rOpenSci News Digest, December 2025

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

🔗 rOpenSci at LatinR

We proudly continued supporting LatinR as a community partner in 2025. Here we share a list of resources and recordings for the tutorials and talks delivered by our staff and community memebers at LatinR. Discover more on the LatinR YouTube channel.

• “R-multiverse” by Maëlle Salmon, Will Landau, Yanina Bellini Saibene, recording, slides;
• “R-universe Q&A” by Jeroen Ooms, Maëlle Salmon, recording;
• “Mejor código, sin esfuerzos, sin siquiera IA” by Maëlle Salmon, Hugo Gruson, Etienne Bacher, recording, slides;
• “Estrategias de divulgación para proyectos de software e infraestructuras abiertas” by Alejandra Bellini, Yanina Bellini Saibene, recording;
• “Comunidades de líderes de código abierto” by Yanina Bellini Saibene, Noam Ross, recording.

🔗 rOpenSci at uRos

Find Maëlle Salmon’s slidedecks from the uRos (Use of R in Official Statistics) 2025 conference:

• tutorial “Painlessly Improve Your Git History”;
• keynote talk “R packages, good vibes only”.

🔗 Yani on the Give Me 5 Podcast

rOpenSci’s community manager, Yani (Yanina Bellini Saibene), was recently interviewed on NumFOCUS’s new podcast, Give Me 5. You can watch the 5-minute episode.

Yani’s central message: people are the heart of open source. And when we invest in those people—maintainers, contributors, educators, and organizers—we strengthen the global scientific community.

🔗 Coworking

Read all about coworking!

• Tuesday January 13th, 9:00 Americas Pacific (17:00 UTC), “Let it go!” with Steffi LaZerte and cohost Yanina Bellini Saibene.
  • Spend some time reviewing the forums, Slack workspaces, Newsletters, RSS feeds (etc. etc.) you’re subscribed to;
  • Unsubscribe to all you no longer need (Let it go!);
  • Meet co-host, Yanina Bellini Saibene, and discuss strategies for this New Year decluttering of your digital (or perhaps not-so-digital) life.
• Tuesday February 2nd, 9:00 Australia Western (01:00 UTC), “Share your Positron setup!” with Steffi LaZerte and cohost Noam Ross.
  • Setup Positron and explore extensions and custom settings;
  • Meet community host, Noam Ross, share how you have set up Positron for your workflow and learn from others.

And remember, you can always cowork independently on work related to R, work on packages that tend to be neglected, or work on what ever you need to get done!

🔗 Software 📦

🔗 New packages

The following package recently became a part of our software suite:

• mantis, developed by T. Phuong Quan: Generate interactive html reports that enable quick visual review of multiple related time series stored in a data frame. For static datasets, this can help to identify any temporal artefacts that may affect the validity of subsequent analyses. For live data feeds, regularly scheduled reports can help to pro-actively identify data feed problems or unexpected trends that may require action. The reports are self-contained and shareable without a web server. It is available on CRAN. It has been reviewed by Rodrigo Pires and Margaret Siple.

Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.

🔗 New versions

The following twelve packages have had an update since the last newsletter: distionary (v0.1.0), pkgstats (v0.2.1), aRxiv (0.18), comtradr (v1.0.5), DataPackageR (v0.16.2), dwctaxon (v2.0.3.9001), git2rdata (v0.5.1), gutenbergr (v0.3.1), hdcuremodels (hdcuremodels_0.0.6), nodbi (v0.14.0), spatsoc (v0.2.12), and vcr (v2.0.0).

🔗 Software Peer Review

There are fourteen recently closed and active submissions and 3 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:

• One at ‘6/approved’:

  • mantis, Multiple Time Series Scanner. Submitted by Phuong Quan.

• Two at ‘5/awaiting-reviewer(s)-response’:

  • pkgmatch, Find R Packages Matching Either Descriptions or Other R Packages. Submitted by mark padgham.

  • read.abares, Provides simple downloading, parsing and importing of Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) data sources. Submitted by Adam H. Sparks.

• Three at ‘4/review(s)-in-awaiting-changes’:

  • cowfootR, Tools to Estimate the Carbon Footprint of Dairy Farms. Submitted by Juan Moreno.

  • openFDA, openFDA API. Submitted by Simon Parker.

  • galamm, Generalized Additive Latent and Mixed Models. Submitted by Øystein Sørensen. (Stats).

• Four at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:

  • ernest, A Toolkit for Nested Sampling. Submitted by Kyle Dewsnap. (Stats).

  • suwo, Access Nature Media Repositories Through R. Submitted by Marcelo Araya-Salas.

  • rcrisp, Automate the Delineation of Urban River Spaces. Submitted by Claudiu Forgaci. (Stats).

  • reviser, Tools for Studying Revision Properties in Real-Time Time Series Vintages. Submitted by Marc Burri.

• Four at ‘1/editor-checks’:

  • Athlytics, Academic R Package for Sports Physiology Analysis from Local Strava Data. Submitted by Ang.

  • coevolve, Fit Bayesian Generalized Dynamic Phylogenetic Models using Stan. Submitted by Scott Claessens. (Stats).

  • priorsense, Prior Diagnostics and Sensitivity Analysis. Submitted by Noa Kallioinen. (Stats).

  • capybara, Fast and Memory Efficient Fitting of Linear Models With High-Dimensional Fixed Effects. Submitted by Mauricio “Pachá” Vargas Sepúlveda.

Find out more about Software Peer Review and how to get involved.

🔗 On the blog

🔗 Tech Notes

• How to Assess Usage of your Package by Maëlle Salmon. Ways to evaluate use of your package, and their downsides. This post was featured in the R Weekly Highlights podcast hosted by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas.

• Better Code, Without Any Effort, Without Even AI by Maëlle Salmon. Useful local, free, deterministic tools to improve your code.

• Code Hosting Options Beyond GitHub by Mark Padgham and Steffi LaZerte. How to manage and mirror code repositories across different platforms.

🔗 Calls for contributions

🔗 Calls for maintainers

If you’re interested in maintaining any of the R packages below, you might enjoy reading our blog post What Does It Mean to Maintain a Package?.

• gutenbergr, download and process public domain works from the Project Gutenberg collection. Issue for volunteering.

• mregions2, streamlined interface to access data from Marine Regions in R for researchers, marine scientists, and geospatial analysts seeking marine geographical information. Issue for volunteering.

• qualtRics, download Qualtrics survey data. Issue for volunteering.

• photosearcher, searches Flickr for photographs and metadata. Issue for volunteering.

🔗 Calls for contributions

Refer to our help wanted page – before opening a PR, we recommend asking in the issue whether help is still needed.

🔗 Package development corner

Some useful tips for R package developers. 👀

🔗 An Advent Calendar about Package Development

Athanasia Monika Mowinckel has been curating an Advent Calendar about R Package Development! Follow her on Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn.

🔗 A new operator in base R: notin

Coming soon, a new operator!

‘x %notin% table’ newly in ‘base’ is an idiom for ‘!(x %in% table)’ and provided almost entirely for convenience and code readability, from an R-devel suggestion, after many years of private definitions mostly hidden in packages, including in R’s ’tools’ package.

🔗 New version of the jarl CLI

Etienne Bacher released a new version of jarl, the CLI for linting R code. See the changelog, including rules specific to testthat such as expect_length, to help you keep up with new testthat expectations.

🔗 A safer .gitignore thanks to usethis::git_vaccinate()

The usethis::git_vaccinate() will vaccinate your global .gitignore file, making sure you for instance no longer commit those pesky .DS_Store files, or your .Rhistory. Tell your friends about it!

🔗 Last words

Thanks for reading! If you want to get involved with rOpenSci, check out our Contributing Guide that can help direct you to the right place, whether you want to make code contributions, non-code contributions, or contribute in other ways like sharing use cases. You can also support our work through donations.

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