The ISA-Tab format and software suite have been developed to break the silo effect induced by technology-specific formats for a variety of data types and to better support experimental metadata tracking. Experimentalists seldom use a single technique to monitor biological signals. Providing a multi-purpose, pragmatic and accessible format that abstracts away common constructs for describing Investigations, Studies and Assays, ISA is increasingly popular. To attract further interest towards the format and extend support to ensure reproducible research and reusable data, we present the Risa package, which delivers a central component to support the ISA format by enabling effortless integration with R, the popular, open source data crunching environment.