[Insight-developers] IJ Volunteers : THE MATRIX : RED PILL

[Torsten Rohlfing]

Hi everyone --

Little as I want to get myself into the middle of a heated argument, I'd 
like to throw in a few thoughts of my own. I also may have missed pieces 
of the discussion thus far, so my apologies if I am bringing up things 
that have already been addressed.

First, I have a comment on Zach's suggestion to increase review activity 
for the IJ by accepting submissions only from people who have provided 
at least three reviews for other papers. While I appreciate the problem 
of getting reviews (trust me, I do), here's the perspective of someone 
who effectively stopped contributing code to ITK when the whole IJ 
process was implemented: I don't get paid to provide code to ITK, much 
less to write test cases and documentation (still, I see why these are 
necessary, so I'll do it). I am getting paid, however, to write code, 
and I do believe it has some value.

Now if I choose to make the result of my work freely available to 
others, then there is a clear limit as to how much I will allow myself 
to be hassled in order to be permitted to give my work away. Writing an 
IJ paper to accompany the code has so far been a bit of a threshold for 
me because I am simply to busy. Being required to review other works 
first before I can even think of submitting a paper, well, let's just 
say it would be pretty much a guarantee that at least this potential 
developer would never contribute anything ever again.

Okay, this may have been pretty pointed, so before I draw the wrath of 
everyone involved upon me, let me backpaddle a little: all I am saying 
is that most code contributions to ITK, and definitely those from 
parties not funded by any related NIH projects, are essentially gifts. 
And in my opinion, the ITK community would be well-advised to not 
"punish" folks for wanting to make such gifts. That is, if the community 
agrees that such contributions are valuable.

A second point I would like to make, and completely unrelated to 
anything above: I have noticed that there are a few papers on the IJ 
that are not really about contributions to ITK. In fact, there are some 
where the source code of the software is not even available (I'll be 
happy to dig up examples). This leads me to wonder:

If the primary purpose of the IJ is to review code contributions to ITK, 
should submissions that are not concerned with such contributions even 
be allowed? If they are, they may take reviewing capacity away from the 
"worthy" papers, and it also makes it necessary for the interested 
readers to dig through a paper to find out whether or not they can 
simply download and try the code or not. On the other hand, if the IJ is 
intended to be more than a channel for code into ITK, then maybe it 
should be split into separate sections?

All that said, I don't want to appear all negative. So I just went and 
updated my review preferences for the IJ, and I promise I'll make an 
effort to start reviewing papers after MICCAI. If you guys also still 
need volunteers to function as AEs for the IJ (I lost the invitation 
email), then I'd be happy to do that as well.

Best,
  Torsten

-- 
Torsten Rohlfing, PhD          SRI International, Neuroscience Program
 Research Scientist             333 Ravenswood Ave, Menlo Park, CA 94025
  Phone: ++1 (650) 859-3379      Fax: ++1 (650) 859-2743
   torsten at synapse.sri.com        http://www.stanford.edu/~rohlfing/

     "Though this be madness, yet there is a method in't"

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