For a fourth year running, we are excited to announce the rOpenSci unconference, our annual event loosely modeled on Foo Camp. We’re organizing #runconf17 to bring together scientists, developers, and open data enthusiasts from academia, industry, government, and non-profits to get together for a couple of days to hack on various projects and generally enrich our community. The agenda is mostly decided during the unconference itself. Past projects have related to open data, data visualization, data publication and open science using R.

Programmatic access to biodiversity data is revolutionising large-scale, reproducible biodiversity research. In the marine realm, the largest global database of species occurrence records is the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, OBIS. As of January 2017, OBIS contains 47.78 million occurrences of 117,345 species, all openly available and accessible via the OBIS API. The number of questions to address using these kinds of resources is as large as the number of investigators, but certain operations commonly crop up in many workflows.

This week an update for xml2 and a new xslt package have appeared on CRAN. A full announcement for xml2 version 1.1 will appear on the rstudio blog. This post explains xml validation (via xsd schema) and xml transformation (via xslt stylesheets) which have been added in this release. XML schemas and stylesheets are not exactly new; both xslt 1.1 (2001) and xsd 1.0 (2004) have been available in browsers for over a decade.

A research project often starts with a bright idea and an initial commitment of volunteer time, or perhaps, a fixed term grant. But what happens after that initial activity? How can the project continue to sustain itself? (We define sustainability as the capacity to endure. Software is sustainable if it will continue to be available in the future, on new platforms, and meeting new needs. [This is from slide 23 of http://www.

Next week I’ll be in Washington DC to meet my peers in research community management as part of the inaugural class of the AAAS Community Engagement Fellowship Program! The program, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has a mission to improve community building and collaboration in scientific organizations and research collaborations by providing a year of training and support to a cohort of scientific community managers. The Fellowship will begin in January 2017 when we 17 Fellows gather for a week-long training course with leaders in the field at AAAS headquarters.