How to distribute data with your R package - R-hub blog

[utterances-bot]

How to distribute data with your R package - R-hub blog

https://blog.r-hub.io/2020/05/29/distribute-data/

[m-macaskill]

How would you recommend setting up a package that provides functions to work with a dataset that you don’t have the right to distribute? eg an international collaborative study where users must individually register and apply to download the files. What would be the best, and fault-tolerant, way for the package to be pointed to where the data files are, and for functions to only run if the location and presence of the files is established? Would be very interested to see examples of such packages and how they handle this.

[maelle]

That's an interesting question. My first thought would be to (ask the users or have a function) set an environment variable corresponding to the path where the data are saved once the person got access. If the environment variable isn't set, functions could error with an informative error message.

I thought of two packages, that however rely on a central service for users to get access to data so not sure how much their source &docs can help.

• https://docs.ropensci.org/rdhs/#getting-started
• https://docs.ropensci.org/cleanEHR/

[maelle]

I am guessing https://docs.ropensci.org/osfr/ could also help as a way to manage the data. Your question seems very focused on a scientific use case, hence my foraging rOpenSci resources (that I know well, being part of rOpenSci team, hence biased). The rOpenSci forum https://discuss.ropensci.org might be a good place to get further insights.