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

rOpenSci HQ

Open Science with a Latin American Identity: Meet the New Cohort of the rOpenSci Champions Program

We’re very excited to introduce the new rOpenSci Champions! This cohort will participate in the program and carry out their work in Spanish, allowing us to continue strengthening the open science and research software development community in this language. We’re excited about the projects they’ll be developing, which tackle real-world challenges across diverse disciplines and regions of Latin America.

Read all about the new Champions and their projects in our blog post.

rOpenSci at useR! 2025

August 1st, useR! 2025 Virtual with free registration.

August 8th through 10th, 2025 useR! 2025 will take place in Penn Pavilion, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

rOpenSci will be there!

• Yanina Bellini Saibene will be presenting her keynote “We R Together. How to learn, use and improve a programming language as a community” on Sat, Aug 9, 2025 – 17:00–18:00 (EDT)

• Will Landau will be presenting his keynote “Poweful simulation pipelines with {targets}” on Sun, Aug 10, 2025 – 15:00-16:00 (EDT)

• Noam Ross will be presenting “Curating a Community of Packages: Lessons from a Decade of rOpenSci Peer Review” on Sat, Aug 9, 2025 – 13:00–14:10 (EDT)

• Our Champion Erika Siregar is presenting “rPlaywright: Bringing Playwright’s Power to R for Scalable Web Automation”, Fri, Aug 8, 2025 – 18:15–19:30 (EDT)

• Our Champion Andrea Gomez Vargas is presenting “ARcenso: A Package Born from Chaos, Powered by Community” on Sat, Aug 9, 2025 – 13:00–14:10 (EDT)

• Luis D. Verde Arregoita is presenting “Bringing the fun of hex stickers to your R session” on Sun, Aug 10, 2025 – 10:30–12:00 (EDT)

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Coworking

Read all about coworking!

• Tuesday August 5th, 2025 9:00 AM Australia Western (01:00 UTC), “Drawing publication-ready plots using R” with Steffi LaZerte and cohost Emi Tanaka.
  • Work on some figures and plots for your own work;
  • Explore ways of making publication-ready plots in R;
  • Chat with Emi Tanaka about making publication-ready plots in R.
• Tuesday September 9th, 14:00 European Central (12:00 UTC), “Improving accessibility in your work” with Steffi LaZerte and cohost Silvia Canelón.
  • Explore where you might improve accessibility in your work;
  • Start making changes to improve accessibility;
  • Chat with Silvia Canelón about tools and techniques for improving accessibility.
• Tuesday October 7th, 09:00 Americas Pacific (16:00 UTC), “Ship your R package to the R-multiverse!” with Steffi LaZerte and cohost Will Landau.
  • Learn more about the R-multiverse;
  • Submit your package to the R-multiverse;
  • Chat with Will Landau, and learn more about the R-multiverse and how to submit your package.

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:

• sits, developed by Gilberto Camara together with Rolf Simoes, Felipe Souza, and Felipe Carlos: An end-to-end toolkit for land use and land cover classification using big Earth observation data, based on machine learning methods applied to satellite image data cubes, as described in Simoes et al (2021) https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13132428. It is available on CRAN. It has been reviewed by Michael Sumner, Jakub Nowosad, Edzer Pebesma, and the late Lorena Abad Crespo.

Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.

New versions

The following nine packages have had an update since the last newsletter: commonmark (v2.0.0), emodnet.wfs (v2.1.1), crul (v1.6.0), fellingdater (v1.2.0), lightr (v1.9.0), qpdf (v1.4.0), weathercan (v0.7.4), webchem (v1.3.1), and webmockr (v2.2.0).

Software Peer Review

There are sixteen recently closed and active submissions and 5 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:

• One at ‘6/approved’:

  • sits, Satellite Image Time Series Analysis for Earth Observation Data Cubes. Submitted by Gilberto Camara.

• Four at ‘4/review(s)-in-awaiting-changes’:

  • trud, Query the NHS TRUD API. Submitted by Alasdair Warwick.

  • SSARP, SSARP (Species-/Speciation-Area Relationship Projector). Submitted by kmartinet.

  • dataset, Create Data Frames that are Easier to Exchange and Reuse. Submitted by Daniel Antal.

  • pkgmatch, Find R Packages Matching Either Descriptions or Other R Packages. Submitted by mark padgham.

• Seven at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:

  • openFDA, openFDA API. Submitted by Simon Parker.

  • reviser, Tools for Studying Revision Properties in Real-Time Time Series Vintages. Submitted by Marc Burri.

  • rixpress, Build Reproducible Analytical Pipelines With Nix. Submitted by Bruno Rodrigues.

  • partialling.out, Residuals from partial regressions. Submitted by Marc Bosch. (Stats).

  • distionary, Create and Evaluate Probability Distributions. Submitted by Vincenzo Coia.

  • sasquatch, Use SAS, R, and quarto Together. Submitted by Ryan Zomorrodi.

  • read.abares, Provides simple downloading, parsing and importing of Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) data sources. Submitted by Adam H. Sparks.

• Two at ‘2/seeking-reviewer(s)’:

  • mantis, Multiple Time Series Scanner. Submitted by Phuong Quan.

  • galamm, Generalized Additive Latent and Mixed Models. Submitted by Øystein Sørensen. (Stats).

• Two at ‘1/editor-checks’:

  • SPARQLchunks, Run SPARQL Chunks and Inline Functions to Retrieve Data. Submitted by André Ourednik.

  • capybara, Fast and Memory Efficient Fitting of Linear Models With High-Dimensional. Submitted by Mauricio “Pachá” Vargas Sepúlveda.

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

On the blog

• Open Science with a Latin American Identity: Meet the New Cohort of the rOpenSci Champions Program by Ana Carolina Moreno, Diana Garcia Cortes, Erick Navarro Delgado, Guadalupe Pascal, Juan Camilo Rojas Hernandez, Lucía Rodríguez Planes, Valentina Clavijo Mesa, Mauro Loprete, Monika Avila Marquez, Soledad Araya Orrego, and Yanina Bellini Saibene. Introducing 10 new rOpenSci Champions — all from Latin America, representing diverse backgrounds and leading inspiring projects. Each of them is advancing open science from within their own communities. Other languages: Ciencia abierta con identidad latinoamericana: conocé al nuevo grupo de personas y proyectos del Programa de Campeon(e|a)s de rOpenSci (es).

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?.

• USAboundaries (and USAboundariesdata), historical and contemporary boundaries of the United States of America. Issue for volunteering.

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. 👀

Feedback wanted! CRAN Task View proposal for “Package Development and Maintenance”

Sharing a request by Heather Turner and Lluís Revilla.

There is a new CRAN Task View proposal for “Package Development and Maintenance”. This task view lists and comments on packages useful for package development and maintenance. The authors and the CRAN task View editorial team are looking for feedback. In particular, they’d especially like your feedback if you’re new to package development or find the idea of creating and maintaining a package intimidating (to avoid the “curse of knowledge”).

Regarding this task view, they’d like to know:

• Does it have most of the information you need to accomplish all the steps through development until your package is released?
• Does this help you understand which tools and packages can help you maintain your package working ?
• Is there any topic or step we missed? Or after reading the relevant topic section you still don’t feel confident on how to do it?

Read the proposal. Please submit your feedback directly in the repository or send the feedback through private channels to Lluís Revilla (email, Slack, …)

Cache values with automatic pruning: the cachem package

If you’re writing a wrapper for an API that has no regular caching headers, you might be interested in the cachem package for caching. Thanks to Tan Ho and Pieter Huybrechts for the tip. See its use in comtradr by Paul Bochtler.

A debugging tip

Miles McBain shared an interesting debugging tip in his post Dive()ing into the hunt #rstats, using a custom function to implement something like a ‘row-wise data debug’ mode!

How to prepare examples in your package for a CRAN submission

The CRAN cookbook by Jasmine Daly and Beni Altmann features a section called “Structuring of Examples” mentioning dontrun and friends and their use cases. Thanks to Hugo Gruson for the find!

Don’t ask “any updates on this?” on GitHub

Carlos Scheidegger, a developer of Quarto, wrote an interesting Bluesky thread about why it’s not considerate to write “any update on this?” on open bug reports or feature requests.

Carlos suggests that better alternatives are to “add new information to the post about how you want to use it, or other workarounds” which might give developers ideas for different fixes, or to simply upvote the request. But avoid “any updates?”, which is hard on the developer because all they can say is “no”, and they know that will disappoint people.

LLLM helpers: the chores package

The chores package by Simon Couch provides LLM helpers for tasks that are hard to automate, like converting your messages to using the cli R package. Its thoughtful documentation includes guidance on creating your own helpers.

LLM tools for R

Speaking of LLM tooling in R, Luis D. Verde Arregoitia maintains an extensive guide.

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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