INFORMS Journal on Computing Software Policy

Like the Data Policy, the Software Policy does not apply to every paper and exceptions can be made.

For papers whose primary contribution is computational experiments, as a condition of final acceptance of the paper, software must be released to the research community to provide support for researchers to reproduce results given in the paper. This will be accomplished, as with the data, using the IJOC GitHub organization. Full instructions for authors can be found here. The public repository that you will create to hold your data, software, and other artifacts will be frozen with the paper, that is, no changes will be made after the paper and repository are accepted.

FAQ

Q. Does my software have to be user-friendly and be fully documented?

A. No. It is being released to the research community to facilitate replicability and transparency in research and to contribute to the furthering of our research community. Instructions sufficient for that must be supplied.

Q. What if my software relies, at least partly, on other software that requires a license (e.g., MA57, CPLEX, MATLAB)?

A. That is OK, particularly if you are releasing your source code. You do not have to include the software that is licensed by others, but you do need to show how to link to it.

Q. What if my paper's primary contributions are theorems but there are computational results provided as an illustration?

A. Then this policy probably does not apply to your paper; it depends on how important the computational results are for the paper. See Greenberg (1990) Computational testing: Why, how and how much. ORSA Journal on Computing 2(1):94–97.