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

Coworking sessions resume!

Join us for social coworking & office hours monthly on first Tuesdays! Hosted by Steffi LaZerte and various community hosts. Everyone welcome. No RSVP needed. Consult our Events page to find your local time and how to join.

• Tuesday, 06 September 2022 9 AM North American Pacific / 16:00 UTC “Teaching with R” Hosted by rOpenSci community manager Yanina Bellini Saibene and Steffi LaZerte

  • Cowork on a project of your choice;
  • Work on R-related lessons;
  • Learn teaching-related R packages;
  • Or chat with Yanina and others to discuss teaching in or with R.

• Tuesday, 04 October 2022 9 AM Australian Western / 1:00 UTC “Start writing that package!” Hosted by community host Nick Tierney and Steffi LaZerte

  • Cowork on a project of your choice;
  • Take time to look up how to write a package;
  • Start putting together that package you’ve always meant to;
  • Or talk to Nick Tierney and others about how to get started.

Find out about more events.

New pkgcheck check for undocumented return values

Our pkgcheck checks now include an additional check that all functions have documented return values. This check is run on all new CRAN submissions, yet is not currently implemented on any other standard check systems (including R CMD check). Checking your packages with pkgcheck will now catch any functions which do not document return values, like in the report on this recent submission. All current checks are also listed in a new vignette.

Software 📦

New packages

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

• spiro, developed by Simon Nolte: Import, process, summarize and visualize raw data from metabolic carts. It has been reviewed by Manuel Ramon, and James Hunter.

Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.

New versions

The following twenty-nine packages have had an update since the last newsletter: av (v0.8.0), babette (v2.3.2), beastier (v2.4.11), beautier (v.2.6.5), cffr (v0.2.3), circle (v0.7.2), datefixR (v1.1.0), drake (7.13.4), epair (v1.1.0), getCRUCLdata (v0.3.3), gittargets (0.0.4), GSODR (v3.1.5), mauricer (v2.5.2), mctq (v0.3.0), nasapower (v4.0.8), nodbi (v0.8.1), occCite (v0.5.6), rdhs (0.7.5), rglobi (v0.2.28), spiro (v0.1.0), stantargets (0.0.5), stplanr (v1.0.1), tarchetypes (0.7.0), targets (0.13.1), terrainr (v0.7.1), tidyhydat (0.5.6), tidytags (v1.0.2), tinkr (0.1.0), and unifir (v0.2.2).

Software Peer Review

There are sixteen recently closed and active submissions and 1 submission on hold. Issues are at different stages:

• One at ‘6/approved’:

  • spiro, Manage Data from Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing. Submitted by Simon Nolte.

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

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

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

  • hudr, A R interface for accessing HUD (US Department of Housing and Urban Development) APIs. Submitted by Emmet Tam.

  • octolog, Better Github Action Logging. Submitted by Jacob Wujciak-Jens.

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

• Five at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:

  • melt, Multiple Empirical Likelihood Tests. Submitted by Eunseop Kim.

  • daiquiri, Data Quality Reporting for Temporal Datasets. Submitted by Phuong Quan.

  • canaper, Categorical Analysis of Neo- And Paleo-Endemism. Submitted by Joel Nitta. (Stats).

  • tsbox, Class-Agnostic Time Series. Submitted by Christoph Sax. (Stats).

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

• Four at ‘2/seeking-reviewer(s)’:

  • NA, NA. Submitted by Daniel Antal.

  • aorsf, Accelerated Oblique Random Survival Forests. Submitted by Byron.

  • bssm, Bayesian Inference of Non-Linear and Non-Gaussian State Space. Submitted by Jouni Helske. (Stats).

  • aorsf, Accelerated Oblique Random Survival Forests. Submitted by Byron.

• Two at ‘1/editor-checks’:

  • dynamite, Bayesian Modeling and Causal Inference for Multivariate. Submitted by Santtu Tikka.

  • wmm, World Magnetic Model. Submitted by Will Frierson.

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

On the blog

Software Review

• Working with Qualtrics Data – Part 1: Importing Data by Jeffrey Stevens. This post summarizes how to use the qualtRics package to import Qualtrics data.

• Working with Qualtrics Data – Part 2: Excluding Data by Jeffrey Stevens. This post summarizes how to use the excluder package to exclude survey data.

  

Other topics

• New Package yfR by Marcelo S. Perlin. A simple tutorial for package yfR.

  

Tech Notes

• Upgrading rtweet by Lluís Revilla Sancho. Update from rtweet 0.7.0 to 1.0.2.

Call for maintainers

We’re looking for a new maintainer, or a new maintainer team, for each of the following packages:

• tabulizer, Extract Tables from PDFs. Issue for volunteering.

• RSelenium, Automate browsers locally or remotely (for instance for webscraping). Issue for volunteering.

• nbaR, R client library for the Netherlands Biodiversity Api (NBA). Issue for volunteering.

• elastic, R client for the Elasticsearch HTTP API. Issue for volunteering.

If you’re interested, please comment in the issues or email [email protected].

For more info, see

• our guidance on Changing package maintainers;
• our Package Curation Policy.

Package development corner

Some useful tips for R package developers. 👀

Test your Shiny app with shinytest2!

Barret Schloerke developed a new package for testing Shiny apps, shinytest2. It was presented in a recorded RStudio conf talk.

Comparing package versions with Diffify

Diffify by Jumping Rivers provides you with a comparison between different versions of any R package stored on CRAN. Colin Gillespie presented it in a recorded RStudio conf talk.

pkgdown missing topics or missing articles

If pkgdown complains about missing reference topics or articles:

• Edit _pkgdown.yml (see ?pkgdown::build_reference – you can choose to omit topics; ?pkgdown::build_articles).

• Then check everything is ok with pkgdown::check_pkgdown. This is faster than rebuilding the whole site to check the configuration!

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.

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