sbtools: A Package Connecting R to Cloud-based Data for Collaborative Online Research

Authors

Luke A. Winslow, U.S. Geological Survey
Scott Chamberlain, University of California, Berkeley
Alison P. Appling, U.S. Geological Survey
Jordan S. Read, U.S. Geological Survey

Date of this Version

8-2016

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (August 2016) 8(1); Editor: Michael Lawrence

Comments

Copyright 2016, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported

Abstract

The adoption of high-quality tools for collaboration and reproducibile research such as R and Github is becoming more common in many research fields. While Github and other version management systems are excellent resources, they were originally designed to handle code and scale poorly to large text-based or binary datasets. A number of scientific data repositories are coming online and are often focused on dataset archival and publication. To handle collaborative workflows using large scientific datasets, there is increasing need to connect cloud-based online data storage to R. In this article, we describe how the new R package sbtools enables direct access to the advanced online data functionality provided by ScienceBase, the U.S. Geological Survey’s online scientific data storage platform.