Three software articles in this SI provide an overview and insights in specific software.
The quarterly journal publishes research, methodology, and software articles, as well as editorials, comments, and book and software reviews.
One of the innovations of JSERD is to offer authors the opportunity to publish four different types of papers, namely: (1) research articles, (2) industrial case studies, (3) reviews, and (4) software articles.
Software articles: these papers should describe newly developed software tools or substantial improvements to existing tools.
We encourage potential contributors for BioJS to submit software articles to this collection describing the functionality of valid components.
For example, BMC Bioinformatics only has policies for software articles and even for these the source code is not required, only an executable.
We are, of course, an open access publisher, and we encourage the publication of many article types, including short articles, negative findings, software articles, case histories, and many other valuable forms of research reporting currently shunned by many journals.
Perverse incentives have lead to a 'fire-and-forget' approach to software; publishing multiple software articles is rewarded whereas there are no direct metrics for maintaining existing software [ 2].
Finally, 30 articles were found in our SLR, as detailed in Table 2. Interestingly, we observed that those articles were published in the last 8 years (since 2008), and that they were defined in three distinct approaches of qualitative synthesis (Table 2, column "Type of study"): research articles, methodology articles, and software articles.
