Joss: What's our policy on issue-trackers that require registration and login?

[labarba]

I'm seeking comment from the JOSS Editors: In this submission, the project owners have indicated that they will accept issues, not through the GitHub issue tracker, but through their separate platform, requiring registration and login. This bothers me ... but I want to know what others think:
https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/151#issuecomment-272135155

[arfon]

This bothers me ... but I want to know what others think

I agree that this is less than ideal, however I'm not sure it's reasonable for us to mandate where people do their issue tracking (or code-hosting for that matter). Perhaps in this case the submitting authors could register some kind of 'guest' account for the reviewer to use?

[labarba]

What bothers me is that they request registration and login to submit an issue.

[kyleniemeyer]

I also agree that using GitHub (or a similar commonly used platform) would be better than something custom. However, such services also require registration and login to submit issues—it's just that people more commonly have accounts at these places. (Also, I suppose, users trust their personal information with the service rather than the specific project owners.)

I think this is more something that could come out of the review process as suggestions for improving ways to contribute and submit issues, rather than being something that would make their submission ineligible for publication in JOSS. I agree with @arfon that some sort of guest account would make submitting issues easier—you don't want to make it hard to do this.

(All that said, if this is something we care about, we should add it to the submission guidelines. Personally I can't imagine moving a project off GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab to something custom because that sounds like a nightmare, but there could conceivably be some institutional reasons for it.)

[labarba]

Good points, @kyleniemeyer !

For some reason, I feel differently about having to log in to GitHub—the hosting service—than giving the software project my details. It just does not feel as "open" ...

[kyleniemeyer]

@labarba I totally agree with you on that!

[jflorence]

I agree that submitting an issue to an open source project should be as simple and fast as possible, in order not to deter people from doing so, and improve the quality of the software as much as possible.
Requiring a login might be necessary to avoid spam and other kinds of problems.
But then it would be better to host the issue tracker on a website like github, where bug reporters might be very likely to already have an account.

[iljah]

What bothers me is that they request registration and login to submit an issue.

As pointed out, this is also true for github so shouldn't be a dealbreaker I think. But the site in question only requires a first name, last name and email to register which doesn't seem a too big of a deal either. Perhaps joss policy in these cases could be that a reviewer must be granted a (temporary) login without any personal info attached?

[remram44]

You guidelines read: "Make software available in an open repository (GitHub, Bitbucket etc.)" so there doesn't seem to be a requirement for the project to not be on a self-hosted platform either.

One thing I'm concerned about is this comment: "Your account is activated." Does registration on their Redmine require manual activation from the team?

I think you might want to list more explicit requirements:

• Repository should be clonable anonymously
• Repository should be browsable online anonymously
• Issue tracker should be readable anonymously
• People should be able to create issue, possibly with open registration

[labarba]

@arfon — this issue is still open, and now we have a new pre-submission enquiry for a project that uses a CLA. Did we ever get to consensus on listing more explicit requirements, as suggested above? Did any modified language on these requirements make it to the Author Guide?

[arfon]

@arfon — this issue is still open, and now we have a new pre-submission enquiry for a project that uses a CLA. Did we ever get to consensus on listing more explicit requirements, as suggested above? Did any modified language on these requirements make it to the Author Guide?

We didn't ever go further than this discussion. I rather like @remram44's suggestions here:

I think you might want to list more explicit requirements:

• Repository should be clonable anonymously
• Repository should be browsable online anonymously
• Issue tracker should be readable anonymously
• People should be able to create issue, possibly with open registration

Could you say more about the CLA requirement that's currently on a pre-submission?

[labarba]

It's this pre-submission enquiry via Issue #391.
They say:

The leaf_simulator package is on the Met Office code subversion repository: https://code.metoffice.gov.uk (there are many other projects here, including JULES). There is no charge for access to the code but it does require user registration. The code is under a CLA license.