rOpenSci HQ Join our Community Manager Stefanie Butland in a CarpentryCon @ Home fireside chat on Growing Inclusive, Computational Communities and Leaders.

This post describes a few different aspects behind the scenes of the development of dittodb which recently went through the rOpenSci peer review process and was released to CRAN on 24 July 2020.This isn’t an introduction to the package itself (that’s available on dittodb’s site), but rather a look behind the scenes of the conceiving of the idea, the inspiration for, some of the development of, and history behind dittodb.The idea The idea for

osfr provides a ( hopefully ) convenient R interface to OSF (Open Science Framework, https://www.osf.io), a free service for managing research developed by the Center for Open Science (COS). osfr completed its rOpenSci peer-review earlier this year and has been available on CRAN since February.

In October last year we wrote about the CRAN Checks API (https://cranchecks.info). Since then there have been four new major items introduced: documentation, notifications, search, and a new version of the cchecks R package.

Webinars and community calls are a great way to gather many people to discuss a specific topic, without the logistic hurdles of in-person events. But whether online or in-person, to reach the broadest audience, all events should work towards greater accessibility.

In March we held a Community Call discussing the maintenance of R packages.This call included a starting presentation by Julia Silge followed by a discussion featuring panelists with a wide variety of backgrounds: Elin Waring, Erin Grand, Leonardo Collado-Torres and Scott Chamberlain.

We have been working hard behind the scenes on the upcoming release of our new git package named gert, a joint effort from rOpenSci and the Tidyverse team. One of the main features of gert is the out-of-the-box authentication mechanism, which is provided via the new credentials package.

rOpenSci HQ The rOpenSci team, together with ten expert community members, put together a post: When Field or Lab Work is not an Option - Leveraging Open Data Resources for Remote Research.

This week we released a major new version of the rsvg package on CRAN. This package provides R bindings to librsvg2 which is a powerful system library for rendering svg images into bitmaps that can be displayed, or use for further processing in for example the magick package. The biggest change in this release is the R package on Windows and MacOS now includes the latest librsvg 2.48.4. This is a major upgrade;

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted all of our lives in a very short period of time.Spring and summer are usually very busy as students prepare to go the field to engage in various data collection efforts.The pandemic has also disrupted these carefully planned activities as travel is suspended and local and remote field stations have closed indefinitely.A lost field season can be a major setback for a dissertation timeline and

Our website is based on Markdown content rendered with Hugo.Markdown content is in some cases knit from R Markdown, but with less functionality than if one rendered R Markdown to html as in the blogdown default.In particular, we cannot use the usual BibTex + CSL + Pandoc-citeproc dance to handle a bibliography.Thankfully, using the rOpenSci package RefManageR, we can still make our own bibliography from a BibTeX file without formatting