Can I submit a R package to Bioconductor or CRAN if I have already published it a journal?

Question

I have written a bioinformatics package in R that I want to publish in a bioinformatics Journal. Presently, I am maintaining a local repo of that package and I want to put in the Bioconductor repository (after publication or at least after submission to the journal), is it possible? or I must submit it to Bioconductor first? Thanks

Answer 1

You can submit a package to a repo after the publication, but I would say that you really should do it before.

Bioconductor accept only packages that are not published on CRAN, however, academic publications are fine.

Conversely, Bioinformatics does not enforce any particular platform for sharing the code, but you have to make it available somehow (e.g. GitHub repo, university webpage, bioconductor). From the instructions for authors

If the manuscript describes new software tools or the implementation of novel algorithms the software must be freely available to non-commercial users at the time of submission, and appropriate test data should be made available.

However, you as a developer should make all the effort to make your software available and easily accessible. Also, sooner you make it available, sooner people start to cite you, which is a great advantage for you. Finally, you really need users to make sure that your package really works (i.e. debugging all the corner cases).

I could not emphasise more, the correct order is 1. make it available 2. write a publication