rOpenSci Statistical Software Peer Review: The importance and challenge of community engagement.

Research software is commonly developed by an internal "core" set of people, and often funded by grants with defined end dates.  Research software which survives often does so through being adopted and maintained by broader communities beyond that initial core.  Community engagement is thus vital to the success of research software.  rOpenSci is an organization dedicated to "*Transforming science through open data, software & reproducibility*," and does so through actively nurturing a large and diverse community of research software authors and users.  One of our primary activities is peer review for software in the R computer language, which has been running for almost 10 years.  A recent large, multi-year project expanded the scope of peer review to include statistical software, the primary focus of the R language itself.  This project was led and coordinated by our own core set of rOpenSci people, resulting in a comprehensive system for documenting and assessing statistical software.  As with research software, we will best ensure the long-term survival and relevance of our system through fostering a transition towards community-led maintenance.  This talk will describe challenges and successes in our efforts to engage and expand our community to support our statistical software system, and will draw important parallels with the abiding importance of community engagement in research software development.