On behalf of the editorial board, I am pleased to present Volume 14 Issue 1 of the R Journal. This issue heralds a switch from two issues per year to four and is my first as Editor-in-Chief. The change to four issues per year is in response to the increase in published articles in recent years. As articles will appear more speedily in a published issue, we will no longer list pdfs for Accepted articles on The R Journal website.

First, some news about the journal board. Dianne Cook has stepped down as Editor-in-Chief but continues as an Executive Editor. In her time as EIC she provided excellent leadership and brought in many advances, most notably the change to the new modern journal format. One new Associate Editor, Simone Blomberg, has recently joined the team. We have a new, slimmed-down Editorial advisory board consisting of Henrik Bengtssen, Gabriela de Quiroz, Michael Kane and Rececca Killick. The board will provide continuity across changes in the editorial board, offering advice and acting as an independent body to handle issues of academic integrity.

Behind the scenes, several people are assisting with the journal operations and the new developments. Mitchell O’Hara-Wild continues to work on infrastructure, and H. Sherry Zhang continues to develop the package. In addition, articles in this issue have been carefully copy edited by Hannah Comiskey.

In this issue

News from the CRAN and the R Foundation are included in this issue.

This issue features 22 contributed research articles the majority of which relate to R packages for modelling tasks. All packages are available on CRAN. Topics covered are: