Monday, September 28, 2026 From rOpenSci (https://ropensci.org/blog/2026/09/28/news-september-2026/). Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under the CC-BY license.
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 community manager Yani and software-review lead Mark will participate in the upcoming Openscapes community call on October 1st (this Thursday!) at 9:30AM PT (16:30 UTC) entitled “Open Communities in the Age of AI”, together with Mara Averick, Senior Developer Advocate at Quansight and Hadley Wickham, Chief Scientist at Posit.
Event page, including link for free registration.
Our current 2026–2027 cohort has completed the training phase and is now focused on developing their individual projects with the support of their mentors, as well as on their outreach activities.
Meanwhile, the 2025–2026 cohort will wrap up their journey with a closing community call, Más Allá del Código: muestra abierta de los proyectos de nuestros campeon(a|e)s (Beyond the Code: an open showcase of our Champions’ Projects). At the call, the Champions will present their final projects, from creating, improving, and reviewing R packages to the outreach work that brought those projects to their communities. They’ll also share what their projects led to, including scholarships, new collaborations, and professional growth. The event is in Spanish. The call will take place on Monday, October 12 at 15:00 UTC. Come get inspired, ask your questions live, and help us celebrate our growing open-source community!
In July, we started to share stories from members of our community about their experiences with rOpenSci. Our second story features Yi-Chin Sunny Tseng and her connection with rOpenSci. Read it on our blog: Happy Birthday rOpenSci — My Journey from First-Time Developer to Current Opportunities Stay tuned for more stories from our community as we continue celebrating 15 years of rOpenSci!
Registration for LatinR 2026 (November 11–13, Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín) is now open, and rOpenSci will have a strong presence.
Jeroen will give a talk on R-Universe. Yani will lead a workshop on R package development and give a talk on the Champions Program’s open curriculum. Nic Crane is one of the conference’s keynote speakers. Evelia Lorena Coss Navarrete, one of our Champions, will talk about the package she developed during the program. Several other rOpenSci folks — Natalia Da Silva, Luis Verde, and Francisco Cardozo, among others — will also be there. Jeroen, Francisco, and Yani will take part in the hackathon during the conference.
Join us in Medellín!
Read all about coworking!
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!
The following two packages recently became a part of our software suite:
ciecl, developed by Rodolfo Tasso Suazo: Tools for working with the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10 Chile official MINSAL/DEIS v2018). Includes optimized SQL search with SQLite, fuzzy matching of medical terms (Jaro-Winkler), Charlson and Elixhauser comorbidity calculation, WHO ICD-11 API integration, and hierarchical code validation. Data from Centro FIC Chile DEIS https://deis.minsal.cl/centrofic/. It has been reviewed by Maëlle Salmon and Yanina Bellini.
brapiR2, developed by Joash Joshua Ayo: Provides pipe-friendly, stateless read access to the Breeding API (BrAPI) v2.1 specification, an open community standard for plant breeding data interchange maintained by the BrAPI project https://brapi.org. Wraps 32 of the 37 BrAPI v2.1 entities across all four modules, Core, Germplasm, Phenotyping, and Genotyping, covering 49 of the specifications 138 retrieval (GET and search) endpoints and returning tidy tibbles ready for analysis. Write and update endpoints are out of scope by design. Features include automatic pagination, async search handling, response caching, parallel batch fetching, and convenience functions for genomic selection workflows (e.g. dosage matrix extraction). Designed for plant breeders and bioinformaticians who need programmatic access to plant breeding databases that implement the BrAPI’ v2 specification. It has been reviewed by David Waring and Jenna Hershberger.
Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.
The following twenty-two packages have had an update since the last newsletter: visdat (v0.6.1), nycOpenData (v0.2.3), ruODK (v1.6.0), stats19 (v4.1.0), npi (v0.3.1), promoutils (v0.7.0), brapiR2 (v0.2.0), ciecl (v1.0.0), bibtex (v0.5.3), ckanr (v0.9.0), osmapiR (v0.2.6), distionary (v0.2.0), GLMMcosinor (v0.2.2), reviser (v0.3.1), autotest (v0.2), occCite (v0.6.3), readODS (v2.3.6), osmdata (v0.4.1), goodpractice (v1.2.0), galamm (v0.4.1), RAMEN (v2.1.2), and EDIutils (v3.0.1).
There are seventeen recently closed and active submissions and 4 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:
Two at ‘6/approved’:
brapiR2, A Tidyverse-Native Client for the BrAPI v2 (Breeding API) Specification. Submitted by Joash Joshua Ayo.
ciecl, International Classification of Diseases ICD-10/ICD-11 for Chile. Submitted by Rodolfo Tasso.
Three at ‘5/awaiting-reviewer(s)-response’:
ibger, Access the IBGE Aggregate Data API from R. Submitted by Andre Leite Wanderley.
RAQSAPI, A Simple Interface to the US EPA Air Quality System Data Mart API. Submitted by mccroweyclinton-EPA.
coevolve, Fit Bayesian Generalized Dynamic Phylogenetic Models using Stan. Submitted by Scott Claessens. (Stats).
One at ‘4/review(s)-in-awaiting-changes’:
Four at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:
camtrapReport, Camera-Trap Report Generator. Submitted by Elham Ebrahimi.
nert, Curated Access to TERN Environmental Raster Data. Submitted by Max Moldovan.
rfastlowess, High-Performance LOWESS Smoothing for R. Submitted by Amir Valizadeh. (Stats).
camtrapReport, Camera-Trap Report Generator. Submitted by Elham Ebrahimi.
Two at ‘2/seeking-reviewer(s)’:
grumpy, Read NumPy .npy and .npz Files. Submitted by Hugo Gruson.
tezr, Access Thesis Metadata from Turkiye’s National Thesis Center. Submitted by Emrah Er.
Five at ‘1/editor-checks’:
ocean3d, Three-Dimensional Marine Spatial Analysis. Submitted by Jay Matsushiba.
corila, Sparse modelling with grouped and correlated features allowing for privileged information. Submitted by Armin Rauschenberger. (Stats).
tarpolyglot, Run Python, Julia, Rust, and C++ Inside targets Pipeline Steps. Submitted by Pierre9344.
OptSurvCutR, Optimal Survival Cut-Point Discovery for Time-to-Event Analysis with OptSurvCutR. Submitted by Payton Yau. (Stats).
HydraR, Stateful Agentic Orchestration for Scientific Reproducibility. Submitted by Ignatius Pang.
Find out more about Software Peer Review and how to get involved.
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?.
Refer to our help wanted page – before opening a PR, we recommend asking in the issue whether help is still needed.
Some useful information for R package developers. 👀
The covr2gh package by Dragoș Moldovan-Grünfeld provides an automated way to summarise the impact of a pull request (PR) on test coverage directly within GitHub. See it in action in a PR in the tfrmt R package.
Hugo Gruson wrote an exhaustive post about the deprecation of data in an R package. The post features the delayedAssign() function.
Athanasia Mo Mowinckel published “Why ggseg Atlases Became Function Calls”, where she explains how she made data into objects into a package in order to allow re-exporting them. She furthermore tells how she got to that conclusion by trying out different solutions and discussing with other package developers in the rOpenSci Slack workspace.
The usethis package was updated on CRAN. The changelog features many quality of life improvements around Git and GitHub, and a new use_readme_qmd() function for drafting a README in the Quarto format.
Thanks for reading! If you want to get involved with rOpenSci, check out our Contributing Guide. This guide will help direct you to the right place, whether you want to make code contributions, non-code contributions, or contribute in other ways such as through sharing use cases. You can also support our work through donations.
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