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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
Leadership changes at rOpenSci
After 13 years at the helm of rOpenSci, our founding executive director Karthik Ram is stepping down.
Noam Ross, rOpenSci’s current lead for peer review, will be our new Executive Director.
Karthik will remain a key advisor to rOpenSci.
We thank him for his years of leadership and service to the community!
Read Karthik’s farewell post, and Noam’s post about his new role on our blog
rOpenSci Dev Guide 0.9.0: Multilingual Now! And Better
We’re delighted to announce we’ve released a new version of our guide,
“rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review”!
A highlight is that our guide is now bilingual (English and Spanish), thanks to work by Yanina Bellini Saibene, Elio Campitelli and Pao Corrales, and thanks to support of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NumFOCUS, and the R Consortium.
Read the guide in Spanish.
Our guide is now also getting translated to Portuguese thanks to volunteers.
We are very grateful for their work!
Read more in the blog post about the release.
Thanks to all contributors who made this release possible.
Interview with Code for Thought podcast
Our community manager, Yanina Bellini Saibene, talked with Peter Schmidt of the Code for Thought podcast, about the importance of making computing materials accessible to non-English speaking learners.
Listen to the episode.
Find our more about rOpenSci multilingual publishing project.
Coworking
Read all about coworking!
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.
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Tuesday, April 2nd, 14:00 Europe Central (13:00 UTC), Sharing your work with Quarto. With cohost Pao Corrales and Steffi LaZerte.
- Explore the Quarto documentation and examples
- Use Quarto to share some of your code
- Ask questions or troubleshoot your Quarto problems with the cohost and other attendees.
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Tuesday, May 7th, 09:00 Americas Pacific (16:00 UTC), Meet rOpenSci’s new Executive Director! With cohost Noam Ross and Steffi LaZerte.
- Learn more about rOpenSci!
- Explore rOpenSci packages and contributing guide
- Ask questions or chat about rOpensci with Noam and other attendees.
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 packages
The following three packages recently became a part of our software suite, or were recently reviewed again:
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nuts, developed by Moritz Hennicke together with Werner Krause: Motivated by changing administrative boundaries over time, the nuts package can convert European regional data with NUTS codes between versions (2006, 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2021) and levels (NUTS 1, NUTS 2 and NUTS 3). The package uses spatial interpolation as in Lam (1983) doi:10.1559/152304083783914958 based on granular (100m x 100m) area, population and land use data provided by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center. It is available on CRAN. It has been reviewed by Pueyo-Ros Josep and Le Meur Nolwenn.
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quadkeyr, developed by Florencia D’Andrea together with Pilar Fernandez: Quadkeyr functions generate raster images based on QuadKey-identified data, facilitating efficient integration of Tile Maps data into R workflows. In particular, Quadkeyr provides support to process and analyze Facebook mobility datasets within the R environment. It has been reviewed by Maria Paula Caldas and Vincent van Hees.
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weatherOz, developed by Rodrigo Pires together with Anna Hepworth, Rebecca O’Leary, Jonathan Carroll, James Goldie, Dean Marchiori, Paul Melloy, Mark Padgham, Hugh Parsonage, Keith Pembleton, and Adam H. Sparks: Provides automated downloading, parsing and formatting of weather data for Australia through API endpoints provided by the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) of Western Australia and by the Science and Technology Division of the Queensland Governments Department of Environment and Science (DES). As well as the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) of the Australian government precis and coastal forecasts, agriculture bulletin data, and downloading and importing radar and satellite imagery files. It has been reviewed by Laurens Geffert and Sam Rogers.
Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.
New versions
The following nineteen packages have had an update since the last newsletter: frictionless (v1.0.3), aRxiv (0.10), cffr (v1.0.0), chromer (v0.8), drake (7.13.9), GSODR (v4.0.0), lightr (v1.7.1), lingtypology (v1.1.17), magick (2.8.3), melt (v1.11.2), nodbi (v0.10.4), nuts (v1.0.0), paleobioDB (v1.0.0), quadkeyr (v0.1.0), rtweet (v2.0.0), ruODK (v1.4.2), spocc (v1.2.3), tarchetypes (0.8.0), and targets (1.6.0).
Software Peer Review
There are thirteen recently closed and active submissions and 6 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:
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Three at ‘6/approved’:
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nuts, nuts: Convert European Regional Data. Submitted by Moritz Hennicke.
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quadkeyr, Tools for converting QuadKeys used in Microsoft’s Bing Maps Tile System into raster images. Submitted by Florencia D’Andrea.
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baRulho, Quantifying (Animal) Sound Degradation. Submitted by Marcelo Araya-Salas.
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Four at ‘4/review(s)-in-awaiting-changes’:
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rix, Rix: Reproducible Environments with Nix. Submitted by Bruno Rodrigues.
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fellingdateR, Estimate, report and combine felling dates of historical tree-ring. Submitted by KriHa.
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rgeeExtra, Extensions for rgee. Submitted by Cesar Aybar.
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agromet, Índices y Estadísticos Climáticos e Hidrológicos. Submitted by Paola Corrales.
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Four at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:
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dendroNetwork, Create networks of dendrochronological series using pairwise similarity. Submitted by RonaldVisser.
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karel, Learning programming with Karel the robot. Submitted by Marcos Prunello.
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rOPTRAM, Derive soil moisture using the OPTRAM algorithm. Submitted by Micha Silver.
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fwildclusterboot, Fast Wild Cluster Bootstrap Inference for Linear Models. Submitted by Alexander Fischer. (Stats).
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One at ‘1/editor-checks’:
- gigs, Assess Fetal, Newborn, and Child Growth with International Standards. Submitted by Simon Parker. (Stats).
Find out more about Software Peer Review and how to get involved.
On the blog
Software Review
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rOpenSci Dev Guide 0.9.0: Multilingual Now! And Better by Maëlle Salmon, Mark Padgham, and Noam Ross. Updates in version 0.9.0 of the online book ‘rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review’. Other languages: rOpenSci Dev Guide 0.9.0: ¡Ahora multilingüe! Y mejor (es).
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rOpenSci Code of Conduct Annual Review by Yanina Bellini Saibene, Mark Padgham, Kara Woo, and Natalia Morandeira. Updates for version 2.5 of rOpenSci’s Code of Conduct.
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Marketing Ideas For Your Package by Yanina Bellini Saibene and Maëlle Salmon. Now that you have created your package, presenting it to the world is a crucial step to gain visibility and attract users. In this blog post we suggest a series of activities and tools for advertizing your package. This post was discussed on the R Weekly highlights podcast hosted by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas.
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rOpenSci Champions Pilot Year: Projects Wrap-Up by Yanina Bellini Saibene. Our first cohort of Champions complete the program. In this blog post, we share each champions projects, their achievements and outreach activities.
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From the Founding Director: My Farewell to rOpenSci by Karthik Ram. Karthik Ram steps down as Executive Director after 13 years. Other languages: Del Director Fundador: Mi despedida de rOpenSci (es).
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Hello from our New Executive Director! by Noam Ross. Noam Ross takes the helm as rOpenSci’s new Executive Director. Other languages: Hola de nuestro nuevo Director Ejecutivo (es).
Tech Notes
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Beautiful Code, Because We’re Worth It! by Maëlle Salmon and Yanina Bellini Saibene. This post was featured in the R Weekly Highlights podcast hosted by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas.
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Help make assertr better! Come close issues by Tony Fischetti and Maëlle Salmon.
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Help users and developers of targets by answering questions! by Will Landau and Maëlle Salmon.
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Help make qualtRics better! Code contributions wanted by Julia Silge, Joseph O’Brien, and Maëlle Salmon.
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An Example of the DRY/DAMP Principles for Package Tests by Maëlle Salmon.
Calls for contributions
Calls 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?.
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internetarchive, an API Client for the Internet Archive. Issue for volunteering.
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historydata, datasets for historians. Issue for volunteering.
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textreuse, detect text reuse and document similarity. Issue for volunteering.
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USAboundaries (and USAboundariesdata), historical and contemporary boundaries of the United States of America . Issue for volunteering.
Calls for contributions
Also refer to 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. 
Reminder: R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) Grant Program Accepting Proposals until April 1st!
The R Consortium Call for Proposal might be a relevant funding opportunity for your package!
Find out more in their post.
If you can’t prepare your proposal in time, the next call will start September 1st.
@examplesIf for conditional examples in package manuals
Do you know you can make some examples of your package manual conditional on, say, the session being interactive?
The @examplesIf roxygen2 tag is really handy.
What’s more, inside the examples of a single manual page, you can seamlessly mix and match @examples and @examplesIf pieces.
‘argument “..2” is missing, with no default’
Mike Mahoney posted an important PSA on Mastodon:
if you’re getting a new error message ‘argument “..2” is missing, with no default’ on #rstats 4.3.3, it’s likely because you have a trailing comma in a call to
glue::glue()
seeing this pop up in a few Slacks so figured I’d share
https://github.com/tidyverse/glue/issues/320
Thanks, Mike!
Useful hack: a CRAN-specific .Rbuildignore
The .Rbuildignore file lists the files to not be included when building your package, such as your pkgdown configuration file.
Trevor L. Davis posted a neat idea on Mastodon: using a CRAN-specific .Rbuildignore, so that CRAN submissions omit some tests and vignettes to keep the package under the size limit.
Regarding tests themselves, remember you can skip some or all on CRAN (but make sure you’re running them on continuous integration!).
Key advantages of using the keyring package
If your package needs the user to provide secrets, like API tokens, to work, you might be interested in wrapping or recommending the keyring package (maintained by Gábor Csárdi), that accesses the system credential store from R.
See this recent R-hub blog post.
A package for linting roxygen2 documentation
The compelling roxylint package by Doug Kelkhoff allows you to check some aspects of your roxygen2 docs, such as the use of full stops and sentence case.
See the list of current rules.
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.
You can also support our work through donations.
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Continue reading: rOpenSci News Digest, March 2024
Long-term implications and possible future developments
With numerous intriguing updates and developments mentioned in the rOpenSci news article, here are several long-term implications and possible future directions.
Leadership Changes at rOpenSci
The change in leadership from Karthik Ram to Noam Ross, both integral individuals in rOpenSci, is likely to generate some shift in the approach and direction of the organization. As Noam takes over the helm, there might be changes to the strategic roadmap for rOpenSci, and the organization’s priorities may evolve, leading to the implementation of new initiatives and the modification of existing practices.
Enhanced Guide In Multiple Language
The fact that rOpenSci’s guide is now bilingual (English and Spanish) has the potential to dramatically expand the organization’s reach to non-English speaking audience. The ongoing translation to Portuguese suggests a broader aim of making rOpenSci accessible to as many global users as possible. This implies that more language versions may also be developed in the future.
Coworking and Community Building
rOpenSci’s coworking initiative helps to foster a sense of community, where users can collaborate, learn from one another, and also help in improving and maintaining various R packages. It can result in creativity and productivity enhancement, and knowledge exchange, fostering a more robust R user base.
New Packages
The inclusion of new packages like ‘nuts’, ‘quadkeyr’, and ‘weatherOz’ to rOpenSci demonstrates growth and adaptability of the open source software that it provides. This would make rOpenSci a more versatile and valuable platform for open science, particularly for researchers working on data related to Europe’s regional data, quadkey-identified data, and Australian weather data respectively.
Actionable advice based on these insights
If you are an existing member of rOpenSci, considering the leadership change, explore any new strategic directions that Noam Ross plans to implement, and find out how you can align your help with those plans. For all users, the availability of the guide in different languages means that there are fewer barriers to using rOpenSci’s resources, so take this opportunity to deepen your understanding.
Engage in the coworking sessions by rOpenSci which offer an opportunity to learn from and connect with other users across the globe. Explore the newly added packages and check if any could serve beneficial for your research or contributions. Lastly, consider if you could contribute to rOpenSci, whether by code or non-code contributions, proactive participation will only enhance your skills and increase your understanding of open science.