Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci!

rOpenSci HQ

Help us maintain {pkgcheck}!

You might know of our {pkgcheck} system used for our automated package checks, and for your own stand-alone and GitHub-action usage on any package. We are seeking co-maintainers for the {pkgcheck} package which powers this system. In particular, we have several ideas for additional checks in current repo issues. We would like volunteers to attend an online get-together for us to coach you on how to implement new checks, and so to help you get involved in maintaining and further developing our checking system. If you’re interested and already part of the rOpenSci Slack, please join our dedicated #pkgcheck channel, otherwise email mark@ropensci.org.

Champions Program 2025

The call for the first cohort in Spanish has closed. We received 121 aplications from people in 22 different countries. Most of this year’s applicants want to develop a new package and the topics are very varied: from data access, to new analytics, educational materials, to health and agricultural applications. The review process is in full swing. Notifications will be going out over the next few weeks to all those who applied. We greatly appreciate the time all applicants took to write and submit their proposals. We can’t wait to see what this year’s cohort will bring to the program!

Coworking

Read all about coworking!

• Tuesday June 3, 2025 2:00 PM CEST (12:00 UTC), “Getting to know the DSLC” with Steffi LaZerte and cohost Jon Harmon.
  • Visit the DSLC.
  • Learn more about the DSLC and how you might get involved
• Tuesday July 1st, 2025 9:00 AM Americas Pacific (16:00 UTC), “Research Software Engineering and R” with Yanina Bellini Saibene and cohost Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal.
  • Look up Research Software Engineering.
  • Chat with Saranjeet about being a Research Software Engineer in R

And remember, you can always cowork independently on work related to R, work on packages that tend to be neglected, or work on what ever you need to get done!

Software

New packages

The following two packages recently became a part of our software suite:

Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.

New versions

The following eleven packages have had an update since the last newsletter: frictionless (v1.2.1), c3dr (v0.1.5), excluder (v0.5.2), fellingdater (v1.0.3), fireexposuR (v1.1.0), forcis (1.0.1), geotargets (v0.3.1), stplanr (overlapping_segments_in_overline), tarchetypes (0.13.1), targets (1.11.3), and tinkr (0.3.0).

Software Peer Review

Find out more about Software Peer Review and how to get involved.

On the blog

Calls for contributions

Calls for maintainers

If you’re interested in maintaining any of the R packages below, you might enjoy reading our blog post What Does It Mean to Maintain a Package?.

• hddtools, Hydrological Data Discovery Tools. Issue for volunteering.

• USAboundaries (and USAboundariesdata), historical and contemporary boundaries of the United States of America. Issue for volunteering.

• historydata, datasets for historians. Issue for volunteering.

Calls for contributions

Refer to our help wanted page – before opening a PR, we recommend asking in the issue whether help is still needed.

Package development corner

Some useful tips for R package developers.

Online R Package Development Workshops by R Forwards

Interesting opportunity starting next week, read more on the R Forwards website:

“The Forwards teaching team is hosting two workshop series beginning next month to teach participants how to build their own R packages. No prior package building experience is required.”

“Cohort 1 meets every other Monday starting June 2, from 09:00 to 10:30 UTC and will be taught by Pao Corrales and Ella Kaye. Cohort 2 meets every other Tuesday starting June 3, from 14:30 to 16:00 UTC and will be led by Emma Rand, Joyce Robbins, and Heather Turner.”

Roaringly Acknowledge Organizations with ROR IDs in DESCRIPTION

In our recent blog post we explained what ROR IDs are: they are to organizations what ORCID are for individuals. They help acknowledge more precisely an organization (a company that owns the copyright, a non-profit that funded the work, etc.) in the package’s metadata. Read more.

Safeguard your documentation in check environments

Or, in other words, how to have your package not fail R CMD check on CRAN, but examples and vignettes still rendered in pkgdown documentation?

Thanks to Alasdair Warwick, maintainer of the recently reviewed gtexr package, for summarizing some advice that we share here:

• For function examples, use the examplesIf roxygen2 tag with the IN_PKGDOWN variable e.g. #' @examplesIf identical(Sys.getenv("IN_PKGDOWN"), "true")
• For vignettes, either pre-build if special tools/data/credentials are required which are unavailable on generic build servers, or use the IN_PKGDOWN variable with knitr eval option e.g.

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
 collapse = TRUE,
 comment = "#>",
 eval = Sys.getenv("IN_PKGDOWN") == "true"
)

Examples:

• examplesIf: https://github.com/ropensci/gtexr/blob/592ac781672f07eb67e935d4155570c5960d1fdb/R/get_service_info.R#L14 (see also Docs of the roxygen2 tag: https://roxygen2.r-lib.org/articles/rd.html?q=examplesIf#examples)
• Vignette, knitr eval option: https://github.com/ropensci/gtexr/blob/592ac781672f07eb67e935d4155570c5960d1fdb/vignettes/gtexr.Rmd#L16

More on {renv} and R versions

To follow up on last newsletter’s item “ CI: Pin the R version if using renv”, a tip by Hugo Gruson: it’s also possible to automatically set the R version to the one documented in renv.lock when using the r-lib/setup-raction.

Air gets a usethis function: usethis::use_air()

In March we mentioned Air, the new formatter developed at Posit. In usethis development version, there’s a function that helps you set up a project to use Air: use_air(). See also the issue about the JSON config.

Better HTTP testing with vcr’s development version

Breaking news: a new vcr version is in the works! Follow the activity by Hadley Wickham and Scott Chamberlain in vcr’s GitHub repository, check out the new local_cassette() function… Or just wait for the next release!

Last words

Thanks for reading! If you want to get involved with rOpenSci, check out our Contributing Guide that can help direct you to the right place, whether you want to make code contributions, non-code contributions, or contribute in other ways like sharing use cases. You can also support our work through donations.

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