Recently, I have become quite fond of open publishing procedures, and am already looking at open publishing outlets such as PLOS One, F1000Research and Science Open. For some publications, however, the standard outlets should work just fine. So we went to J. Appl. Cryst. for our latest “software” publication on the Monte Carlo method, McSAS.
The manuscript has, of course, also been uploaded to the arXiv preprint server and is available here. Please have a look at it if you are interested in extracting distributions of a variety of models from SAS data.
Unbeknownst to us at the time of submission (I know, I should have more carefully read the guidelines for authors), “software” papers should be accompanied by user statements declaring that the software is useful and adequately documented. I am now hunting some users of the software willing to spend some time downloading the latest version (latest on the “restructuring”-branch), and willing to test it and write such a statement, though Christmas time is always a bit busy for many.
Until then, the manuscript is in the “not quite fully submitted”-state. Nevertheless, the manuscript is available and open for comments, and I would be very happy to hear about the experience from you to know what you would like to see in the future.
The code has been drastically reworked thanks to the fantastic efforts of Ingo Breßler, as evidenced on the blog posts on this blog and the extensive version history. The core code remained somewhat the same, but there is a fantastic user interface around it now that should make it much easier to use.
There is a quick start guide included in the “doc” directory included with the distribution, which contains a step-by-step guide to the GUI and some demonstration data. If there is anything missing in that, please tell me and I will include it.
A compiled version will appear shortly, and it is now only a few very minor issues away from becoming version 1.0
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