Philip Leifeld: texreg, DNA, and btergm
@leifeld

We need your funding! Let me tell you why and for what.

My open-source software improves academic research. I am a professor of research methods and develop scientific methods and open-source software. My software projects include the R package texreg for creating regression tables (with > 8k downloads per month on CRAN, putting it in the 96th percentile of all R packages), the xergm and btergm packages for statistical inference with dynamic networks, and Discourse Network Analyzer, a qualitative content analysis software with a graphical user interface and R front-end rDNA.

It is hard to continue this development without your funding. Despite the heavy usage and impact generated by these packages, there are few incentives to continue their development. Employers and research funders require researchers to demonstrate the impact of their work, and this is traditionally a difficult task for open-source software, which does not require any registration from the user. It is also difficult to find the time to continue the development due to other commitments as a full-time professor. For this reason, we need your help!

What difference will your funding make? Please help me fund the continued development of these awesome software projects. If I can raise enough funds to hire a research assistant for a few months, this RA can dedicate his or her time to fixing bugs and improving the software under my supervision. If you provide the funding, I am happy to contribute the supervision!

How much do we need? While this is hard to estimate, a total of €3,000 can already go a long way. If we reach this point until the end of 2020, I will hire an RA at the University of Essex in the UK to help with the development. If not, consider your donation as a personal incentive for me to continue to invest some of my own time into the continued development of open-source research software. Even a small donation of €1 per week for a year will make a difference.

We value your contribution! Unless you opt out by e-mailing me, I will include your name in the software packages as a valuable contributor. There are other ways to contribute as well if you do not wish to send us money at this time. Please help fix some issues on the project pages at https://www.github.com/leifeld. Cite my research in your own work. Tell other people about the software. For more information on the underlying research, go to https://www.philipleifeld.com.