Review of Papers Describing Neuroinformatics Software

Excerpt

This and other specialized journals publish many papers that describe computer software, including programs for analyzing data (Duff et al. 2007; Srinivasan et al. 2007; Bagarinao et al. 2008; Condron 2008; Liu et al. 2008; Zhang et al. 2008; Glascher 2009; Goldberg et al. 2009; Gunay et al. 2009; Nowinski et al. 2009), assist in the acquisition or management of data (Brown et al. 2005; Bezgin et al. 2009), and for simulating computer models (Cannon et al. 2003; Ichikawa 2005; Versace et al. 2008; Koene et al. 2009). Like all papers submitted to the journal the manuscripts are thoroughly refereed by two or three independent reviewers for scientific quality and clarity of the exposition. Usually, however, the reviewers have to trust that the authors gave a fair description of the software. The situation is somewhat similar to the review of experimental papers, where the referees have to trust that the authors describe the experiments accurately and completely. In experimental science, it would be impractical to reproduce systematically the empirical claims. For computer software, in contrast, this limitation only reflects an old-fashioned approach, stemming from a time when it was difficult to distribute code or executables, and when programs were often very platform-dependent. In this era of sharing of resources and data (Kennedy 2004) and of web-based software distribution (Gardner et al. 2008; Luo et al. 2009) it has become fairly easy to make the software itself also accessible to reviewers, opening possibilities for deeper review of software related papers. This opportunity is particularly meaningful for the field of neuroinformatics and its leading (and namesake) journal. …