Working together to push science forward
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at
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. This package arises from an annoyance in another set of packages I maintain: The brranching package uses the taxize package internally, calling it’s function taxize::tax_name(). The taxize::tax_name() function throws useful messages to the user if their API key is not found, and gives them instructions on how to find it. However, the user does not have to get an API key....
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. 🔗 Split and Join PDF files It is now possible to split, join, and compress pdf files with pdftools....
🔗 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. I was surprised and intrigued to see an example of our software peer review guidelines being used in a manuscript review, independent of our formal collaboration with the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution (MEE). This is exactly the kind of thing rOpenSci is working to enable by developing a good set of practices that broadly apply to research software....
“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. However, keeping up-to-date with security best practices and applying them meticulously requires significant effort and is difficult without expert knowledge....
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at