rOpenSci News Digest, October 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

Help us translate our dev guide to Portuguese

Since last year we started the translation and localization of our Spanish version of our comprehensive guide to software development. We have a first version in Spanish and now, thanks to the R Community initiative, we are working on the Portuguese version.

Our process includes the review of automatic translations by two people, and we need your help!

If you are interested in collaborating with this community effort, please check the “TODO – Second Review” tab of this project on GitHub and let us know you want to collaborate by leaving a comment in the corresponding Pull Request.

All contributors will be added to the rOpenSci Slack, listed on our multilingual publishing project webpage and acknowledged as authors of the Portuguese translation.

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, Nov 7th, 9:00 America Pacific (17:00 UTC), Fixing scary bugs 😱🐛 With community host Salix Dubois and Steffi LaZerte.
  • Identify/fix some scary bugs;
  • Chat with Salix about scary bugs!

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!

Reminder: Three upcoming community calls, and our first one in Spanish!

R in Government

In this community call, our panelists will share their experiences and examples of projects with R at different levels of government and in different countries. We invite you to learn about the challenges and lessons learned from our panelists and attendees in their efforts to make their government data, processes, and analyses more open and reproducible.

With Luíza Andrade, Karly Harker, Ahmadou Dicko, Pablo Tiscornia.

Tuesday, 31 October 2023 16:00 UTC

Multilingual Publishing

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.

Software 📦: new versions

The following twenty-three packages have had an update since the last newsletter: gert (v2.0.0), aorsf (v0.1.1), beastier (v2.4.12), beautier (v2.6.9), biomartr (v1.0.5), drake (7.13.6), EDIutils (v1.0.3), epubr (v0.6.4), FedData (v4.0.0), hunspell (v3.0.3), MODIStsp (v2.1.0), nodbi (v0.9.8), prism (v0.2.1), rdhs (v0.8.0), rglobi (v0.3.4), rtweet (v1.2.1), stats19 (v3.0.0), tarchetypes (0.7.9), targets (1.3.2), terrainr (v0.7.5), tiler (v0.3.1), tracerer (v2.2.3), and waywiser (v0.5.0).

Software Peer Review

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

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

  • fastMatMR, “fastMatMR: High-Performance Matrix Market File Operations in R”. Submitted by Rohit Goswami.

  • naijR, Operations to Ease Data Analyses Specific to Nigeria. Submitted by Victor Ordu .

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

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

• Seven at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:

  • GLMMcosinor, Fit a cosinor model using a generalised mixed modelling framework. Submitted by Rex Parsons.

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

  • 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).

  • GLMMcosinor, Fit a cosinor model using a generalised mixed modelling framework. Submitted by Rex Parsons.

• Four at ‘2/seeking-reviewer(s)’:

  • comtradr, Interface with the United Nations Comtrade API. Submitted by paulbochtler.

  • baRulho, Quantifying (Animal) Sound Degradation. Submitted by Marcelo Araya-Salas.

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

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

• Three at ‘1/editor-checks’:

  • rgeeExtra, Extensions for rgee. Submitted by Cesar Aybar.

  • agromet, Índices y Estadísticos Climáticos e Hidrológicos. Submitted by Paola Corrales.

  • 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

• How to Translate a Hugo Blog Post with Babeldown by Maëlle Salmon, and Yanina Bellini Saibene. Other languages: Cómo traducir un artículo de blog de Hugo con Babeldown (es), Comment traduire un billet de blog Hugo avec Babeldown (fr).

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.

Call for co-maintainers

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. 👀

System Dependencies in R Packages & Automatic Testing

Are you curious about, or stalled by, the installation of system dependencies in your continuous integration workflows? Refer to Hugo Gruson’s clear and extensive post on the R-hub blog.

Translate your package’s messages with {potools}

The potools package by Michael Chirico is to translation files what roxygen2 is to Rd documentation files: it very much simplifies your writing and maintaining them! Refer to potools documentation or a recent tutorial.

testthat new release

If you use testthat for your package tests, don’t miss the release announcement of testthat 3.2.0! That post describes the major features such as the return of mocking support within testthat itself.

Among minor features you might notice the new desc argument of testthat::test_file() to run a single test at a time. You can now for instance run devtools::test_active_file(desc = 'blop() runs')

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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