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Welcome to our newest member Parexel!

By Announcement, Blog, News

The R Consortium, a Linux Foundation project supporting the R Foundation and R community, today announced that Parexel has joined the R Consortium as a Silver Member. 

Parexel is a clinical research organization providing Phase I to IV clinical development services. Parexel uses R for a wide range of internal decision-making and regulatory interactions. They have a team of more than 21,000 global professionals collaborating with biopharmaceutical leaders, emerging innovators delivering clinical trials worldwide.

 “We are thrilled to welcome Parexel as a member of the R Consortium and connect more closely with the rest of the R Consortium community,” said Joseph Rickert, R Consortium Board Chair, and Posit’s R Community Ambassador. “Parexel brings expertise in using R as a tool to perform analyses as part of clinical trials to their sponsors. We look forward to collaborating with the Parexel team to expand the use of R in drug development.”

“Upskilling our personnel in the use of R, coupled with enhancing our computing environment to incorporate R holistically with our other, more established software options, provides Parexel with additional tools in performing analyses of clinical trial data and opens up new avenues to innovative techniques,” said Michael Cartwright, Associate Biostatistics Director, Parexel.

About The R Consortium 

The R Consortium is a 501(c)6 nonprofit organization and Linux Foundation project dedicated to the support and growth of the R user community. The R Consortium provides support to the R Foundation and to the greater R Community for projects that assist R package developers, provide documentation and training, facilitate the growth of the R Community and promote the use of the R language.

About Linux Foundation 

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org

{riskassessment} app from the R Validation Hub voted best Shiny app at shinyConf 2023! 🎉

By Blog, News

The {riskassessment} app, presented by Aaron Clark from the R Validation Hub, was voted best Shiny app at shinyConf 2023. Congratulations!

The 2nd Annual Shiny Conference was held March 15-17, 2023. It was all virtual with over 4k global registrants. Aaron Clark, from the R Validation Hub Executive Committee, presented on the {riskassessment} app.

The app features several key features such as providing a framework to quantify risk via metrics that evaluate package dev best practices, code documentation, community engagement, and sustainability. The app aims to be a platform for quality assessment within organizations that operate in regulated industries but can be leveraged in various contexts. 

More Information

The {riskassessment} app extends the functionality of riskmetric by allowing the reviewer to: 

  • Analyze riskmetric output without the need to write code in R
  • Categorize a package with an overall assessment (i.e., low, medium, or high risk) based on subjective opinions or after tabulating user(s) consensus after the evaluating metric output
  • Download static reports with the package risk, metrics outputs, review comments, and more
  • Store assessments in a database for future viewing and historical backup
  • User authentication with admin roles to manage users and metric weighting
Here is the {riskassesment} demo app’s example dashboard. Several packages have been uploaded and run to evaluate shiny apps and if they have any risks. 

Note: Development of both riskassessment and riskmetric was made possible thanks to the R Validation Hub, a collaboration to support the adoption of R within a biopharmaceutical regulatory setting.

For more information, the talk is currently available on Appsilon’s Youtube channel

Congratulations! 🎉

UPDATE: Successful R-Based Package Submission with Shiny Component to FDA

By Announcement, Blog, News

The R Consortium is happy to announce that on Nov 18th, 2022, the R Submissions Working Group successfully submitted a test submission package with a Shiny component through the FDA eCTD gateway! The submission package has been received by the FDA CDER staff. All submission materials can be found at: https://github.com/RConsortium/submissions-pilot2-to-fda

The objective of the R Consortium R submission Pilot 2 Project is to test the concept that a Shiny application created with the R-language can be bundled into a submission package and transferred successfully to FDA reviewers. The application was built using the source data sets and analyses contained in the R submission Pilot 1 Project.

To our knowledge, this is the first publicly available submission package that includes a Shiny component. We hope this submission package and our learnings can serve as a good reference for future regulatory submission efforts, when considering Shiny as a tool for a more user-friendly interface to navigate through analysis results. Additional agency feedback will be shared in future communications.

To learn more about the R consortium R submission Working Group and the Pilot 1 submission, more information can be found at:

New Repositories Working Group

By Blog, News


The R Validation Hub is happy to announce the Regulatory R Repository Working Group, which will be tasked with designing and prototyping the tools to support a cross-pharma, collaborative repository of regulated use case suitable R packages – You can imagine the end result as being a CRAN-like service for systematically vetting packages for regulated use and providing access to high-quality packages. For this, we are looking for new contributors and expertise.

Other Opportunities to Get Involved!

The Hub has two further active technology work streams:

Each of these has been running for a while now but underwent a change in leadership over the summer following the industry departures of Marly Gotti and Yilong Zhang to Apple and Meta respectively.  I’m pleased to say that Eric Milliman (riskmetric) and Aaron Clark (Risk Assessment app) have now picked up the baton(s) and are working together on a joint roadmap to take us forward. 

If you’d like to know more, we’ve just published a new page on the website describing each of our work streams.  Please check it out and, if you have something to contribute, get in touch through the website.

Case Studies

We’re still happy to receive case studies following the three sessions earlier in the year (available to watch here).  These can be oral presentations, or if you would like to write up your case study then we welcome additions to the GitHub repository. Again, please reach out if you would like to know more.

R Consortium Welcomes Genentech as Gold Member

By Announcement, News

SAN FRANCISCO, March 07, 2019 – The R Consortium, a Linux Foundation project supporting the R community, today welcomed Genentech as a Gold member.  Genentech is the first company in the pharmaceutical industry to join R Consortium and plans to support the community by contributing to pan-industry collaborative projects that further the adoption of R and its application to drug and biomarker discovery, clinical reporting and pharmaceutical data science.

Thousands of statisticians, analysts and scientists worldwide rely on the R language to allow them to analyze, model and visualize large, complex datasets and to create statistical software. In addition, R provides interfaces to other computing platforms, providing users with access to the best computations for understanding data. Interest in the language is growing across industries that rely on statistical computing including, journalism, finance, AI, and now healthcare.

“We are excited to join the R Consortium as a gold member,” said Alun Bedding, director of biostatistics at Genentech, and the Genentech representative for R Consortium. “We see R as the future of statistical analysis because of its flexibility and the strong active community behind it.”

Genentech’s decision to join the R Consortium highlights how the R language is particularly well suited not just to designing clinical trials, but other areas important to the pharmaceutical industry and more broadly, medical research. Some specific examples include; reproducible research, regulatory compliance and validation, safety monitoring, drug discovery, research & development, genomics, diagnostics, PK/PD/pharmacometrics, immunogenicity and more.

“We are pleased to welcome Genentech into the R Consortium family,” said Louis Bajuk, chair of the R Consortium Board of Directors and senior director of product management for streaming and advanced analytics at TIBCO Software. “We see great value in the symbiotic relationship between our organizations as R continues to expand into pharmaceutical data science.”

Genentech joins six existing R Consortium Gold and Platinum members, including: TIBCO, IBM, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Microsoft and RStudio.

About Genentech

Founded more than 40 years ago, Genentech is a leading biotechnology company that discovers, develops, manufactures and commercializes medicines to treat patients with serious and life-threatening medical conditions. The company, a member of the Roche Group, has headquarters in South San Francisco, California. For additional information about the company, please visit http://www.gene.com.

About The R Consortium

The R Consortium is a 501(c)6 nonprofit organization and Linux Foundation project dedicated to the support and growth of the R user community. The R Consortium provides support to the R Foundation and to the greater R Community for projects that assist R package developers, provide documentation and training, facilitate the growth of the R Community and promote the use of the R language. For more information about R Consortium, please visit: http://www.r-consortium.org.

Media Contact

Nancy McGrory

The Linux Foundation nmcgrory@linuxfoundation.org


On conduct and diversity in the R Community

By Announcement, Blog, Events, News, R Consortium Project

An explicit goal of the R Consortium is to help create a welcoming space for everyone, no matter their race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, socio-economic status, nationality, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, ability, or age. Diversity and inclusion are essential to foster true collaboration, move ideas forward, and create long-term sustainable community.

R Consortium recently sponsored R/Finance 2018, where it was found that there were insufficient diversity and inclusion practices, including the absence of a prominently displayed Code of Conduct. This illuminated shortcomings with our existing processes for sponsoring conferences. We are troubled and disappointed to have sponsored a conference that does not reflect our core beliefs in diversity and inclusion.

The Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) has approved the creation of a new working group to address diversity and inclusion issues in the R community. The R Community Diversity and Inclusion Working Group (RCDI-WG), which will include members from R Community groups that promote diversity, such as R-Ladies and FORWARDS, event organizers, and key industry members, will focus on three areas:

  • Work with conferences organizers to ensure diversity is addressed as a priority in both their program committees and speaker lineups.
  • Establish recommended Code of Conduct and Diversity Guidelines for R Community events, which will be adopted by the R Consortium and required for any event that the R Consortium participates in.
  • Have an ongoing conversation on opportunities to drive diversity and inclusion across the R Community.

This group is open to any member of the R community, and you can join by signing up for the mailing list. The group plans to have a kickoff meeting soon to work on the Code of Conduct and Diversity Guidelines, with the goal to have them established later in summer 2018. Look for updates on progress on the R Consortium blog.

Announcing the R Consortium ISC Funded Project grant recipients for Spring 2018

By Announcement, Blog, News

The R Consortium supports the R Community through investments in sustainable infrastructure, community programs and collaborative projects. Through the The Funded Project Program, now in it’s fourth year, the R Consortium has invested more that $650,000 USD in over 30 projects that impact the over 2 million R users worldwide.

We are pleased to announce the Spring 2018 grant recipients. We will provide updates on these projects throughout the year. Congratulations to all grant recipients, and look forward to our session at useR!2018 this July where many of our funded projects will showcase their work and tips for leveraging the grant program for driving open collaboration.

Maintaining DBI

Grantee: Kirill Müller

DBI, R’s database interface, is a set of methods declared in the DBI R package. Communication with the database is implemented by DBI backends, packages that import DBI and implement its methods. A common interface is helpful for both users and backend implementers.

The Maintaining DBI Project which follows up on two previous projects supported by the R Consortium will provide ongoing maintenance and support for DBI, the DBItest test suite, and the three backends to open-source databases (RSQLite, RMariaDB and RPostgres).

Ongoing infrastructural development for R on Windows and MacOS

Grantee: Jeroen Ooms

The majority of R users rely on precompiled installers and binary packages for Windows and MacOS that are made available through CRAN. This project seeks to improve and maintain tools for providing such binaries. On Windows we will upgrade the Rtools compiler toolchain, and provide up-to-date Windows builds for the many external C/C++ libraries used by CRAN packages. For MacOS we will expand the R-Hub homebrew-cran with formulas that are needed by CRAN packages but not available from upstream homebrew-core. Eventually, we want to lay the foundation for a reproducible build system that is low maintenance, automated as much as possible, and which could be used by CRAN and other R package repositories.

Developing Tools and Templates for Teaching Materials

Grantee: François Michonneau

The first-class implementation of literate programming in R is one of the reasons for its success. While the seamless integration of code and text made possible by Sweave , knitr, and R Markdown was designed for writing reproducible reports and documentation, it has also enabled the creation of teaching materials that combine text, code examples, exercises and solutions. However, while people creating lessons in R Markdown are familiar with R, they often do not have a background in education or UX design. Therefore, they must not only assemble curriculum, but also find a way to present the content effectively and accessibly to both learners and instructors. As the model of open source development is being adapted to the creation of open educational resources, the difficulty to share materials due to a lack of consistency in their construction hinders the collaborative development of these resources.

This project will develop an R package that will facilitate the development of consistent teaching resources. It will encourage the use of tools and lesson structure that support and improve learning. By providing the technical framework for developing quality teaching materials, we seek to encourage collaborative lesson development by letting authors focus on the content rather than the formatting, while providing a more consistent experience for the learners.

PSI application for collaboration to create online R package validation repository

Grantee: Lyn Taylor (on behalf of PSI AIMS SIG)

The documentation available for R packages currently widely varies. The Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry (PSI) Application and Implementation of Methodologies in Statistics (AIMS) Special Interest Group (SIG) will collaborate with the R-Consortium and representatives from pharmaceutical companies on the setting up of an online repository /web portal, where validation which is of regulatory standard for R packages can be submitted and stored for free use. Companies (or individual R users) would still be liable to make their own assessment on whether the validation is suitable for their own use, however the online repository would serve as a portal for sharing existing regulatory standard validation documentation.

A unified platform for missing values methods and workflows

Grantees: Julie Josse and Nicholas Tierney

The objective is to create a reference platform on the theme of missing data management and to federate contributors. This platform will be the occasion to list the existing packages, the available literature as well as the tutorials that allow to analyze data with missing data. New work on the subject can be easily integrated and we will create examples of analysis workflows with missing data. Anyone who would like to contribute to this exciting project can contact us.

histoRicalg — Preserving and Transfering Algorithmic Knowledge

Grantee: John C Nash

Many of the algorithms making up the numerical building-blocks of R were developed several decades ago, particularly in Fortran. Some were translated into C for use by R. Only a modest proportion of R users today are fluent in these languages, and many original authors are no longer active. Yet some of these codes may have bugs or need adjustment for new system capabilities. The histoRicalg project aims to document and test such codes that are still  part of R, possibly creating all-R reference codes, hopefully by teaming older and younger workers so knowledge can be shared for the future. Our initial task is to establish a Working Group on Algorithms Used in R and add material to a website/wiki.

Interested workers are invited to contact John Nash.

Proposal to Create an R Consortium Working Group Focused on US Census Data

Grantee: Ari Lamstein

The Proposal to Create an R Consortium Working Group Focused on US Census Data aims to make life easier for R programmers who work with data from the US Census Bureau. It will create a working group where R users working with census data can cooperate under the guidance of the Census Bureau. Additionally, it will publish a guide to working with Census data in R that aims to help R programmers a) select packages that meet their needs and b) navigate the various data sets that the Census Bureau publishes.

 

R Consortium welcomes R-Ladies as a top level project

By Announcement, Blog, News, R Consortium Project

In 2016, R-Ladies started their effort for a global expansion, with the help from the R-Consortium. Back then there were only 4 active chapters (San Francisco, Taipei, Twin Cities  and London) and the goal was to expand to 5-10 cities within the next year. The enthusiasm within the R community for local R-Ladies chapters far exceeded any possible expectations! As of March 2018, the organization has over 90 chapters and almost 19,000 members.

There are R-Ladies chapters in 45 countries around the globe, with many chapters hosting monthly events.  

With this fast growth, it became apparent to the R Consortium ISC that this project needs long term investment for success. The diversified voice of R-Ladies, speaking not only as a group representing gender minorities in tech but also a group attracting new R users, aligned with the R Consortium’s defined Code of Conduct and its desires for building a more diverse and inclusive R community.

R Consortium ISC is pleased to announce and welcome R-Ladies as a top level project. R-Ladies has shown a big commitment within the R community and becoming a top level project will provide them a longer term budget cycle (3 years instead of 1 year) to support their community. R-Ladies will also have a voting seat on the ISC (represented by Gabriela de Queiroz).

We invite all in the R community to congratulate R-Ladies on this milestone, and look forward to ensuring they have the infrastructure and funding to bring more diversity to the R community.

Announcing the second round of ISC Funded Projects for 2017

By Announcement, Blog, News, R Consortium Project

The R Consortium ISC is pleased to announce that the projects listed below were funded under the 2017 edition of the ISC Funded Projects program. This program, which provides financial support for projects that enhance the infrastructure of the R ecosystem or which benefit large segments of the R Community, has awarded $500,000 USD in grants to date. The Spring 2018 call for proposals is now open and will continue to accept proposals until midnight PST on April 1, 2018.  Learn more about the program and how to apply for funding for your project.

Quantities for R

Proposed by Iñaki Ucar

The ‘units’ package has become the reference for quantity calculus in R, with a wide and welcoming response from the R community. Along the same lines, the ‘errors’ package integrates and automatises error propagation and printing for R vectors. A significant fraction of R users, both practitioners and researchers, use R to analyse measurements, and would benefit from a joint processing of quantity values with errors.

This project not only aims at orchestrating units and errors in a new data type, but will also extend the existing frameworks (compatibility with base R as well as other frameworks such as the tidyverse) and standardise how to import/export data with units and errors.

Refactoring and updating the SWIG R module

Proposed by Richard Beare

The Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator (SWIG) is a tool for automatically generating interface code between interpreters, including R, and a C or C++ library. The R module needs to be updated to support modern developments in R and the rest of SWIG. This project aims to make the R module conform to the recommended SWIG standards and thus ensure that there is support for R in the future. We hope that this project will be the first step in allowing SWIG generated R code using reference classes.

Future Minimal API: Specification with Backend Conformance Test Suite

Proposed by Henrik Bengtsson

The objective of the Future Framework implemented in the future package is to simplify how parallel and distributed processing is conducted in R. This project aims to provide a formal Future API specification and provide a test framework for validating the conformance of existing (e.g. future.batchtools and future.callr) and to-come third-party parallel backends to the Future framework.

An Earth data processing backend for testing and evaluating stars

Proposed by Edzer Pebesma

The stars project enables the processing Earth imagery data that is held on servers, without the need to download it to local hard drive. This project will (i) create software to run a back-end, (ii) develop scripts and tutorials that explain how such a data server and processing backend can be set up, and (iii) create an instance of such a backend in the AWS cloud that can be used for testing and evaluation purposes.

R Consortium Call For Proposals: February 2018

By Announcement, Blog, News, R Consortium Project

by Joseph Rickert

The first ISC Call for Proposals for 2018 is now open. We are looking for ambitious projects that will contribute to the infrastructure of the R ecosystem and benefit large sections of the R community. However, we are not likely to fund proposals that ask for large initial cash grants. The ISC tends to be conservative with initial grants, preferring projects structured in such a way that significant initial milestones can be achieved with modest amounts of cash.

As with any proposed project, the more detailed and credible the project plan, and the better the track record of the project team, the higher the likelihood of receiving funding. Please be sure that your proposal includes measurable objectives, intermediate milestones, a list of all team members who will contributing work and a detailed accounting of how the grant money will be spent.

But, most importantly – don’t let this talk of large projects dampen your enthusiasm! We are looking for projects with impact, regardless of their size. With this call for proposals, we are hoping to stimulate creativity and help turn good ideas into tangible benefits. Look around your corner of the R Community, what needs doing and how can the R Consortium help?

Please do not submit proposals to sponsor conferences, workshops or meetups. These requests should be sent directly to the R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program.

To submit a proposal for ISC funding, read the Call for Proposals page and submit a self-contained pdf using the online form. You should receive confirmation within 24 hours.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is midnight PST, Sunday April 1, 2018.