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!

NASA generates and provides heaps of data to the scientific community. Not allof it is looking out at the stars. Some of it is looking back at us here onEarth. NASA’s Earth science program observes, understands and models theEarth system ¹ . We can use these data to discover how our Earth is changing,to better predict change, and to understand the consequences for life on Earth.

🔗Introduction Open Trade Statistics (OTS) was created with the intention to lower the barrier to working with international economic trade data. It includes a public API, a dashboard, and an R package for data retrieval.

rOpenSci is one of the first organizations in the R community I ever interacted with, when I participated in the 2016 rOpenSci unconf. I have since reviewed several rOpenSci packages and been so happy to be connected to this community, but I have never submitted or maintained a package myself. All that changed when I heard the call for a new maintainer for the qualtRics package. “IT’S GO TIME,” I thought.

conditionz is a new (just on CRAN today) R package for controlling how many times conditions are thrown.

Last month we released a new version of pdftools and a new companion package qpdf for working with pdf files in R. This release introduces the ability to perform pdf transformations, such as splitting and combining pages from multiple files. Moreover, the pdf_data() function which was introduced in pdftools 2.0 is now available on all major systems.

🔗 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.