Get Involved with pyOpenSci

The pyOpenSci mission

Founded in 2018 by our Executive Director, Leah Wasser, pyOpenSci builds diverse community that supports free and open Python tools for processing scientific data. We also build technical skills needed to contribute to open source and that support open science. While a diverse, inclusive community is at our core, radiating out from it are the three petals–how we accomplish our community goals–of pyOpenSci. These are:

1. Open peer review of scientific software
2. Community partnerships
3. Training and open educational resources

Promote pyOpenSci online and in-person

pyOpenSci is active on both LinkedIn and Fosstodon, and you’re welcome to tag us on social media, as well as to reach out with questions! We also have a series of brand assets and guidelines if you need a copy of our logo, information on our fonts, and/or access to various illustrations we use.

Are you attending a large, recognized, Python meeting that we will be unable to attend? Reach out to us! Dependent on timing, cost, and location, we’d also be more than happy to send you a set of pyOpenSci stickers to share! You can email us at media@pyopensci.org to inquire about the event you’ll be attending.

Please feel free to use any information from our website to share about the work pyOpenSci is doing, and to reach out via email or on LinkedIn or Fosstodon with any questions. And don’t forget to share your personal experiences with pyOpenSci as well!

Volunteer with pyOpenSci

If you’re looking to be more hands-on with pyOpenSci, consider joining our Review Team or Editorial Board, digging into some code and working from our Help Wanted board, or writing a guest blog post!

pyOpenSci’s Review Team

pyOpenSci welcomes reviewers from a diversity of backgrounds and with varying levels of Python technical expertise. Some of the basic things that we look for in a reviewer include:

• Familiarity with using the Python programming language.
• Ability to evaluate a Python package for usability and documentation quality.
• Ability to provide a technical review of Python package structure and code quality/approach to solving the problems that the package seeks to address.

We like to have a mix of technical and usability focus in our reviews so it’s ok if you don’t have all of the above skills! Reviewing code is an important skill, especially if you are working in a collaborative team environment (professionally or in academia). And if you are interested in peer review but have never reviewed before, we offer a mentorship program, where we will pair you up with someone who has more experience reviewing code. From this experience you can learn more and empower yourself with code review skills. Software review skills are generally useful in data science, so they are skills worth investing in!

To join our review team, fill out our reviewer form. We will contact you if we have a package that we need reviewers for. It’s OK if you’ve never reviewed a package before! We’ll walk you through it.

pyOpenSci’s Editorial Team

The pyOpenSci Editorial Board is comprised of a diverse group of volunteers, with each editor being responsible for the following tasks:

• Finding reviewers from diverse backgrounds who have a mixture of scientific domain and Python experience.
• Overseeing the entire review process for a package ensuring it runs in a timely and efficient manner.
• Supporting the submitting authors and reviewers in answering questions related to the review.
• Determining whether that package should be accepted into the pyOpenSci ecosystem once the review has wrapped up.

It’s critical to our mission that our Editorial Board have a combined expertise in various scientific domains, technical expertise in Python packaging, awareness of the importance of documentation in package usability, and awareness of the importance of CI/test suites in order to ensure robust software development. We do not expect any single editor to be an expert in all of these areas!

Apply to be a pyOpenSci editor

As of May 2024, pyOpenSci looking for editors from a wide variety of scientific backgrounds due to an increased number of package submissions. If you feel you’d be a good fit for the pyOpenSci Editorial Board, please fill out this form. We’re looking to fill several volunteer spots, and will be accepting applications through June and July.

If you’re interested in joining our Editorial Board, but have questions or would like to chat with someone from pyOpenSci about volunteering to be an editor, please email us at media@pyopensci.org.

Contribute to pyOpenSci

do you want to contribute to an open source project that is supporting other open science projects? We need your help! Check out our GitHub Help Wanted board, where we have a wide variety of issues, ranging from highly technical to beginner-friendly. The status column makes it easy to identify the issue category, and the label column helps to further clarify any needs around the issue.

All contributors are credited and recognized on the pyOpenSci website.

Write a guest blog post for pyOpenSci

We are always looking for guest bloggers on the pyOpenSci blog! If you’d like to write about a pyOpenSci package that has been accepted into our ecosystem, your experiences with pyOpenSci, or how you’re using free and open Python tools in your scientific endeavors, we’d love to hear from you! Email our Community team at media@pyopensci.org for more information.

Submit a package to pyOpenSci

pyOpenSci’s suite of packages are contributed by community members with a great diversity of skills and backgrounds. This diversity of developer backgrounds enables us to vet and promote a broad ecosystem of high quality tools that supports scientists across domains with a suite of different data types and structures.

pyOpenSci packages are reviewed for quality, fit, scope, documentation and usability. The review process is similar to a manuscript review, however it has a stronger focus on Python packaging best practices.

Unlike a manuscript review, our peer review process is an ongoing conversation. Once all major issues and questions are addressed, the review editor package will make a decision to accept, hold, or reject the package.

Rejections are usually done early in the process, before the review process begins. In rare cases a package may also not be on-boarded into the pyOpenSci ecosystem after review & revision.

To submit a package to pyOpenSci, open an issue in our peer review GitHub repository. Not sure if your package is in-scope? Then submit a pre-submission inquiry, and an editor will be in touch!

Learn more about our Open Peer Review process in our Peer Review Guide!

Run a pyOpenSci sprint

Consider hosting a sprint, which is a time to come together with colleagues to collaborate on contributing to pyOpenSci.

Get in touch with us at least two weeks in advance so we know when the sprint is happening, and can support you in holding it! You can contact us at media@pyopensci.org.

We’ll be sharing more information in a separate post with more details on how to run a pyOpenSci sprint, either online or in-person!

Connect with pyOpenSci

​​We are thrilled, honored, and humbled that you’re interested in getting involved with pyOpenSci, and created this guide with the intention of providing a resource on all the ways available to get involved with us. You can stay up-to-date with all things pyOpenSci by following us on LinkedIn and Fosstodon, and you can connect with the broader pyOpenSci community on our Discourse forum. And if you’re interested in our weekly newsletter where we share news, blog posts, and monthly updates, subscribe on LinkedIn.