Linking Github usernames to Author Names @ Submission

[TomDonoghue]

Short version: I'm wondering if it would be useful to suggest that authors also somehow link or note their Github account handles when submitting, to make it easier for reviewers to link contributions between author names & github account names.

Longer Version: One of the criteria to check when reviewing JOSS papers is:

Contribution and authorship: Has the submitting author (XX) made major contributions to the software? Does the full list of paper authors seem appropriate and complete?

Which I agree is a good thing to check.

However, on larger projects, in which many github accounts have contributed to the code repository, and many individuals are listed on the paper, actually checking this by doing the mapping between github account names and listed author names is sometimes tricky, takes time, and/or can't be completely done. This is largely because often account names and listed author names are typically different, and not all github names list the associated individuals name.

So I wonder if it would be useful to ask submitters to list contributing authors with a link to their github account name. This information could be propagated to the review issue, so that reviewers can quickly reference this list with the repositories list of account contributors and the papers list of authors.

This seems most useful to make sure key code contributors aren't missed, since there can also be good reasons a valid author doesn't have code contributions. A possible slightly broader idea is to have this be a short 'Author Contributions' section, so that there is some annotation of author contributions, that can be referenced in review.

[arfon]

Thanks @TomDonoghue - I think this is a good idea. I'd love to work out ways to make this as easy as possible for submitting authors to generate this list but in theory I think this makes a bunch of sense.

I wonder if we could try and teach Whedon to run some kind of automated check of for authors, reviewers, and editors: https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/whedon.html