Giving software its due through community-driven review and publication

A recent editorial in Nature Methods, “Giving Software its Due”, described challenges related to the development of research software and highlighted, in particular, the challenge of software publication and citation. Here, we call attention to a system that we have developed that enables community-driven software review, publication, and citation: The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is an open-source project and an open access journal that provides a light-weight publishing process for research software. Focused on and based in open platforms and on a community of contributors, JOSS evidently satisfies a pressing need, having already published more than 500 articles in approximately three years of existence.