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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:

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. An understanding of the concept of ‘modularity’ in software design, following the Unix philosophy that programs should ‘do one thing and do it well’. This realisation has led to code inside the rOpenSci-hosted package stplanr being split-out into two separate packages: cyclestreets and stats19.

We have a wider motivation: we want the roads to be safer. By making data on the nature of road crashes more publicly accessible to inform policy, we hope this package saves lives.

• software peer review
• data access
• geospatial
• transport
• packages
• stats19
• road safety
• open data UK

The ssh package provides a native ssh client for R. You can connect to a remote server over SSH to transfer files via SCP, setup a secure tunnel, or run a command or script on the host while streaming stdout and stderr directly to the client. The intro vignette provides a brief introduction.

This week version 0.4 has been released, so you can install it directly from CRAN:

install.packages("ssh")

The NEWS file shows that this is mostly a bugfix release:

• ssh
• packages
• tech notes

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. In a recent community call, I discussed some of these components through the lens of my research on open source research software project governance....

• governance
• open science
• open source
• community call

This week version 2.0 of the V8 package has been released to CRAN. Go get it now!

install.packages("V8")

The V8 package provides an embedded JavaScript engine that can be used inside of R. You can use it interactively as a JavaScript console, but it is mostly useful for wrapping JavaScript libraries in R packages. Some cool examples include jsonld, jsonvalidate, and daff.

This major and much anticipated upgrade brings a new version of the JavaScript engine, effectively upgrading the JavaScript language. This opens up a lot of new possibilities, but it can also introduce some subtle behavioral changes, so read on carefully.

• javascript
• v8
• tech notes

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....

• Software Peer Review
• dev guide