This special volume collates ten issues under the rubric "Spectroscopy and Chemometrics in R". In so doing, it provides an overview of the breadth, depth and state of the art of R-based software projects for spectroscopy and chemometrics applications. Just as the authors have contributed to R their documentation and source code, so has R contributed to the quality, standardization and dissemination of their software, as this volume attests. We hope that the volume is inspiring to both computational statisticians interested in applications of their methodologies and to spectroscopists or chemometricians in need of solutions to their data analysis problems.