Onboarding at rOpenSci: A Year in Reviews
Code review, in which peers manually inspect the source code of software written by others, is widely recognized as one of the best tools for finding bugs in software. Code review is relatively uncommon in scientific software development, though. Scientists, despite being familiar with the process of peer review, often have little exposure to code review due to lack of training and historically little incentive to share the source code from their research.
rOpenSci geospatial libraries
Geospatial data input/output, manipulation, and vizualization are tasks that are common to many disciplines. Thus, we’re keenly interested in making great tools in this space. We have an increasing set of spatial tools, each of which we’ll cover sparingly. See the cran and github badges for more information. We are not trying to replace the current R geospatial libraries - rather, we’re trying to fill in gaps and create smaller tools to make it easy to plug in just the tools you need to your workflow.
We're hiring a community manager!
The rOpenSci team is growing, thanks in part to our recent funding. We recently welcomed Jeroen Ooms on the software development side and today we’re thrilled to announce a position for community manager. Our mission is to expand access to scientific data and promote a culture of reproducible research and sustainable research software. We aim to cultivate a vibrant and open community through activities such as our community calls, discussion forums, package review, and annual unconferences.
Australian rOpenSci Unconference
The rOpenSci Unconference is coming to Australia and we are excited!! The event will take place in sunny Brisbane, on April 21-22 2016 hosted at the Microsoft Innovation Centre. You can find more information about the event and how to register at https://auunconf.ropensci.org/. I was completely and unceremoniously thrown into the deep end when I first started learning R. Contrary to what I initially thought possible, I am now irreversibly converted to the ideology of open source.
Introducing pdftools - A fast and portable PDF extractor
Scientific articles are typically locked away in PDF format, a format designed primarily for printing but not so great for searching or indexing. The new pdftools package allows for extracting text and metadata from pdf files in R. From the extracted plain-text one could find articles discussing a particular drug or species name, without having to rely on publishers providing metadata, or pay-walled search engines. The pdftools slightly overlaps with the Rpoppler package by Kurt Hornik.
