Dec 19, 2016

This edition marks the 2-year anniversay of rOpenSci News! It’s hard to believe this thing has been around for two years. Anyway, we hope you enjoy it, and we’ll see you in ‘17. Happy coding!

Software

New packages

• A new package jsonld (v1.1) is on CRAN. JSON-LD is a light-weight syntax for expressing linked data. jsonld provides bindings to the JavaScript library jsonld for converting, expanding and compacting JSON-LD documents. Check out the README to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new package natserv (v0.1.0) is on CRAN. natserv is an interface to NatureServe. Includes methods to get data and image metadata, search taxonomic names, and make maps. Check out the README to get started. Repository on GitHub

Releases

• A new version (0.9.6) of rgbif is on CRAN. This version includes a few bug fixes. See release notes for changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (1.3) of tesseract is on CRAN. This version adds an options parameter to tesseract for setting engine variables, a new function tesseract_download(), and support for ocr() on magick package images. See release notes for changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.2.0) of originr is on CRAN. This version adds a new data source: Global Register of Introduced and Invasive Species (GRIIS). See release notes for changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (2.3) of hunspell is on CRAN. This version updates libhunspell. See release notes for changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.6.0) of spocc is on CRAN. This version adds two new data sources: Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS). See release notes for changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.6.0) of mregions is on CRAN. This version is a minor change with some new functions and changes to others - following significant changes in the http://marineregions.org web services. More fixes and changes are coming. See release notes for changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.1.6) of internetarchive is on CRAN. See the NEWS for changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.8.0) of taxize is on CRAN. This version adds a new data source: Open Tree of Life (OTL), and adds support for that data source to classification() and lowest_common(). taxzie is now importing ritis for ITIS data. lowest_common() in addition to gaining OTL as a data source gains Catalogue of Life as well. New function synonyms_df() to combine outputs from synonyms() for single data sources. See release notes for the rest of the changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.1.6) of crul is on CRAN. This version adds improved handling of curl options, now optionally uses fauxpas for HTTP condition handling (if you have it installed), adds stream and write to disk support, and adds raise_for_status() method to responses. See release notes for changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (1.1) of graphql is on CRAN. This version updates libgraphqlparser to the latest version. See release notes for changes. Repository on GitHub.

Onboarding

We accept community contributed packages via our onboarding system - a software review system, sorta like scholarly paper review, but way better. We’ll highlight new packages here that have come through this system. A huge thanks to our reviewers, who do a lot of work reviewing (see the blog post on our review system), and the authors of the packages!

If you want to be a reviewer we have a new form you can fill out, and we’ll ping you when there’s a submission that fits in your area of expertise.

There haven’t been any submissions or approved packages since last news - so please do submit your packages! At least ask questions if you’re not sure how it works, or if your package is a good fit.

Use cases

A blog post and a few papers cite rOpenSci packages:

• Gavin Simpson wrote a great blog post on Pangaea and R and open palaeo data, which included use of pangaear, an rOpenSci client for interacting with the https://www.pangaea.de/ database. Gavin is also an author on the package. ¹
• Bradie & Leung use and cite taxize in their paper A quantitative synthesis of the importance of variables used in MaxEnt species distribution models ²
• Cramer & Verboom use and cite taxize in their paper Measures of biologically relevant environmental heterogeneity improve prediction of regional plant species richness ³
• Pfenninger et al. cite rOpenSci in their paper The importance of open data and software: Is energy research lagging behind? ⁴

Keep up with rOpenSci news

There are a number of ways to keep up with what rOpenSci is doing:

• Mailing list: Sign up with an email address to get new blog posts sent to your inbox -> ropensci.org/#subscribe
• rOpenSci on Twitter: we’re @ropensci
• The rOpenSci blog at ropensci.org/blog - you can subscribe in any RSS aggregator, or manually via https://ropensci.org/feed.xml. We also announce new blog posts on our Twitter account.

Footnotes