Working together to push science forward
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Geospatial data input/output, manipulation, and vizualization are tasks that are common to many disciplines. Thus, we’re keenly interested in making great tools in this space. We have an increasing set of spatial tools, each of which we’ll cover sparingly. See the cran and github badges for more information. We are not trying to replace the current R geospatial libraries - rather, we’re trying to fill in gaps and create smaller tools to make it easy to plug in just the tools you need to your workflow....
The rOpenSci team is growing, thanks in part to our recent funding. We recently welcomed Jeroen Ooms on the software development side and today we’re thrilled to announce a position for community manager. Our mission is to expand access to scientific data and promote a culture of reproducible research and sustainable research software. We aim to cultivate a vibrant and open community through activities such as our community calls, discussion forums, package review, and annual unconferences....
The rOpenSci Unconference is coming to Australia and we are excited!! The event will take place in sunny Brisbane, on April 21-22 2016 hosted at the Microsoft Innovation Centre. You can find more information about the event and how to register at https://auunconf.ropensci.org/. I was completely and unceremoniously thrown into the deep end when I first started learning R. Contrary to what I initially thought possible, I am now irreversibly converted to the ideology of open source....
Scientific articles are typically locked away in PDF format, a format designed primarily for printing but not so great for searching or indexing. The new pdftools package allows for extracting text and metadata from pdf files in R. From the extracted plain-text one could find articles discussing a particular drug or species name, without having to rely on publishers providing metadata, or pay-walled search engines. The pdftools slightly overlaps with the Rpoppler package by Kurt Hornik....
We’ve got a big year ahead of us as we work towards expanding our team and organizing various events and activities. We remain committed to supporting and expanding the landscape of open source tools that are available to researchers. While much of our focus has been around making it easier to access various data repositories, we are keen on improving other parts of the research pipeline, including data munging, documentation and sharing....
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at