever submission to JOSS, and we made the decision to submit to JOSS because it is one of the only communities that actually reviews the software itself. We were looking for feedback on ways to further improve the package to make it even easier for the greater world of survey researchers (most of which have limited programming experience) to be able to make complex and reproducible surveys using a no-code GUI solution. The open source community is built on open communication and dialogue - a back and forth to improve software for everyone. For our submission to be so quickly rejected without even providing an opportunity for that dialogue is quite disappointing. If there is any opportunity to send our package to reviewers, we would greatly appreciate their feedback.