Academic publication - an experiment

Python is extremely popular and widely-used by research academics across diverse fields and most software developed by academics is open source. Despite the clear overlap, academics do not frequently attend PyCon AU and other related conferences. As a way to reach out to this community and encourage participation, we trialled a new collaborative process to support publication of PyCon AU 2024 proposals in The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), an academic journal that runs their own formal peer-review process.

We received robust interest in academic publications from PyCon AU submitters, and the proposals that were in-scope for JOSS were developed into full academic papers with the help of the PyCon AU 2024 Academic Publishing team. Submitters who progressed to JOSS submission but were not included in the main conference will be presenting a special flash talk at PyCon AU 2024, during the Scientific Python Specialist Track. These papers are now under review at JOSS, and will be linked here once that process concludes and the papers are made available as part of JOSS’s PyCon AU 2024 special collection.

The academic publishing process was run by Alan Rubin and Maia Sauren.