Preface

Welcome! This book is a guide for authors, maintainers, reviewers and editors of rOpenSci.

The first section of the book contains our guidelines for creating and testing R packages.

The second section is dedicated to rOpenSci’s software peer review process: what it is, our policies, and specific guides for authors, editors and reviewers throughout the process. For statistical software review, refer to the project webpage and resources.

The third and last section features our best practice for nurturing your package once it has been onboarded: how to collaborate with other developers, how to document releases, how to promote your package and how to leverage GitHub as a development platform. The third section also features a chapter for anyone wishing to start contributing to rOpenSci packages.

We hope that you’ll find the guide useful and clear, and welcome your suggestions in the issue tracker of the book. Happy R packaging!

The rOpenSci editorial team.

This book is a living document. You can view updates to our best practices and policies via the release notes.
You can cite this book using its Zenodo metadata and DOI.

@software{ropensci_2021_6619350,
  author       = {rOpenSci and
                  Anderson, Brooke and
                  Chamberlain, Scott and
                  DeCicco, Laura and
                  Gustavsen, Julia and
                  Krystalli, Anna and
                  Lepore, Mauro and
                  Mullen, Lincoln and
                  Ram, Karthik and
                  Ross, Noam and
                  Salmon, Maëlle and
                  Vidoni, Melina and
                  Riederer, Emily and
                  Sparks, Adam and
                  Hollister, Jeff},
  title        = {{rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and 
                   Peer Review}},
  month        = nov,
  year         = 2021,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {0.7.0},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.6619350},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6619350}
}

If you want to contribute to this book (suggestions, corrections) please refer to the GitHub repository in particular the contributing guidelines. Thanks!

We are thankful for all authors, reviewers and guest editors for helping us improve the system and this guide over the years. Thanks also to the following persons who made contributions to this guide and its previous incarnations: Katrin Leinweber, John Baumgartner, François Michonneau, Christophe Dervieux, Lorenzo Busetto, Ben Marwick, Nicholas Horton, Chris Kennedy, Mark Padgham, Jeroen Ooms, Sean Hughes, Jan Gorecki, Joseph Stachelek, Dean Attali, Julia Gustavsen, Nicholas Tierney, Rich FitzJohn, Tiffany Timbers, Hilmar Lapp, Miles McBain, Bryce Mecum, Jonathan Carroll, Carl Boettiger, Florian Privé, Stefanie Butland, Daniel Possenriede, Hadley Wickham, Mauro Lepore, Matthew Fidler, Luke McGuinness, Aaron Wolen, Indrajeet Patil, Kevin Wright, Will Landau, Hugo Gruson, Hao Ye, Sébastien Rochette. Please tell us if we forgot to acknowledge your contribution!

1 Packaging Guide