rOpenSci News Digest, October 2025

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

2025-11-06 Community call: Graceful Internet Packages

Join us for our next Community Call, “Graceful Internet Packages”, on Thursday, 06 November 2025 at 15:00 UTC featuring Matthias Grenié, Tan Ho, and Salix Dubois. In this session, we’ll explore how to design and maintain R packages that interact with online data sources. Our speakers will share practical lessons, examples, and best practices to help R package developers create reliable packages.

Community call recording: R-multiverse, a new way to publish R packages

Resources associated with the community call, including the video recording, slides, notes have been posted.

You can also find the notes from the related coworking session on our website.

Coworking

Read all about coworking!

• Tuesday November 3rd, 09:00 Australia Western (01:00 UTC), “Code Review with rOpenSci” with Steffi LaZerte and cohost Liz Hare.
  • Explore resources for Code review;
  • Sign up to volunteer to do software peer-review at rOpenSci;
  • Chat with Liz Hare, and learn more about rOpenSci’s code review and the resources available.
• Tuesday December 2nd, 14h00 Europe Central (13:00 UTC), “Getting to know The Carpentries” with Steffi LaZerte and cohost Angelique Trusler.
  • Visit The Carpentries;
  • Meet community host, Angelique Trusler, and learn more about The Carpentries and how you might get involved.
• Tuesday January 13th, 9:00 Americas Pacific (17:00 UTC), “Let it go!” with Steffi LaZerte and cohost Yanina Bellini Saibene.
  • Spend some time reviewing the forums, Slack workspaces, Newsletters, RSS feeds (etc. etc.) you’re subscribed to;
  • Unsubscribe to all you no longer need (Let it go!);
  • Meet co-host, Yanina Bellini Saibene, and discuss strategies for this New Year decluttering of your digital (or perhaps not-so-digital) life. 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:

• partialling.out, developed by Marc Bosch-Matas: Creates a data frame with the residuals of partial regressions of the main explanatory variable and the variable of interest. This method follows the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell theorem, as explained in Lovell (2008) https://doi.org/10.3200/JECE.39.1.88-91. It is available on CRAN. It has been reviewed by Christian Testa, Kyle Butts, and Adam Loy.

Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.

New versions

The following fourteen packages have had an update since the last newsletter: saperlipopette (v0.1.0), datapack (1.4.2), fingertipsR (v1.1.0), googleLanguageR (v0.3.1.1), lingtypology (v1.1.24), occCite (v0.6.1), openalexR (v2.0.2), partialling.out (cran), spatsoc (v0.2.11), stats19 (v3.4.0), tidyhydat (v0.7.2), USAboundaries (v0.5.0), USAboundariesData (v0.5.0), and weathercan (v0.7.6).

Software Peer Review

There are fifteen recently closed and active submissions and 3 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:

• Four at ‘5/awaiting-reviewer(s)-response’:

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

  • distionary, Create and Evaluate Probability Distributions. Submitted by Vincenzo Coia, Ph.D., P.Stat..

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

  • 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.

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

  • babelquarto, Renders a Multilingual Quarto Book. Submitted by Maëlle Salmon.

  • openFDA, openFDA API. Submitted by Simon Parker.

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

• Three at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:

  • rcrisp, Automate the Delineation of Urban River Spaces. Submitted by Claudiu Forgaci. (Stats).

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

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

• Five at ‘1/editor-checks’:

  • ernest, A Toolkit for Nested Sampling. Submitted by Kyle Dewsnap. (Stats).

  • coevolve, Fit Bayesian Generalized Dynamic Phylogenetic Models using Stan. Submitted by Scott Claessens. (Stats).

  • priorsense, Prior Diagnostics and Sensitivity Analysis. Submitted by Noa Kallioinen. (Stats).

  • 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

• rOpenSci Code of Conduct Committee Templates by Yanina Bellini Saibene, Natalia Morandeira, and Mark Padgham. rOpenSci has a stablish Code of Conduct Committee and process for their functioning. We use templates to support our work and we share these templates in this blog post.

• Recognition Beyond Blog Post Authors by Maëlle Salmon and Yanina Bellini Saibene. How we acknowledge different types of contributions to our blog. Other languages: Reconociendo contribuciones más allá de la autoría en los artículos de blog (es), Reconnaissance au-delà des auteur·rice·s de billets de blog (fr).

• Go for Launch! Packages Shipped to the R-Multiverse by Maëlle Salmon. Packages submitted to the R-multiverse during our recent coworking session. Other languages: ¡Prepárense para el lanzamiento! Paquetes enviados al R-multiverse (es), En route pour le lancement ! Paquets expédiés au R-Multiverse (fr).

Tech Notes

• A Primer on Domain Verification by Maëlle Salmon. How domain verification helps against impersonation and takeover attacks, and how to use it.

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?.

grainchanger, data aggregation methods for raster data. Issue for volunteering.

photosearcher, searches Flickr for photographs and metadata. 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. 👀

Community over code

In his post reflecting on Arrow’s 10 year anniversary, Neal Richardson provides interesting insights including:

“These values are capped off by the foundation’s mantra, “community over code,” which means that focusing on how people work together is more important than technical purity.”

Felienne Hermans’ AI newsletter

Felienne Hermans now translates her excellent weekly AI newsletter to English!

AI helping find potential issues in software

Daniel Stenberg, creator and maintainer of curl, posted that “Joshua Rogers sent us a massive list of potential issues in #curl that he found using his set of AI assisted tools…Mostly smaller bugs, but still bugs and there could be one or two actual security flaws in there. Actually truly awesome findings.”.

Two Git tricks

git blame helps you explore the history of a file to understand why certain lines were added or modified.

Now, do you know how to…

• find out which Git commit deleted a file? You can do that by filtering commits that touched that path: git log --oneline -- path/to/file.

• find out which Git commit deleted a line? You can do that with git log -S<string> path/to/file or git log -G<regex> path/to/file.

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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