Feb 2, 2015

Software

• The rvertnet package update is now on CRAN - we’d love your feedback. See the release notes for changes. This version is the first in quite a while, and works with the new VertNet API. VertNet has a blog post about the new version.
• A new version of spocc has been put on CRAN. See the release notes for the changes. No major changes, mostly bug fixes, and slimming down dependencies used in the package.
• A new version of rplos has been put on CRAN. See the release notes for the changes. One large change in rplos is that you no longer need an API key to use the package - lowering the barrier to exploring PLOS data!
• Our R client for Elasticsearch - elastic - is now on CRAN. Elasticsearch is a powerful NoSQL-style document database - similar to SOLR (p.s. we have a client for SOLR if you’re interested). See the release notes.
• Welcome a new client to the family: parasiteR. parasiteR is an R client to work with the London Natural History Museum’s Helminth parasite database.

Community

• We announced our upcoming unconference and hackathon on March 26-27 in San Francisco. There are still spaces if you would like to attend. Nominate yourself by February 15th if you’d like to attend.
• We gained two new contributors! Check out our community page.
  • Chris Ray is is a postdoc at the Institute for Bird Populations. She contributes to rvertnet.
  • Tad Dallas is a graduate student in the University of Georgia’s Odum School of Ecology. He maintains parasiteR.

In The News

• rOpenSci got a mention in Hadley Wickham’s article Impact the world by being useful
• We were highlighted in GBIF’s page for applications
• rOpenSci is listed on Connected Researchers for digital tools for researchers.
• We were mentioned in the Coursera course Getting and Cleaning Data

Events

Past events

• Carl Boettiger gave a workshop on using rOpenSci packages at the Davis (CA) R user group. Check out the recording at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNVRxq-hS9M, the talk materials, and a zip file of the materials.

Upcoming events

• Karthik Ram will be at a workshop at Imperial College to work on tools for graphical resources for modeling infectious diseases in R. Karthik will also be running a workshop in Seville on the 16th and 17th. Details on our events page.

Use cases, questions & answers

• We recently talked with folks doing neurobiology research and were curious if there’s any way we can help. We started a thread in our discussion forum if you have any thoughts: http://discuss.ropensci.org/t/neurobiology-data/112