(Blog post) “MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier” by Cory Doctorow. This blog post is about the collective action problem of moving academic publishing away from the big corporate publishers that extract millions of dollars/year from scholarly research while contributing very little in return. It reports on an encouraging report by SPARC about MIT’s success in canceling their Elsevier subscriptions.

We just published a dataset of canopy tree maps for 100 million trees in the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) with information on location, species identify, size, and whether the tree is alive.

If you’re interested in big ecological datasets, natural history, and predictive cross-scale ecology (like we are) then you should check out the upcoming Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Unifying Ecology Across Scales (July 28 – Aug 2) and the associated Gordon Research Seminar (GRS;

Last week an exciting new addition to the R ecosystem was announced: webR. webR lets you run R from inside your browser, without installing R ¹ . This is a really exciting development for educational materials, because it makes it possible to provide interactive materials where students can modify, create, and run code right inside a web page with zero setup.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted all of our lives in a very short period of time.Spring and summer are usually very busy as students prepare to go the field to engage in various data collection efforts.The pandemic has also disrupted these carefully planned activities as travel is suspended and local and remote field stations have closed indefinitely.A lost field season can be a major setback for a dissertation timeline and

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.

In this data-driven era, research is faced with new challenges, from sharing, storing and accessing data, including how to better integrate data to answer big questions in science. With many data repositories available, it is hard to maintain them all – some repositories are forced to close – meaning loss of access to invaluable datasets.

NASA generates and provides heaps of data to the scientific community. Not allof it is looking out at the stars. Some of it is looking back at us here onEarth. NASA’s Earth science program observes, understands and models theEarth system ¹ . We can use these data to discover how our Earth is changing,to better predict change, and to understand the consequences for life on Earth.

We’ve just released a new version of rnoaa with A LOT of changes. Check outthe release notesfor a complete list of changes.

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.