rOpenSci Software Peer Review 📦
🤗 Empathy, 📶 communication, 🗒️ documentation, and 🤖 automation
https://epiverse-ropensci-software-review.netlify.app/
What is rOpenSci?
rOpenSci fosters a culture that values open and reproducible research using shared data and reusable software.
Some Cool rOpenSci Activities/Projects
R-universe: new umbrella project under which we experiment with various new ideas for improving publication and discovery of research software in R.
And Software Review!
What is rOpenSci Software Peer-Review?
A happy mix between academic peer-review and industry software review, for packages in our scope:
🧰 Research lifecycle (data access, data wrangling, reproducibility…);
đź“Š Statistics and machine learning.
In the open (on GitHub).
Example submission
Our “recipe” (& credits for the subtitle)
Some hard-earned lessons on editorial management for software peer-review at @rOpenSci . If I had to sum up the strategy we've come to: empathy, communication, documentation, and automation https://t.co/GGMfItaRq3
— Noam Ross (@noamross) April 19, 2022
🤗 Empathy
Non adversarial! Kindness. No “RTFM”.
Possibility to put submissions on hold for up to one year.
📶 Communication
Private slack channel for editors. Friendly, responsive.
Changes in the system & tooling regularly communicated. Blog posts (picked up by our newsletter), changelog.
🗒️ Documentation (1/2)
📖 “Dev guide”: rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review;
📖 “Stats dev guide”: rOpenSci Statistical Software Peer Review, including ✨ standards ✨.
Updated based on feedback from the process, on our tooling, and changes in the wider ecosystem. Situational awareness.
🗒️ Documentation (2/2)
We also “document”, in an Airtable base:
who reviewed what, how much time;
volunteer reviewers’ skills & interests.
To volunteer, fill the form at https://ropensci.org/software-reviewer!
🤖 Automation (1/2)
Work with The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) to extend JOSS’s approach of chatops-driven publishing into a new GitHub chat-bot that manages our editorial process. buffy.
✨
@ropensci-review-bot check package✨
@ropensci-review-bot add @maelle to reviewers🤖 Automation (2/2)
{pkgcheck}: Check whether a package is ready for submission to rOpenSci’s peer review system. (available as GitHub Action!)
Also, {devguider} for dev guide maintenance.
Thank you
Work by
Package reviewers;
Volunteer editors (software review board, statistical software review board);
rOpenSci Software Peer-Review Recipe
🤗 Empathy
📶 Communication
🗒️ Documentation
🤖 Automation