Wednesday, January 22, 2025 From rOpenSci (https://ropensci.org/blog/2025/01/22/year-in-review-2024/). Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under the CC-BY license.
In 2024, we remained committed to open science and open source software. We continued to build a welcoming and inclusive community, through innovation and collaboration.
Here are the highlights of the year:
R-Universe, rOpenSci’s platform for finding and publishing R packages, saw major advancements in 2024, making it an increasingly useful and trusted resource for the wider R community.
Some of the highlights of our work have included a big rewrite of the web frontend and search engine to serve faster, beautiful, informative webpages, and search through tens of thousands packages, articles and datasets. On the build side we added support for new tools like Rust and Quarto, and improved the process of building binaries for WebAssembly and Apple Silicon.
Moreover, we received a Google Season of Docs grant, aimed at centralizing the documentation. The project focused on consolidating numerous tech notes and READMEs into a unified and easily navigable Quarto website, highlighting best practices and guiding users to maximize the platform’s features.
These enhancements have resulted in even more users and projects joining R-Universe. We saw more than a doubling of traffic, and R-Universe has become the distribution platform of choice for anchor community projects like Stan, DuckDB, and Polars, and we’ve seen the creation of new community initiatives that build on R-Universe, like R-Multiverse!
For 2025, we have once again been awarded support by the R-Consortium, now being named a top-level consortium project! With this long-term support, we will be investing even more in making R-Universe a platform that supports building large-scale, collaborative repositories that experiment with new models for release, reproducibility, and governance.
In 2024, rOpenSci’s software peer review program continued to grow, showcasing our community’s commitment to improving software quality and validating R packages for a variety of applications.
We’ve had 17 packages successfully complete software peer review with the help of about 33 reviewers and 11 editors, with three new editors. We also did the first bilingual review in English and Spanish.
We also streamlined the review process and provided transparency through regular updates on the number of submissions, approvals, and the status of packages under review. These updates were shared through newsletters, our Slack and our open GitHub organization. We built a new dashboard to monitor the health and responsiveness of our system for authors, reviewers, and editors. Peer review remains a cornerstone of how we maintain quality and reproducibility in R software development and how we build community.
In the year ahead, we are going to keep pushing our tooling to make review more efficient and helpful, and we have plans to do more to make our software peer-review process a tool that other organizations can use to curate their own software ecosystems and build collaborations and community.
In 2024, we worked hard to expanded our multilingual resources. We finished translating our core resource, the “rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review” into Spanish. This has been the central project around which we developed our multilingual toolkit, including packages like babeldown and babelquarto, that facilitate LLM-supported translation workflows. This work also led to our rOpenSci Localization and Translation Guidelines which we published in Spanish and English to assist our community as well as other groups in translating and localizing open science resources.
We hosted a series of great community events on multilingual publishing, like our first Portuguese Community Call and our first Traslathon, which reinforced the importance of breaking language barriers in open science.
What’s happening with translation in 2025? Portuguese translations of the development guide are underway, supported by dedicated community volunteers. It’s been inspiring to see the enthusiasm from contributors and volunteers driving this effort forward, and we will be giving it an extra push with additional support of our new CZI-funded Latin America program. We are also in the midst of Spanish-language revisions of our website and Champions programs materials.
We had an inspiring 2024 with the second cohort of our Champions Program. These leaders have tackled projects that span disciplines and geographies, driving open science and open data initiatives with creativity and local impact.
Package development is most common type of project tackled by our Champions, but some have also taken on the challenge of becoming reviewers in our software peer-review community.
Multilingualism plays an important role in the Champions Program, and this year, as part of their outreach activity, Champions put on events and workshops in Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and, of course, English.
In 2025, we will run our first cohort of Champions with a fully Spanish-language curriculum, under the support of our new Latin America focus program, funded by CZI. We are also excited to be working on new models and partnerships for the Champions Program to make it more sustainable and self-supporting, and to be follow up with our first cohort of Champions (2022-2023) to better understand the long-term impacts of this program.
This past year we’ve had 49 new code contributors to rOpenSci packages. Other community members shared new use cases to help package authors see how their work is being used and to help other users see how these packages might be used.
Our blog featured many different voices and experiences during 2024. We have a total of 35 community authors, of which 18 are first time community authors! Counting our staff, 42 authors wrote 54 blog posts, 63% of which were written by community authors and 13% were multilingual.
We also celebrated our vibrant package ecosystem with the “A Package a Day” campaign on Mastodon and Weekly Package Digests in LinkedIn. These efforts showcased the incredible diversity of our over 300 federated open-source packages.
Community Calls and virtual Social Coworking and Office Hours brought together people from over 20 countries to learn, get their own work done and to join in some spirited scavenger hunts!
Many others have continued to read our newsletter, cite our software, ask or answer questions, open issues to report bugs or request features, weigh in on standards and best practices, invite us to talk about our work, or mentioned us in presentations, posts, or social media.
We will continue to support our community’s amazing contributions and plan to offer even more opportunities to get involved in 2025. We started with a Community Call and will continue with a series of mini-hackathons during our co-working sessions to support first-time contributors to open source projects. These events will provide opportunities for knowledge-sharing, networking and up-skilling in a safe and friendly space encompasing the collaborative spirit of rOpenSci.
We are also looking forward to collaborations with partners and other communities, like Epiverse, RECON, data.org, LatinR, PyOpenSci, OpenScapes and other Open-Source Program offices. Watch this space for new projects and events!
In 2024 we bade farewell to Karthik Ram, our co-founder and Executive Director of 13 years and welcomed Noam Ross, formerly our leader for peer-review, into the role.
An enormous thank you to all our authors, maintainers, reviewers, editors, mentors, Champions, package contributors, commenters, bloggers, translators, bug-reporters, documentation-copy-editors, package-publishers, issue-filers, and event-attendees for giving rOpenSci an amazing 2024. rOpenSci is our community. We are grateful for it all and look forward to what we will do together in 2025!
