rOpenSci News Digest, August 2023

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

Open Call for rOpenSci Champions Program Applications!

Still open: our call for the second cohort of Champions and Mentors for the rOpenSci Champions Program 🎉 !

This 12-month-long program will continue to support our goal of identifying, recognizing, and rewarding passionate community members who help the community grow and improve. The activities include cohort-based training, project development, and personal mentorship.

This program focuses on people who belong to groups that are historically and systematically excluded from the open software and research software communities and who are interested in contributing to rOpenSci and the broader open source and research software communities.

You can apply to be a champion or a mentor until September 4th.

Want to hear more from the protagonists? In these videos (in English and Spanish) our champions and mentors tell us what it’s like to be part of the program.

More information on eligibility, timeline, curriculum, application process, etc. is on the program webpage.

Our first community call in Spanish (and English too)!

As global movements, Open Source and Open Science face language-based exclusion as most resources are in English. This affects scientists and research software engineers working in R, particularly those who don’t have English as their first language.

rOpenSci multilingual efforts aim to lower access barriers, democratize quality resources, and increase the possibilities of contributing to open software and science. We successfully piloted our Spanish-language peer review and the localization to Spanish of our comprehensive guide to software development, with Portuguese translation underway.

Maëlle Salmon, Paola Corrales, and Elio Campitelli, will share the rOpenSci Multilingual project details on this call. Maëlle will present the R packages that allow us to have our content in several languages. Then Elio and Paola will share the translation workflow and show the Translation Guide written to document the process.

• Multilingual Publishing: Tuesday, 21 November 2023 12:00 UTC.

• Proyecto Multilingüe: Thursday, 23 November 2023 12:00 UTC.

Community call recording: Mentoring & Training Program for Scientific Open Source Champions

Video and resources.

Champions programs are designed to identify, recognize, and reward emerging leaders within a community. The rOpenSci Champions Program is part of a series of activities and projects we are carrying out to ensure our research software serves everyone in our communities, which means that it needs to be sustainable and open, and built by and for all groups.

On this call Beatriz Milz, Victor Ordu and Carolina Pradier shared their experience of being rOpenSci mentors and champions.

Coworking

Read all about coworking in our recent post!

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, September 5th, 09:00 Australia Western (01:00 UTC), " AI in/for R" Hosted by Joel Nitta and Steffi LaZerte
  • Explore how R can inform/perform AI as well as how AI can inform/perform R.
  • Cowork independently on work related to R.
• Note October coworking is cancelled (see you in November!) Nope, it’s back on! Stay tuned for coworking Tuesday, October 3rd, 14h00 Europe Central (12:00 UTC), Theme TBA

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!

Software 📦

New versions

The following twenty-four packages have had an update since the last newsletter: gert (v1.9.3), av (v0.8.4), BaseSet (v0.9.0), c14bazAAR (4.0.0), chromer (v0.5), dittodb (v0.1.7), ezknitr (v0.6.3), geojsonio (v0.11.2), GSODR (v3.1.9), lingtypology (v1.1.15), magick (v2.7.5), nasapower (v4.0.11), nodbi (v0.9.6), openalexR (v1.2.0), osmdata (v0.2.5), osmextract (v0.5.0), readODS (v2.0.0), rerddap (v1.0.4), spatsoc (v0.2.0), spiro (v0.2.1), targets (1.2.2), tiler (v0.3.0), waywiser (v0.4.2), and weathercan (v0.7.0).

Software Peer Review

There are thirteen recently closed and active submissions and 3 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:

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

  • ohun, Optimizing Acoustic Signal Detection. Submitted by Marcelo Araya-Salas.

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

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

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

• Six at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:

  • rangr, Mechanistic Simulation of Species Range Dynamics. Submitted by Katarzyna Markowska.

  • eph, Argentina’s Permanent Household Survey Data and Manipulation Utilities. Submitted by Carolina Pradier.

  • mregions2, Access Data from Marineregions.org: The Marine Regions Gazetteer and the Marine Regions Data Products. Submitted by salvafern.

  • pangoling, Access to Large Language Model Predictions. Submitted by Bruno Nicenboim.

  • dfms, Dynamic Factor Models. Submitted by Sebastian Krantz.

  • fwildclusterboot, Fast Wild Cluster Bootstrap Inference for Linear Models. Submitted by Alexander Fischer. (Stats).

• One at ‘2/seeking-reviewer(s)’:

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

• Three at ‘1/editor-checks’:

  • NA, NA. Submitted by Victor Ordu .

  • weatherOz, An API Client for Australian Weather and Climate Data Resources. Submitted by Rodrigo Pires.

  • qualtdict, Generating Variable Dictionaries and Labelled Data Exports of Qualtrics. Submitted by lyh970817.

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

On the blog

• Teaching targets with Penguins by Athanasia Mo Mowinckel, and Joel Nitta. An inspiring collaboration for reproducibility! rOpenSci members Joel and Mo’s fortuitous encounter led to an exciting targets workshop in Oslo.

• My Life with the R-universe by Zhian N. Kamvar. Using the R-universe to rapidly deploy releases, dependencies, and bugfixes.

• rOpenSci Champions Pilot Year: Training Wrap-Up by Yanina Bellini Saibene, Camille Santistevan, Maya Sanghvi, Lou Woodley, Maëlle Salmon, Mauro Lepore, Heather Turner, and Pao Corrales.

Tech Notes

• New cran.dev shortlinks to package information and documentation by Jeroen Ooms. The new cran.dev shortlinks help you navigate directly to the r-universe homepage, docs or API for any CRAN package.

Call 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? (or listening to its discussion on the R Weekly highlights podcast hosted by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas)!

• rvertnet, Retrieve, map and summarize data from the VertNet.org archives (https://vertnet.org/). Functions allow searching by many parameters, including taxonomic names, places, and dates. In addition, there is an interface for conducting spatially delimited searches, and another for requesting large datasets via email. Issue for volunteering.

• natserv. Interface to NatureServe (https://www.natureserve.org/). Includes methods to get data, image metadata, search taxonomic names, and make maps. Issue for volunteering.

Call for comaintainers

Refer to our somewhat recent blog post to identify other packages where help is especially wished for! See also our help wanted page – before opening a PR, we recommend asking in the issue whether help is still needed.

Package development corner

Some useful tips for R package developers. 👀

Register a package author in DESCRIPTION in one function call…

with desc::desc_add_author_gh()! For instance, desc::desc_add_author_gh("maelle", role = "aut").

You can also register yourself with desc::desc_add_me().

These functions are great tools to implement our advice “Be generous with attributions”.

Hadley Wickham’s newsletter “Tidy design principles”

Hadley Wickham started a free newsletter to share his “semi-regular thoughts on writing good R code”, as part of work on his new book.

Broken @docType package documentation

If you got an email from CRAN about a broken @docType package documentation (package-level manual page), you might want to read this roxygen2 GitHub issue. Example fix.

rOpenSci dev guide recommends having a package-level manual page. You can create it by running usethis::use_package_doc().

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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