Publications by rOpenSci - open tools for open science
Exploring European attitudes and behaviours using the European Social Survey
Introduction I never thought that I’d be programming software in my career. I started using R a little over 2 years now and it’s been one of the most important decisions in my career. Secluded in a small academic office with no one to discuss/interact about my new hobby, I started searching the web for tutorials and packages. After getting to...
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Chat with the rOpenSci team at upcoming meetings
You can find members of the rOpenSci team at various meetings and workshops around the world. Come say ‘hi’, learn about how our software packages can enable your research, or about our process for open peer software review and onboarding, how you can get connected with the community or tell us how we can help you do open and reproducible res...
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Announcing new software review editors: Anna Krystalli and Lincoln Mullen
Part of rOpenSci’s mission is to create technical infrastructure in the form of carefully vetted R software tools that lower barriers to working with data sources on the web. Our open peer software review system for community-contributed tools is a key component of this. As the rOpenSci community grows and more package authors submit their work...
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A package for tidying nested lists
Data == knowledge! Much of the data we use, whether it be from government repositories, social media, GitHub, or e-commerce sites comes from public-facing APIs. The quantity of data available is truly staggering, but munging JSON output into a format that is easily analyzable in R is an equally staggering undertaking. When JSON is turned into an ...
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Exploring ways to address gaps in maternal-child health research
It’s easy to come to a conference and feel intimidated by the wealth of knowledge and expertise of other attendees. As Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and writer describes,1 I was aware at all times that I had only islands of knowledge separated by darkness; that I was surrounded by chasms of not-knowing, into one of which I was certain to f...
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phylogram: dendrograms for evolutionary analysis
Evolutionary biologists are increasingly using R for building, editing and visualizing phylogenetic trees. The reproducible code-based workflow and comprehensive array of tools available in packages such as ape, phangorn and phytools make R an ideal platform for phylogenetic analysis. Yet the many different tree formats are not well integrated, a...
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What’s inside? pkginspector provides helpful tools for inspecting package contents
R packages are widely used in science, yet the code behind them often does not come under scrutiny. To address this lack, rOpenSci has been a pioneer in developing a peer review process for R packages. The goal of pkginspector is to help that process by providing a means to better understand the internal structure of R packages. It offers tools t...
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Gifski on CRAN: the fastest GIF encoder in the universe
The gifski package which was demonstrated in May at eRum 2018 in Budapest is now on CRAN. Gifski is a simple but powerful package which can hopefully take away an important performance bottleneck for generating animated graphics in R. What is Gifski Gifski is a multi-threaded high-quality GIF encoder written in Rust. It can create animated GIF im...
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rOpenSci Educators Collaborative: What Are The Challenges When Teaching Science With R?
Educators who teach science using R tend to face common pedagogical problems, regardless of their scientific domain. Yet instructors who teach with R often feel isolated at their institutions. They may be the only ones in their departments to teach using R. Even if there are others, the culture of collaboration around teaching is generally impove...
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rOpenSci Educators Collaborative: What Educational Resources Work Well and Why?
In the first post of this series, we sketched out some of the common challenges faced by educators who teach with R across scientific domains. In this post, we delve into what makes a “good” educational resource for teaching science with R. For instructors teaching sciences with R, there are a number of open educational resources that they c...
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