Jun 19, 2017

Software

New packages

• A new package unrtf (v1.0) is on CRAN. unrtf wraps the unrtf utility to extract text from rtf files. Check out the unrtf README to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new package nneo (v0.1.0) is on CRAN. nneo is an R client for the NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network) API (http://data.neonscience.org/data-api). Check out the nneo README to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new package charlatan (v0.1.0) is on CRAN. charlatan is a package for making fake data. charlatan is inspired from and ports many things from Python’s https://github.com/joke2k/faker library. In turn, faker was inspired from PHP’s faker, Perl’s Faker, and Ruby’s faker. charlatan went through rOpenSci review. Check out the charlatan vignette to get started. Look out for a blog post coming out later this week on the package. Repository on GitHub

Releases

• A new version (v2.0.2.2) of assertr is on CRAN. Repository on GitHub
• A new version (v0.2.1) of ropenaq is on CRAN. See the NEWS for details. Check out the vignettes to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new version (v1.1) of cld2 is on CRAN. Check out the README to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new version (v0.0.3) of osmdata is on CRAN. See the NEWS for changes. Check out the vignette to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new version (v1.3) of pdftools is on CRAN. This version improves support for reading password protected and encrypted pdf files, and supports direct conversion from pdf to png/jpeg/tiff. See the release notes for details. Check out the README to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new version (v0.1.6) of getCRUCLdata is on CRAN. Check out the release notes for details on changes. See the vignette to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new version (v1.0.3) of GSODR is on CRAN. Check out the release notes for details on changes. See the vignettes to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new version (v0.3.8) of crul is on CRAN. This version adds fixes a bug in AsyncVaried to return async responses in the order that they were passed in. This also fixes this exact same behavior in Async because Async uses AsyncVaried internally. Big thanks to Dirk Schumacher for pointing out the problem. See release notes for details. Check out the vignettes to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new version (v0.5.1) of biomartr is on CRAN. biomartr performs metagenomic data retrieval and functional annotation retrieval. It aims to provide users with a standardized way to automate genome, proteome, coding sequence (CDS), GFF, and metagenome retrieval from NCBI and ENSEMBL databases. This is not the first version on CRAN - but it just completed our software review process and is now in the rOpenSci family - welcome Hajk-Georg!. Check out the vignettes to get started. 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 five packages were recently submitted to our onboarding process:

• bib2df > Parse a BibTeX File to a data.frame
  • Author: Philipp Ottolinger
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#124
  • Reviewers:
    • Vasant Marur
    • Adam Sparks
• rtimicropem > Supports the Analysis of RTI MicroPEM Output Files
  • Author: Maëlle Salmon
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#126
  • Reviewers:
    • Lucy D’Agostino McGowan
    • other not assigned yet
• googleLanguageR > Call Google’s Natural Language API, Cloud Translation API and Cloud Speech API from R
  • Author: Mark Edmondson
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#127
  • Reviewers: not yet assigned

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

• patentsview > An R Client to the PatentsView API
  • Author: Christopher Baker
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#112
  • Reviewers:
    • Verena Haunschmid
    • Paul Oldham
• charlatan > Make Fake Data
  • Author: Scott Chamberlain
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#94
  • Reviewers:
    • Brooke Anderson
    • TJ Mahr

On the blog

• Our community manager got a blog post up the other day about the event: Bringing Together People and Projects at Unconf17. She’s keeping the post updated with blog posts by unconf attendees.
• We rolled out a series of blog posts covering what we accomplished:
  • Unconf projects 1: skimr, emldown, testrmd, webrockets
  • Unconf projects 2: checkers, gramr, data-packages, exploRingJSON
  • Unconf projects 3: available, miner, rcheatsheet, ponyexpress
  • Unconf projects 4: cityquant, notary, packagemetrics, pegax
  • Unconf projects 5: mwparser, Gargle, arresteddev
• Last week, we had what turned out to be a very popular blog post from our software engineer Jeroen Ooms on New rOpenSci Packages for Text Processing in R

Onboarding series

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

• 8th: George Moroz on his package lingtypology - Easy linguistic mapping with lingtypology.
• 7th: Thomas Leeper on his package tabulizer - Release ‘open’ data from their PDF prisons using tabulizer.
• 6th: Tony Fischetti on his package assertr - Data validation with the assertr package.
• 5th: Adam Sparks on his package GSODR - Everybody talks about the weather.
• 4th: Lukas Lundstrom on his package camsRad - camsRad, satellite-based time series of solar irradiation.
• 3rd: Claudia Vitolo on her package hddtools - Discover hydrological data using the hddtools R package.
• 2nd: Maëlle Salmon on her package ropenaq - ropenaq, a breath of fresh air/R.
• 1st: Sean Hughes on his package plater - From a million nested ifelses to the plater package.

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

Use Cases

The following two papers use/cite rOpenSci or rOpenSci software:

• Palomino et al. mentioned rOpenSci in their paper A review of the emergent ecosystem of collaborative geospatial tools for addressing environmental challenges ¹
• Ludt et al. cited and used rgbif in their paper A quantitative and statistical biological comparison of three semi-enclosed seas: the Red Sea, the Persian (Arabian) Gulf, and the Gulf of California 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