rOpenSci Announces $2.9M Award from the Helmsley Charitable Trust

"rOpenSci, whose mission is to develop and maintain sustainable software tools that allow researchers to access, visualize, document, and publish open data on the Web, is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a grant of nearly $2.9 million over three years from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust. The grant, which was awarded through the Trust’s Biomedical Research Infrastructure Program, will be used to expand rOpenSci’s mission of developing tools and community around open data and reproducible research practices. rOpenSci is a project at the University of California, Berkeley that began a little over three years ago as a small collaboration among a few researchers who intended to package data-retrieval scripts. The founders wanted the data underlying their analysis to be open and easily accessible to everyone. The project has since grown into a widely recognized worldwide collaborative effort that plays an important role in fostering open and transparent scientific practices across the research community. rOpenSci supports an ecosystem of more than 50 software packages, engages scores of collaborators from nearly two dozen countries, and has conducted dozens of workshops worldwide ..."