At the eLife Sprint in September 2020, we revamped the covidpreprints.com website, which aims at featuring landmark preprints on a timeline of the pandemic. The birth of the project The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has led to about 35 million confirmed cases and over a million deaths worldwide.

I am happy to say that the latest issue of The R Journal includes a paperdescribing rentrez,the rOpenSci package for retrieving data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information(NCBI). The NCBI is one of the most important sources of biological data. The centreprovides access to information on 28 million scholarly articles through PubMed and 250million DNA sequences through GenBank.