The rOpenSci Multiverse

The R-Universe is used by professionals from different fields, although they all pursue the same objective: to offer their R packages in a simple and accessible way.

At rOpenSci we work to provide tools that facilitate access to data and research software generated with good software development practices and in a friendly community. With the R-Universe platform we basically seek to present the entire #rstats universe so that anyone can find the most suitable package to solve a problem.

In the R-Universe we find very diverse packages. From teams analyzing statistical data in the Argentine state to research on the human brain in Norway.

In this blog post, we summarize the interviews of the series Meeting the stars of the R-Universe and bring you five examples of organizations and teams that choose the R-Universe to facilitate access and promote community sharing of data and software.

• SINTA: R community, sharing and learning. In this interview we reviewed the experience of working with R packages in the Argentine state. From the Ministry of Tourism and Sports our stars work to optimize workflows in open processes which are accessible to everyone. They define the R-Universe as a “big closet where to put our toolboxes”.

• Learn, help and share: ThinkR’s method to create a growing and friendly R community. In this meeting we talked about R in education through the story of a French organization that seeks to help more people work with R. They define the R-Universe as a place to record all their processes and tools in an orderly way and with useful information.

• Researching our brain with the magic of the R-Universe. In this interview we learned how the R-Universe came at the right time to solve the problems with data size and multiple tools needed to work on human brain research as part of the LifeBrain Consortium.

• PEcAn: an open source project to care for the planet. In this meeting we came to know the Universe of a team that works with climate change and research in a diverse and complex field which demands models that save time and resources to researchers.

• The R-Universe against diseases. In this fifth meeting, we discovered the work done by a team of developers at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis to fight against infectious diseases and how they use the R-Universe to host their packages. Our experiences with the pandemic help us to understand the dimension and importance of this work.

This is a small sample of a large Universe where professionals from different areas coexist, all of them people who use R. Each team highlights different benefits of our platform:

• Automate the building of binaries for different operating systems and thus
• Facilitate the release and installation of packages and save hours of work related to these tasks
• Publish packages with large amounts of data
• Publish all your software tools in one place in an organized way
• Show joint software development efforts of many organizations in one place

There are a lot more R-Universes out there! Which other Universes you would like us to interview in the next series so we can learn even more about the teams and packages that are part of the rOpenSci Multiverse?

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