Project Status: JOSS Rejection & Roadmap

[prathameshnium]

Status Update

Our recent submission to the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) was rejected at the pre-review stage.
openjournals/joss-reviews#9961

Clarification & Inquiry

Clarification on Repository Statistics: We would like to respectfully clarify the context regarding the automated repository report. The report flagged ~1.3 million lines of code as recent insertions, which appeared to be a 'code dump.'

We wish to note that this statistic was a technical artefact caused by a recent directory restructuring and the inclusion of a large log file (git_history.txt), rather than sudden code generation. In reality, PICA has grown organically for more than 2 years as the operational infrastructure for a National User Facility, and we are fully committed to continuing and increasing this development in the public eye.

We are currently in the process of reviewing the JOSS editorial guidelines and the recent blog post on open development standards. We fully respect these criteria and understand the importance of a verifiable development history.

The software itself is substantial and has been in genuine operational use for over two years. We are now aligning our workflow to meet the standards required for a future resubmission.

Roadmap

We are committed to the following steps:

1. Transparent Development Workflow: We will enhance our future development activity, including granular commits, real-time feature discussions, and bug tracking, all visible to the community in real-time (on this GitHub).
2. Resubmission: We target a resubmission in mid 2026 if the current decision stands.

Citation

• Zenodo Archive (v1.0.1): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18377216
• arXiv: We are discussing the possibility that we should pre-print the current Joss paper to arXiv. The README.md and this will be updated with the DOI shortly.

Contributing

Community participation is encouraged by JOSS. So, please use the Issues tab of the github for to report bugs or request features, or ask questions.

[prathameshnium]

Internal Review Update

I have forwarded the full rejection details and the reviewer feedback to Dr. Sudip Mukherjee. We are scheduled to meet tomorrow to discuss the decision in detail.

Agenda: We'll be looking over the eligibility criteria cited in the rejection in the context of our facility's operational history. The goal of this consultation is to determine the best path to align our internal research and development workflow with the public JOSS requirements for our target resubmission in 2026.

I will post a finalised roadmap update here after our discussions.

[prathameshnium]

Update: Post-Consultation Roadmap: 16-02-25

After discussing with Dr. Mukherjee, we have decided to prioritise code stability and organic growth.

We will continue polishing the project and issuing fixes for the current user base.

The archive is already seeing traction, 143 views, 30 downloads on Zenodo and 5 stars and 1 fork on GitHub.

We will let the project build momentum in the community first and revisit the publication strategy later.

Specific feedback was raised regarding the darker colour of the background in the GUI; we need to make the GUI colours lighter/cleaner. So I am opening a separate issue to track the UI/Theme adjustments.