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.

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.

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. First, an introduction to the API for those not familiar.

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.