Feb 27, 2017

rOpenSci Community Calls

Our 14th community call is coming up in March. The topic is How to ask questions so they get answered! Possibly by yourself!, with special guests Jenny Bryan and JD Long. Check out community call #14 for details.

Software

New packages

• A new package ccafs (v0.1.0) is on CRAN. ccafs is a client for Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) General Circulation Models (GCM) data - supporting dataset search, data download an reading into R. Check out the ccafs vignette to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new package randgeo (v0.1.0) is on CRAN. randgeo generates random points and shapes in GeoJSON and WKT formats for use in examples, teaching, or statistical applications. randgeo has no run-time dependencies. Check out the randgeo vignette to get started. Repository on GitHub

Releases

• A new version (v0.3.0) of crul is on CRAN. This version adds two methods for asynchronous HTTP requests: Async as a simple interface that treats all URLs the same - and AsyncVaried that accepts any HTTP request using HttpRequest method for constructing requests. See release notes for changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (v0.1.3) of europepmc is on CRAN. 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.

The following packages were recently submitted to our onboarding process:

• rBBS > Imports North American Breeding Bird Survey data
  • Author: Bob O’Hara
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#98
  • in editor check stage
• cmipr > Client for Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) Data
  • Author: Scott Chamberlain
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#99
  • Reviewers:
    • Claudia Vitolo
    • Ben Bond-Lamberty
• cleanEHR > A toolset to deal with the Critical Care Health Informatics Collaborative dataset
  • Author: Sinan Shi
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#102
  • in editor check stage

The following package recently went through our onboarding process and has been approved:

• ccafs > Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) General Circulation Models (GCM) data
  • Author: Scott Chamberlain
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#82
  • Reviewers:
    • Michael Koontz
    • Manuel Ramon

On the blog

We’re doing a series of guest blog posts for packages that have gone through our software review process at ropensci/onboarding.

The first in our series was by Sean Hughes on his package plater - From a million nested ifelses to the plater package.

The second was by Maëlle Salmon on her package ropenaq - ropenaq, a breath of fresh air/R.

We’ll have more posts in this series coming out soon - keep an eye out.

Use Cases

Two papers use/cite rOpenSci packages:

• Shabangu et al. used our package rerddap in their paper Modelling the effects of environmental conditions on the acoustic occurrence and behaviour of Antarctic blue whales ¹
• Bezerra et al. used our package rfishbase in their paper Fish diversity in tidepools: assembling effects of environmental heterogeneity ²

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.
• rOpenSci news feed at https://news.ropensci.org/feed.xml

Footnotes