🔗 Stefanie Butland, rOpenSci Community Manager Some things are just irresistible to a community manager – PhD student Hugo Gruson’s recent tweets definitely fall into that category.

“Security” can be a daunting, scary, and (frankly) quite often a very boring topic. BUT!, we promise that this Community Call on May 7th will be informative, engaging, and enlightening (or, at least not boring)! Applying security best practices is essential not only for developers or sensitive data storage but also for the everyday R user installing R packages, contributing to open source, working with APIs or remote servers.

🔗Importance of Hydrology Given that liquid water is essential to life on Earth, water research cuts across numerous disciplines including hydrology, meteorology, geography, climate science, engineering, ecology, and more. Numerous R packages have emerged from this diversity of approaches, and we recently gathered many of them into a new rOpenSci task view which we broadly titled ‘Hydrology’ and published to CRAN.

Version 7.0.0 of drake just arrived on CRAN, and it is faster and easier to use than previous releases.install.packages("drake") 🔗Recap Data analysis can be slow. A round of scientific computation can take several minutes, hours, or even days to complete. After it finishes, if you update your code or data, your hard-earned results may no longer be valid. How much of that valuable output can you keep, and how much do you need to update?

Our next Community Call, on March 27th, aims to help people learn about using rOpenSci’s R packages to access and analyze taxonomy and biodiversity data, and to recognize the breadth and depth of their applications. We also aim to learn from the discussion how we might improve these tools.

Citations are a crucial piece of scholarly work. They hold metadata on each scholarly work, including what people were involved, what year the work was published, where it was published, and more. The links between citations facilitate insight into many questions about scholarly work. Citations come in many different formats including BibTex, RIS, JATS, and many more. This is not to be confused with citation styles such as APA vs. MLA and so on.

🔗Introduction stats19 is a new R package enabling access to and working withGreat Britain’s official road traffic casualty database,STATS19.

The ssh package provides a native ssh client for R. You can connect to a remote server over SSH to transfer files via SCP, setup a secure tunnel, or run a command or script on the host while streaming stdout and stderr directly to the client. The intro vignette provides a brief introduction.

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?