PyOpenSci collaborates with domain-specific communities to streamline our diverse ecosystem. Instead of creating new review processing and packaging guidelines, partner organizations can leverage and contribute to our existing review processes and guidelines.

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Community Partnerships Streamline Peer Review & Packaging Standards

pyOpenSci adds an extra layer of community-specific review to our established open peer review process. This allows domain-specific scientific Python communities to vet affiliated tools through our robust peer review process. Communities then don't have to develop and maintain their own review processes and software guidelines.

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Benefits of partnering with us

Through a single review process, your community's maintainers:
  • Have their package accepted into the pyOpenSci ecosystem
  • Can be published in JOSS (if in scope)
  • Can become an affiliated package with your community following your community guidelines.
  • Gain support in maintaining their tools from our diverse, knowledgeable community that includes active members from across the Python, Conda, PyPA and broader packaging ecosystem.

Increase visibility for your communities’ tools

We will:

  • Promote your community and its packages on our website.
  • Post about your affiliated packages on our social media channels.
  • List your package on our packages page.
  • Provide a feed allowing you to cross-list affiliated packages on your website.
  • Keep in touch with maintainers to ensure packages are actively maintained.
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Help scientists find the open science tools that they need

Our catalog of vetted open source tools will over time make it easier for scientists to find the trusted tools that they need to develop their open science workflows.

Leverage our peer review process

Your community can take advantage of our existing, developed and well-documented peer review process which includes:

  • A diverse and growing team of editors. We ask partner communities to have at least 2 members of their community on our editorial team. We want our partner community to make the final decision on whether a package should receive the label of being “affiliated”. Typically an editor will run 2-4 reviews a year. Learn more about the editor role.
  • A suite of community reviewers whose expertise spans numerous scientific domains. We ask that partner communities help us find reviews in their specific domain areas as packages come in for review. Learn more about the requirements for reviewers.
  • Community driven packaging resources and guidelines: Our packaging guidelines are what drive the peer review process. Rather than communities creating their own individual guidelines, we hope that partners can join us in expanding our packaging resources as it makes sense.
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Let's make packaging easier for scientists, together

Given the numerous diverse packaging options, many communities are crafting their guidelines and review processes. Partnering with pyOpenSci enables your community to:

  • tap into and contribute to an established community-owned set of packaging standards.
  • mitigate the redundancy of multiple communities creating their own processes and standards.

Aligning packaging criteria will support increased consistency in packaging approaches across the ecosystem. This consistency will lower the barrier of entry for new potential contributors.

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Harness the power of community

pyOpenSci is driven by a vibrant community of technical packaging experts, open science enthusiasts, and Pythonistas. When you partner with or join pyOpenSci, you:

  • become part of a community rich in expertise, ready to assist you with your packaging challenges.
  • As a package grows, we will help your community maintainers decide what to do if they need to step down from maintenance roles be it finding a new maintainer or gracefully archiving the package for safekeeping.

Raising the bar for Scientific Python software

More packages going through our review process means we’re all working together to raise the bar in terms of quality, documentation and usability of scientific software.

By reviewing packages from the entire ecosystem, pyOpenSci can identify redundancy in package functionality and areas where maintainers could benefit from consolidation efforts.

Why do so many scientific Python communities exist?

Within the Python ecosystem, various science-domain-specific communities are creating peer review processes to evaluate community-affiliated tools.

  • A response to the need to vet and maintain a list of high-quality tools that their communities embrace
  • A need to track software maintenance to ensure ecosystem tools in their vetted lists are maintained
  • The need for packaging guidance given a complex packaging ecosystem filled with numerous tools and options

However, creating a review process for software requires significant effort. pyOpenSci was created to target these exact issues in support of open science.

Astropy is most mature of the domain-specific communities that we work with, having built its peer review process in 2013.