At rOpenSci, our R package peer review process relies on the the hard work of many volunteer reviewers. These community members donate their time and expertise to improving the quality of rOpenSci packages and helping drive best practices into scientific software. Our open review process, where reviews and reviewers are public, means that one benefit for reviewers is that they can get credit for their reviews. We want reviewers to see as much benefit as possible, and for their contributions to be recorded as part of the intellectual trail of academic work, so we have been working at making reviews visible and discoverable.

To give you an idea of where I am in my R developer germination, I’d just started reading about testing when I received an email from @rOpenSci inviting me to review the weathercan package. Many of us in the R community feel like imposters when it comes to software development. In fact, as a statistician, it was a surprise to me when I was recently called a developer. In terms of formal computer science training, I took one subject in first year, with the appropriate initialism OOF.

I love working with R and have been sharing the love with my friends and colleagues for almost seven years now. I’m one of those really annoying people whose response to most analysis-related questions is “You can do that in R! Five minutes, tops!” or “Three lines of code, I swear!” The problem was that I invariably spent an hour or more showing people how to get the data, load the data, clean the data, transform the data, and join the data, before we could even start the “five minute analysis”.

rOpenSci is holding our annual staff and leadership meeting in Vancouver, so we’re taking the opportunity to share what we do and, if you’re interested, how you can get involved. Join us for a series of 7 short talks and demos followed by informal networking over snacks & refreshments. rOpenSci is a non-profit initiative that promotes open and reproducible research using shared data and reusable software. We are creating technical infrastructure in the form of carefully vetted, staff- and community-contributed R software tools that lower barriers to working with scientific data sources on the web, and building a welcoming and diverse global community of R users and developers from a range of research domains.

rOpenSci’s mission is to enable and support a thriving community of researchers who embrace open and reproducible research practices as part of their work. Since our inception, one of the mechanisms through which we have supported the community is by developing high-quality open source tools that lower barriers to working with scientific data. Equally important to our mission is to build capacity and promote researchers who are engaged in such practices within their disciplinary communities.