Issues with the JOSS paper

[svisak]

Here I'll collect my comments on the manuscript for the JOSS review.

First, the manuscript is quite old by now (last commit was 2 years ago), so I recommend going over it in general and see if new developments, yours or others, should be included. Some references have been published since the last revision.

The manuscript mentions an MIT license, but the LICENSE file is GPL.

I wouldn't call the piecewise polytrope or speed of sound models "metamodels". A metamodel typically indicates an expansion in terms of physical properties of nuclear matter at saturation density.

"Many of these studies such as (Raaijmakers et al., 2023) focus on EOS meta-models [...] rather than being driven by microphysics." Please forgive a slight bias on my part here, as I'm involved in the mentioned study, but I don't think it's correct to say that it is not driven by microphysics, as ab initio nuclear matter calculations based on chiral EFT forms an important part of that framework. I think the benefits of CompactObject can be highlighted without that statement.

Some references are not using the proper syntax, such as one place where "\citep" is visible in the PDF.

Otherwise the manuscript reads well.

[ChunHuangPhy]

Thank you for these helpful comments. We have comprehensively revised and updated the manuscript.

We revised the discussion of the field and the bibliography to include work published since the previous version, including the published NEoST paper and recent applications and developments of CompactObject.

The manuscript now also describes the current software functionality more fully, including its EOS implementations, observational and nuclear-physics likelihoods, inference workflow, and testing.

We corrected the license statement from MIT to GPL-3.0-or-later and aligned the manuscript, README, and package metadata accordingly.

We also revised the terminology. Piecewise-polytropic and speed-of-sound constructions are now described as parameterized EOS models, while “nuclear metamodel” is reserved for expansions in empirical nuclear-matter properties around saturation density.

The discussion of Raaijmakers et al./NEoST has been rewritten. It now explicitly acknowledges the role of chiral-EFT calculations and other microphysical constraints in that framework. We instead explain the complementarity between NEoST and CompactObject without suggesting that the former is not driven by microphysics.

Finally, we standardized the citation syntax, removed the visible \citep command, and replaced outdated or unpublished bibliography entries with their published versions.

Thank you again, hope these revisions help.