[Dune] Release notes as publications

[Markus Blatt]

Hi,

On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 12:50:49PM +0200, Oliver Sander wrote:
> FEniCS recently released version 1.5 of their software suite.  Their release notes
> are available in form of a short "paper", under
> 
> https://bitbucket.org/fenics-project/fenics-release-notes
> 
> The Archive of Numerical Software
> 
> http://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/ans/
> 
> is willing to publish such release notes.  That way, they become real journal
> articles.  They can be cited, and people who worked on a particular release
> can get some credit for it.
> 

Sorry, but I have to say this:
Depending on how the contributors/authors are chosen, this sounds like
a way to manipulate your h-index or whatever is used to measure your
academic performance. All this sounds a bit fishy to me.

Having said that:
But as I am not an academic I do not care too much about
whether this is fraudulent or not ;).

What does excite me about cited releases is the fact that this seems
to be a nice incentive for contributors and might even increase the
number of contributions from people that are not part of the core
developer team and its colleagues.

The really difficult question is how are the authors chosen? I know
that for dealii theses are always just the current core
developers. This is not an option for me as this neglects considerable
contributions from outside.

Listing all contributors between two releases neglects previous
contributors and even inventors of the software. Listing all
contributors up to a release data might be a very long list and it
will be hard to find the current institutions of all of them. In
addition I consider it good style to ask people whether the want to
appear on a publication or not. (I am surprised that I am listed as an
author on some publication that I never had a chance to review or even
comment on.)

Seems like a big discussion for the developer meeting to me.

My peronal favorite is to list for every major release all
contributors after the last release with the release managers upfront
as primary authors.

Markus
-- 
Do you need more support with DUNE or HPC in general? 

Dr. Markus Blatt - HPC-Simulation-Software & Services http://www.dr-blatt.de
Hans-Bunte-Str. 8-10, 69123 Heidelberg, Germany
Tel.: +49 (0) 160 97590858
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.dune-project.org/pipermail/dune/attachments/20150720/4e7b559e/attachment.sig>