Working together to push science forward
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at
rOpenSci’s community is increasingly international and multilingual. While we have operated primarily in English, we now receive submissions of packages from authors whose primary language is not. As we expand our community in this way, we want to learn from the experience of other organizations. How can we manage our peer-review process and open-source projects to be welcoming to non-native English speakers? Our guest speakers will include: Rayna Harris, who has co-led work with The Carpentries in internationalization of curricula....
Software is maintained by people. While software can in theory live on indefinitely, to do so requires people. People change jobs, move locations, retire, and unfortunately die sometimes. When a software maintainer can no longer maintain a package, what happens to the software? Because of the fragility of people in software, in an ideal world a piece of software should have as many maintainers as possible. Increasing maintainers increases the so-called bus factor....
We’ve been following rOpenSci’s work for a long time, and we use several packages on a daily basis for our scientific projects, especially taxize to clean species names, rredlist to extract species IUCN statuses or [treeio](many probs with this post) to work with phylogenetic trees. rOpensci is a perfect incarnation of a vibrant and diverse community where people learn and develop new ideas, especially regarding scientific packages. We’ve also noticed how much the thorough review process improves the quality of the packages that join the rOpenSci ecosystem....
Introduction ramlegacy is a new R package to download, cache and read in all the different versions of the RAM Legacy Stock Assessment Database, a public database containing stock assessment results of commercially exploited marine populations from around the world. The package accomplishes all this by: Providing a function download_ramlegacy(), to download all the available versions of the RAM Database and cache them on the user’s computer in a location provided by the rappdirs package....
As announced in our recent post about updates to our Software Peer Review system, all our package development, review and maintenance is available as an online book. Our goal is to update it approximately quarterly so it’s already time to present its second official version! You can read the changelog or this blog post to find out what’s new in our dev guide 0.2.0! A more legit and accessible book Let’s start with very exciting news, the dev guide now has a cover, designed by Oz Locke from Locke Creatives!...
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at