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rOpenSci News Digest, June 2025

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Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! < !-- blabla --> You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci!

rOpenSci HQ

Farewell to software review editor Julia Gustavsen

This month we say farewell to Software Peer-Review Editor Julia Gustavsen. Julia has been an essential member of the rOpenSci peer-review team for more than 10 years, since before we had an editorial board, and before we even called it peer review! Julia was one of rOpenSci’s original reviewers as we figured out how to transform from a team publishing our in-house developed tools to a broader, community-driven ecosystem. Her early reviews were a model for the careful, helpful, non-confrontational style that has set the tone for our approach. We were lucky to have her join as an editor in 2020. She has expertly guided many authors and reviewers through the peer-review process, served as Editor in Chief, and been a pleasure to have as colleague making the process better, smoother, and more valuable to our community. Thanks Julia for your service!

New software review editors

We are excited to welcome Emi Tanaka and, more recently, Nima Hejazi to our team of Associate Editors for rOpenSci Stats Software Peer Review. Emi brings her experiences in experimental design, mixed-effects models and data visualisation, while Nima contributes his expertise in causal inference, de-biased machine learning, and semi-parametric and computational statistics.

Read more in the post introducing Nima and Emi.

R-universe updates

R-universe now also builds and checks binaries for ARM64-linux (both R-release and R-devel). To install Linux binaries, see the docs.

Furthermore, build results are now easier to navigate. On any universe builds tab, hovering on a icon will indicate the build status such as “Source: OK” or “macos-release-arm64: WARNING”. Clicking on an orange or red icon will open the GitHub Actions log at the right job, with “Annotations” (failures) ready to be expanded at the top. This should help trouble shoot package builds.

Champions Program 2025

We are excited to introduce the new team of mentors for the rOpenSci Champions Program! This year, we have ten very talented individuals, all from Latin America, who bring a unique combination of experience, enthusiasm, and commitment to open science. Some of them have already been part of the program in previous editions, either as mentors or Champions, and today, they return to continue strengthening this community. Read more in the blog post introducing them all: Carolina Pradier, Elina Gómez, Elio Campitelli, Francisco Cardozo, Geraldine Gómez Millán, Luis D. Verde Arregoitia, Milagros Mendoza, Pablo Tiscornia, Pao Corrales, Ronny Hernandez Mora.

We’ve also completed the selection of our new Champions and can’t wait to introduce them and their projects very soon! We selected 10 incredible people from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay. The decision was not easy – the quality of the applications and the relevance of the proposed projects made the selection process especially challenging. We’re excited to see all the great things this group will create and contribute to open science and research software engineering during the next 12 months.

Coworking

Read all about coworking!

And remember, you can always cowork independently on work related to R, work on packages that tend to be neglected, or work on what ever you need to get done!

Software 📦

New packages

The following package recently became a part of our software suite:

  • PFW, developed by Mason W. Maron: Provides tools to import, clean, filter, and prepare Project FeederWatch data for analysis. Includes functions for taxonomic rollup, easy filtering, zerofilling, merging in site metadata, and more. It has been reviewed by Sunny Tseng and Paul Carteron.

Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.

New versions

The following thirteen packages have had an update since the last newsletter: pkgmatch (v0.5.0), daiquiri (v1.2.0), fellingdater (v1.1.0), gtexr (v0.2.0.9001), gutenbergr (v0.3.0), helminthR (v1.1.0), lingtypology (v1.1.21), magick (ImageMagick-6.9.13-25), nasapower (v4.2.5), nodbi (v0.13.1), occCite (v0.6.0), rgbif (v3.8.2), and slopes (v1.0.1).

Software Peer Review

There are twelve recently closed and active submissions and 8 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:

Find out more about Software Peer Review and how to get involved.

On the blog

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Use cases

Four use cases of our packages and resources have been reported recently.

Explore other use cases and report your own!

Calls for contributions

Calls for maintainers

If you’re interested in maintaining any of the R packages below, you might enjoy reading our blog post What Does It Mean to Maintain a Package?.

Calls for contributions

Refer to our help wanted page – before opening a PR, we recommend asking in the issue whether help is still needed.

Package development corner

Some useful tips for R package developers. 👀

Refactoring code with {flir}

Etienne Bacher explains how to use his flir package to, for instance, replace the usage of a superseded function with a newer function over a project. Note that from flir 0.4.3, it will be possible to share rules across packages.

Tips and tools for co-maintenance of R packages

In his blog post, Hugo Gruson gives advice on how best to maintain an R package as a team. Furthermore, he shares GitHub Actions workflows that warn all package authors or maintainers when an R package is at risk of archival, rather than just the officially listed maintainer.

Authors@R field becoming compulsory for new CRAN submissions

Also shared by Hugo Gruson, it seems that the richer authorship field Authors@R will now be compulsory for new CRAN submissions, as opposed to being able to use Maintainer: and Author. Example.

Last words

Thanks for reading! If you want to get involved with rOpenSci, check out our Contributing Guide that can help direct you to the right place, whether you want to make code contributions, non-code contributions, or contribute in other ways like sharing use cases. You can also support our work through donations.

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