{"id":400595,"date":"2026-04-15T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ropensci.org\/blog\/2026\/04\/16\/editors2026\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T00:00:00","slug":"expanding-the-editorial-team-alec-robitaille-and-lucy-dagostino-mcgowan-join-as-editors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.r-bloggers.com\/2026\/04\/expanding-the-editorial-team-alec-robitaille-and-lucy-dagostino-mcgowan-join-as-editors\/","title":{"rendered":"Expanding the Editorial Team: Alec Robitaille and Lucy D’Agostino McGowan Join as Editors"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n
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At rOpenSci, we\u2019re continually grateful for the support and engagement of our community, who help make research open-source stronger, more inclusive, and more collaborative. The software peer review program<\/a> continues to grow, and today we announce that our editorial team keeps expanding:<\/p>\n

We\u2019re excited to welcome Alec Robitaille<\/em> and Lucy D\u2019Agostino McGowan<\/em> as new editors. Alec joins our general review team, and Lucy our statistical software review team. Their expertise and dedication will help sustain and strengthen software peer review, ensuring that software reviews continue to meet the highest standards of quality, transparency, and impact.<\/p>\n

Meet our new editors!<\/p>\n

\nAlec Robitaille\n<\/h2>
\n

\nAlec is a graduate student at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador (Canada) studying foraging ecology, habitat selection and social networks in caribou and other ungulates. He has been involved in many projects along the way, from measuring muskrat habitat and lake ice dynamics at McGill University to estimating drought sensitivity in Canada\u2019s forests with the Canadian Forestry Service. Passionate about teaching open science and programming, he regularly mentors peers, runs workshops, develops example repositories, and organizes a Bayesian stats colearning group. He maintains the package spatsoc<\/a> (reviewed<\/a> by rOpenSci in 2018) and has developed smaller packages with diverse applications including remote sensing (irg<\/a>), social networks (hwig<\/a>), camera trap monitoring (camtrapmonitoring<\/a>), and animal movement (distanceto<\/a>). He reviewed the ohun<\/a>, chopin<\/a>, and emodnet.wfs<\/a> packages for rOpenSci, guest edited for the rredlist<\/a> package and is currently handling the reviews for the ActiGlobe<\/a>, and saperlipopette<\/a> packages.\n<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n

Alec on GitHub<\/a>, Website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

I first connected with the rOpenSci community through the review process for the package spatsoc in 2018 as part of our manuscript submission at Methods in Ecology and Evolution. During the review, I was thoroughly impressed by how welcoming the community was, and how effective the process was in helping me learn how to improve the package. rOpenSci is a landmark in the R and open science ecosystems with an ever evolving community to learn from and to be a part of. I am very grateful to be given the opportunity to continue contributing to rOpenSci in this new role as editor.<\/p>\n