Another 1000 packages were added to CRAN, which took less than 9 months. Today (August 12, 2015), the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) package page reports:

“Currently, the CRAN package repository features 7002 available packages.”

While the previous 1000 packages took 355 days, going from 6000 to 7000 packages took 286 days – which means that now a new CRAN package is born on average every 6.9 hours (or 3.5 packages per day). Since the start of CRAN 18.3 years ago on April 23, 1997, there has been on average one new package appearing on CRAN every 22.9 hours. It is actually more frequent than that because dropped/archived packages are not accounted for. The 7000 packages on CRAN are maintained by ~4130 people. Thanks to the CRAN team and to all package developers. You can give back by carefully reporting bugs to the maintainers and properly citing any packages you use in your publications (see citation("pkg name")). Milestones: 2015-08-12: 7000 packages 2014-10-29: 6000 packages 2013-11-08: 5000 packages 2012-08-23: 4000 packages 2011-05-12: 3000 packages 2009-10-04: 2000 packages 2007-04-12: 1000 packages 2004-10-01: 500 packages 2003-04-01: 250 packages These data are for CRAN only. There are many more packages elsewhere, e.g. Bioconductor, R-Forge (sic!), RForge (sic!), Github etc.