Update 2014-12-15

Software

Patch version v0.2.1 of rcrossref sent to CRAN. Release notes: https://github.com/ropensci/rcrossref/releases/tag/v0.2.1 - We’re in the process of adding content negotiation to this package, to get full text, where available, across any Crossref member publisher that participates. This will be heavily used in the fulltext package to search for full text content.
New version v0.5 of taxize out. Release notes: https://github.com/ropensci/taxize/releases/tag/v0.5.0 - Note that this version is not on CRAN as of this date.
The elife R package is temporarily deprecated as they’re dropping their API soon https://github.com/ropensci/elife - Let us know if you would use an eLife API so we can communicate that to eLife.
We use httr a lot in our packages. A recent addition in httr v0.6 includes a way to deal with a problem you may have stumbled upon when working with data from the web. When a series of requests to get data from the web is interrupted, you often get an error like easy handled already used in multi handle. httr now has the functions handle_find() and handle_reset() to help in this scenario. Check out this blog post to find out more.
We updated our packages page on our website (https://ropensci.org/packages/) with many new packages in development, and updated notes about packages (e.g., a package deprecation). Check it out.

We just announced that we’ll be starting to do community calls, Check out the blog post: http://ropensci.org/blog/2014/12/15/community-calls/
We have a few new community members/contributors:
- First, Matt Pennel, maintaining the chromer package (https://github.com/ropensci/chromer) to interact with Chromosome Counts Database (CCDB) http://ccdb.tau.ac.il
- Second, Abaghan Ghahraman, brings to the rOpenSci suite the R package rGEM (https://github.com/ropensci/rGEM) to connect to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) http://www.gemconsortium.org/
- Third, Kyle Hamilton joins rOpenSci, with two packages in development. RCryptsy (https://github.com/ropensci/RCryptsy) is a package to interact with the Public API for the Crypto-Currency exchange Cryptsy (https://www.cryptsy.com/). RStars (https://github.com/ropensci/RStars) is a package to access to the Digital Universe Data set (http://star-api.herokuapp.com/)

Carl Boettiger, of the rOpenSci leadership team, was at NESCENT for Reproducible Science Hackathon: Curriculum & Workflow Development (see http://www.nescent.org/cal/calendar_detail.php?id=1125). Ciera Martinez will be joining us at our first rOpenSci community call to discuss highlights of this event.
Karthik Ram and Scott Chamberlain attended a PLOS altmetrics conference in San Francisco. We maintain R clients for Altmetric.com and for the PLOS altmetrics application, Lagotto.