Re: Peer-reviewed journals for technical articles

[Eric Talevich <eric.talevich@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 8:57 AM, Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org> wrote:

Hello,

For biophysical research (measuring butterfly wings and eyes), I have
developed several device drivers[0] (among others for a camera and for a
spectrometer). In our group we normally publish in biological journals,
like the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. In this case, I would like
to write an article for a technical journal, describing the device
drivers and the setup in general, with less focus on the measurements.

However, I do not know which journal would be appropriate. Does anyone
here know such a journal? I'm looking for something scientific, which
means peer reviewed. I can adapt the article to be more technical or
more about the measurements, depending on the target journal, but the
focus should mostly be on the setup, not on the measurements.

Thanks a lot,
Bas Wijnen

[0] The drivers I wrote are free software and are or will soon be in
Debian. Unfortunately the driver for the camera requires a non-free
library from the manufacturer, so that will go into contrib.

I would recommend PLOS ONE as an appropriate open-access journal for this work. They are known for a relatively quick peer-review and publication process, extremely broad scope (not just limited to biological sciences), and very permissive licensing of published articles -- Creative Commons Attribution, CC-BY. There are also no limitations on article length or accompanying supplementary files.

http://www.plosone.org/static/authors.action

If journal prestige is very important for this article, PLOS Computational Biology would be a good alternative. But PLOS ONE is certainly a legitimate venue, and potentially less of a hassle as they will not reject an article based on scope alone.

The BMC stable is also good; they have a similar reputation, though their journals are typically more focused and researcher articles are released under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license (CC-BY-NC). Since you're also releasing the driver software independently of the published article, the license difference probably won't mean much in practice.

All the best,
Eric