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!

Tomáš Kalibera (1978–2026)

The rOpenSci team is deeply saddened at the loss of Tomáš Kalibera, a member of R-Core and contributor to the R community for almost 10 years. Tomáš passed away on April 1.  Our thoughts are with Tomáš’s friends and family at this time. 

Read Jan Vitek’s remembrance of Tomáš.

rOpenSci HQ

New editors Alec Robitaille and Lucy D’Agostino McGowan

We’re excited to welcome Alec Robitaille and Lucy D’Agostino McGowan as new editors. Alec joins our general review team, and Lucy our statistical software review team. Read more in the post introducing them!

Champions Program update

We’re excited to share that we’ve finished selecting the new cohort for the rOpenSci Champions Program! This was not an easy process. The quality of the proposals was exceptionally high, which made the selection both challenging and inspiring. We’re grateful to everyone who applied and shared their ideas with us. Please join us in welcoming our new Champions: Bastián Olea Herrera, Durga Valentina Linares Herrera, José Daniel Conejeros, Denisse Fierro Arcos, Evelia Lorena Coss Navarrete, Gladys Choque Ulloa, Linda Jazmín Cabrera Orellana, Patricia Andrea Loto, Marina Cecilia Cock, María Florencia Tames, and Estefanía Torrejón.

Over the coming months, they will contribute to the R Community through developing new packages, reviewing packages, and submitting packages for peer review. We’re looking forward to working with this amazing group and supporting their projects!

Collaborating between Bioconductor and R-universe on Development of Common Infrastructure

Bioconductor is collaborating with R-universe to gradually modernize parts of its infrastructure, while accommodating the project’s scale, governance, and established processes. In turn, Bioconductor is helping R-universe expand and refine its features as we learn to serve the complex needs of the Bioconductor community. Read more in the blog post.

rOpenSci Staff presentations

Yanina Bellini Saibene at R/Medicine 2026

Yani will deliver her keynote talk “Software Sustainability and Community Management” on Thursday May 7th, 11:15AM–12:15PM ET.

Jeroen Ooms at “Where Do R Packages Live?”

Jeroen will take part in an online discussion panel on Wednesday 20 May at 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM (AEST). The panel is organized by the Statistical Computing and Visualisation section of the Statistical Society of Australia (details).

Updates to the goodpractice R package

We have long recommended the goodpractice package, which identifies issues with R packages, and advises how to fix them. Thanks to a huge amount of work by valued community member Athanasia Mo Mowinckel, goodpractice has been extended and improved to include entirely new suites of checks, and improved ability to control which checks are run. A blog post describing the updates will be published soon, but in the meantime, we encourage you to install the current development version and try it out yourself.

Analyse your targets pipeline

Following our blog post about tree-sitter, Tyler Morgan Wall was inspired to create a static analysis tool for targets pipelines (as a VS Code extension).

Coworking

Read all about coworking!

• 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.
• Tuesday June 2nd 2026, 14:00 Europe Central (12:00 UTC) [theme to be determined], with Steffi LaZerte and cohost to be determined.
  • Explore resources related to the theme
  • Meet the cohost, and other attendees, and discuss the theme or other topics.

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!

Editors’ Office Hours

We are exploring hosting a new event, Editors’ Office Hours, where you can drop in to ask questions about rOpenSci Software Peer Review on or near the third Tuesday of each month, alternating among timezones to accommodate different parts of the world.

Upcoming office hours:

• Tuesday May 19, 16:00-17:00 Europe Central (14:00-15:00 UTC) (event)

useR! 2026 Diversity Scholarship Program

useR! 2026 is offering diversity scholarships to support participation from people in underrepresented or historically marginalized groups within the R community. The program includes both registration fee waivers and full needs-based scholarships, which cover conference registration as well as travel and lodging (via reimbursement). Applications are open to eligible participants worldwide until May 10, and will be reviewed based on need, eligibility, and potential impact by a committee from Forwards, RLadies+ Global, and rOpenSci.

Found all the details and important links on the conference website: https://user2026.r-project.org/additional/diversity_scholarship.html

Software 📦

New packages

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

• reviser, developed by Marc Burri together with Philipp Wegmueller: Analyzes revisions in real-time time series vintages. The package converts between wide revision triangles and tidy long vintages, extracts selected releases, computes revision series, visualizes vintage paths, and summarizes revision properties such as bias, dispersion, autocorrelation, and news-noise diagnostics. It also identifies efficient releases and estimates state-space models for revision nowcasting. Methods are based on Howrey (1978) https://doi.org/10.2307/1924972, Jacobs and Van Norden (2011) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconom.2010.04.010, and Kishor and Koenig (2012) https://doi.org/10.1198/jbes.2010.08169. It has been reviewed.

Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.

New versions

The following ten packages have had an update since the last newsletter: osmextract (v0.6.0), Athlytics (v1.0.5), emodnet.wfs (v2.1.2), fellingdater (v1.2.1), readODS (v2.3.5), git2rdata (v0.5.2), weatherOz (v3.0.0), promoutils (v0.5.0), allcontributors (v0.2.3), and reviser (v0.1.1).

The writexl package has a new maintainer, Bill Denney. NLMR is now maintained by Jakub Nowosad.

Software Peer Review

There are eighteen recently closed and active submissions and 4 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:

• One at ‘6/approved’:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • ActiGlobe, Wearable Recording Processor for Time Shift Adjustment and Data Analysis. Submitted by C. William Yao.

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

• Five at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:

  • 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.

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

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

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

• Three at ‘2/seeking-reviewer(s)’:

  • EpiStrainDynamics, Infer temporal trends of multiple pathogens. Submitted by Saras Windecker. (Stats).

  • lakefetch, Calculate Fetch and Wave Exposure for Lake Sampling Points. Submitted by jeremylfarrell.

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

• Three at ‘1/editor-checks’:

  • ciecl, International Classification of Diseases ICD-10/ICD-11 for Chile. Submitted by Rodolfo Tasso.

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

  • 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

• reviser: Analyzing Real-Time Data Revisions in R by Marc Burri. A short introduction to reviser for analyzing real-time data vintages and revisions in R.

• Expanding the Editorial Team: Alec Robitaille and Lucy D’Agostino McGowan Join as Editors by Alec Robitaille, Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, and Yanina Bellini Saibene. Introducing two new editors for rOpenSci statistical software peer review.

• Collaborating between Bioconductor and R-universe on Development of Common Infrastructure by The rOpenSci Team and The Bioconductor Team. R-consortium ISC top-level project R-universe is working with Bioconductor to help gradually modernize parts of its infrastructure, while accommodating the project’s scale, governance, and established processes.

Tech Notes

• A Better R Programming Experience Thanks to Tree-sitter by Maëlle Salmon. Modern tooling for parsing, searching, formatting, editing R code, just like for other programming languages.

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?.

• 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 information for R package developers. 👀

Useless code, duplicated function? Refactoring with Jarl

The Jarl CLI by Étienne Bacher received several useful new features for package developers:

• unused_function
• duplicated_function_definition.

They are a nice complement to unreachable_code.

Read more in the release announcement.

Git commands to get to know a project

Ally Piechowski wrote an insightful post entitled “The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code”, which suggests Git commands which are useful for understanding the code base. For instance a command to determine which files recently changed the most!

To complement this post, Garrick Aden-Buie wrote “a little git-recon bash script that runs them in series, complete with some ascii bar plots”.

Another R mailing list archive

Last month we listed several ways to browse the R mailing lists. Newsletter reader Florian Kohrt kindly wrote to us to mention the plain text backup maintained by Michael Chirico.

Will R run out of random seeds? Useful seed explainer

Andrew Heiss published an useful and interesting deep dive into random seeds.

Enforcing the coalesce operator

Are you enjoying the coalesce operator %||% introduced in R 4.4.0?

L %||% R newly in base is an expressive idiom for the phrases if(!is.null(L)) L else R or if(is.null(L)) R else L.

Consider enforcing it via Jarl or lintr.

As a reminder, the operator can be used in older versions of R through the backports R package or by importing it from rlang.

Positive AI reading

If you’re feeling some AI dread, you might enjoy:

• The blog post “Antidote” by Vicky Boykis;
• The talk “Is my degree worthless” by Davis Vaughan.

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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