[PRE REVIEW]: Sorcha: A Solar System Survey Simulator for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time

[editorialbot]

Submitting author: @mschwamb (Megan E. Schwamb)
Repository: https://github.com/dirac-institute/sorcha/
Branch with paper.md (empty if default branch):
Version: v1.0 (the version in the github repo is v1.0 we are waiting to push to v1.0 after JOSS review with the publication of the paper)
Editor: Pending
Reviewers: Pending
Managing EiC: Warrick Ball

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Thanks for submitting your paper to JOSS @mschwamb. Currently, there isn't a JOSS editor assigned to your paper.

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[editorialbot]

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[editorialbot]

Reference check summary (note 'MISSING' DOIs are suggestions that need verification):

✅ OK DOIs

- 10.1016/0032-0633(95)00107-7 is OK
- 10.1016/j.pss.2017.02.013 is OK
- 10.1051/0004-6361/201322068 is OK
- 10.3847/1538-3881/aabc4f is OK
- 10.3847/1538-4357/ac7c74 is OK
- 10.3847/0004-6256/152/3/70 is OK
- 10.3847/1538-4365/aab77a is OK
- 10.3847/1538-4365/ac3e72 is OK
- 10.1016/j.icarus.2019.113517 is OK
- 10.1086/427976 is OK
- 10.3847/0004-6256/151/6/172 is OK
- 10.3847/PSJ/acc9a9 is OK
- 10.3847/PSJ/ac58fe is OK
- 10.3847/1538-4357/ab042c is OK
- 10.1016/j.icarus.2006.07.024 is OK
- 10.1007/s11038-009-9305-z is OK
- 10.1016/j.icarus.2017.11.033 is OK
- 10.1088/0004-6256/137/6/4917 is OK
- 10.3389/fspas.2018.00014 is OK
- 10.1088/0004-6256/142/4/131 is OK
- 10.1051/0004-6361/201118085 is OK
- 10.1093/mnras/stu2164 is OK
- 10.48550/ARXIV.1802.01783 is OK
- 10.3847/2515-5172/ab0e10 is OK
- 10.3847/2515-5172/ad1f6b is OK
- 10.1093/mnras/stu2267 is OK
- 10.3847/0004-6256/152/4/103 is OK
- 10.1016/j.icarus.2009.07.042 is OK
- 10.3847/1538-3881/aa73d0 is OK
- 10.21105/joss.01298 is OK

🟡 SKIP DOIs

- No DOI given, and none found for title: Sorcha: Optimized Solar System Ephemeris Generatio...
- No DOI given, and none found for title: Predictions of the LSST Solar System Yield: The Fo...
- No DOI given, and none found for title: Predictions of the LSST Solar System Yield: Discov...

❌ MISSING DOIs

- 10.2172/1156415 may be a valid DOI for title: LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

❌ INVALID DOIs

- None

[editorialbot]

Software report:

github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.98  T=0.68 s (403.6 files/s, 436131.9 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CSV                             41              3              0         216391
Text                            25            195              0          42632
Python                         131           3830           4973          11264
Jupyter Notebook                17              0          10892           1429
INI                             12            622              0           1361
reStructuredText                20            868            679           1174
Markdown                        11            130              0            562
TeX                              1             42              0            562
YAML                            11             42             49            297
TOML                             1             13              4            105
Bourne Shell                     3              8             16             29
DOS Batch                        1              8              1             26
JSON                             1              0              0             17
make                             1              6              9             15
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                           276           5767          16623         275864
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Commit count by author:

   567	Meg Schwamb
   342	Steph Merritt
   108	samncorn
    86	fedorets
    81	Ryan Lyttle
    77	Jeremy Kubica
    57	Drew Oldag
    57	Pedro Bernardinelli
    34	Joseph Murtagh
    27	Mario Juric
    18	Conor MacBride
    17	Siegfried Eggl
    16	Max West
    14	eggls6
    13	smmatthews
    10	matthewholman
     9	Dave
     9	Samuel Cornwall
     7	sam
     6	drewoldag
     3	Ricardo Bánffy
     1	Dr Steph Merritt
     1	JJ Kavelaars
     1	berres2002

[editorialbot]

Paper file info:

⚠️ Wordcount for paper.md is 1843

✅ The paper includes a Statement of need section

[editorialbot]

⚠️ An error happened when generating the pdf. Problem with affiliations for Jeremy Kubica, perhaps the affiliations index need quoting?.

[editorialbot]

License info:

🟡 License found: Other (Check here for OSI approval)

[warrickball]

@editorialbot generate pdf

[editorialbot]

⚠️ An error happened when generating the pdf. Problem with affiliations for Jeremy Kubica, perhaps the affiliations index need quoting?.

[warrickball]

Hi @mschwamb, thanks for your submission! All the suitable JOSS editors are currently working at capacity so I'm going to "waitlist" this review until an editor with the relevant expertise is available to take it on. Thanks for your patience!

In the meantime, can I double check that the code is dual licensed as BSD 3-Clause and GPL v3? Is this because some files fall under one licence and other files under the other? I don't think dual licensing is a problem, as long as both licences are open source (according to the OSI definition), but we would like to know why you've chosen multiple licences.

I'm also not sure why the paper is failing to build. It works for me locally. Jeremy Kubica's affiliations look fine and there aren't any stray tabs. Any ideas, @openjournals/dev?

[mschwamb]

@warrickball - A PR is in to fix the affiliation issue. I had an extra 1 in the number that made it fail, but the CI checks don't catch it. Should be approved in the next hour or two

[mschwamb]

In the meantime, can I double check that the code is dual licensed as BSD 3-Clause and GPL v3? Is this because some files fall under one licence and other files under the other? I don't think dual licensing is a problem, as long as both licences are open source (according to the [OSI definition](https://opensource.org/osd)), but we would like to know why you've chosen multiple licences.

Yes -we license all contributions to this code under both BSDv3 and GPLv3 - We've heavily adapted some of the functions from the Rubin Observatory LSST stack (it is identified in the relevant files) and those were licensed originally under the GPLv3 so we've licensed under for both these reasons.

[mschwamb]

@warrickball PR just merged that fixed the affiliation issue

[warrickball]

@editorialbot generate pdf

[editorialbot]

👉📄 Download article proof 📄 View article proof on GitHub 📄 👈

[mschwamb]

@mschwamb if you have any suggestions for potential reviewers then please mention them here in this thread (without tagging them with an @). You can search the list of people that have already agreed to review and may be suitable for this submission.

The authors suggest jessie-dotson (Jessie Dotson), mkretlow (Mike Kretlow) , and Onoddil (Tom J. Wilson) as potential reviewers.

[warrickball]

Yes -we license all contributions to this code under both BSDv3 and GPLv3 - We've heavily adapted some of the functions from the Rubin Observatory LSST stack (it is identified in the relevant files) and those were licensed originally under the GPLv3 so we've licensed under for both these reasons.

Sorry for taking a few days to get back to you. I've been discussing this case and I think there's a licensing issue that needs to be resolved. Note that I am not a lawyer and none of this constitutes legal advice, but is my best interpretation of the situation based on my experience with open source licenses and after taking some advice from others on the editorial board.

The GPLv3-licensed files appear to me to be

src/sorcha/modules/PPAddUncertainties.py
src/sorcha/modules/PPDetectionProbability.py
src/sorcha/modules/PPFootprintFilter.py
src/sorcha/modules/PPRandomizeMeasurements.py
src/sorcha/modules/PPTrailingLoss.py

which all have the GPLv3 notice in them. Note that, since the authors of Sorcha are presumably not the original copyright holders, these cannot simply be relicensed as GPLv3 & BSD 3-Clause, because GPLv3's copyleft terms require that the code is shared under licences that preserve the copyleft terms of GPLv3.

For the remaining code, presuming the Sorcha authors wrote it all, you're free to license under GPLv3 & BSD 3-Clause, although I note this is an unusual choice because BSD 3-Clause is a permissive license anyway. This gets murky but dual-licensing under these two license does have merit for e.g. inclusion in other GPLv3 code, where everything could be under one licence (GPLv3).

If you stick to licensing the code you've written as GPLv3 & BSD 3-Clause, then we need a very clear statement somewhere—README.md or LICENSE.txt are options—specifying which files are under which licence. Alternatively, if Sorcha is licensed as GPLv3 only, then the whole project would fall under that single licence.

I'm happy to discuss further, since it looks (based on the last change to LICENSE.txt) that the Sorcha team may have already discussed this in some detail.

[mschwamb]

Mario Jurić on our team is the one who made the commit and has strong opinions on the licenses. So I'll point him to this discussion, and we'll let you know what change we've made to address the issue.