2 Months in 2 Minutes - rOpenSci News, October 2020

rOpenSci HQ

rOpenSci at R-Ladies

Our community manager Stefanie Butland, and one of our software review editors Brooke Anderson, are speaking remotely at an R-Ladies East Lansing meetup Thursday, October 22nd. They will talk about our how to get involved in rOpenSci using our new Contributing Guide as an entry point, and through participating in software review as a package author or reviewer.

Contributing Guide Release

The purpose of our new Contributing Guide is to welcome you to rOpenSci and help you recognize yourself as a potential contributor. It will help you figure out what you might gain by giving your time, expertise, and experience; match your needs with things that will help rOpenSci’s mission; and connect you with resources to help you along the way.

Software Peer Review

3 community-contributed packages passed software peer review.

• mcbette - Model Comparison Using babette. Author: Richel Bilderbeek; Reviewers: Vikram Baliga, Joëlle Barido-Sottani; Read the Review

• medrxivr - Access and Search MedRxiv and BioRxiv Preprint Data. Author: Luke McGuinness; Reviewers: Tuija Sonkkila, Najko Jahn; Read the Review

• treedata.table - A Wrapper For data.table For Fast Manipulation Of Phylogenetic Trees Matched To Data. Author: Josef Uyeda; Reviewers: Hugo Gruson, Kari Norman; Read the Review

Consider submitting your package or volunteering to review. If you want to be a reviewer fill out this short form, and we’ll ping you when there’s a submission that fits in your area of expertise.

Software

2 new peer-reviewed packages from the community are on CRAN.

• medrxivr and treedata.table recently passed peer review and are listed above.

1 new package from the rOpenSci team is on CRAN.

• rbace - a client for interacting with the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine API. Author: Scott Chamberlain

On the Blog

From the community

• The treedata.table Package by April Wright, Christian Román-Palacios, and Josef Uyeda

From the rOpenSci team

• Rectifying Hand-Drawn Marks on Maps With the mapscanner Package by Mark Padgham

• Scientific Name Parsing: rgnparser and namext Tech note by Scott Chamberlain

• Hacktober? Any Month is a Good Month to Contribute to rOpenSci by Stefanie Butland

• 2 Months in 2 Minutes - rOpenSci News, August 2020 by Stefanie Butland

Use Cases

• 74 published works cited or used rOpenSci software (listed in individual newsletters)

• 6 use cases for our packages or resources were posted in our discussion forum. Look for citecorp, europepmc, fulltext, magick, oai, rAltmetric, rcrossref, refsplitr, rentrez, rtweet, roadoi

Have you used an rOpenSci package? Share your use case and we’ll tweet about it.

In the News

• One of our software review editors, Anna Krystalli, was featured in the podcast RSE Stories, in an episode titled R for Reproducibility.

• The latest episode of the Changelog Podcast was How open source saved htop. It may be of interest to readers of our newsletter as a vignette of how a project transitioned maintainers. The original htop repository, and the new one.

Call For Maintainers

Part of our mission is making sustainable software that users can rely on. Sometimes software maintainers need to give up maintenance due to a variety of circumstances. When that happens we try to find new maintainers. Check out our guidance for taking over maintenance of a package.

monkeylearn is in need of a new maintainer. Comment on this thread if you’re interested.

Keep up with rOpenSci

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Find out how you can contribute to rOpenSci as a user or developer.