Announcing new software peer review editors: Melina Vidoni and Brooke Anderson

We are pleased to welcome Brooke Anderson and Melina Vidoni to our team of Associate Editors for rOpenSci Software Peer Review. They join Scott Chamberlain, Anna Krystalli, Lincoln Mullen, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross and Maëlle Salmon. With the addition of Brooke and Melina, our editorial board now includes four women and four men, located in North America, South America and Europe.

Our open Software Peer Review system for community-contributed R tools is a key component of our mission to create technical infrastructure that lowers barriers to working with data sources on the web. 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. The number of packages submitted for review has increased every year, resulting in an increased workload for Editors and the need to expand the team.

Brooke Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and a Faculty Associate in the Department of Statistics at Colorado State University, with a PhD in Engineering. She reviewed the bomrang, charlatan and riem packages for rOpenSci. Brooke wrote Mastering Software Development in R with Sean Kross and Roger Peng.

I think that rOpenSci’s model of open peer review for science-relevant R software packages is one of the most innovative things happening right now for scientific methodology. In my own field, it is advancing how, and how openly, we do science. I’m thrilled to continue to contribute in this new role.

Brooke on GitHub, Twitter, website

Melina Vidoni is a PhD in Information Systems Engineering, and currently holds a Postdoctoral Scholarship at INGAR CONICET-UTN. She is also a Lecturer in the Department of Information Systems Engineering at Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Santa Fe, Argentina. She is a founder and main co-organizer of R-Ladies Santa Fe, she is part of the translation group for the book “R for Data Science”, and has contributed a package to CRAN: rsppfp. As of May 2019, Melina is a Lecturer at RMIT Computer Science, in Melbourne, Australia

I support rOpenSci goals as I strongly believe that software should also be peer-reviewed, so it can help researchers to make the most of their code and data, while also recognising the hard work of the developers behind it. Being an editor here is a great opportunity to learn more about the growing space of research software development in R and its outstanding open-review system, while contributing back to such an incredible active community.

Melina on GitHub, Twitter, website

Tomorrow we’ll publish a post highlighting some important recent updates to the process and documentation of Software Peer Review at rOpenSci.