rOpenSci News Digest, January 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 2024 Highlights and what comes next in 2025

In this blog post, the rOpenSci Team shares the highlights of 2024 and what come next in 2025. Read the full story for details about our project’s progress and activities, from R-Universe, our software peer review system, to the champions program and the multilingual project to the great work of our community.We are excited to continue building an open science for all in 2025.

“rOpenSci Statistical Software Peer Review: The importance and challenge of community engagement”

Find the recording of Mark Padgham’s talk at RSE CONF 2024.The talk was second in a two-part session devoted to software peer review, and followed a walk-through demonstration of the process of submitting to Journal of Open Source software.Explore Mark’s slides.

Community Call From Novice to Contributor: Making and Supporting First-Time Contributions to FOSS

In our first community call of 2025, we explored the journey of open source contributions. Hugo Gruson moderated a dynamic discussion featuring insights from three community members: Sunny Tseng offered practical advice for navigating the challenges of initial open source involvement, Pascal Burkhard shared essential git skills for first-time contributors, and Yaoxiang Li delved into test strategies for enhancing R package quality using testthat.

Check the video recording (with captions) and all the resources shared in the call on our website. Also, check the next coworking session and mini hackathon to learn how to join us to support first-time contributions to open source projects.

Coworking Mini-hackathons

Read all about coworking!

Join us for two special Coworking Mini-Hackathon for First-Time Contributors. If you’re curious about contributing to Open Source Software, and would like some support to get started, these events are for you!

During these sessions you’ll join others making contributions to R packages while package maintainers and other mentors are available ’live’ to answer questions and give guidance.

• Tuesday February 4th 09:00 Australian Western (01:00 UTC)
• Tuesday March 4th 14:00 European Central (13:00 UTC)

Don’t forget to register to participate!

Software

New packages

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

• emodnet.wfs, developed by Salvador Fernández-Bejarano together with Anna Krystalli and Maëlle Salmon: Access and interrogate EMODnet (European Marine Observation and Data Network) Web Feature Service data through R. It has been reviewed by Alec L. Robitaille, Liz Hare, and François Michonneau.

Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.

New versions

The following seven packages have had an update since the last newsletter: rsi (v0.3.2), cffr (v1.2.0), hoardr (v0.5.5), nasapower (v4.2.2), readODS (v2.3.2), stats19 (v3.3.0), and targets (1.10.0).

Software Peer Review

There are sixteen recently closed and active submissions and 4 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:

• One at ‘6/approved’:

  • emodnet.wfs, Access EMODnet Web Feature Service data through R. Submitted by Maëlle Salmon.

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

  • rredlist, IUCN Red List Client. Submitted by William Gearty.

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

  • fireexposuR, Compute and Visualize Wildfire Exposure. Submitted by Air Forbes.

  • mbquartR, Finding Manitoba Quarter Sections. Submitted by Alex Koiter.

  • pangoling, Access to Large Language Model Predictions. Submitted by Bruno Nicenboim.

• Six at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:

  • butterfly, Verification For Continually Updating Timeseries Data. Submitted by Thomas Zwagerman.

  • geotargets, Targets Extensions for Geospatial Formats. Submitted by Nicholas Tierney.

  • mapmetadata, Map health metadata onto predefined research domains. Submitted by Rachael Stickland.

  • QuadratiK, A Collection of Methods Using Kernel-Based Quadratic Distances for. Submitted by Giovanni Saraceno. (Stats).

  • sits, Satellite Image Time Series Analysis for Earth Observation Data Cubes. Submitted by Gilberto Camara.

  • fwildclusterboot, Fast Wild Cluster Bootstrap Inference for Linear Models. Submitted by Alexander Fischer. (Stats).

• Two at ‘2/seeking-reviewer(s)’:

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

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

• Three at ‘1/editor-checks’:

  • sasquatch, Use SAS, R, and quarto Together. Submitted by Ryan Zomorrodi.

  • forcis, An R Client to Access the FORCIS Database. Submitted by Nicolas Casajus.

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

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

On the blog

• rOpenSci 2024 Code of Conduct Transparency Report by Yanina Bellini Saibene, Mark Padgham, and Natalia Morandeira. rOpenSci 2024 Code of Conduct Transparency Report.

• rOpenSci 2024 Highlights by The rOpenSci Team. A summary of the highlights of the rOpenSci community in 2024 and some news for 2025.

• Coworking Mini-Hackathon for First-Time Contributors by Steffi LaZerte, Yanina Bellini Saibene, Yi-Chin Sunny Tseng, Pascal Burkhard, Yaoxiang Li, and Hugo Gruson. Announcing mini-hackathons to support first time contributors.

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?.

• hddtools, Hydrological Data Discovery Tools. Issue for volunteering.

• tic, Tasks Integrating Continuously: CI-Agnostic Workflow Definitions. Issue for volunteering.

• USAboundaries (and USAboundariesdata), historical and contemporary boundaries of the United States of America . Issue for volunteering.

• historydata, datasets for historians. 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.

The bib2df package, for parsing BibTeX files into tibbles, would need some help! Issue for volunteering.

Package development corner

Some useful tips for R package developers.

How to change stuff in your package (deprecations)

Prompted by a discussion in the rOpenSci slack workspace on how to gracefully change default values in R functions, we thought it’d be worth mentioning the dev guide’s chapter on “Package evolution – changing stuff in your package” again.Changing stuff entails: deprecating functions, arguments, values of arguments (and even changing maintainers!).

We also discussed other relevant resources such as:

• The lifecycle R package.
• The rlang functions for handling missing arguments like rlang::is_missing() (thanks to Jon Harmon for pointing those out).
• Hadley Wickham’s keynote talk at rstudio::global 2021 “Maintaining the house the tidyverse built”.

Gotcha if using R on GitHub Actions ubuntu-latest

Gábor Csárdi posted on Bluesky about a change in GHA ubuntu-latest that might affect R workflows.The new ubuntu-latest by GHA does not have R installed by default so you need to either

• Use r-lib/actions/setup-r@v2 from github.com/r-lib/actions (which is already the case if you use the example workflows from that repository), or
• Use a Docker container.

Reminder: use the newest tools for mocking

In honor of local_mock() and with_mock()’s getting removed from testthat as they won’t work with R 4.5, let’s remember that testthat has newer functions for mocking: with_mocked_bindings() and local_mocked_bindings().See also the R-hub blog post on the topic.

New expectations from testthat 3.2.2

New expectations have been added to testthat in the 3.2.2 version:

• A new inheritance expectation, expect_s7_class() (S7 being a new object-oriented programming system for R.)
• A bit meta: tools for testing… expectations. See their use in testthat’s tests.

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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