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 Coworking Read all about coworking! Join us for social coworking & office hours monthly on first Tuesdays! Hosted by Steffi LaZerte and various community hosts. Everyone welcome. No RSVP needed. Consult our Events page to find your local time and how to join ..read more

The goal of the rOpenSci Champions Program is to enable more members of historically excluded groups to participate in, benefit from, and become leaders in the R, research software engineering, and open source and open science communities. This program includes 1-on-1 mentoring for the Champions as they complete a project and perform outreach activities in their local communities. Every year, rOpenSci opens a call for applications for the roles of Champions and Mentors which are selected following a rigorous process that we describe in this blog post ..read more

We are excited to announce that R-Universe has been awarded a Google Season of Docs grant. R-Universe is rOpenSci’s platform for testing, building, distributing, and discovering R packages, led by Jeroen Ooms. It provides no-setup continuous integration, compilation for all platforms (including WebR!), accessible HTML R package manuals, a comprehensive API, and the ability for users or organizations to create their own “universes” - package repositories with their standards, participation and publishing criteria ..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 Leadership changes at rOpenSci After 13 years at the helm of rOpenSci, our founding executive director Karthik Ram is stepping down. Noam Ross, rOpenSci’s current lead for peer review, will be our new Executive Director. Karthik will remain a key advisor to rOpenSci ..read more

I am pleased, excited, and humbled to announce that I am stepping into the role of Executive Director of rOpenSci starting April 1. First, let me give my gratitude to our outgoing Executive Director and friend Karthik Ram for his leadership and mentorship running rOpenSci the past decade. He’s been a steady hand and visionary that helped our community accomplish so much together in this time. Thanks to him and the rest of the team for entrusting me with this role ..read more

Dear rOpenSci community, This is a bit of a bittersweet announcement… After nearly 13 years, it’s time for me to step down as the Executive Director of rOpenSci. In the summer of 2011 I co-founded rOpenSci alongside a group of dedicated colleagues. What began as a casual collaboration among open science enthusiasts quickly evolved into something far more meaningful. We never imagined it would become the global initiative it is today, with a team spanning the world and impacting countless researchers ..read more

Our first cohort of the rOpenSci Champions Program has now completed the second phase of the program by developing their project and carrying out outreach activities. In this article, we share each Champion’s project, their achievements and their outreach activities. Champions’ Projects In their applications Champions choose to develop a new package or to participate in the review process as authors or reviewers. Projects related to rOpenSci Software Peer Review Carolina Pradier from Argentina worked on the eph package, which facilitated working with data from the Permanent Household Survey ..read more

rOpenSci’s second cohort of Champions has been onboarded! Their training first started with a session on code style, was followed by three sessions on the basics of R package development, and ended with a session on advanced R package development, which consisted of a potpourri of tips with discussion, followed by time for applying these principles to the participants’ packages. Here, I want to share one of the topics covered: Package testing, and in particular, the DRY (“don’t repeat yourself”) and DAMP (“descriptive and meaningful phrases”) principles ..read more

rOpenSci Software Peer Review’s guidance is gathered in an online book that keeps improving! This blog post summarises what’s new in our Dev Guide 0.9.0, with all changes listed in the changelog. Now available in Spanish! Our guide is now bilingual (English and Spanish), thanks to work by Yanina Bellini Saibene, Elio Campitelli and Pao Corrales, and thanks to support of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NumFOCUS, and the R Consortium. Read the guide in Spanish ..read more

Now that you have created your package, presenting it to the world is a crucial step to gain visibility and attract users. Marketing your package effectively contributes to reaching the people your package can support, finding users to assist you in maintaining and improving your package and allowing you to learn about how people use it. In this blog post we suggest a series of activities and tools for advertising your package ..read more