How to Participate with rOpenSci

This blog post is intended to help you get started in rOpenSci community by highlighting some key links and activities. If you have questions, please get in touch with our Community Manager, Yanina Bellini Saibene by email or schedule a meeting.

We are here for you as you begin your journey with our community. Welcome!

Where do I get started?

Glad you asked! rOpenSci fosters a culture that values open and reproducible research using shared data and reusable software. We are dedicated to providing a welcoming and supportive environment for all people. By participating in this community, participants agree to abide by our Code of Conduct. Whether you have a little or a lot of time, there are many ways to contribute and engage with us.

If you’re ready for the big dive, check out our Contributing Guide which covers all the ways you can get more involved with rOpenSci and how you may benefit.

Otherwise, see below for a quick overview of the resources available.

Finding information & asking for help

Do you want to know how to use an rOpenSci package? or are you looking information on how to develop an R package? There are several way to ask for help:

• Discussion forum: public forum on Discourse for use cases, Q & A about rOpenSci packages, exploration of ideas, and best practices. Learn how to Gather on the rOpenSci Forum

• Packages Documentation: this site hosts pkgdown documentation for all rOpenSci packages.

• Use Cases: check how our R packages or resources have been used.

• Blog: browse our blog posts and technical notes to see packages updates, how-to and examples. You can find articles written by our community members. If you feel inspired, our Blog Guide explains how to contribute a blog post.

• rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review: this book contains our guidelines for creating and testing R packages and our process for peer review.

• rOpenSci Statistical Software Peer Review: this book provides guidelines for authors on how to develop statistical software, and for editors and reviewers on our processes for peer review of statistical software.

• Talks and Publications: talks by the rOpenSci team or community members representing us, in English, French, or Spanish.

• Slack: A semi-open space for communications among people who contribute to rOpenSci. Our Slack is open to anyone who contributes to an rOpenSci project or participates in our peer-review process as an author or reviewer.

Chat with other community members

If you want to chat with other members of the community, in addition to the Discussion forum and Slack, we have meeting places such as

• Community Calls: join to our quarterly Community Calls, these are free and open for anyone to attend and provide an opportunity to connect with rOpenSci community members around the world.

• Remote Co-Working Sessions: monthly social coworking + office hours sessions via Zoom (see upcoming sessions in Events)

• Events: our staff and collaborators participate in different events and conferences.

Receive communications

We have several channels for our information to reach you directly. Worried about too many communications? Don’t be! Only subscribe to the communications you want, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

• Newsletter: every month receive in your inbox R package news, blog posts, tips and tricks, events and use cases. Subscribe via RSS (XML), JSON feed, or email.

• Social Media: follow our organization’s activities on Twitter, and Vimeo. Also follow our roknowtifier bot that tweets new rOpenSci packages or new versions of packages

Use and contribute to our infrastructure

• Packages: our packages are carefully vetted, staff- and community-contributed R software tools that in particular lower barriers to working with local and remote scientific data sources.

• The R-universe: improving publication and discovery of research software in R.

• Software Peer-Review: packages contributed by the community undergo a transparent, constructive, non-adversarial and open review process.

• Statistical Software Peer-Review: we have expanded our peer review system to include packages that implement statistical algorithms.

• Multilingual Publishing: we are expanding documentation for our review process beyond the English language.

• Champions Program: support community champions from historically excluded groups to become contributors to rOpenSci.

• Package Citations: if you use one of our packages, please cite it! You can learn here how to cite R and R Packages.

• Help Wanted: if you are ready to contribute, here is a list of issues where your expertise is needed (we have issues for different levels of expertise).

Ready to contribute!

We are happy you made it this far. We hope you find some way to participate among these options. We would be glad to learn more if you have ideas about other ways to collaborate with us!

We hope to see you in some of our spaces.

Post first at rOpenSci.org