taxize was seven years old this last Saturday! What is taxize? taxize is designed around making working with taxonomic names easier - abstracting away the details of what each of 20 or so taxonomic data sources require for a given use case. A samping of use cases covered in taxize (all ...

Phylogenetic trees are commonly used to present evolutionary relationships of species. Newick is the de facto format in phylogenetic for representing tree(s). Nexus format incorporates Newick tree text with related information organized into separated units known as blocks. For the R community, we have ape and phylobase packages to ...

Icons in R The icon package provides a convenient interface for adding icons from popular web fonts to R Markdown documents. The project began at rOpenSci OzUnconf 2017, and was developed by Mitchell O’Hara-Wild, Earo Wang and Timothy Hyndman. The package currently supports icons from Font Awesome, Academicons, and ionicons. ...

Our onboarding process ensures that packages contributed by the community undergo a transparent, constructive, non adversarial and open review process. Before even submitting my first R package to rOpenSci onboarding system in December 2015, I spent a fair amount of time reading through previous issue threads in order to assess whether ...

I’m excited to announce a new package for accessing official statistics from the UK. nomisr is the R client for the Nomis database. Nomis is run by Durham University on behalf of the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), and contains over a thousand datasets, primarily on the ...

Our onboarding process, that ensures that packages contributed by the community undergo a transparent, constructive, non adversarial and open review process, involves a lot of work from many actors: authors, reviewers and editors; but how much work? Managing the effort involved in the peer-review process is a major part of ...

library(tidyverse)
library(monkeylearn)

This is a story (mostly) about how I started contributing to the rOpenSci package monkeylearn. I can’t promise any life flipturning upside down, but there will be a small discussion about git best practices which is almost as good 🤓. The tl;dr here is nothing novel but is ...

rOpenSci’s package review system (aka onboarding) is one of our key activities to improve quality and sustainability of scientific R packages. The editorial team are constantly working towards improving the experience for both authors and reviewers. After our first year, we surveyed authors and reviewers who participated in our ...

Dr. Noam Ross [@noamross on Twitter] is a disease ecologist at EcoHealth Alliance in NYC, as well as an editor for rOpenSci. Topics of discussion included Noam’s history with R and rOpenSci, working in a team-driven research environment, and inspirations for pushing research processes and rOpenSci projects in exciting ...

If you read my reflection #1 on rOpenSci Onboarding, then you know I see value in the Onboarding process. A LOT of value even. This post is about where that value lies. This question has important corollaries which I will explore here based on my experience as a reviewer of bowerbird: ...

Hydrology is a concept to unify statistics, data analysis and numerical models in order to understand and analyze the endless circulation of water between the earth and its atmosphere. That’s a lot alike Data Science, isn’t it? Hydrologic Processes evolve in space and time, are extremely complex and ...

Olfactory Coding Detecting volatile chemicals and encoding these into neuronal activity is a vital task for all animals that is performed by their olfactory sensory systems. While these olfactory systems vary vastly between species regarding their numerical complexity, they are amazingly similar in their general structure. The periphery of olfactory ...

I am happy to say that the latest issue of The R Journal includes a paper describing rentrez, the rOpenSci package for retrieving data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The NCBI is one of the most important sources of biological data. The centre provides access to information ...