It was a loud week at ASCL Central, what with a backhoe and a couple of Bobcats working outside, so I decamped to my office at UMD for a couple of days to get away from the noise and, especially, the diesel exhaust. It was also a productive week, with eighteen entries added to the ASCL, two records curated, and notification emails sent out. I submitted my proceedings paper for ADASS. A paper submitted in September came back from review, and we’ve started a series of writing sprints to address the reviewers’ concerns; the paper will be resubmitted before the end of the year. I also did some organizing work to prepare for this coming week’s FORCE2021 Hackathons; the SciCodes consortium hopes to make progress on several items during this event, which will be held on Monday and Friday. Come join us!

In the dawn’s early light, a lot of mud.

A busy week, but more on the organizing and writing side than actual work on the ASCL itself. One of the organizational tasks was for a Deep Dive webinar on software citation for FORCE2021; this is a dedicated session presented by the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group (SCIWG), and will be held on Tuesday, December 7 at 17:00 UTC. Several lightning talks will be presented on the work of the SCIWG, what challenges still exist, and work that is planned in the future, and then the floor will be opened for discussion among presenters and attendees. I wrote a first draft (which I expect is pretty close to the final draft) of a proceedings paper for last month’s ADASS meeting, this for the poster I presented. By “wrote,” I mean “mostly fought with LaTeX,” since that struggle took the majority of the time spent on the paper. On the ASCL itself, seven entries were curated and three new entries were staged.

This past week, fourteen new code entries were put into production, fourteen entries were curated, and three entries were staged. We also sent numerous emails to code authors. We’ve been working on increasing the number of codes added every month, and that effort is paying off, as you can see in the graph (from our dashboard) below. In 2017-2020, we averaged 21 codes/month; this year so far, we’re averaging almost 28 new entries/month.

We currently provide all of our public data in JSON and individual entries in both CITATION.cff and codemeta.json. This past week, we had some discussion with one of our developers about making all of our public data available in codemeta.json. We don’t have a date for doing this yet, but perhaps will make this change in time for the January AAS meeting.

This was the week before ADASS! The meeting this year is a hybrid meeting, with some attendees in Cape Town, and the others scattered all over the world. As much as I would love to be in Cape Town, I am attending virtually because of the pandemic. My poster this year involves but isn’t about the ASCL; instead, I’m presenting a poster about SciCodes.

Speaking of SciCodes, this week was our monthly meetings, so I spent time on them, but also had time for working on the ASCL. Random code of the day posts were scheduled through the end of the month and twenty entries were updated. Six new codes were staged, and two were submitted. This coming week, numerous ASCL-involved folks will be at ADASS, and I look forward to seeing them there!

Writing and organizing seemed to be this week’s theme. Melissa Harrison and I wrote and submitted a proposal for a dedicated working group session at FORCE2021 on behalf of the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group and secured a number of speakers for lightning talks. I got a rejection notice on Wednesday for a paper I’d submitted in early September; based on feedback from the reviewers and the to-do list I’d started after submitting it, I edited the paper, intending to post it to arXiv. A couple of people encouraged me to submit it to another journal, however, so I did. I also worked on my ADASS poster and paper. Actual work on the ASCL itself included curating seven entries, processing one submission and assigning the code an ASCL ID, and staging three new entries.

As previously mentioned, curating records in the ASCL is done a number of ways. We ensure that every record gets looked at periodically by querying our database as to which records have not been updated since current year – 3, which this year means  January 1, 2018. We’ve been busy looking at records and can now say that every record in the ASCL has been examined for health and/or curated in some way (or added) since January 1, 2018.With that done, we will now start checking entries that haven’t been updated since January 1, 2019, because curation never ends.

This week, we also sent emails to authors of codes added in September and staged three new entries. I attended the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group meeting on Tuesday, and later in the week, talked with several people about possible poster presentations at upcoming conferences.

One sad note: On September 27, ASCL Central became catless, alas. RIP, handsome little cat; it was a lovely 15 years.

Thirty codes were added to the ASCL this week, seven of which had been submitted by authors. Nineteen codes were curated, mostly through our work in creating the daily random code social media posts; we scheduled twenty-three posts. This coming week, we’ll be sending out registration notices for the new entries along with other usual correspondence, and I’ll be attending a FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group meeting on Tuesday.

What a difference a week makes! Our paper has been reconsidered and is now with the journal for peer-review. Productivity on the ASCL was lower than usual this week as I took a few days off, but still, nine code records were edited, daily random code posts were made to Facebook and Twitter, and three new entries were written and staged for consideration. I also made note of minor changes to make on another paper that is undergoing peer review. This coming week will be all code entry work, vetting, writing, and curating.

The main events this past week were finishing up and submitting an article, this for the special issue of PeerJ Computer Science, which I’ve previously mentioned, and prepping for and holding the monthly SciCodes meetings. Unfortunately, our paper was desk-rejected for being out of scope for the journal (yet in scope for the call for papers). This happened very quickly, which gave the author team some time to determine what our options might be and how we would approach considering them before the week was out. The SciCodes meetings went well and I had a great chat with a possible new participant in the consortium; it was a very fruitful conversation. As is common, the week included curation, new entries, social media post scheduling, and correspondence. Sixteen records were curated, some of them the result of scheduling of seven daily code posts, and three new entries were staged. All in all, a busy week, with elation, disappointment, determination, and some whining from the ASCL Central cat, who, poor thing, is going to the kitty dentist on Monday for evaluation before his dental surgery later this month.