Is R the Right Toolset for eScience/Open Science? Fireside Chat with Maëlle Salmon - Information Matters

"Andy Wills (2019) draws parallels between the emergence of the open-source software movement and the open science movement. According to him, the reproducibility problem was not with analysis or the data but with the research practices. Since psychology experiments primarily involved computer-based testing, the unavailability of the testing program’s source code was perhaps the reason for irreproducibility. One could not audit research properly without access to the source code on which the experiment was based—the testing software, the raw data, and the analysis scripts. The Free and Open Source Software community perhaps could show how science could be open and transparent. Just as computing has its advocates of open-source software, psychology and other sciences started gaining advocates for Open Science. According to Wills, an excellent reason for using R is that all analyses take the form of scripts. Thus if the analysis is done entirely in R, a complete, reproducible record of the analysis path is already created. Anyone with an internet connection can download R and reproduce the analysis using the script. In other words, we can easily achieve the goal of open, reproducible science with R.

Tina Amirtha (2014) says that the rise of R language is bringing open source to science. R is crossing over from just calculating statistics to scientific experimentation and bringing hacker culture. Thanks to R, the “open science” advocates are succeeding at getting science to go open source. A growing number of researchers have joined the R development community to create new libraries that branch away from statistical analysis and into parsing the ever-increasing quantity of scientific articles and data that find their way online. Moreover, it could change the way we do science in a significant way.

Lortie (2017) proposed R as a natural bridge between data and open science and a powerful ally in promoting transparent, reproducible science...."