Welcome!

Welcome to the R Consortium’s 2023 Q2 newsletter. This quarterly newsletter puts together the latest updates about our organization’s activities, the progress each working group has made, upcoming R-related events, and recording of past events. In short, all you need to know about the R Consortium! We hope you enjoy it.

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Change in R Consortium Leadership – Thank you, Joseph Rickert!

After serving as chair of the board for the R Consortium and being involved in multiple R Consortium committees both on the technical and community development sides, as well as participating directly in R-focused events, webinars, and countless other R activities, Joseph Rickert is stepping away from the position. The board will be conducting elections to decide the next chair.

Thank you for your tireless interest in promoting R and supporting developers and user groups around the world who are working to improve the R programming language.

Thank you, Joseph! 🏅

Nominations for Chairperson, Vice-Chair, Treasurer, and Secretary will be open until July 14, 2023. Make a self-nomination HERE

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R/Medicine 2023 Keynotes ⚕️

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Catch up with RUGS (R useR Groups) and ISC-Funded Projects

Newly-Funded ISC Projects for 2023 Cycle One ⚙️

• Secure TLS Communications for R
• volcalc: Calculate predicted volatility of chemical compounds
• autotest: Automated testing of R packages
• api2r: An R Package for Auto-Generating R API Clients

R Validation Hub Update

The R Validation Hub recently had its community meeting after a brief hiatus. The team discussed announcements, and common challenges, and brainstormed ideas for possible future projects through the R Validation Hub. Stay tuned for the next monthly community meeting in late July. Read More

Join the community calls – Stay tuned for dates! 📆

📣 RENEWED Working Group

The Census WG has been renewed! Ari Lamstein, Director of Analytics at MarketBridge, shares how the group plans to use R for census data and the resources the group hopes to revitalize such as ‘A Guide to Working with Census Data in R.’ Learn more: Renewing the R Consortium Census Working Group

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Working groups updates

RENEWED: Census Guide Working Group

The Census Guide WG has been renewed, learn more in the recent announcement: Renewing the R Consortium Census Working Group

Interested in being part of this working group? Fill out the interest form

R Certification

Domains and Sub Topics The R Certification Working Group has continued to fill up the question bank and have narrowed down the domains and sub-topics for exam guide. Group will engage with hosting services for the alpha exam draft.

Joseph Korszun joseph@procogia.com Further information: https://github.com/RConsortium/R-Certification-WG

R Tables for Regulatory Submission (RTRS)

Book publication We have finalized the content for the first edition of “Clinical Trial Tables in R” which reviews the landscape of table packages in R relevant to the output of static clinical trial tables.   The final publication location for Edition 1 of the book is still being determined, but it can be viewed now at https://rconsortium.github.io/rtrs-wg/

Gabe Becker gabembecker@gmail.com Adrian Waddell adrian.waddell@gene.com   Working Group github repository: https://github.com/RConsortium/rtrs-wg

R Validation Hub

Reg R Repo The Reg R Repo is a working group under the R Validation Hub striving to support a transparent, open, dynamic, cross-industry approach of establishing and maintaining a repository of R packages with accompanying evidence of their quality and the assessment criteria.  8 sponsor companies, 2 contract research organizations (CRO), 1 health authority, 2 service provider companies compose this working group.  Join us at the Basel useR! conference on July 21st where we will give a talk!

Doug Kelkhoff  doug.kelkhoff@gmail.com Coline Zeballos coline.zeballos@gmail.com

Submissions

Multiple Pilot Submission Projects are under way Pilot 2 – which contained an interactive shiny app was resubmitted through the FDA Gateway. We expect the FDA’s report in July Pilot 3 – includes building the ADaM datasets used in the test submissions will be ready to go as soon as Pilot 2 is complete. Pilot 4 – is investigating technologies to achieve long term reproducibility of submissions including containers and Web Assembly technology.

Ning Leng leng.ning@gene.com Further information:  R Consortium Submissions WG GitHub

Repositories

Working with CRAN The Repositories working group has had several conversations with members of the CRAN team about how the R Community can better understand the various CRAN internal testing environments in order that R developers can better emulate CRAN tests before submitting packages. At least one member of the CRAN team has also expressed an interest in having the R Consortium provided help implementing container technology to upgrade a CRAN test environment.

Further information: see the minutes of the WG meeting which contains a link to a video of the meeting and the recent rOpenSci newsletter.

OOP

Reconsideration of fundamental type for S7 objects We shifted to using LISTSXP as the C-level type for S7 objects, but we are considering moving back to S4SXP contingent on generalization of that type to formally support alternative object systems.

Michael Lawrence Hadley Wickham   Further information: https://github.com/RConsortium/OOP-WG

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Upcoming events

You’ve missed a recent event?

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We need you!

In this section, we highlight a few opportunities for getting more involved with the R Consortium.