Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this message on our blog. Now let’s take a look at the activities on and around rOpenSci!
rOpenSci headquarters
Strong commitment to the Champions Program call
The call for the Champions program closed on February 23 and the response to it was fantastic. We have received 81 champion And 14 Mentor requests by 23 countriesof 74% of applicants proposing to apply for a new package. We are now starting the selection process, starting with mentors so they can support the evaluation of Champion proposals. Confirmation emails have already been sent to all applicants. Thank you to everyone who signed up!
Policy updates for using generative AI tools
We published one first blog post about planned updates to our policies and practices for using generative AI tools in rOpenSci packages. This follows recent policy updates at both the Journal of Open Source Software And pyOpenSci. We are looking for feedback on the blog postand about the policy changes proposed therein, via this decided GitHub issue. The blog explains our intent to allow the use of generative AI tools during package development and during the review process. Our policy is to maintain our culture of openness and transparency, and we have already started informally asking authors about using generative AI tools.
Coworking
Read everything about coworking!
And remember: you can always collaborate independently on work related to R, work on packages that are often neglected, or work on whatever you want to do!
Community dashboard for your own R universe
Last year we published one blog post on one dashboard at organizational level for all rOpenSci packages and community contributors. We now have the orgmetricsDashboard repository to enable anyone to deploy their own organizational dashboard directly from their own organizational dashboard R-Universe repository. The only input required is one R-Universe “packages.json” fileand you can deploy via GitHub actions or a local Docker workflow. Give it a try!
Software 📦
New packages
The following two packages have recently become part of our software package:
- Atlyticadeveloped by Zhiang He: an open-source computational framework for longitudinal analysis of exercise physiology metrics using local Strava data exports. Designed for personal analysis and sports science applications, this package provides standardized functions for calculating and visualizing key physiological indicators including Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio (ACWR), Efficiency Factor (EF) and training load statistics. It’s been like that assessed by Eunseop Kim and Simon Nolte.
- orgmetrydeveloped by Mark Padgham: Metrics for your GitHub organization. Call one function to generate an interactive dashboard showing the status of your organization.
Discover more packagesread more about Peer review of software.
New versions
The following thirteen packages have been updated since the last newsletter: ditdb (v0.1.11), goals (1.12.0), RSelenium (v1.7.10), Atlytica (v1.0.4), pkgstats (v0.2.2), osmapiR (v0.2.5), dbparser (v2.2.1), appraise (v0.10.1), ranking (v1.0.9), wikitaxa (v0.5.0), praying mantis (v1.0.2), target types (0.14.0), and neatly hydrated (1.0.0).
dfms release message: Release Dfms 1.0: Fast and Versatile Estimation of Dynamic Factor Models in R.
Peer review of software
There are seventeen recently closed and active entries and four entries are on hold. The problems are at different stages:
Learn more about Peer review of software and how you can get involved.
On the blog
Software review
- Announcing new peer review editors for statistical software: Natalia da Silva and Andrew Heiss by Natalia da Silva, Andrew Heiss and Yanina Bellini Saibene. Introducing two new editors for peer review of rOpenSci statistical software.
- Software review in the age of AI: what we test at rOpenSci by Mark Padgham, Noam Ross, Maëlle Salmon, Yanina Bellini Saibene, Mauro Lepore, Emily Riederer, Jouni Helske and Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez. rOpenSci is testing preliminary policies for using generative AI tools, with proposed updates to documentation and procedures for authors submitting software for review, for editors, and for reviewers.
- Paleontology R packages benefit from Software Sustainability Institute Grant by Will Gearty and the Palaeverse team. A grant from the Software Sustainability Institute will go toward improving the sustainability and maintainability of R packages used in paleontological research.
- Our forum is closed, but our community is not! by the rOpenSci team. Why we’re closing our forum, how you can continue to participate in our community.
Calls for contributions
Call for maintainers
If you are interested in maintaining one of the R packages below, you may want to read our blog post What does it mean to maintain a package?.
Calls for contributions
Please refer to our help wanted page – Before opening a PR, we recommend that you ask at the time of issue whether any assistance is required.
Package development corner
Some useful tips for R package developers. 👀
The R Foundation on OSS
The R Foundation responded a Call for evidence from the EU on open sourceafter asking for examples of the added value of R in the public or private sector. You can read the full response from the R Foundationincluding a discussion of useful ideas for the future of R and open source in general.
About sitrep (situation report) functions
Athanasia Monika Mowinckel wrote a message about it sitrep functions: features that allow the user to check their settings and provide them with useful diagnostics. There are two examples in the blog post.
New version of the jarl CLI
Etienne Bacher’s jarl CLI “finds inefficient, hard-to-read, and suspicious patterns of R code in dozens of files and thousands of lines of code in milliseconds.” Read more about the new features in jarl 0.4.0such as the ability to find “unreachable code”.
R package futures
Henrik Bengtsson released futurize which allows you to parallelize execution with minimal code changes, by simply adding a call futurize(): y <- lapply(x, fcn) |> futurize().
About AI agents and open source
Scott Shambaugh, an open source maintainer, wrote that he was targeted by an AI agent after closing a PR on an issue intended for novices. First blog post: “An AI agent published a hit piece about me”, Updated.
Last words
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to get involved with rOpenSci, check out our Contributing guide that can direct you to the right place, whether you want to make code contributions, non-code contributions, or contribute in other ways such as sharing use cases. You can also support our work via donations.
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