TL;DR rsnps is a package that enables the retrieval of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data from the NCBI’s dbSNP database and openSNP by providing wrappers for the APIs. Single nucleotide polymorphisms represent differences at one specific position in a detected biological sequence compared to the reference. ncbi_snp_query() now returns all reported variant allele frequencies in dbSNP in column maf_population in form of a tibble.

In early September, the version 2.0.0 of rmangal was approved byrOpenSci, four weeks later it made it to CRAN. Following-up on our experience wedetail below the reasons why we wrote rmangal, why we submitted our package torOpenSci and how the peer review improved our package.

The free online book Open Forensic Science in R was created to foster open science practices in the forensic science community.

Textual data and natural language processing are still a niche domain within the R ecosytstem.

There is no problem in science quite as frustrating as other peoples’ data . Whether it’s malformed spreadsheets, disorganized documents, proprietary file formats, data without metadata, or any other data scenario created by someone else, scientists have taken to Twitter to complain about it. As a political scientist who regularly encounters so-called “open data” in PDFs, this problem is particularly irritating.

I’ve worked for over 12 years in hydrology and natural hazard modelling and one of the things that still fascinates me is the variety of factors that come into play in trying to predict phenomena such as river floods.