Update 2015-02-16

Software

We have started to dive into neuroscience. We recently chatted with three neuroinformaticians about open data and R in their field. They directed us towards lots of interesting sources of open data. Our first shot at this field is the rif package - an R client to search and get data from the Neuroscience Information Framework web services. We’d love to work with people in neuroscience/neuroinformatics on R clients.
Our R client for Orcid.org got a reboot and some new functionality. Give it a try and let us know what you think. Get started. In addition, Simon Goring wrote a blog post recently about creating a co-author network using rorcid
We started work on an R client for the key-value store etcd by Coreos, written in Go. Try it - let us know what you think.
rentrez, our client for the NCBI’s entrez API got a new release on CRAN. New features include richer records from entrez_summary and a set functions to help users learn about what data is available from NCBI and how to get it. We’ve started planning for a 1.0 release of rentrez, so add any requests you have for the package.

Jeff Hollister is the new maintainer of the maptools task view. The maptools task view focuses on tools for mapping and visualizing spatial data in R. Thanks Jeff!
Attendees of our upcoming unconference/hackathon in March have started to generate ideas for the event. Check them out at https://github.com/ropensci/unconf/issues, and check out the event site. If you want to join remotely, instructions are in the README.

We were listed in the UPenn guide for R. w00t!
Our R client for Solr, solr, has been added to the list of Solr clients on the Apache Solr website. Sweet :)

Past events

Karthik Ram participated in a workshop at Imperial College’s school of Medicine on tools for graphical resources for modeling infectious diseases in R. Details on our events page.

In case you aren’t aware, we have a shiny new discussion forum based on Discourse - it’s at http://discuss.ropensci.org/. Join us there for questions, discussion of use cases, feature requests, and more.