Announcing new software review editors: Anna Krystalli and Lincoln Mullen

Part of rOpenSci’s mission is to create technical infrastructure in the form of carefully vetted R software tools that lower barriers to working with data sources on the web. Our open peer software review system for community-contributed tools is a key component of this. As the rOpenSci community grows and more package authors submit their work for peer review, we need to expand our editorial board to maintain a speedy process. As our recent post shows, package submissions have grown every year since we started this experiment, and we see no reason they will slow down!

Editors manage the review process, performing initial package checks, identifying reviewers, and moderating the process until the package is accepted by reviewers and transferred to rOpenSci. Anna Krystalli and Lincoln Mullen have both served as guest editors for rOpenSci and now they join as full members of the editorial board with Scott Chamberlain, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross and Maëlle Salmon. As a Research Software Engineer for University of Sheffield RSE, Anna brings the experience of working at the intersection of science and software development that we need. Lincoln has worked broadly in reproducibility for the digital humanities, and led editorial for specialized text analysis packages on an ad-hoc basis.

Anna Krystalli is a Research Software Engineer at University of Sheffield with a PhD in marine macroecology. She has helped organize Reprohacks where teams try to reproduce papers nominated by their authors from supplied code and data; is one of Mozilla Foundation’s ‘50 People Who Made the Internet a Better Place in 2016’; and she co-organizes the Sheffield R Users Group. Anna reviewed the codemetar and rdflib packages for rOpenSci. During her second package review, Anna started work on an experimental reviewing workflow package, pkgreviewr.

The overall goals of rOpenSci are fully aligned with my interests and passions, both personally and also professionally as a Research Software Engineer, tasked with helping researchers make the most of their code and data. It’s a great opportunity to learn more about the incredibly active and constantly developing space of research software development in R which will ultimately benefit the communities I serve.

Anna on GitHub, Twitter, website

Lincoln Mullen is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University with a PhD in history. He is a historian of American religious history and the nineteenth-century United States, with expertise in computational methods for texts and maps. Lincoln’s historical research that uses R includes an article on legal history published in the American Historical Review, the leading journal in history; America’s Public Bible, which won first-place in the National Endowment for the Humanities Chronicling America Data Challenge; and the NEH-funded project Mapping Early American Elections. Lincoln maintains six rOpenSci packages, including: tokenizers for fast, consistent tokenization of natural language text, textreuse for detecting text reuse and document similarity, and USAboundaries for historical and contemporary state, county, and Congressional district boundaries, as well as zip code tabulation area centroids.

My software has benefitted from rOpenSci’s thorough peer reviews. I am glad to join the editorial team to help accomplish the rOpenSci mission of making software recognizable as scholarship.

Lincoln on GitHub, website

Want to learn more about rOpenci software review?

• how we use code review to promote reproducible research
• software review collaborations with academic journals
• perspectives of software reviewers
• online book - rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review

We’d love to see you soon in the onboarding repository as a submitter or reviewer!