Community Call Follow-up - Governance of Open Source Research Software Organizations
We tend to know a good open source research software project when we see it: The code is well-documented, users contribute back to the project, the software is licensed and citable, and the community interacts and co-produces in a healthy, productive fashion. The academic literature 1 and community discourse 2 around research software development offer insight into how to promote the technical best-practices needed to produce some of these project attributes; however, the management of non-technical, social components of software projects are less visible and therefore less often discussed in best-practice pieces.
rOpenSci Software Peer Review: Still Improving
rOpenSci’s suite of packages is comprised of contributions from staff engineers and the wider R community, bringing considerable diversity of skills, expertise and experience to bear on the suite. How do we ensure that every package is held to a high standard? That’s where our software review system comes into play: packages contributed by the community undergo a transparent, constructive, non adversarial and open review process. For that process relying mostly on volunteer work, associate editors manage the incoming flow and ensure progress of submissions; authors create, submit and improve their package; reviewers, two per submission, examine the software code and user experience.
Announcing new software peer review editors: Melina Vidoni and Brooke Anderson
We are pleased to welcome Brooke Anderson and Melina Vidoni to our team of Associate Editors for rOpenSci Software Peer Review. They join Scott Chamberlain, Anna Krystalli, Lincoln Mullen, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross and Maëlle Salmon. With the addition of Brooke and Melina, our editorial board now includes four women and four men, located in North America, South America and Europe. Our open Software Peer Review system for community-contributed R tools is a key component of our mission to create technical infrastructure that lowers barriers to working with data sources on the web.
Interacting with The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program data
There seem to be a lot of ways to write about your R package, and rather than have to decide on what to focus on I thought I’d write a little bit about everything. To begin with I thought it best to describe what problem rdhs tries to solve, why it was developed and how I came to be involved in this project. I then give a brief overview of what the package can do, before continuing to describe how writing my first proper package and the rOpenSci review process was.
wateRinfo - Downloading tidal data to understand the behaviour of a migrating eel
Do you know what that sound is, Highness? Those are the Shrieking Eels — if you don’t believe me, just wait. They always grow louder when they’re about to feed on human flesh. If you swim back now, I promise, no harm will come to you. I doubt you will get such an offer from the Eels. Vizzini, The Princess Bride European eels (Anguilla anguilla) have it tough. Not only are they depicted as monsters in movies, they are critically endangered in real life.
