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
06-11-2025 Community call: Elegant internet packages
Join our next community call, “Gracious internet packages”on Thursday, November 6, 2025 at 3:00 PM UTC with Matthias Grenié, Tan Ho and Salix Dubois. In this session we explore how to design and maintain R packages that interact with online data sources. Our speakers will share practical lessons, examples, and best practices to help R package developers create reliable packages.
Community conversation recording: R-multiverse, a new way to publish R packages
Resources related to the community callincluding the video recording, slides, notes have been posted.
You can also view the related comments coworking session on our website.
Coworking
Read everything about coworking!
- Tuesday, November 3, 09:00 Australia West (01:00 UTC), “Code review with rOpenSci” of Steffi LaZerte and cohost Liz Hare.
- Discover code review resources;
- Sign up to volunteer peer review of software at rOpenSci;
- Chat with Liz Hare and learn more about rOpenSci’s code review and the resources available.
- Tuesday, December 2, 2:00 PM Europe Central (1:00 PM UTC), “Meet The Carpentries” of Steffi LaZerte and cohost Angelique Threats.
- Visit The Carpentry;
- Meet community host Angelique Trusler and learn more about The Carpentries and how you can get involved.
- Tuesday, January 13, 9:00 AM Americas Pacific (5:00 PM UTC), “Let it go!” of Steffi LaZerte and cohost Yanina Bellini Saibene.
- Spend some time checking out the forums, Slack workspaces, newsletters, RSS feeds (etc. etc.) you’re subscribed to;
- Unsubscribe from anything you no longer need (let it go!);
- Meet co-host Yanina Bellini Saibene and discuss strategies for decluttering your digital (or maybe not so digital) life this new year. 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!
Software 📦
New packages
The following package has recently become part of our software package:
- hand outdeveloped by Marc Bosch-Matas: Creates a data frame containing the residuals of partial regressions of the main explanatory variable and the variable of interest. This method follows the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell theorem, as explained in Lovell (2008). https://doi.org/10.3200/JECE.39.1.88-91. It is available on CRANE. It’s been like that assessed by Christian Testa, Kyle Butts and Adam Loy.
Discover more packagesread more about Peer review of software.
New versions
The following fourteen packages have been updated since the last newsletter: saperlipopette (v0.1.0), data package (1.4.2), fingertipsR (v1.1.0), googleLanguageR (v0.3.1.1), language typology (v1.1.24), Occite (v0.6.1), openalexR (v2.0.2), hand out (cran), spatsoc (v0.2.11), statistics19 (v3.4.0), neatly hydrated (v0.7.2), Borders of the US (v0.5.0), USAboundariesData (v0.5.0), and weather (v0.7.6).
Peer review of software
There are fifteen recently closed and active entries and 3 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
Technical notes
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?.
grain changerdata aggregation methods for raster data. Issue for volunteer work.
photo findersearches Flickr for photos and metadata. Issue for volunteer work.
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. 👀
Community over code
In his message he reflects on Arrow has been around for 10 yearsNeal Richardson offers interesting insights, including:
“These values are capped by the foundation’s mantra: ‘community over code,’ which means that focusing on how people work together is more important than technical purity.”
Felienne Hermans’ AI newsletter
Felienne Hermans now translates her excellent weekly AI newsletter into English!
AI helps detect potential problems in software
Daniel Stenberg, creator and maintainer of curl, posted that “Joshua Rogers us a enormous list of potential issues in #curl that he discovered using his set of AI-powered tools… Mostly smaller bugs, but still bugs and there may be one or two actual security flaws in there. Actually really great findings.”
Two Git tricks
git blame helps you explore the history of a file to understand why certain lines were added or changed.
Do you now know how to…
find out which Git commit was deleted file? You can do that by filtering commits that reached that path:
git log --oneline -- path/to/file.find out which Git commit was deleted line? That’s possible do that of
git log -Sorpath/to/file git log -G.path/to/file
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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