UPDATE: Use the new discussion forum at https://discuss.ropensci.org/

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Community

Community is at the heart of rOpenSci. We couldn’t have accomplished most of our work without help from various contributors and users.

Most of our discussions with the broader community over the past year have been through twitter or one-on-one conversations. However, we would like to foster more open ended and deeper discussions with our community. To this end, we are resurrecting our public Google group list. We encourage you to sign up and post ideas for packages, solicit feedback on new ideas, and most importantly find other collaborators who share your domain interests. We also plan to use the list to solicit feedback on some of the bigger rOpenSci projects early on in the development phase allowing our community to shape future direction and also collaborate where appropriate.

• community

We’re delighted to be sponsoring the upcoming Open Science Codefest in Santa Barbara, California, alongside RENCI, NCEAS, NSF, DataONE, and Mozilla Science Lab. The Open Science Codefest’s goal is to gather researchers from across ecology, biodiversity science, and other earth and environmental sciences with programmer types to collaborate on coding projects. The ideas for the event so far include not just coding projects with the end result being software, but conversations on particular topics that may or my not lead to code being written....

• conference

We just released v0.2 of rnoaa. For details on the update, see the release notes. What follows are some notes on the more important changes.

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Updating to v0.2

Install rnoaa from CRAN

install.packages("rnoaa")

or Github

devtools::install_github("ropensci/rnoaa")

Then load rnoaa

library("rnoaa")

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UI changes

We changed almost all function names to have a more intuitive programmatic user interface (or UI).

• We changed all noaa*() functions to ncdc*() - these work only with NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) data, so the ncdc name makes sense.
• noaa_seaice() changed to seaice(), which works with NOAA sea ice data.
• noaa_swdi() changed to swdi(), which works with data from the Severe Weather Data Inventory.

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Two new data sources

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ERDDAP

We added new functions to interact with NOAA ERDDAP data: erddap_info(), erddap_data(), and erddap_search(). As a quick example, let’s search for data, get a dataset identifier, then get information on that dataset, then get the data.

• API

We’re delighted to announce that we have received additional funding from the Sloan Foundation to continue and expand our efforts from the past year.

We’re grateful for the overwhelming support from the community, especially through engagement at various events we organized and attended this past year. Over the next year we plan to: advance not only the technical infrastructure for accessing, managing, and synthesizing large and heterogeneous data, but also the social infrastructure of research to facilitate collaboration and exchange of data, methods, and ideas so they can be easily reproduced and extended. Over the next several months you can expect to see various tools that allow for seamless data interoperability, a comprehensive spatial and mapping toolkit, and a new suite of tools to support reproducibility.

• funding

Science is reportedly in the middle of a reproducibility crisis. Reproducibility seems laudable and is frequently called for (e.g., nature and science). In general the argument is that research that can be independently reproduced is more reliable than research that cannot be independently reproduced. It is also worth noting that reproducing research is not solely a checking process, and it can provide useful jumping-off points for future research questions. It is difficult to find a counter-argument to these claims, but arguing that reproducibility is laudable in general glosses over the fact that for each research group it is a significant amount of work to make their research (easily) reproducible for independent scientists. While much of the attention has focused on entirely repeating laboratory experiments, there are many simpler forms of reproducibility including, for example, the ability to recompute analyses on known sets of data....

• reproducible research
• archiving
• open science