rOpenSci News Digest, March 2026

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

rOpenSci Dev Guide 1.0.0: Trilingual and Improved

rOpenSci Software Peer Review’s guidance is gathered in an online book that keeps improving! It is now available in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Read more in the release announcement

Champions Program Update

We are still going through the Champions selection process, and we’re excited to share that the new group of mentors has already been selected and is now actively reviewing Champions applications.

This cohort brings together a wonderful mix of returning Champions stepping into mentorship roles, mentors continuing their contributions, and new members joining the program. The 2026 mentors are Andrea Gómez Vargas, Pablo Paccioretti, Alber Hamersson Sánchez Ipia, Erick Isaac Navarro Delgado, Francisco Cardozo, Luis Verde Arregoitia, Monika Ávila Márquez, Guadalupe Pascal, Pao Corrales, and Elio Campitelli. Together, they represent a diverse and vibrant community across Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia, with some currently based in Switzerland, Canada, the United States, and Australia. We’re very happy to see this growing, interconnected network supporting the next cohort of Champions.

R-Universe update

You can now download artifacts and log files from R-Universe without being logged in with a GitHub account, for example https://ropensci.r-universe.dev/opencv#checktable.

Software review and usage of AI tools

Authors submitting new software for peer review are now required to explain potential usage of generative AI tools in their package development. All submission templates now include a mandatory check-box:

- [ ] Generative AI tools were used to produce some of the material in this submission.
If so, please describe usage, and include links to any relevant aspects of your repository.

This is the start of our updates to accommodate generative AI tools in package development, as described in our recent blog post. The next phase will involve updates to our Dev Guide, explaining requirements and recommendations for authors, reviewers, and editors. All updates are intended to permit generative AI tools to be used in any useful way, while minimising the burden on those who volunteer their own time to keep our software peer review service running.

Software review bot updates

The ropensci-review-bot now delivers an initial report to all new software pre-submissions and submissions, identifying the five most similar packages from both all rOpenSci packages, and all CRAN packages. The matches are generated by our ropensci-review-tools/pkgmatch package (itself reviewed in this review issue). Matching is based on an “term frequency-inverse document frequency” algorithm, using inverse document frequencies from all rOpenSci and CRAN packages. Similar package reports can also be manually triggered (by editors only) with @ropensci-review-bot similar packages, like in this example for the pkgmatch package itself.

Coworking

Read all about coworking!

• Tuesday April 7th 2026, 9:00 Americas Pacific (16:00 UTC) “Getting to know the CSID Network” with Steffi LaZerte and cohosts Irene Ramos and Adamu Saleh Saidu.
  • Learn more about the CSID Network
  • Meet cohosts, Irene Ramos and Adamu Saleh Saidu, and learn more about the CSID Network and how you might get involved.
• Tuesday May 5th 2026, 9:00 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
  • Meet cohost, Liz Hare, and discuss resources for Code Review with rOpenSci.

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:

• suwo, developed by Marcelo Araya-Salas together with Jorge Elizondo-Calvo and Alejandro Rico-Guevara: Streamline searching/downloading of nature media files (e.g. audios, photos) from online repositories. The package offers functions for obtaining media metadata from online repositories, downloading associated media files and updating data sets with new records. It has been reviewed by Eric R. Scott and Hugo Gruson.

Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.

New versions

The following eleven packages have had an update since the last newsletter: cffr (v1.3.0), pkgmatch (v0.5.2), tarchetypes (0.14.1), rgbif (v3.8.5), saperlipopette (v0.1.1), gutenbergr (v0.5.0), trud (v0.2.1), naijR (v0.7.0), sasquatch (v0.1.3), lingtypology (v1.1.25), and rerddap (v1.2.3).

Post on dfms release: Releasing dfms 1.0: Fast and Feature-Rich Estimation of Dynamic Factor Models in R.

Software Peer Review

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

• One at ‘6/approved’:

  • suwo, Access Nature Media Repositories Through R. Submitted by Marcelo Araya-Salas.

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

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

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

  • logolink, An Interface for Running NetLogo Simulations. Submitted by Daniel Vartanian.

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

• Six at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:

  • pvEBayes, Empirical Bayes Methods for Pharmacovigilance. Submitted by Yihao Tan. (Stats).

  • saperlipopette, Create Example Git Messes. Submitted by Maëlle Salmon.

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

  • 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.

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

• Two at ‘2/seeking-reviewer(s)’:

  • nycOpenData, Convenient Access to NYC Open Data API Endpoints. Submitted by Christian Martinez.

  • RAMEN, RAMEN: Regional Association of Methylome variability with the Exposome and geNome. Submitted by Erick Navarro-Delgado.

• Three at ‘1/editor-checks’:

  • RAQSAPI, A Simple Interface to the US EPA Air Quality System Data Mart API. Submitted by mccroweyclinton-EPA.

  • fcmconfr, Fuzzy Cognitive Map Analysis in R. Submitted by benroston. (Stats).

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

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

On the blog

Software Review

• Software Review in the Era of AI: What We Are Testing at rOpenSci by Mark Padgham, Noam Ross, Maëlle Salmon, Yanina Bellini Saibene, Mauro Lepore, Emily Riederer, Jouni Helske, and Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez. rOpenSci is testing preliminary policies on the use of generative AI tools, with proposed updates to documentation and procedures for authors submitting software for review, for editors, and for reviewers.

• rOpenSci Dev Guide 1.0.0: Trilingual and Improved by Maëlle Salmon, Mark Padgham, and Noam Ross. Updates in version 1.0.0 of the online book ‘rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review’. Other languages: rOpenSci Dev Guide 1.0.0: Trilingüe y mejorada (es), Guia de desenvolvimento da rOpenSci 1.0.0: trilíngue e aprimorado (pt).

• Breaking Release of the patentsview R Package by Russ Allen and Chris Baker. Breaking Release of the patentsview R Package.

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?.

• NLMR, R package to simulate neutral landscape models. Issue for volunteering.

• landscapetools, R package for some of the less-glamorous tasks involved in landscape analysis. Issue for volunteering.

• hddtools, Tools to discover hydrological data, accessing catalogues and databases from various data providers. Issue for volunteering.

• qualtRics, download Qualtrics survey data. 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. 👀

A new R core member!

The R Foundation announced that Heather Turner has joined the R Core Team! 🎉

How to browse the R mailing lists

The official mailing lists of the R project like R-package-devel are full of important and useful information. How to browse them, given that the default website is not easy to search? You can use the mail-archive website (thanks to Hugo Gruson for the reminder!) or a new project by James Balamuta: the R Mailing Lists Archive!

“Claude Code: Setting up ast-grep with R support”

Thanks to Mauro Lepore for sharing this blog post by Emil Hvitfeldt: “Claude Code: Setting up ast-grep with R support”. ast-grep is a tool for querying code by syntax rather than brittle regular expressions. The blog post describes how to add R support to this tool, and how to take advantage of it when using Claude.

On muffling messages from packages

A follow-up on our post “Please Shut Up! Verbosity Control in Packages”.

• With the {cli} R package you can change the default handler for messages. See the docs. It seems mostly used to muffle messages, e.g. in flir.
• Here’s how the usethis R package muffles gert message selectively.

Last words

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