Collaboration and reproducibility are fundamental to Antarctic and Southern Ocean science, and fit seamlessly with the Antarctic Treaty's provision that "to the greatest extent feasible and practicable ... scientific observations and results from Antarctica shall be exchanged and made freely available".

rOpenSci is a a non-profit initiative founded in 2011 that promotes open and reproducible research using shared data and reusable software. This is achieved by promoting R software tools that lower the barriers to working with scientific data sources, creating social infrastructure through a welcoming and diverse community, and building the capacity of software users and developers.

Software development to support Antarctic data usage is growing, but still lags behind the available data, and some common tasks are still more difficult than we would like. Starting in late 2017, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research has been collaborating with rOpenSci to strengthen the Antarctic and Southern Ocean R/science communities. Our focus is on data and tasks that are common or even unique to Antarctic and Southern Ocean science, including supporting the development of R packages to meet Antarctic science needs, guides for R users and developers, active fora for open discussions, and strengthening connections with the broader science world. This collaboration has been coordinated through the Expert Group on Antarctic Biodiversity Informatics.

Please get involved!

• contribute your Antarctic R knowledge, your Antarctic use case for a package, or ask a question in the dedicated Antarctic and Southern Ocean category of rOpenSci's discussion forum,

• make a suggestion — perhaps for Antarctic-related functionality that you feel is missing from the current R ecosystem?

• contribute an Antarctic R package, or improve the documentation or code of an existing one. See the task view as a starting point,

• join the #antarctic rOpenSci Slack channel for R users and developers — contact us at [email protected] for an invitation to join. Slack is a great space in which to have conversations with the rOpenSci community, or to give us feedback in a less-public manner,

• participate in the broader rOpenSci community. Follow on Twitter, read the blog, and check out the ecosystem of R packages.

The administrative contacts for this initiative are Ben Raymond, Sara Labrousse, Michael Sumner, and Jess Melbourne-Thomas. Contact us via [email protected], or find us on Slack or Twitter.

See also this blog post which includes a short demonstration of a few early packages from this community.