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🔗 Introduction Open Trade Statistics (OTS) was created with the intention to lower the barrier to working with international economic trade data. It includes a public API, a dashboard, and an R package for data retrieval. The project started when I was affected by the fact that many Latin American Universities have limited or no access to the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UN COMTRADE). There are alternatives to COMTRADE, for example the Base Pour L’Analyse du Commerce International (BACI) constitutes an improvement over COMTRADE as it is constructed using the raw data and a method that reconciles the declarations of the exporter and the importer....
rOpenSci is one of the first organizations in the R community I ever interacted with, when I participated in the 2016 rOpenSci unconf. I have since reviewed several rOpenSci packages and been so happy to be connected to this community, but I have never submitted or maintained a package myself. All that changed when I heard the call for a new maintainer for the qualtRics package. “IT’S GO TIME,” I thought....
conditionz is a new (just on CRAN today) R package for controlling how many times conditions are thrown. This package arises from an annoyance in another set of packages I maintain: The brranching package uses the taxize package internally, calling it’s function taxize::tax_name(). The taxize::tax_name() function throws useful messages to the user if their API key is not found, and gives them instructions on how to find it. However, the user does not have to get an API key....
Last month we released a new version of pdftools and a new companion package qpdf for working with pdf files in R. This release introduces the ability to perform pdf transformations, such as splitting and combining pages from multiple files. Moreover, the pdf_data() function which was introduced in pdftools 2.0 is now available on all major systems. 🔗 Split and Join PDF files It is now possible to split, join, and compress pdf files with pdftools....
🔗 Stefanie Butland, rOpenSci Community Manager Some things are just irresistible to a community manager – PhD student Hugo Gruson’s recent tweets definitely fall into that category. I was surprised and intrigued to see an example of our software peer review guidelines being used in a manuscript review, independent of our formal collaboration with the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution (MEE). This is exactly the kind of thing rOpenSci is working to enable by developing a good set of practices that broadly apply to research software....
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