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I am a science academic and I develop R packages for the research community as part of my job. I am funded by federal grants, and I really should be acknowledging my funding sources in the documentation of my R packages, but I'm not sure where in the package documentation would be most appropriate.

I have looked around at other open science R packages, and I have found no consistency in how grants and other funding sources are acknowledged. In some cases, the grant number is in the package description. In other cases, the funder is added as an author of the package and given the 'funder' role. Still others put this information in the README.

R package developers in academia, what would you recommend?

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  • Which sponsor are we talking about? You will not necessarily find consistency between US federal sponsors -- that is true for any question involving sponsored research, so that can't be the goal. First we need to know if your agency has any additional restrictions you should look into. In most cases, they are simply looking for a good faith effort. However, there are new requirements for data management every day.
    – yourfriendlyresearchadmin
    Commented Sep 25 at 1:09
  • I have made multiple R packages funded by different grants in my career. These include the Australian Research Council and the National Science Foundation.
    – ecogrammer
    Commented Sep 25 at 15:29
  • @ecogrammer: I'm also an Australian academic and I've also programmed multiple R packages (though without grant funding). I'd love to chat sometime about possible collaboration, particularly if we can get joint funding. Shoot me an email if you're interested.
    – Ben
    Commented Sep 27 at 1:35

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So long as your acknowledgement is in a location that is easy to find, it probably doesn't matter exactly where you put it. If it were me, I would put it in the DESCRIPTION file using a Funder: line, probably just after the author and maintainer information. (Alas, as someone who has programmed multiple R packages without any grant funding, this is something I've not had the joy of doing.)

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