One year ago, we released our new Code of Conduct. At that time, the Code of Conduct Committee (authors of this post) agreed to do an annual review of the text, reporting form, and our internal guidelines. We have made one change to the Code of Conduct text.

We tend to know a good open source research software project when we see it: The code is well-documented, users contribute back to the project, the software is licensed and citable, and the community interacts and co-produces in a healthy, productive fashion.

We are pleased to announce the release of our new Code of Conduct. rOpenSci’s community is our best asset and it’s important that we put strong mechanisms in place before we have to act on a report. As before, our Code applies equally to members of the rOpenSci team and to anyone from the community at large participating in in-person or online activities.

🎤 Dan Sholler, rOpenSci Postdoctoral Fellow 🕘 Tuesday, December 18, 2018, 10-11AM PST; 7-8PM CET (find your timezone) ☎️ Details for joining the Community Call. Everyone is welcome. No RSVP needed. Researchers use open source software for the capabilities it provides, such as streamlined data access and analysis and interoperability with other pieces of the scientific computing ecosystem.

A growing community of scientists from a variety of disciplines is moving the norms of scientific research toward open practices. Supporters of open science hope to increase the quality and efficiency of research by enabling the widespread sharing of datasets, research software source code, publications, and other processes and products of research.

We are pleased to welcome our Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Dan Sholler. Dan is an expert in qualitative research (yes, you read that correctly) and studies digital infrastructure creation, growth, and maintenance efforts. Through this research interest, he was drawn to the open science community and its ongoing development of tools and communities to support sustainable, reproducible, high-quality research.

Our Community Call on December 15th covered a big topic in tech communities: “How do I create a code of conduct for my event/lab/codebase?”. Here, we cover some of the key themes and considerations that arose from the discussion and point to curated resources and examples to follow when developing a code of conduct (CoC) for your community. Three guest speakers shared different perspectives.

In order to facilitate a transformation towards open and reproducible research, rOpenSci is building and improving not only the technical infrastructure, but the social infrastructure as well. To support this, occasionally a Community Call will focus on a topic that reflects the values of rOpenSci.

Last week I was lucky enough to spend five days in North Carolina at the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded initiative that brings teams together on a retreat style meeting to work on specific projects.

We ducked a fundamental question raised by our proposal for infrastructure principles: “what exactly counts as infrastructure?” Of course this is not a straightforward question and part of the reason for leaving it in untouched in the introductory post. We believe that any definition must entail a much broader discussion from the community.