Editors: Jan de Leeuw & Achim Zeileis        ISSN 1548-7660; CODEN JSSOBK Published by the American Statistical Association

JSS Instructions

1. Types of Papers
2. Issues
3. Review
4. Copyright
5. Costs
6. Submission
7. Languages
8. Journal Interface

Types of Papers

JSS will publish the following types of original contributions

1. Manuals, user's guides, and other forms of description of statistical software, together with the actual software in human-readable form (peer-reviewed).
2. Code snippets -- small code projects, any language (section editors Hornik and Koenker, peer-reviewed).
3. Special issues on topics in statistical computing (guest editors, peer-reviewed, suggestions welcomed).
4. Reviews of books on statistical computing and software (section editor Gentleman, suggestions welcomed).
5. Reviews and comparisons of statistical software (section editors Unwin and Hartman, suggestions welcomed).

The typical JSS paper will have a section explaining the statistical technique, a section explaining the code, a section with the actual code, and a section with examples. All sections will be made browsable as well as downloadable. The papers and code should be accessible to a broad community of practitioners, teachers, and researchers in the field of statistics.

Issues

Each article/manual/paper will be an issue. Thus the appropriate bibliography entry will be Journal of Statistical Software, volume 1, 1995, issue 17, 1-15. There is no page limit.

Review process

The article/paper/manual will be peer reviewed in the usual way. The editor selects an associate editor, the AE selects two reviewers (one of them can be the AE). The review has two parts: both the write-up (manual) and the software reviewed. The combination of the parts should work as indicated, be clearly documented, and serve a useful purpose. The statistical part of all submissions is reviewed for both correctness and usefulness. If the statistical technique has been published elsewhere, a short introduction with references is usually sufficient.

If a submission cannot be placed with an associate editor within three months the corresponding author will be notified the submission is unsuitable for the journal.

If a revision is not received back from the authors within a year, the paper will be considered to be withdrawn.

Copyright

Authors keep the copyright. This means that as far as JSS is concerned, authors can publish their submissions elsewhere as well. The published paper stays on the servers, however. Papers and code on our servers, will be freely and unrestrictedly available for download via HTTP.

Costs

JSS will be free, in the sense that there is no charge for submission and no charge for subscription. Actually, there is no subscription. Everybody is free to download code and papers and to print or otherwise distribute them.

Submission

All submissions are electronic. Submissions and correspondence with the editor should go to deleeuw@stat.ucla.edu.

Accepted final versions of the papers must be submitted in LaTeX using the JSS style files. Initial submissions can be written in any word processing or typesetting system, but it is the responsibility of the authors to provide a final version in the appropriate format. JSS has no resources to help authors with conversions, so we strongly advise authors who need assistance to find a local TeX expert. The zip archive includes examples. Also, a manual with more detailed instructions is available in the download.

Code must be submitted in separate ASCII files. Code should be readable and should have comments. Submissions in R/S or Stata should come with formatted help files and should be packaged for easy installation.

Languages

Papers should preferably be in English. All non-English papers should have an English summary.

Code can be in any language. We prefer code that can be executed by interpreters, written in languages such as S, SPSS/Matrix, SAS/IML, Matlab, and Mathematica, provided the interpreter is not too esoteric. If it is, it should come with the submission.

Code in Fortran, C, C++, Common Lisp is also welcome, but it will generally take longer to review.

Journal Interface

UCLA Statistics will maintain the interface to the journal (homepage, table of contents, links, interactive features), will provide disk space, and network access. The journal will have cross-referencing and search-on-keywords, allowing easy browsing. The journal indices are available as HTML, RSS, Bibtex, OAI-DC and RePEc. UCLA Statistics shall also maintain page counts, showing how many hits each paper gets.