Another 1,000 packages were added to CRAN and this time in less than 12 months. Today (2014-10-29) on The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) package page:

“Currently, the CRAN package repository features 6000 available packages.”

Going from 5,000 to 6,000 packages took 355 days - which means that it on average was only ~8.5 hours between each new packages added. It is actually even more frequent since dropped packages are not accounted for. The 6,000 packages on CRAN are maintained by 3,444 people. Thanks to all package developers and to the CRAN Team for handling all this!

You can give back by carefully reporting bugs to the maintainers and properly citing any packages you use in your publications, cf. citation("pkg name").

Milestones:

These data are for CRAN only. There are many more packages elsewhere, e.g. Bioconductor, R-Forge (sic!), RForge (sic!), Github etc.