The ‘Editorial’ article from the 2011-2 issue.
Following the guiding principles set down by its predecessor R News, the journal has maintained the policy of allowing authors to retain copyright of their published articles. However the lack of an explicit licence has meant that the rights of others regarding material published in the journal has been unclear. Therefore from this issue, all articles will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). This license is the standard set by the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals and ensures compatibility with other open access journals such as the Journal of Statistical Software.
The key features of the CC BY 3.0 license are that anyone is free to share or to adapt the licensed work, including for commercial use, provided that they cite the original article. This increases the value of articles published in The R Journal, whilst ensuring that authors receive appropriate credit for their work.
In the immediate term, the new licensing policy will mean that members of the community are free to translate articles in the journal, an initiative already planned by the R User’s Group in South Korea (http://www.openstatistics.net/). It also opens up other possibilities, such as distributing sources alongside articles, that could be considered in future.
The selection of contributed articles in this issue is again testament to the diverse concerns of the R community. In the area of statistical methodlogy, Taylor Arnold and John Emerson introduce new functions for non-parametric goodness-of-fit tests, whilst Ian Marschner and joint authors Haizhou Wang and Mingzhou Song propose improved algorithms for generalized linear models and 1-D \(k\) means clustering respectively. On graphics, Han Lin Shang introduces the rainbow package for visualizing time series; Markus Gesmann and Diego de Castillo demonstrate use of the Google visualistion API with R, and Maxime Hervé presents a GUI designed to help R novices create publication-quality graphics in R. Providing easier access to R’s functionality is also the focus of our first article, which demonstrates how to create an Excel application from an R package, using rpart as an example. Finally the area of documentation and reproducible research is represented by articles on the spell-checking of Rd files and vignettes, and the implementation of the compendium concept with Sweave and DOCSTRIP.
In addition to these articles, we have the first Programmer’s Niche article since becoming The R Journal. This column is intended to provide “programming pearls” for R developers—short articles that elucidate programming concepts or technical issues in developing R packages. In this instance, the article is not on R itself, but on writing portable C++ for R packages, problems with which cause many an error, especially on Solaris systems.
In the usual round up of news, readers are particularly encouraged to take a look at the report on R’s Participation in the Google Summer of Code 2011. As well as reporting back on an especially productive season, the GSoC 2011 administrators discuss the costs and benefits of involvement in this scheme and note that suggestions for 2012 projects are already being collected.
Finally I would like to thank the associate editors and column editors for their work and support during my year’s tenure as Editor-in-Chief. In 2012, this role will be taken on by Martyn Plummer. Peter Dalgaard will stand down from the editorial board after four years of service and Deepayan Sarkar will join us to fill his place. As Deepayan is currently based in Delhi, the editorial board will thus span three continents, with myself and Martyn in Europe and Hadley Wickham in the US. Such international diversity is important, when the R community itself is spread around the globe. Hopefully as the R Journal continues to establish itself and we look to expand the editorial board, the diversity of the R community will be increasingly represented.
Environmetrics, MachineLearning, Survival
This article is converted from a Legacy LaTeX article using the texor package. The pdf version is the official version. To report a problem with the html, refer to CONTRIBUTE on the R Journal homepage.
Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".
For attribution, please cite this work as
Turner, "Editorial", The R Journal, 2011
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2011-2-editorial,
author = {Turner, Heather},
title = {Editorial},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2011},
note = {https://rjournal.github.io/},
volume = {3},
issue = {2},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {3-3}
}