Community Call - Research Applications of rOpenSci Taxonomy and Biodiversity Tools
Our next Community Call, on March 27th, aims to help people learn about using rOpenSci’s R packages to access and analyze taxonomy and biodiversity data, and to recognize the breadth and depth of their applications. We also aim to learn from the discussion how we might improve these tools. Presentations will start with an introduction to the topic and details on some specific packages and we’ll hear from several people about their “use cases in the wild”.
stats19: a package for road safety research
Introduction stats19 is a new R package enabling access to and working with Great Britain’s official road traffic casualty database, STATS19. We started the package in late 2018 following three main motivations: The release of the 2017 road crash statistics, which showed worsening road safety in some areas, increasing the importance of making the data more accessible. The realisation that many researchers were writing ad hoc code to clean the data, with a huge amount of duplicated (wasted) effort and potential for mistakes to lead to errors in the labelling of the data (more on that below).
Community Call Follow-up - Governance of Open Source Research Software Organizations
We tend to know a good open source research software project when we see it: The code is well-documented, users contribute back to the project, the software is licensed and citable, and the community interacts and co-produces in a healthy, productive fashion. The academic literature 1 and community discourse 2 around research software development offer insight into how to promote the technical best-practices needed to produce some of these project attributes; however, the management of non-technical, social components of software projects are less visible and therefore less often discussed in best-practice pieces.
rOpenSci Software Peer Review: Still Improving
rOpenSci’s suite of packages is comprised of contributions from staff engineers and the wider R community, bringing considerable diversity of skills, expertise and experience to bear on the suite. How do we ensure that every package is held to a high standard? That’s where our software review system comes into play: packages contributed by the community undergo a transparent, constructive, non adversarial and open review process. For that process relying mostly on volunteer work, associate editors manage the incoming flow and ensure progress of submissions; authors create, submit and improve their package; reviewers, two per submission, examine the software code and user experience.
Announcing new software peer review editors: Melina Vidoni and Brooke Anderson
We are pleased to welcome Brooke Anderson and Melina Vidoni to our team of Associate Editors for rOpenSci Software Peer Review. They join Scott Chamberlain, Anna Krystalli, Lincoln Mullen, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross and Maëlle Salmon. With the addition of Brooke and Melina, our editorial board now includes four women and four men, located in North America, South America and Europe. Our open Software Peer Review system for community-contributed R tools is a key component of our mission to create technical infrastructure that lowers barriers to working with data sources on the web.
