We’re delighted to announce that we have received new funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The $678K grant, awarded through the Foundation’s Data & Computational Research program, will be used to expand our efforts in software peer review.

Our 1-hour Call on Reproducible Research with R will include three speakers and 20 minutes for Q & A. Ben Marwick will introduce you to a research compendium, which accompanies, enhances, or is a scientific publication providing data, code, and documentation for reproducing a scientific workflow.

Three members of the rOpenSci team - Scott Chamberlain, Jenny Bryan, and Rich FitzJohn - as well as many community members will give talks at useR!2019. Many other package authors, maintainers, reviewers and unconf participants will be there too. Don’t hesitate to ask them about rOpenSci packages, software peer review, community, or just say hello if you’re looking for a friendly face. We’ve listed their talks for you.

🔗rOpenSci HQ 👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 🏗️ Join our next Community Call on Involving Multilingual Communities June 28th.Video of our Community Call on Security for R is up, with a long list of resources.Our Community Manager, Stefanie Butland, spoke at R-Ladies Seattle and Fred Hutch about rOpenSci, Learning R, and Building Community May 22nd.

rOpenSci’s community is increasingly international and multilingual. While we have operated primarily in English, we now receive submissions of packages from authors whose primary language is not. As we expand our community in this way, we want to learn from the experience of other organizations. How can we manage our peer-review process and open-source projects to be welcoming to non-native English speakers?

Software is maintained by people. While software can in theory live on indefinitely, to do so requires people. People change jobs, move locations, retire, and unfortunately die sometimes. When a software maintainer can no longer maintain a package, what happens to the software? Because of the fragility of people in software, in an ideal world a piece of software should have as many maintainers as possible.

As part of our continuous effort to improve rOpenSci infrastructure, we are rolling out a new service to automatically build and host documentation for all rOpenSci packages.

We’ve been following rOpenSci’s work for a long time, and we use several packages on a daily basis for our scientific projects, especially taxize to clean species names, rredlist to extract species IUCN statuses or [treeio](many probs with this post) to work with phylogenetic trees.rOpensci is a perfect incarnation of a vibrant and diverse community where people learn and develop new ideas, especially regarding scientific packages.We’ve also

🔗Introduction ramlegacy is a new R package to download, cache and read in all the different versions of the RAM Legacy Stock Assessment Database, a public database containing stock assessment results of commercially exploited marine populations from around the world.

We strive for high quality in our suite of packages, in practice via a system of software peer review, and via packaging guidelines that keep growing. There is therefore a risk of increasing the workload of package authors, who already have a lot on their plate. To avoid that, when explaining how to do things in our dev guide, we recommend existing automated tools to authors.

As announced in our recent post about updates to our Software Peer Review system, all our package development, review and maintenance is available as an online book. Our goal is to update it approximately quarterly so it’s already time to present its second official version!