R-based tools for open and collaborative science

Open science is the practice of making the elements of scientific research - methods, data, code, software, results, and publications - readily accessible to anyone. While this has great potential for advancing research, the absence of an open science toolkit prevents open science from being more widespread. We are building bridges between data (e.g, Dryad) and literature (e.g., PLoS journals) repositories and the open source R software, a programming environment already familiar to many ecologists. These bridges facilitate open science by bringing together data acquisition, manipulation, analysis, visualization, and communication into one open source, open science toolkit.