This chapter provides some motivation for doing the extra work to contribute a post by outlining what rOpenSci does to promote it.
5 Publication and Promotion
We hope that by doing the extra work of publishing a blog post or tech note that you will benefit by getting more eyes on your work. Blog posts and tech notes published in 2019 on rOpenSci website got on average 426 page views in the 31 days following their publication (median of 298.5, minimum of 96, maximum of 1687). Blog posts then live a life of their own: some people will still access them, e.g. finding them via a Search Engine or rOpenSci website tag pages.
When your post is published, here is what we do to promote it.
Tweet from rOpenSci with a link to your post, tagging post author(s) and package reviewers with a link to the software peer review thread where relevant. rOpenSci has more than 25,000 followers on Twitter.
List your post, with author names, in our biweekly newsletter. Our newsletter has more than 2,000 email subscribers and additional readers through RSS & JSON feeds.
Our blog and tech notes are syndicated to and tweeted by R-bloggers and R Weekly. R-Bloggers cross-posts posts so it adds page views we can’t measure, whereas R Weekly drives traffic to blog posts on our website. R-Bloggers had nearly 80,000 Twitter followers in February 2020.
Consult Understanding Twitter cards if you would like to learn about using the YAML metadata in your post to influence the appearance when someone shares a link to your post on Twitter, or Slack for example.
You are welcome to cross-post to your own website as long as you also link to the rOpenSci website version. Example.