rOpenSci Software Peer Review’s guidance is gathered in an online book that keeps improving! This blog post summarises what’s new in our Dev Guide 0.9.0, with all changes listed in the changelog.

Now available in Spanish!

Our guide is now bilingual (English and Spanish), thanks to work by Yanina Bellini Saibene, Elio Campitelli and Pao Corrales, and thanks to support of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NumFOCUS, and the R Consortium. Read the guide in Spanish.

You can find out more about our multilingual publishing project in the materials and recording from a recent community call. Useful tools produced by the project include our translation guide, the babelquarto package to render multilingual Quarto books or websites, and the babeldown package to create and update translations using the DeepL API.

Our guide is now also getting translated to Portuguese thanks to volunteers. We are very grateful for their work!

Policy updates

We have updated Aims and Scope to include translation packages, remove experimental text-processing categories, and provide clarifications around API wrappers.

In our guide for authors, we now correctly refer to the lifecycle stage “Stable” as the one at which a package can be submitted, thanks to a contribution by GitHub user bart1.

rOpenSci Package maintainer cheatsheet

We have created a cheatsheet for maintainers of rOpenSci packages about how to ask for help on different topics.

Improvements to the packaging guide

The package guide chapter received several improvements.

We’ve updated our advice around roxygen2, mainly linking to the roxygen2 website. The advice also includes an explanation of how to document an argument’s default, thanks to Hugo Gruson. We have also improved our wording to emphasise that using roxygen2 still means manual efforts (thanks to Vincent van Hees).

We have added tips for packages wrapping web APIs, based on the blog post “Why You Should (or Shouldn’t) Build an API Client”.

Our instructions around CITATION files now reflect the newest CRAN policies.

Our list of packages helping with testing now includes shinytest2, which we anticipate will ultimately supersede shinytest.

Improvements to GitHub and CI guidance

Our collaboration chapter features more links to resources about for instance PR reviews, and Git workflows, thanks to Mauro Lepore. That same chapter now mentions GitHub Discussions as a way to communicate with users, and more details on issue templates.

Edward Wallace added an explanation of continuous integration (CI) in general and of codecov in particular, to our CI guide.

Better documentation of the process

We now highlight the values of our system and the tone we strive to achieve in more places: at the top of the reviewer guide, in the template for review requests, and in the message our bot posts after editors assign a reviewer.

rOpenSci’s community is our best asset. We aim for reviews to be open, non-adversarial, and focused on improving software quality. Be respectful and kind! See our reviewers guide and code of conduct for more.

Alexander Fischer added an explanation of package submission via non-default branches to the guide for authors and to the guide for reviewers.

Our guide reviewers now clearly explains how to volunteer as a reviewer, in general or for a particular submission.

Conclusion

In this post we summarized the changes incorporated into our book “rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review” over the last months. We are thankful for all contributions that shaped this release. We are already working on the next version, including a translation to Portuguese thanks to community contributors!