With services like Google Maps, finding the fastest route from A to B has become quick, cheap, and easy. Not just for driving but walking, cycling and public transport too. But in the field of transport studies, we often want not only a single route, but thousands or millions of ... [Read more...]

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rOpenSci HQ On behalf of rOpenSci, thank you to everyone who has contributed their creativity, curiosity, smarts, and time in the last year. Read our Thank You, 2019. Software Peer Review 3 community-contributed packages passed... [Read more...]

Dealing with taxonomic inconsistencies within and across datasets is a fundamental challenge of ecology and evolutionary biology. Accounting for species synonyms, taxa splitting and unification is especially important as aggregation of data across time and different data sources becomes increasingly common. One potentially powerful approach for addressing these issues is ... [Read more...]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Dickens might have meant it figuratively, but in the case of the rOpenSci OzUnconf 2019, we mean it literally. Set to the backdrop of a national emergency that is still ongoing from 11-13 December, our participants came from across ... [Read more...]

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babette 1 is a package to work with BEAST2 2, a software platform for Bayesian evolutionary analysis from R. babette is a spin-off of my own academic research. As a PhD I work on models of diversification: mathematical descriptions of how species form new species. Instead of working on a species’ individuals, ... [Read more...]

One year ago, we released our new Code of Conduct. At that time, the Code of Conduct Committee (authors of this post) agreed to do an annual review of the text, reporting form, and our internal guidelines. We have made one change to the Code of Conduct text. Because some ... [Read more...]

In January 2019, we announced the release of rOpenSci’s Code of Conduct version 2.0. This includes a named Committee, greater detail about unacceptable behaviors, instructions on how to make a report, and information on how reports are handled. We are committed to transparency with our community while upholding of victims and ... [Read more...]

We mean it. On behalf of rOpenSci, thank you to everyone who has contributed their creativity, curiosity, smarts, and time in the last year. We are fortunate to have paid staff who work to build technical and social infrastructure to... [Read more...]

Want to get some hands-on insights into running an open source community? Here’s an opportunity to work with me, rOpenSci’s Community Manager, on some non-code community-related work. I am looking for someone to work 1 day a week ... [Read more...]

rOpenSci HQ rOpenSci Announces a New $896k Award From The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to Improve the Scientific Package Ecosystem for R. We’re excited to announce a new member of our team! Introducing Mark Padgham, rOpenSci’s new Software Research Scientist NumFOCUS recognizes Melina Vidoni and Will Landau ... [Read more...]

Last year we reported on the joy of using commonmark and xml2 to parse Markdown content, like the source of this website built with Hugo, in particular to extract links, at the time merely to count them. How about we go a bit further and use the same approach to ... [Read more...]

Testing is a crucial component to any software package. Testing makes sure that your code does what you expect it to do; and importantly, makes it safer to make changes moving forward because a good test suite will tell you if a change has broken existing functionality. Our recent community ... [Read more...]

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We’re thrilled to be introducing a new member of our team. Mark Padgham has joined rOpenSci as a Software Research Scientist working full-time from Münster, Germany. Mark will play a key role in research and development of statistical software standards and expanding our efforts in software peer review, ... [Read more...]

The United States Deparment of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service (USDA-NASS) provides a wide range of agricultural data that includes animal, crop, demographic, economic, and environmental measures across a number of geographies and time periods. This data is available by direct download or queriable via the Quick Stats interface. While ... [Read more...]

rOpenSci thrives because of volunteer contributions from community members - submitting and reviewing R packages, serving as editors for software peer review, writing blog posts, sharing information about packages and resources, contributing code and documentation and answering others’ questions. Recently our fiscal sponsor, NumFOCUS, gave us an opportunity to nominate ... [Read more...]

Studies of muscle physiology often rely on closed-source, proprietary software for not only recording data but also for data wrangling and analyses. Although specialized software might be necessary to record data from highly-specialized equipment, data wrangling and analyses should be free from this constraint. It’s becoming more common for ... [Read more...]

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