Antarctic/Southern Ocean science and rOpenSci Collaboration and reproducibility are fundamental to Antarctic and Southern Ocean science, and the value of data to Antarctic science has long been promoted. The Antarctic Treaty (which came into force in 1961) included the provision that scientific observations and results from Antarctica should be openly shared. The high cost and difficulty of acquisition means that data tend to be re-used for different studies once collected.

While many people groan at the thought of participating in a group ice breaker activity, we’ve gotten consistent feedback from people who have been to recent rOpenSci unconferences. Best ice breaker ever! We’ve had lots of requests for a detailed description of how we do it. This post shares our recipe, including a script you can adapt, a reflection on its success, examples of how others have used it, and some tips to remember.

rOpenSci’s software engineer / postdoc Jeroen Ooms will explain what images are, under the hood, and showcase several rOpenSci packages that form a modern toolkit for working with images in R, including opencv, av, tesseract, magick and pdftools. 🕘 Thursday, November 15, 2018, 10-11AM PST; 7-8PM CET (find your timezone) ☎️ Find all details for joining the call on our Community Calls page. Everyone is welcome. No RSVP needed.

Every R package has its story. Some packages are written by experts, some by novices. Some are developed quickly, others were long in the making. This is the story of jstor, a package which I developed during my time as a student of sociology, working in a research project on the scientific elite within sociology. Writing the package has taught me many things (more on that later) and it is deeply gratifying to see, that others find the package useful.

Do you have code that accompanies a research project or manuscript? How do you review and archive that code before you submit a paper? Our next Community Call will present different perspectives on this hot topic, with plenty of time for Q&A. What’s the culture of the group around feedback and code collaboration? What are the use cases? What are some practices that can adopted? 🕘 Tuesday, October 16th, 9-10 AM PDT (find your timezone)