Publications by rOpenSci - open tools for open science
rOpenSci Vancouver Community Meetup: Transforming science through open data and software
rOpenSci is holding our annual staff and leadership meeting in Vancouver, so we’re taking the opportunity to share what we do and, if you’re interested, how you can get involved. Join us for a series of 7 short talks and demos followed by informal networking over snacks & refreshments. rOpenSci is a non-profit initiative that promotes open an...
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Integrating data from weathercan
I love working with R and have been sharing the love with my friends and colleagues for almost seven years now. I’m one of those really annoying people whose response to most analysis-related questions is “You can do that in R! Five minutes, tops!” or “Three lines of code, I swear!” The problem was that I invariably spent an hour or mor...
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An Ode to Testing, my first review
To give you an idea of where I am in my R developer germination, I’d just started reading about testing when I received an email from @rOpenSci inviting me to review the weathercan package. Many of us in the R community feel like imposters when it comes to software development. In fact, as a statistician, it was a surprise to me when I was rece...
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Thanking Your Reviewers: Gratitude through Semantic Metadata
At rOpenSci, our R package peer review process relies on the the hard work of many volunteer reviewers. These community members donate their time and expertise to improving the quality of rOpenSci packages and helping drive best practices into scientific software. Our open review process, where reviews and reviewers are public, means that one b...
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A rentrez paper, and how to use the NCBI’s new API keys
I am happy to say that the latest issue of The R Journal includes a paper describing rentrez, the rOpenSci package for retrieving data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The NCBI is one of the most important sources of biological data. The centre provides access to information on 28 million scholarly articles through P...
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DoOR – The Database of Odorant Responses
Olfactory Coding Detecting volatile chemicals and encoding these into neuronal activity is a vital task for all animals that is performed by their olfactory sensory systems. While these olfactory systems vary vastly between species regarding their numerical complexity, they are amazingly similar in their general structure. The periphery of olfact...
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ὕδωρ + σκοπῶ = water + observe
Hydrology is a concept to unify statistics, data analysis and numerical models in order to understand and analyze the endless circulation of water between the earth and its atmosphere. That’s a lot alike Data Science, isn’t it? Hydrologic Processes evolve in space and time, are extremely complex and we may never comprehend them. For this rea...
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Where is the value in package peer review?
If you read my reflection #1 on rOpenSci Onboarding, then you know I see value in the Onboarding process. A LOT of value even. This post is about where that value lies. This question has important corollaries which I will explore here based on my experience as a reviewer of bowerbird: How is a package peer reviewer’s time best spent? When is t...
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Forcing Yourself to Make Your Life Easier
The general struggle Something that will make life easier in the long-run can be the most difficult thing to do today. For coders, prioritising the long term may involve an overhaul of current practice and the learning of a new skill. This can be painful for a number of reasons: We have to admit to ourselves that we’ve been doing things ineffi...
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.rprofile: Noam Ross
Dr. Noam Ross [@noamross on Twitter] is a disease ecologist at EcoHealth Alliance in NYC, as well as an editor for rOpenSci. Topics of discussion included Noam’s history with R and rOpenSci, working in a team-driven research environment, and inspirations for pushing research processes and rOpenSci projects in exciting new directions. KO: What ...
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