OSF: A Project Management Service Built for Research
osfr provides a (hopefully) convenient R interface to OSF (Open Science Framework, https://www.osf.io), a free service for managing research developed by the Center for Open Science (COS). osfr completed its rOpenSci peer-review earlier this year and has been available on CRAN since February. Throughout its development and since its release I’ve had numerous conversations with members of the R community about OSF (and osfr), and through these interactions a couple recurring patterns emerged.
Community Captioning of rOpenSci Community Calls
Webinars and community calls are a great way to gather many people to discuss a specific topic, without the logistic hurdles of in-person events. But whether online or in-person, to reach the broadest audience, all events should work towards greater accessibility. In particular, it is difficult for people who are deaf or hard of hearing to follow the conversation because of low quality video hindering lip reading, or for non-native speakers because of low quality sound.
Maintaining an R Package - Community Call Summary
In March we held a Community Call discussing the maintenance of R packages. This call included a starting presentation by Julia Silge followed by a discussion featuring panelists with a wide variety of backgrounds: Elin Waring, Erin Grand, Leonardo Collado-Torres and Scott Chamberlain. The rOpenSci Package Maintenance Community Call was my (Janani’s) first Community Call and I loved it. For R/software-dev newbies, learning the right terminology/lingo/vocabulary is everything. It can take a few dozen blog posts and many hours of reading before beginners get to the ‘aha’ moment of ‘oh, these are the terms I need to use to search for what I’m thinking!
2 Months in 2 Minutes - rOpenSci News, June 2020
rOpenSci HQ The rOpenSci team, together with ten expert community members, put together a post: When Field or Lab Work is not an Option - Leveraging Open Data Resources for Remote Research. We highlighted examples of how specific collections of packages are being used right now in fields as varied as archaeology and climate science and compiled a table of > 100 rOpenSci packages for access to open data. Software Peer Review Software peer review is accepting submissions again, after a pause to reduce the load on reviewers and editors in light of the COVID-19 crisis.
When Field or Lab Work is not an Option - Leveraging Open Data Resources for Remote Research
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted all of our lives in a very short period of time. Spring and summer are usually very busy as students prepare to go the field to engage in various data collection efforts. The pandemic has also disrupted these carefully planned activities as travel is suspended and local and remote field stations have closed indefinitely. A lost field season can be a major setback for a dissertation timeline and students will have to improvise.
