Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci! rOpenSci HQ Looking for Maintainers to Support First-Time Contributors Now open to non-rOpenSci package maintainers! Making your first contribution to Open Source can be both empowering and intimidating. As such, we’re exited to announce a special series of activities to support first-time contributors ..read more

Thanksgiving is celebrated in many parts of the world. The USA, rOpenSci’s official location, celebrates Thanksgiving this Thursday, 28th November. Giving thanks to contributors is also an important part of open-source software development. Many open-source software projects use the allcontributors.org system to acknowledge contributions, which includes a bot to automate the tedious stuff for adding project contributors, so you can focus on your project instead of managing your ReadMe. One strong motivation for allcontributors ..read more

Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci! rOpenSci HQ Fostering open science in Latin America: CZI awards funds for sustainable research software development Exciting News! The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has awarded rOpenSci a new grant to foster sustainable scientific software as a pillar of Open Science in Latin America by building capacity and community ..read more

Do you remember your first contribution to open source? Or are you still waiting to make it? Contributing to open source can be very rewarding, but also incredibly intimidating. When we asked about first time contributions on the rOpenSci Slack, people recalled the challenges and mistakes they made, but mostly how much they learned from and enjoyed that experience. For open source maintainers, contributions can also lead to mixed feelings, as reviewing contributions and making your repository contributor-friendly1 can take time ..read more

Exciting News! The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has awarded rOpenSci a new grant to foster sustainable scientific software as a pillar of Open Science in Latin America by building capacity and community. With this $340K grant, we’re planning to launch a Spanish-language version of our Champions Program, along with other new initiatives to make sustainable software development more accessible to researchers across the region. Let’s dive into how this project will support Latin American scientists ..read more

Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci! rOpenSci HQ Community call recording: Navigating the R ecosystem using R-universe Video and resources. Learn more about R-Universe and how you can use it to improve your R package development workflow. In this community call, Jeroen Ooms provided details on what R-Universe is and an update on what you can do with it today ..read more

For the better part of a year, I have been looking for an opportunity to use the rOpenSci package deposits in my role as the Data Librarian at EcoHealth Alliance. I had done some initial testing with Mark Padgham, the brilliant person who developed this package, but there weren’t any projects ready for me to put deposits through its paces. Enter the Rift Valley Fever Virus in South Africa project, a ten year, multiple part study of humans, wildlife (mosquitoes and wild ungulates), and domestic animals that uses every data store from Dropbox to Google Drive to Airtable to ODK with a healthy mix ..read more

Over the past thirty years I have written five technical books, co-written three others, and edited a further six. Since 2007 they have all lived in GitHub repositories, as did the first versions of the Software Carpentry lessons that I helped to write. A few months ago I wrote about the GitHub issue labels I use for writing projects like these. As I put that post together, I realized that I wasn’t actually using all of the labels I had created, and that the problem of choosing good labels for a mixture of code and prose is more complicated than it seems ..read more

As part of our work documenting R-Universe, we’re adding screenshots of the interface to the documentation website. Taking screenshots manually could quickly become very cumbersome, especially as we expect they’ll need updating in future: we might want to change the universes we feature, the interface might improve yet again and therefore look slightly different. Therefore, we decided to opt for a programmatic approach. In this post we shall present our learnings from using the R packages chromote and magick to produce screenshots ..read more

R is a language and environment for statistical computing. There are several tools and approaches for interacting with R, but not all are accessible with screen readers. This guide provides an overview of the tools and techniques available to screen reader users across different operating systems, with practical tips and resources to help them navigate the R environment. This guide may not be complete, but I hope it serves as a valuable starting point ..read more