Open access is one of the principal drivers of changes in science. Prominent open data repositories were established by The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Harvard University, industry, and many others. This led to data democratisation and resulted in an increasing number of publications for the public good. Free and open source software changed the analytical landscape, with the rapid rise of the R project as the most widely used software for data analysis and visualization (now it substantially outperformed commercial counterparts). R flourishes with an ecosystem of packages that allow to perform different tasks from figure preparation to machine learning. However, medical specialities have only a few programming algorithms available for use and re-use by a wide research community. As a consequence, every research group needs to write the code for the same scores and equations, spending substantial resources on performing work already done by others but not published in open access.
To fill this gap in nephrology field, Scientific-Tools.Org staff developed the CRAN kidney.epi package. It contains universally applicable programming algorithms for the calculation of estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), the Kidney Donor Profile Index (KDPI) and Kidney Donor Risk Index (KDRI). The package makes possible to easily perform these calculations for clinical trials and observational studies of any size. The kidney.epi package is available at the CRAN repository, and detailed description has been published as a separate article. The use of this package would save substantial time for other research groups and facilitate the analysis of already collected data.
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