Working together to push science forward
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Dickens might have meant it figuratively, but in the case of the rOpenSci OzUnconf 2019, we mean it literally. Set to the backdrop of a national emergency that is still ongoing from 11-13 December, our participants came from across Australia as well as New Zealand, Japan, India and Indonesia. An rOpenSci unconference (unconf) is about building - building software, tools, but more importantly community....
babette 1 is a package to work with BEAST2 2, a software platform for Bayesian evolutionary analysis from R. babette is a spin-off of my own academic research. As a PhD I work on models of diversification: mathematical descriptions of how species form new species. Instead of working on a species’ individuals, I work on species as evolutionary lineages. A good way to show the evolutionary relationships between species are phylogenies....
In January 2019, we announced the release of rOpenSci’s Code of Conduct version 2.0. This includes a named Committee, greater detail about unacceptable behaviors, instructions on how to make a report, and information on how reports are handled. We are committed to transparency with our community while upholding of victims and people who report incidents. Our Code of Conduct applies to all people participating in the rOpenSci community, including rOpenSci staff and leadership....
One year ago, we released our new Code of Conduct. At that time, the Code of Conduct Committee (authors of this post) agreed to do an annual review of the text, reporting form, and our internal guidelines. We have made one change to the Code of Conduct text. Because some people who have experienced abuse prefer not to label themselves as a victim, in “We are committed to transparency with our community while upholding the privacy of victims” we edited to “… upholding the privacy of victims and people who report incidents”....
We mean it. On behalf of rOpenSci, thank you to everyone who has contributed their creativity, curiosity, smarts, and time in the last year. We are fortunate to have paid staff who work to build technical and social infrastructure to lower barriers to working with research data. But it is our community, built on trust, that binds us together and helps us see who we are working for. Many people have submitted their R packages for software peer review (31)1, reviewed those packages (~60), contributed some code or documentation to a package (117 people made their first code contribution to rOpenSci this year), (co-)authored a blog post or tech note about their package or an rOpenSci resource (48 authors), shared a use case to help package authors see how their work is being used and help other users imagine how they can apply it (26 people), attended a Community Call (331 people in 23 countries), cited our software (306 citations of 122 packages), asked or answered questions, explored project ideas, or gave us a generous shoutout in a talk, a post, or on Twitter....
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at