Journals for descriptions of open energy models

Outreach
1

I transferred this topic from the mailing list (only summarising it):
@tom_brown started a request:
We’ve written a paper describing the concept and technical details (but no research results beyond brief examples) behind our software tool “Python for Power System Analysis” https://github.com/FRESNA/PyPSA but we are not sure to which journal we should submit it. (We’d put a preprint on arXiv to avoid the open-access problem, until a proper solution Starting an open energy journal can be found).
Suitable energy-specific journals would be:

  • Applied Energy (topic is suitable, but it’s Elsevier and we’re not sure if it accepts software package descriptions)
  • IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (has accepted software papers in the past, e.g. MATPOWER, but the PyPSA paper is more focused on general energy systems rather than just power flow)
    Then there are a series of more general journals for free software, listed here:
    https://www.software.ac.uk/which-journals-should-i-publish-my-software
    Superficially this one looks attractive:
    https://openresearchsoftware.metajnl.com/
    Does anyone have any positive experiences to share?
2

an answer from Robbie included the link to the openmod wiki that has a list https://wiki.openmod-initiative.org/wiki/Open_Journals
which also includes the Journal of Open Research Software

other answers covered the question of preprints which should be another thread and are not copied here.

3

I had a conference call about open science policy with okfn last week and the Journal of Open Research Software was also mentioned as a good place to publish software (and participants of the call already published their software there.
regards
Berit

4

Thanks for the positive feedback on JORS! There’s also a positive author review here:

Model descriptions that have appeared in other more regular journals include for MATPOWER in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems:

and OSeMOSYS in Energy Policy:

I’ll start another thread soon on the pre-/post-print topic.