On Jan 22, 2012, at 18:15 , Artur wrote:
> Hello there
>
> I will submit my first R package soon and I m curious If I can submit a
> package with an algorithm which is not published in a journal yet. I see
> most people are writing papers on their packages. So I assumed they
> submitted their packages before the publication of their new methods (like
> Journal of Statistical Software). Any ideas if it is possible ?
As a matter of principle, you should request such information from the relevant
journal(s), but, as far as I know, no statistical journal has a practice of
jealously guarding first publication rights. Such practices do exist in, e.g.,
parts of the medical world.
Usually, the policy is to disallow double publication of the actual paper
content, but non-peer-reviewed items like conference abstracts and preprints are
OK.
CRAN only requires that the package license allows free redistribution.
You do need to be aware that your paper can sit in a journal pipeline for quite
some time while the package code has already been released under an Open Source
license. The good thing about this is that no-one can claim your contribution as
theirs, but people might start building on your algorithms before the paper
comes out.
There is of course no guarantee that the editors and reviewers actually want to
publish your paper, and publishing a package cannot coerce them to do so. There
have been cases of packages including preprints of methods papers, even using
LaTeX submission style files for easily recognized journals; I think that needs
to be discouraged.
--
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com