washr

washr turns a cleaned dataset into a documented R data package that follows the FAIR principles, with a website, a citation file and machine readable metadata. It is the toolkit behind the openwashdata data packages, and it works for any group that publishes open data as an R package.

Installation

From CRAN:

install.packages("washr")

Or the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("openwashdata/washr")

What washr does

The stable core scaffolds and documents the package, one function per step, in the order you run them:

• setup_ci() adds the R CMD check workflow the review standard requires.
• setup_rawdata() creates data-raw/ and the processing script.
• setup_dictionary() writes the variable dictionary from the data objects.
• setup_roxygen() writes the roxygen documentation from the dictionary.
• update_description() completes DESCRIPTION to the openwashdata standard.
• setup_readme() writes the README from the template.
• setup_website() writes the pkgdown configuration and builds the site.
• use_brand() installs the openwashdata brand for the site.
• update_citation() writes the citation files, with the DOI once there is one.

The FAIR layer is one experimental function. update_metadata() derives a schema.org description of the dataset from the files above and embeds it in the site, where dataset search engines read it.

Every function reads what is there, merges its changes, and is safe to run again.

How to use washr

The Get started page walks through the workflow in order, and the Reference page documents each function. The publishing guide covers the same steps with more explanation and the parts outside R, such as the GitHub repository and the Zenodo release.