“Security” can be a daunting, scary, and (frankly) quite often a very boring topic. BUT!, we promise that this Community Call on May 7th will be informative, engaging, and enlightening (or, at least not boring)! Applying security best practices is essential not only for developers or sensitive data storage but also for the everyday R user installing R packages, contributing to open source, working with APIs or remote servers.

Our next Community Call, on March 27th, aims to help people learn about using rOpenSci’s R packages to access and analyze taxonomy and biodiversity data, and to recognize the breadth and depth of their applications. We also aim to learn from the discussion how we might improve these tools.

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.

🎤 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.

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.

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.

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?

Join our Community Call on Tuesday, January 30th (January 31 for our Australian friends) Nick Golding, 2017 rOpenSci Fellow, will talk about two R packages he has developed recently. zoon aims to promote open and reproducible research in ecological modeling by helping researchers share their code in a modular way and produce reproducible research artifacts.

Are you thinking about submitting a package to rOpenSci’s open peer software review? Considering volunteering to review for the first time? Maybe you’re an experienced package author or reviewer and have ideas about how we can improve.

Our Community Call on Tuesday, March 7th, 8-9 AM PST, will cover “How to ask questions so they get answered! Possibly by yourself!”. Asking questions about programming is a skill you can develop - we’re not just born with it. The speakers will cover some of the background and skills you’ll need to increase your chances of having your questions answered by your peers or by a busy expert.