Thank you @cwhanse and @AdamRJensen.

Here is an updated draft after the initial reviews: draft 2023-09-14.pdf

Thanks @wholmgren and @adriesse for the reviews. Here is the latest rendering: draft 2023-09-15.pdf

Regarding author order, I am -1 to alphabetical. If we do that here then it presumably sets a precedent for any future publications, and it's not fair for me to arbitrarily be the perpetual beneficiary of whatever significance people assign to the ordering.

I think the current ordering, other than myself, was based on github's reporting of commit counts here: https://github.com/pvlib/pvlib-python/graphs/contributors

If ordering by commits is a reasonable approach, perhaps it would make more sense to order by commits since the last paper: https://github.com/pvlib/pvlib-python/graphs/contributors?from=2018-09-07&to=2023-09-15&type=c

(edit: corrected the publication date of the paper in the above link)

Of course commit count only captures one dimension of contribution to the project, and rather loosely at that. Ideas for other objective ordering methods are welcome!

If ordering by commits is a reasonable approach, perhaps it would make more sense to order by commits since the last paper: https://github.com/pvlib/pvlib-python/graphs/contributors?from=2018-09-07&to=2023-09-15&type=c

I'm inclined to agree that this seems the best option, albeit not perfect.

Thanks everyone for the input and kind words. Since all of us have reviewed, I will merge this PR and begin the JOSS submission.

Note that we can still make additional manuscript changes if needed; JOSS reviews usually take a while to get going.

I think ranking core team members is fundamentally undesirable. As I pointed out, we all operate under different constraints. This allows some of us to spend much more time on pvlib than others. It would probably be easier to change my name than to change my constraints. Furthermore, the core team is not homogeneous, so contributions will vary in nature and size and countability, and I doubt any ranking could get it right.

Even if we agreed on having no ranking (open question) there's no getting around the fact that the author list is an ordered list and that readers have preconceived notions about the meaning of that order. So we have to deal with it. Having the main writer listed as first author is, in my opinion, not always justified or necessary. It is perhaps even less so in this case, where the paper itself is a minor thing. Looking through a few JOSS papers I see that many use a symbol to indicate corresponding author (rather than placing them first) and a star to identify equally contributing authors.

The idea that is forming is to place Cliff first (perhaps as a substitute for the PVSC award) and the rest alphabetically, with Kevin identified as corresponding author.

If the present ranking (system) is maintained by majority vote, then I would ask that you add stars to the names with the explanation: "authors are sorted by number of commits" below the authors' names.

Good point about mentioning the ordering method in the manuscript somehow. After looking into it, the JOSS build system doesn't seem to provide much flexibility in the authors list beyond the "equal-contrib" and "corresponding" flags, which both display hard-coded text as far as I can tell :/ The best option I've found to include this explanation is in a footnote, which renders like this: paper-order-footnote.pdf. In that PDF I added the footnote to only one name; I also tried adding the footnote symbol to each name, but the resulting PDF had the same footnote text 6 times with 6 different symbols. Once the review begins, we can ask the JOSS folks if there is a better option.

Regarding the choice of ordering itself, it seems that 5 out of the 6 of us thought the current ordering is reasonable. If the group can be swayed to some other majority or consensus then I'll happily edit accordingly!