News · 30 September 2026
MIRROR accepted by the Journal of Open Research Software
“MIRROR: Local Evidence Bundles for Reproducible Research Software Review, with a JANUS Case Study” was accepted by the Journal of Open Research Software on 30 September 2026. The decision followed three rounds of peer review; the final revision answered the reviewers' asks without changing the released code.
MIRROR is a small tool for a large habit. When a reviewer, an editor or a later reader wants to know whether a piece of research software still does what its paper says, the usual answer is a repository link and goodwill. MIRROR instead produces a local evidence bundle: a manifest of the files that were run, the hashes that pin them, the environment, the commands, and the outputs, in a form a stranger can re-check offline without asking the author anything. The JANUS case study walks one real review through the bundle.
The code is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence, 10.5281/zenodo.20463358, with 115 tests. The article's text is what the journal reviewed; the software it describes did not change between submission and acceptance.
The accepted manuscript is now with the journal's production team. The published article will be linked here when it appears; until then this is an acceptance, not a publication.