Announcing New Software Peer Review Editors: Laura DeCicco, Julia Gustavsen, Mauro Lepore

We are pleased to welcome Laura DeCicco, Julia Gustavsen, and Mauro Lepore to our team of Associate Editors for rOpenSci Software Peer Review. They join Brooke Anderson, Anna Krystalli, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross, Maëlle Salmon, and Melina Vidoni. Lincoln Mullen and Scott Chamberlain are now board alumni.

Since 2015, rOpenSci has been running a software peer review system to combine the best of academic peer review with software review. Having robust and reliable software tools is an important component of supporting open science and reproducible research. 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.

Meet our new editors!

Laura DeCicco

Laura is an engineer for the U.S. Geological Survey, with a PhD in mechanical engineering. She’s the lead developer on several R packages in the USGS such as dataRetrieval, EGRET, and toxEval. She’s attended 2 rOpenSci Unconfs (2017 and 2018), participating on the roomba and checkers packages. Laura has reviewed 4 rOpenSci packages (tidyhydat, smapr, wateRinfo, and tic).

Laura on GitHub, Twitter, rOpenSci

I’ve been so lucky to have many talented co-workers and collaborators that have mentored my software development progress over the years. Those same values of technical best practices AND building up a supportive community are shown in the rOpenSci software review process. I am looking forward to learning about more new rOpenSci tools and people!

Julia Gustavsen

Julia is a Bioinformatician at the health-tech company SOPHiA GENETICS in Lausanne (Switzerland). Julia honed her bioinformatics skills during her PhD in marine microbial ecology from the University of British Columbia (Canada). Julia is a co-maintainer of rsnps; has reviewed four rOpenSci packages googleLanguageR, plateR, rusda, FedData; and edited treedata.table.

Julia on GitHub, Twitter, Website, rOpenSci

Being a reviewer for rOpenSci packages has improved my R coding skills, and increased my knowledge of package development. Also, I have enjoyed being part of the welcoming and inclusive community that rOpenSci has cultivated. I am excited for the chance to view this process through another lens as an editor, and to continue to gain more experience with R packages for scientific applications.

Mauro Lepore

Mauro builds R packages for the think tank 2 Degrees Investing Initiative. His PhD (UQ) and post-doctoral research (STRI) studied human impacts on coral reefs from Australia and Panama. Since 2017 he has been teaching data-science and building research software. He is co-author of the package datos to translate the dataset from the book R for Data Science to Spanish; and reviewed the rOpenSci package gitignore and edited medrxivr.

Mauro on GitHub, Twitter, rOpenSci

I learned to build software in a job where I had no mentor; but I got the support I needed from the rOpenSci community. Having the opportunity to give back is exciting – especially now that the R community is thriving in Latin America, and rOpenSci will experiment doing reviews in Spanish.

Resources

• About rOpenSci Software Peer Review
• Browse the online book rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review
• Read public software review threads on GitHub