When Standards Go Wild - Software Review for a Manuscript
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.
Community Call - Security for R
“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.
Getting your toes wet in R: Hydrology, meteorology, and more
Importance of Hydrology Given that liquid water is essential to life on Earth, water research cuts across numerous disciplines including hydrology, meteorology, geography, climate science, engineering, ecology, and more. Numerous R packages have emerged from this diversity of approaches, and we recently gathered many of them into a new rOpenSci task view which we broadly titled ‘Hydrology’ and published to CRAN. Our intent is to be exhaustive and compile R packages to access, model, and summarise information related to the movement of water across the Earth’s landscape.
Community Call - Research Applications of rOpenSci Taxonomy and Biodiversity Tools
Our next Community Call, on March 27th, aims to help people learn about using rOpenSci’s R packages to access and analyze taxonomy and biodiversity data, and to recognize the breadth and depth of their applications. We also aim to learn from the discussion how we might improve these tools. Presentations will start with an introduction to the topic and details on some specific packages and we’ll hear from several people about their “use cases in the wild”.
stats19: a package for road safety research
Introduction stats19 is a new R package enabling access to and working with Great Britain’s official road traffic casualty database, STATS19. We started the package in late 2018 following three main motivations: The release of the 2017 road crash statistics, which showed worsening road safety in some areas, increasing the importance of making the data more accessible. The realisation that many researchers were writing ad hoc code to clean the data, with a huge amount of duplicated (wasted) effort and potential for mistakes to lead to errors in the labelling of the data (more on that below).
