Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci! 🔗rOpenSci HQ 🔗Help us maintain {pkgcheck}! You might know of our {pkgcheck} system used for our automated package checks, and for your own stand-alone and GitHub-action usage on any package. We are seeking co-maintainers for the {pkgcheck} package which powers this system.

Call for Papers – Transnational Perspectives on Anime: A Symposium, in collaboration with Japan Foundation London Location: Lancaster University Date: July 4th 2025 Anime studies has become a significant area of investigation with exponential growth throughout the 21st century and more specifically the past decade.

Two week ago I uploaded a paper that has been in the works for some time. In fact, I first mention it as conference paper for the special issue of the 11th International Conference on Chemical Structures, you know, the meeting held in 2018, of which the 13th edition starts in 7 days. I had a poster at that conference which I described in this blog post.

I spent a couple of days at the National Academy of Sciences in the USA at the invitation of the Royal Society, who held a forum on "Measuring Biodiversity for Addressing the Global Crisis". It was a packed program for those working in evidence-driven conservation: I was honoured to talk about our work on using AI to "connect the dots" between disparate data like the academic literature and remote observations at scale.

The data from the German Library Statistics (DBS) reveals a clear trend: while spending on Closed Access content in university libraries in Germany has remained relatively stable, investments in Open Access have surged dramatically. Please note that not all universities reported all values consistently, making it impossible to quantify the trends with complete precision. However, clear trends can still be identified.

“If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.” Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals Watching the recent Severance season 2 finale “Cold Harbour,” I became increasingly intrigued with the show’s explorations of selfhood and autonomy, whereby the ‘innies’ are […]

Reposted from the original at https://blog.stephenturner.us/p/quarto-books. ...In the spirit of learning in public, I wanted an excuse to dive into Quarto to learn more about publishing formats beyond simple PDF and HTML documents.If you’re not familiar, Quarto (quarto.org) is the successor to RMarkdown, the next-generation scientific publishing system that works natively with Python, R, and OJS.

Sitting by a lake, watching frogs that never knew they were the reason we survived

Points to ponder

In the past few months I have been engaging in the exegesis of source code from the 1980ies and -90ies. Serendipity towards the end of last year brought me in closer contact with the concept of ludemes, in which I found a fitting perspective on these magic moments of translation. David M. Berry outlines this processes through the computational image, Hartmut Rosa approaches it through his theories on resonance, Karen Barad talks about inter- and intra-actions, and Luhman also has an opinion on the topic. Either way, ludemes have been utterly fruitful in reading source code against a techno-deterministic grain, and as a lens into programming practices of the past.

tl;dr: It’s been around 6 weeks using an ergonomic split keyboard. Inspired by Peter’s blog post about his experiences in changing to a split keyboard (and alternative keyboard layouts), I wanted to share bit of my own journey of using an ergonomic split keyboard: As part of the “elder millennials” , I grew up around early DOS computers and their command-line, followed by an early internet that for lack of real