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!

🔗 rOpenSci HQ

🔗 Recordings of useR! 2021

Recordings of useR! 2021 are now available on the conference website.

You can watch contributions by rOpenSci staff:

• Jeroen Ooms’ keynote talk about the R-universe project (slidedeck);

• Stefanie Butland’s talk rOpenSci’s Model for Managing a Federated Open Source Software Community (slidedeck);

• Mark Padgham’s talk on autotest, a package for automatic testing of packages;

• Maëlle Salmon’s tutorial GET better at testing your R package! (materials).

And you can also discover contributions by community members about rOpenSci packages and peer review:

• Andrea Gilardi’s talk osmextract: An R package to download, convert, and import large OpenStreetMap datasets (rOpenSci-reviewed osmextract package);

• Michael Mahoney’s talk Virtual Environments: Using R as a Frontend for 3D Rendering of Digital Landscapes (rOpenSci-reviewed terrainr package);

• Lluís Revilla Sancho’s talk Packages submission and reviews; how does it work?

Thanks to the volunteers team behind useR! 2021 for their work before, during and after the conference!

🔗 Recordings of AOS/SCO-SOC 2021

rOpenSci staff presented at this year’s joint meeting of the American Ornithological Society and the Society of Canadian Ornithologists / Société des ornithologistes du Canada in the lightning symposium “Great R packages for ornithologists” organized by Steffi LaZerte:

• Steffi LaZerte’s opening talk How can ornithologists find R packages? (slidedeck);

• Mark Padgham’s talk osmdata: Roadless areas and avian diversity (source).

🔗 Social coworking!

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be hosting monthly social coworking + office hours sessions via Zoom, starting September 7th! Coworking is a great way to be productive and reduce feelings of social isolation (especially important over the last year)! Our first two sessions take place Tuesday September 7th 2021 9-11am American Pacific hosted by Steffi LaZerte and Tuesday October 5th 2021 9-11am Australian Western hosted by Nick Tierney. Find more details in our blog post.

🔗 Software ?

🔗 New packages

No new package this month, but you can browse our current suite of packages, and read more about Software Peer Review.

🔗 New versions

The following seventeen packages have had an update since the latest newsletter: beastier (v2.4.5), beautier (v2.6.2), c14bazAAR (2.4.1), exoplanets (v0.2.2), helminthR (v1.0.9), MODIStsp (v2.0.6), nasapower (v4.0.0), nodbi (v0.4.3), osmdata (v0.1.6), osmextract (v0.3.1), piggyback (v0.1.0), rerddap (v0.7.6), rfishbase (slb-21.04), rglobi (v0.2.25), tarchetypes (0.3.0), targets (0.7.0), terrainr (v0.5.0-r).

🔗 Software Peer Review

There are twelve recently closed and active submissions and 6 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:

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

  • rsat, Tools for Downloading, Customizing, and Processing Time Series of Satellite Images from Landsat, MODIS, and Sentinel. Submitted by Unai Pérez-Goya.

  • gendercoder, Recodes Sex/Gender Descriptions Into A Standard Set. Submitted by Emily Kothe.

  • slopes, Calculate Slopes of Roads, Rivers and Trajectories. Submitted by RFlx.

  • healthdatacsv, Access data in the healthdata.gov catalog. Submitted by iecastro.

  • chemspiderapi, R Wrapper for ChemSpider’s API Services. Submitted by Raoul Wolf.

• Five at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:

  • excluder, Checks for Exclusion Criteria in Online Data. Submitted by Jeffrey Stevens.

  • allodb, Tree Biomass Estimation at Extratropical Forest Plots. Submitted by Erika Gonzalez-Akre.

  • ROriginStamp, Interface to OriginStamp API to Obtain Trusted Time Stamps. Submitted by Rainer M Krug.

  • jagstargets, Targets for JAGS Workflows. Submitted by Will Landau.

  • occCite, Querying and Managing Large Biodiversity Occurrence Datasets. Submitted by Hannah Owens.

• Two at ‘1/editor-checks’:

  • phruta, Phylogenetic Reconstruction and Time-dating. Submitted by Cristian Román-Palacios.

  • rdbhapi, Interface to DBH-API. Submitted by Marija Ninic.

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

🔗 On the blog

• The Story Behind censo2017, the First rOpenSci Package to be Reviewed in Spanish by Pachá (aka Mauricio Vargas Sepúlveda). Chilean census tables at a glance.

• La Historia de censo2017, el Primer Paquete de rOpenSci Revisado en Español by Pachá (aka Mauricio Vargas Sepúlveda). Las tablas del Censo de Chile al instante.

• rOpenSci Introduces Monthly Social Coworking and Office Hours by Steffi LaZerte, Stefanie Butland, Nicholas Tierney. Work, meet other developers, get your questions answered, and/or socialize.

🔗 Citations

No new citations added to our database this month (browse all citations).

🔗 Use cases

Four use cases of our packages and resources have been reported since we sent the last newsletter.

• Investigating the drought in the Canadian prairies. Reported by Alex Koiter.

• targets pipeline with RMarkdown to download and visualize USGS data. Reported by Lindsay Platt.

• Answering ‘what colour is London?’ with magick and rtweet. Reported by Matt Dray.

• Informal package review using rOpenSci review template. Reported by Hugo Gruson.

Explore other use cases and report your own!

🔗 Call for maintainers

There’s no open call for new maintainers at this point but you can refer to our contributing guide for finding ways to get involved!

As the maintainer of an rOpenSci package, feel free to contact us on Slack or email [email protected] to get your call for maintainer featured in the next newsletter.

🔗 Package development corner

Some useful tips for R package developers. ?

Do you maintain an R package on CRAN that has some tricky tests e.g. accessing a web API? With the tools presented in the online book “HTTP testing in R” you can build some more robustness in your tests by e.g. using cached API responses instead of hitting the actual web service. However, bad things can still happen on CRAN therefore a whole chapter is dedicated to CRAN preparedness, with the suggestion to skip a few tests or even all of them… as long as you are running them regularly yourself on some CI service.

Have you ever gotten the R CMD check NOTE “Namespace in Imports field not imported from” on some CRAN check platform for instance? It might indicate you forgot to remove a dependency from DESCRIPTION after ditching it from actual code… or that you are using it at the top-level rather than in the body of a function, which is where that check looks for usage! E.g. if you use memoise to create a memoised version of a function m_bla <- memoise::memoise(bla), you will have to add an explicit import statement e.g. #' @importFrom memoise memoise with roxygen2. Thanks to rOpenSci Mark Padgham, and to Jim Hester for chiming in rOpenSci semi-open slack.

🔗 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.

If you haven’t subscribed to our newsletter yet, you can do so via a form. Until it’s time for our next newsletter, you can keep in touch with us via our website and Twitter account.