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Grants For R Language Infrastructure Projects Available Now!

By Announcement, Blog

Round two is here! The R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) orchestrates two rounds of proposal calls and grant awards per year to fortify the R ecosystem’s technical infrastructure. We have one key goal: to make meaningful infrastructure improvements that serve the R community. 

ISC’s Call for Proposals opens on September 1, 2023. Send in your submission! https://www.r-consortium.org/all-projects/call-for-proposals 

We’re reaching out to the extended R community to tap into your expertise and insights. What areas do you think need attention to extend R’s capabilities? Do you see emerging domains where R could significantly impact? Whether in Climate Science, Engineering, Finance, Medicine, or any other discipline, your ideas could spark innovations that advance the field and broaden the R community. 

Technical Infrastructure projects that have been funded include:

  • R-hub is a centralized tool for checking R packages
  • Testing DBI and improving key open-source database backends.
  • Improvements in packages such as mapview and sf 
  • Improving Translations in R
  • Ongoing infrastructural development for R on Windows and macOS

Social Infrastructure projects include:

  • SatuRDays bootstrapping a system for local R conferences.
  • Data-Driven Discovery and Tracking of R Consortium Activities

The ISC is interested in projects that:

  • Are likely to have a broad impact on the R community.
  • Have a focused scope (a good example is the Simple Features for R project). If you have a larger project, consider breaking it into smaller chunks (a good example is with the DBI/DBItest project submission, where multiple proposals came in overtime to address the various needs).
  • Have a low-to-medium risk with a low-to-medium reward. The ISC tends not to fund high-risk, high-reward projects.

Key Dates for 2023

Second Grant Cycle: September 1 to October 1, acceptance by November 1, contract by December 1.

Review Process

The Chair of the ISC and committee members will review all proposals. Results will be announced as per the schedule above, and all funded projects will feature on the R Consortium blog.

Final Thoughts

Let’s enrich the R landscape, amplifying its utility across various sectors. The time is ripe, and your ideas could be the seeds of transformation. We look forward to your active participation.

Apply now and be part of shaping the future of R! You can read more about ISC Grant Proposal application process here.

ISC Call for Proposals – Now Accepting Applications

By Announcement, Blog

The first 2022 call for proposals for R Consortium Infrastructure Steering (ISC) grants is now open and will be accepting proposals through May 1, 2022. This year, the R Consortium has restructured its grant programs to allow the ISC to focus on technical projects. If you are contemplating a technical project that you think will have a significant impact on a relatively large segment of the R Community, please apply for a grant at the link above where you will find guidance on the kinds of projects the ISC is looking for, instructions on how to apply, as well information on the grant process. 

Select “Funded Projects” from the “Projects” tab on the R Consortium home page. You will see a pull down box that points you to the previous projects funded by the ISC. Searching through these projects is not only a great way to review the history of ISC funding, but also a place to look for inspiration. 

A typical ISC grant ranges between $5,000 and $20,000 and is structured in such a way that intermediate milestones correspond to meaningful work. If you look through the history of what the ISC funded in the past, you will find several examples of important projects that received additional grants over time. The ISC occasionally awards larger grants, but if you are seeking a large grant your best strategy is still to structure your project in a way that delivers value by way of intermediate milestones.

Since our first ISC call for proposals in 2016, the R Consortium has awarded $1.4M in grants. Help us help you make the R ecosystem even more awesome by organizing the good work that you may already be doing in a way that could be accelerated with a grant.

Note, if you are seeking funding for an R User Group, a conference, or for delivering a training session please don’t apply for an ISC grant. Instead, apply for a grant at the R User Groups, Conferences, and Training page.

September 2021 ISC Call for Proposals – Now Open!

By Announcement, Blog

The deadline for submitting proposals is October 31, 2021.

The September 2021 ISC Call for Proposals is now open. The R Consortium’s Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) solicits progressive, pioneering projects that will benefit and serve the R community and ecosystem at large. The ISC’s goal is to foster innovation and help bring your ideas into tangible realities. 

Please consider applying!

Although there is no set theme for this round of proposals, grant proposals should be focused in scope. If you are currently working on a larger project, consider breaking it into smaller, more manageable subprojects for a given proposal. The ISC encourages you to “Think Big” but create reasonable milestones. The ISC favors grant proposals with meaningful detailed milestones and justifiable grant requests, so please include measurable objectives attached to project milestones, a team roster, and a detailed projection of how grant money would be allocated. Teams with detailed plans and that can point to previous successful projects are most likely to be selected.

To submit a proposal for ISC funding, read the Call for Proposals page and submit a self-contained pdf using the online form.

March 2021 ISC Call for Proposals – Now Open!

By Announcement, Blog

The deadline for submitting proposals is April 19, 2021.

The March 2021 ISC Call for Proposals is now open. The R Consortium’s Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) solicits progressive, pioneering projects that will benefit and serve the R community and ecosystem at large. The ISC’s goal is to foster innovation and help bring your ideas into tangible realities. 

Please consider applying!


Although there is no set theme for this round of proposals, grant proposals should be focused in scope. If you are currently working on a larger project, consider breaking it into smaller, more manageable subprojects for a given proposal. The ISC encourages you to “Think Big” but create reasonable milestones. The ISC favors grant proposals with meaningful detailed milestones and justifiable grant requests, so please include measurable objectives attached to project milestones, a team roster, and a detailed projection of how grant money would be allocated. Teams with detailed plans and that can point to previous successful projects are most likely to be selected.


To submit a proposal for ISC funding, read the Call for Proposals page and submit a self-contained pdf using the online form.

September 2020 ISC Call for Proposals – Now Open!

By Announcement, Blog

The deadline for submitting proposals is midnight, October 1st, 2020.

The September 2020 ISC Call for Proposals is now open. The R Consortium’s Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) solicits progressive, pioneering projects that will benefit and serve the R community and ecosystem at large. The ISC’s goal is to foster innovation and help bring your ideas into tangible realities. 


Although there is no set theme for this round of proposals, grant proposals should be focused in scope. If you are currently working on a larger project, consider breaking it into smaller, more manageable subprojects for a given proposal. The ISC encourages you to “Think Big” but create reasonable milestones. The ISC favors grant proposals with meaningful detailed milestones and justifiable grant requests, so please include measurable objectives attached to project milestones, a team roster, and a detailed projection of how grant money would be allocated. Teams with detailed plans and that can point to previous successful projects are most likely to be selected.


To submit a proposal for ISC funding, read the Call for Proposals page and submit a self-contained pdf using the online form.

March 2020 ISC call for proposals – Now Open!

By Announcement, Blog

The March 2020 ISC Call for Proposals is now open. Once again, we are looking for ambitious projects that will contribute to the infrastructure of the R ecosystem and benefit large sections of the R community.  Our goal is to stimulate creativity and help you turn good ideas into tangible benefits. 

It is very likely that everyone who reads this post will be reorganizing aspects of their everyday lives to cope with the challenge of the Covid-19 virus. Accordingly, we are suggesting a theme for this call for proposals: What can we do to improve the R infrastructure for locating, accessing, cleaning and reporting on data related to the epidemic that will be useful now and in the future?

In the recently published post COVID-19 epidemiology with R, researcher Tim Churches highlights some of the challenges presented in acquiring accurate “real time” data. These include locating sources, writing code to scrape Wikipedia, a site whose structure may change every time it is updated, digging out data embedded in multiple different languages etc and providing mechanisms for researchers to store data, share code and exchange ideas. 

But don’t be constrained by the theme. There is other work that needs to be done and we want to hear about ideas that we may be able to facilitate.

As always, “Think Big” but structure your proposal with intermediate milestones. The ISC is not likely to fund proposals that ask for large initial cash grants. We tend to be conservative with initial grants, preferring projects structured in such a way that significant initial milestones can be achieved with modest amounts of cash.

As with any proposed project, the more detailed and credible the project plan, and the better the track record of the project team, the higher the likelihood of receiving funding. Please be sure that your proposal includes measurable objectives, intermediate milestones, a list of all team members who will be contributing work and a detailed accounting of how the grant money will be spent.

To submit a proposal for ISC funding, read the Call for Proposals page and submit a self-contained pdf using the online form. You should receive confirmation within 24 hours.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is midnight, April 2, 2020.

R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee Chair Wins 2019 COPSS Presidents’ Award

By Announcement, Blog

Congratulations to our very own Hadley Wickham, Infrastructure Steering Committee Chairperson, for winning the “Nobel Prize of Statistics.” The award is given to a person under the age of 41, in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics. According to Wikipedia, the COPSS Presidents’ Award, along with the International Prize in Statistics, are considered the two highest awards in Statistics.

The award citation recognized Wickham’s “influential work in statistical computing, visualization, graphics, and data analysis” including “making statistical thinking and computing accessible to a large audience.”

In previous years, the award has primarily recognized theoretical contributions to statistics. This year is the first time it has been awarded for practical application.

Hadley is Chief Scientist at RStudio, a Platinum member of the R Foundation, and Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and the University of Auckland. The skills with statistics runs in the family: his sister is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Oregon State University.

Hadley builds tools – both computational and cognitive – to make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science – a pioneering a suite of tools for R known as the “Tidyverse”: including ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr, purrr, and readr – and principled software development (roxygen2, testthat, devtools). He is also a writer, educator, and speaker promoting the use of R for data science. Learn more on his website, http://hadley.nz.

Congratulations, Hadley!

Get Funded by the R Consortium – Call for Proposals Open Now!

By Blog

Strengthen the R community with Your Project

The R Consortium is committed to supporting the R community by funding projects that create important infrastructure and fortify long term stability for the R Community. The R Consortium’s Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) has developed a grant program that looks to help the broader R community.

The Call for Proposals opens today, September 13, 2019, and runs for a full month, through October 14, 2019.

This is the fourth year of funding, and over $1,000,000 has been given out in sponsorships and grants.

We encourage you to apply, even those without experience applying for grants.

Apply now!

In this round, the ISC is looking for projects that:

  • Are likely to have a broad impact on the R community.
  • Have a focused scope. Simple is better than over-ambitious. Larger projects can often be broken up into smaller steps.

The process for submitting a proposal has been has been updated annually to ensure that the process is as smooth as possible. Full details on proposal requirements, examples of previous projects, suggestions for what to avoid, and more, are included here.

Any questions about the proposals or submission process, please write to proposal@r-consortium.org

Apply now!