🎤 Dan Sholler, rOpenSci Postdoctoral Fellow 🕘 Tuesday, December 18, 2018, 10-11AM PST; 7-8PM CET (find your timezone) ☎️ Details for joining the Community Call. Everyone is welcome. No RSVP needed. Researchers use open source software for the capabilities it provides, such as streamlined data access and analysis and interoperability with other pieces of the scientific computing ecosystem.

spatsoc is an R package written by Alec Robitaille, Quinn Webber and Eric Vander Wal of the Wildlife Evolutionary Ecology Lab (WEEL) at Memorial University of Newfoundland. It is the lab’s first R package and was recently accepted through the rOpenSci onboarding process with a big thanks to reviewers Priscilla Minotti and Filipe Teixeira, and editor Lincoln Mullen.

What is restez? R packages for interacting with the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) have, to-date, depended on API query calls via NCBI’s Entrez.For computational analyses that require the automated look-up of reams of biological sequence data, piecemeal querying via bandwith-limited requests is evidently not ideal.

Although there are increasing incentives and pressures for researchers to share code (even for projects that are not essentially computational), practices vary widely and standards are mostly non-existent. The practice of reviewing code then falls to researchers and research groups before publication.

Antarctic/Southern Ocean science and rOpenSci Collaboration and reproducibility are fundamental to Antarctic and Southern Ocean science, and the value of data to Antarctic science has long been promoted. The Antarctic Treaty (which came into force in 1961) included the provision that scientific observations and results from Antarctica should be openly shared.

While many people groan at the thought of participating in a group ice breaker activity, we’ve gotten consistent feedback from people who have been to recent rOpenSci unconferences. We’ve had lots of requests for a detailed description of how we do it. This post shares our recipe, including a script you can adapt, a reflection on its success, examples of how others have used it, and some tips to remember.

rOpenSci’s software engineer / postdoc Jeroen Ooms will explain what images are, under the hood, and showcase several rOpenSci packages that form a modern toolkit for working with images in R, including opencv, av, tesseract, magick and pdftools. 🕘 Thursday, November 15, 2018, 10-11AM PST; 7-8PM CET (find your timezone) ☎️ Find all details for joining the call on our Community Calls page.Everyone is welcome. No RSVP needed.

Every R package has its story. Some packages are written by experts, some bynovices. Some are developed quickly, others were long in the making. This is thestory of jstor, a package which I developed during my time as a student ofsociology, working in a research project on the scientific elite withinsociology.

Do you have code that accompanies a research project or manuscript? How do you review and archive that code before you submit a paper? Our next Community Call will present different perspectives on this hot topic, with plenty of time for Q&A. What’s the culture of the group around feedback and code collaboration? What are the use cases? What are some practices that can adopted?

Background Surveys are ubiquitous in the social sciences, and the best of them are meticulously planned out. Statisticians often decide on a sample size based on a theoretical design, and then proceed to inflate this number to account for “sample losses”. This ensures that the desired sample size is achieved, even in the presence of non-response.