We tend to know a good open source research software project when we see it: The code is well-documented, users contribute back to the project, the software is licensed and citable, and the community interacts and co-produces in a healthy, productive fashion.

This week version 2.0 of the V8 package has been released to CRAN. Go get it now!install.packages("V8") The V8 package provides an embedded JavaScript engine that can be used inside of R. You can use it interactively as a JavaScript console, but it is mostly useful for wrapping JavaScript libraries in R packages. Some cool examples include jsonld, jsonvalidate, and daff.

rOpenSci’s suite of packages is comprised of contributions from staff engineers and the wider R community, bringing considerable diversity of skills, expertise and experience to bear on the suite. How do we ensure that every package is held to a high standard?

We are pleased to welcome Brooke Anderson and Melina Vidoni to our team of Associate Editors for rOpenSci Software Peer Review. They join Scott Chamberlain, Anna Krystalli, Lincoln Mullen, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross and Maëlle Salmon. With the addition of Brooke and Melina, our editorial board now includes four women and four men, located in North America, South America and Europe.

There seem to be a lot of ways to write about your R package, and rather than haveto decide on what to focus on I thought I’d write a little bit about everything.To begin with I thought it best to describe what problem rdhs tries to solve,why it was developed and how I came to be involved in this project.

European eels ( Anguilla anguilla ) have it tough. Not only are they depicted as monsters in movies, they are critically endangered in real life. One of the many aspects that is contributing to their decline is the reduced connectivity between their freshwater and marine habitats.

We are pleased to announce the release of our new Code of Conduct. rOpenSci’s community is our best asset and it’s important that we put strong mechanisms in place before we have to act on a report. As before, our Code applies equally to members of the rOpenSci team and to anyone from the community at large participating in in-person or online activities.

🔗Why vitae? The vitae package leverages the dynamic nature of R Markdown to quickly produce and update CV entries from a variety of data sources. With use of the included templates, examples and helper functions, it should be possible to produce a reasonable looking and data-driven CV in less than an hour.

A bit more than one year ago, rOpenSci launched its new website design, by the designer Maru Lango. Not only did the website appearance change (for the better!), but the underlying framework too. ropensci.org is powered by Hugo, like blogdown!

In late November 2018, we ran the third annual rOpenSci ozunconf. This is the sibling rOpenSci unconference, held in Australia. We ran the first ozunconf in Brisbane in 2016, and the second in Melbourne in 2017. Photos taken by Ajay from Fotoholics As usual, before the unconf, we started discussion on GitHub issue threads,and the excitement was building with the number of issues.

We have released updates for the rOpenSci text analysis tools. This technote will highlight some of the major improvements in the spelling package and also the underlying hunspell package, which provides the spelling engine for the spelling package.install.packages("spelling") Update to the latest versions to use these cool new features!