From: Ernst van Waning
Subject: Experimental Software and Toolkits -- special issue of Science of Computer programming
Date: 
Message-ID: <1118443611.706803.75140@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
Somebody asked me kindly to distribute the following announcement in
the Lisp community.  Feel free to redistribute it to your networks.

Kind regards and hoping to meet you at Stanford,

Ernst van Waning

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         Call for Systems of Science of Computer Programming
                        for a Special Issue on
               Experimental Software and Toolkits (EST)

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      The idea in a nutshell: Reproducibility and Accessibility

The  journal  "Science of Computer Programming"  of  Elsevier
Science has a long history of publishing high-quality articles on
programming and software. The idea of this special issue on
Experimental Software and  Toolkits  (ETS) is  to  allow  academic
software  developers to publish  the  software  system  they
developed together with a short paper.  We hope this will help the
software community to find a wider audience for their work.
Moreover, by enhancing the accessibility and the  reproducibility of
results, we hope to help to encourage a wider application and
adoption of experimental software.


                            Aim and scope

Academic  software  development  may  involve the development of
huge software  systems in order to perform all kinds of experiments.
This can  be  compared with huge experiments in physics or
chemistry.  The focus of researchers developing such experimental
software systems is mainly on software development. The software
developer has some idea, algorithmic  or  functional,  and  in
order to prove his or her idea software  is  adapted  or newly
developed.  Some of these systems are distributed  to  different
researchers and may become very popular in the  community.  The
software development of these systems is almost always  in conflict
with papers that are to be written.  Specially if the  users
community  grows  and  the  requests for enhancements and
improvements  increases.  The  application  areas  of  these
software systems  are  rather diverse, from language prototyping
environments, theorem provers,  visualisation tools,  renovation
tools, programming environments, etc.

This  EST  initiative  is  focussed  on the creation of a forum
where beside the paper the software system itself is published. Two
obvious questions arise here:
 * What is the difference between this initiative and the open source
   facilities  like  SourceForge?  The most important and challenging
   difference  is  that  the  software  is  reviewed.   A  number  of
   independent  referees  will  review both the system and the system
   description paper and will give a verdict.
 * What is the difference with tool demonstrations at conferences and
   workshops.    The   difference   is   that   at  conferences  tool
   demonstrations  are accepted based on the tool demonstration only,
   the  referee  has  no opportunity to install and use the system or
   have a look at the code.

We  want to invite authors to submit software systems together with a
short  paper.   We  want  to  go  one  step  further  than  the  tool
demonstrations   at  the  various  conferences,    such  as  Compiler
Construction. The software systems is reviewed on various aspects:
 * ease of installation,
 * quality of (user) documentation,
 * ease of usage, and
 * applicability to the indented domain.

Referees  are  also  invited to have a look at the actual code of
the system.  The  major improvement over the conference and workshop
tool demonstration is that a broader audience is able to use the
system.


                        Guidelines for authors

In order to submit a software system the author has to produce a
tool description  paper,  comparable to the tool descriptions
submitted to conferences and workshops.  The size of the tool
description paper is
about 10 pages (but need not be limited to 10 pages).   The main goal
of the paper is to introduce the tool,  the application domain of
the tool  and  to  give  a  comparison  with  relevant  related
tools and systems. Moreover, relevant theory should concisely be
addressed.

The requirements of the software system itself:
 * Installation documentation.
 * The  source  files  and an installation script or procedure, it is
   possible  to provide the binaries as well, but the original source
   files are required for code inspection.
 * A number of example applications.
 * User documentation.


                             Submission

The  submission  deadline is October 1st, 2005. Authors are
requested to submit their system and corresponding paper
electronically  to the guest editor (··················@cwi.nl),
either in postscript  or in PDF  format.  We  encourage  the  use
of the Elsevier style file for LaTeX.


                              Copyright

The  copyright  of  the  articles  is  held,  except  where noted,
by Elsevier  Science.  Copyright  as well as other proprietary
rights in the source code are held by the authors. By submitting the
code along with  the  article,  the authors have agreed to permit
the readers of Science  of  Computer Programming the right to use
the algorithms for personal  and  professional  research  use,  but
not for any further redistribution,  further sub-licensing, or
commercial use. All rights are  otherwise  reserved.  Authors  are
thus  free to distribute the published  version  of  the source code
via other media as well as to develop and distribute new versions of
the source code.


                             Guest editor

Mark van den Brand
Department of Software Engineering
Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica
Kruislaan 413
NL-1098 SJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Institute for Information Technology
Hogeschool van Amsterdam
Weesperzijde 190
NL-1097 DZ Amsterdam
The Netherlands

For more information see: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~markvdb/SCP-EST/.


-------------------------------------------------
M.G.J. van den Brand

Department of Software Engineering
CWI
Kruislaan 413
NL-1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Tel___(+31) 20 5924213
WWW____http://www.cwi.nl/~markvdb/
Fax___(+31) 20 5924199
·························@cwi.nl

Instituut voor Informatica
Hogeschool van Amsterdam
Weesperzijde 190
NL-1097 DZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Room__A.7.08
Tel___(+31) 20 5951619
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