This post describes a few different aspects behind the scenes of the development of dittodb which recently went through the rOpenSci peer review process and was released to CRAN on 24 July 2020. This isn’t an introduction to the package itself (that’s available on dittodb’s site), but rather a ... [Read more...]

osfr provides a (hopefully) convenient R interface to OSF (Open Science Framework, https://www.osf.io), a free service for managing research developed by the Center for Open Science (COS). osfr completed its rOpenSci peer-review earlier this year and has been available on CRAN since February. Throughout its development and ... [Read more...]

In October last year we wrote about the CRAN Checks API (https://cranchecks.info). Since then there have been four new major items introduced: documentation, notifications, search, and a new version of the cchecks R package. First, an introduction to the API for those not familiar. CRAN Checks API The ... [Read more...]

Webinars and community calls are a great way to gather many people to discuss a specific topic, without the logistic hurdles of in-person events. But whether online or in-person, to reach the broadest audience, all events should work towards greater accessibility. In particular, it is difficult for people who are ... [Read more...]

In March we held a Community Call discussing the maintenance of R packages. This call included a starting presentation by Julia Silge followed by a discussion featuring panelists with a wide variety of backgrounds: Elin Waring, Erin Grand, Leonardo Collado-Torres and Scott Chamberlain. The rOpenSci Package Maintenance Community Call was ... [Read more...]

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rOpenSci HQ The rOpenSci team, together with ten expert community members, put together a post: When Field or Lab Work is not an Option - Leveraging Open Data Resources for Remote Research. We highlighted examples of how specific collections of packages are being used right now in fields as varied ... [Read more...]

This week we released a major new version of the rsvg package on CRAN. This package provides R bindings to librsvg2 which is a powerful system library for rendering svg images into bitmaps that can be displayed, or use for further processing in for example the magick package. The biggest ... [Read more...]

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Our website is based on Markdown content rendered with Hugo. Markdown content is in some cases knit from R Markdown, but with less functionality than if one rendered R Markdown to html as in the blogdown default. In particular, we cannot use the usual BibTex + CSL + Pandoc-citeproc dance to handle ... [Read more...]

Thanks to a quite overdue update of Hugo on our build system1, our website can now harness the full power of Hugo code highlighting for Markdown-based content. What’s code highlighting apart from the reason behind a tongue-twister in this post title? In this post we shall explain how Hugo’... [Read more...]

Whilst working on the blog guide, Stefanie Butland and I consolidated knowledge we had already gained, but it was also the opportunity to up our Rmd/Hugo technical game. Our website uses Hugo but not blogdown1 to render posts: every post is based on an .md file that is either ... [Read more...]

Leave the code cleaner than you found it. – R.C. Martin in Clean Code The R language has become very popular among scientists and analysts because it enables the rapid development of software and empowers scientific investigation. However, regardless of the language used, data analysis is usually complicated. Because of ... [Read more...]

rOpenSci HQ The recording, collaborative notes and links to community discussion and resources are up for our latest Community Call on Maintaining an R package. Panel moderated by Julia Silge included Elin Waring, Erin Grand, Leonardo Collado-Torres, and Scott Chamberlain.   Software Peer Review 1 staff-contributed package passed software peer review. parzer ... [Read more...]

One of the first things I took on when I started at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology was creating the auk R package for accessing eBird data. The entire eBird dataset can be downloaded as a massive text file, called the eBird Basic Dataset (EBD), and auk pulls out manageable ... [Read more...]

rOpenSci Software Peer Review’s guidance has been compiled in an online book for more than one year now. We’ve just released its fourth version. To find out what’s new in our dev guide 0.4.0, you can read the changelog, or this blog post for more digested information. Note ... [Read more...]

After soliciting, reviewing, and publishing over 100 blog posts and tech notes by rOpenSci community members, we have created the rOpenSci Blog Guide for Authors and Editors to address many frequently asked questions and frequently given suggestions. Technically, we structured the content as a bookdown gitbook. It was Stef’s first ... [Read more...]

parzer is a new package for handling messy geographic coordinates. The first version is now on CRAN, with binaries coming soon hopefully (see note about installation below). The package recently completed rOpenSci review. parzer motivation The idea for this package started with a tweet from Noam Ross (https://twitter.com/... [Read more...]

“Continuous Integration” (CI) has become a standard for proper software development. Checking the integrity of software after changes have been made is essential to ensure its proper functionality. Also, CI helps catch problems introduced by dependencies early when executed on a regular basis (usually done via scheduled CRON runs). Multiple ... [Read more...]

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