Contributing to this project 🎉 📣

Thanks for being interested in contributing to this package 🌟 🎊 and overall project! This document contains guidelines for getting started with contributing.

Overall mission

My hope from this toolkit/package is to build a R toolkit (or a series of packages) so that biomedical researchers can adhere to and use open scientific practices in as easy and as automated way as possible so that the barrier to being open and reproducible is as low as possible. Currently, the project is aimed at R users, but I would like to eventually make it more language agnostic (I know… this is an R package).

One of the current challenges of being open is that it is hard to start doing it, since it is still so new and in constant discussion and development. There are also not a lot of resources for those in biomedical/health research for learning about it. This project hopes to start fixing those issues.

Things to know before starting

Please read over the Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms. For other details, check out the README.

How and what to contribute

I am looking for any and all ideas and contributions. Mostly this project needs help on the R development side, the user interface side, and for ideas on what needs to be included to simplify doing open science.

Bugs, enhancements, or other comments

Have a suggestion, idea, or comment, but don’t have the time or expertise to contribute code or documentation? No worries! Head over to the Issues page, create a new Issue, and type out those thoughts and ideas!

Code or documentation

This project adheres to the tidyverse coding style, so please stick to writing code in that form if you want to contribute, fix, or enhance R functions.

This is a Git repository on GitHub, so there are certain procedures you will have to follow in order to contribute code or text. First and foremost is, well, you need to use Git and GitHub. GitHub has very good documentation on using Git with GitHub. If you are a beginner to Git, there is an excellent interactive tutorial you can use to learn Git.

Some specifics about contributing:

  • You’ll need to fork the repository before you can contribute.
  • Git messages should be clear and concisely describe the change made in the commit.
  • Each commit should be fairly small and/or focused. Don’t commit all changes in one commit, but rather break it up into smaller commits.
  • The Pull Request should describe the change fairly concisely, preferably referencing an existing problem or feature request from the Issues (but it doesn’t have to be).

I’ll try to label issues that would be good first attempts for new contributors with a easy label. I also label issues with hard if the task is a bit more difficult and low priority or high priority for issues to focus more on.

No matter how you contribute, your help and thoughts and ideas are truly appreciated!!