JOSS paper

[akeeste]

JOSS criteria:

• [x] Title
• [x] Tags
• [x] Author list. @kmruehl please review, perhaps depends on whether this is viewed holistically over 10+ years or e.g. from v5.0 vs v4.0. I'm not sure what JOSS wants, but may be holistically
• [x] Affiliations
• [x] Summary. Using WEC-Sim boilerplate
• [ ] Statement of need (including problems WEC-Sim addresses, target users, software alternatives, state of the field). @kmruehl Can you comment on historical needs that sparked the creation of WEC-Sim?
• [ ] Recent projects/publications utilizing WEC-Sim. Easy way to reference PRIMRE SP or TE publications en masse?
• [ ] References. Could include prior WS publications, other theory references, etc

JOSS guidelines: https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/submitting.html#submission-requirements

[dforbush2]

WEC-Sim library depends on binary source files (e.g. *slx) where the code is not visible. JOSS does not allow submissions that include binary source files. Can we re-save the *slx as a readable source and reconsider submission? Closing for now we can reconsider later.

From Dave's correspondence: "We were asked if the WEC-Sim software, as stored on GitHub in https://github.com/WEC-Sim/, could be published in JOSS, given that it is Matlab code that utilizes Simulink, Simscape, and Simscape Multibody components, saved as .slx binary files. The answer is no, this is not open-source software. The .m files are open source and JOSS has published Matlab projects in the past. However, the problem arises in the .slx binary files, which are not open source per the OSI definition (https://opensource.org/osd/), as they are not source code. If they were, they would also need to have an OSI-approved license (https://opensource.org/licenses/). The fact that these are part of the software package makes this software ineligible for JOSS review and publication."

[reos-rcrozier]

One solution: write matlab code file(s) which generates the .slx files.

[kmruehl]

Thanks for reaching out to JOSS. In the past we saved our library's *.slx files as *.mdl, which allowed them to be opened like a text file. MDL files appear to be be incompatible with newer versions of MATLAB, more info here. I'm going to re-open this issue as a motivation to explore solutions.

Update: I was able to export the WEC-Sim_Lib.slx as WEC-Sim_Lib.mdl, which can be opened with any text editor. We used this format for a while ago to allows us to better track revisions to the library, but the files are much larger the *.slx files, so we stopped used this format. WECSim_Lib.zip