R Journal publication

The R Journal is the open access, refereed journal of the R project for statistical computing. It features short to medium length articles covering topics that should be of interest to users or developers of R.

Christoph Weiss, Gernot Roetzer and myself have joined forces to write an R package and the accompanied paper: Forecast Combinations in R using the ForecastComb Package, which is now published in the R journal. Below you can find a few of my thoughts about the journey towards publication in the R journal, and a few words about working with a small team of three, from three different locations.

The road to publishing in the R journal is not easy. The journal is peer-reviewed, and peers chosen are very knowledgeable, which means there are valuable and valid comments to address. Apart from that, and unlike with other publications you may have already, given that it is a computing journal the code is also scrutinized for bugs and important possible extensions. That said, the quality at the end is undoubtedly improved.

Communication and treatment from the R journal is excellent. You are assigned with associate editor who distributes the prospective publication to few referees. Then you get an email describing the next steps and associated (expected) time lines. The whole system can be described as responsive.

The R journal itself is growing in popularity, and in impact:

On working remotely

Nowadays we enjoy an incredible set of tools at our disposal to allow an Amsterdam-Cambridge-Dublin collaboration, without the need to even see each other. I don’t think I could even recognize my co-authors passing them on the street, which is quite something given that we have been doing so much together. We simply had a skype call for working meetings with clear to-do lists every three weeks or so, whatsup app for small things, dropbox for tex files and edits, git for the code and email for concise questions and meetings prep. All free tools (free here means that you don’t pay with money..).

A boundaryless era we live in. Amazing experience.