Emerging viruses might be on everyone’s mind right now, but as an epidemiologist and disease ecologist I’ve always been interested in how and why pathogens move from animal hosts to humans.The current pandemic of the disease we call COVID-19 is caused by Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a virus that has emerged from wildlife like SARS coronavirus and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus

We are pleased to welcome Laura DeCicco, Julia Gustavsen, and Mauro Lepore to our team of Associate Editors for rOpenSci Software Peer Review.They join Brooke Anderson, Anna Krystalli, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross, Maëlle Salmon, and Melina Vidoni.Lincoln Mullen and Scott Chamberlain are now board alumni.

rOpenSci Software Peer Review’s guidance has been compiled in an online book for more than one year now. We’ve just released its fifth version.To find out what’s new in our dev guide 0.5.0, you can read the changelog,or this blog post for more digested information.A curation policy for rOpenSci packages The most exciting update to our guide is probably the addition of a chapter featuring rOpenSci package curation policy.

Background & motivation medRxiv, as the preprint repository for papers in the medical, clinical, and related health sciences, ¹ has become a central source of new studies related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

At the eLife Sprint in September 2020, we revamped the covidpreprints.com website, which aims at featuring landmark preprints on a timeline of the pandemic. The birth of the project The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has led to about 35 million confirmed cases and over a million deaths worldwide.

The title of this post refers to Hacktoberfest, a month-long event organized annually by Digital Ocean to encourage contributions to open source projects on GitHub.Unfortunately, this October, many maintainers are dealing with spam pull requests.So instead of issuing a general appeal to participate, we’re pointing you to our new Community Contributing Guide’s section dedicated to our open Issues List.Along with showing you how to find help

mapscanner It is sometimes easy in the midst of the cutting-edge world of uniquesoftware development that is rOpenSci to forget that even though oursoftware might be freely available from anywhere in the world, access toadequate hardware is often restricted.

The data.table package enables high-performance extended functionality for data tables in R. treedata.table is a wrapperfor data.table for phylogenetic analyses that matches a phylogeny to the data.table, and preserves matching during data.table operations.Using the data.table package greatly increases analysis reproducibility and the efficiency of data manipulation operations over other ways of performing similar tasks inbase R, enabling

I’m starting to tackle a few hard packages (spplit and spenv) having to do with integrating disparate data sources. I’ll talk here about spplit. I haven’t worked on spplit in a few years; I thought I’d make another attempt with “fresh” eyes. There are many use cases I can imagine for spplit; I’ll highlight a few.

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