Guide to building an issue

Select articles

Identify articles to include in the new issue. Normally, all articles accepted up to the publication dates: Mar 31, Jun 30, Oct 31, Dec 31, should be included.
Set the status of each included article to “proofed” using
```
rj::update_status("<article_id>", "proofed")
```
Copy included articles into Proofs folder using
```
rj:::make_proof(<issue number>)
```
The issue number is of the form YYYY-N where N is the issue number within the year. e.g., 2026-1 for the first issue of 2026.

Contact the following people for news items (give them each a couple of weeks):
- Changes on CRAN: <Achim.Zeileis at r-project.org>
- News from R Core: <Tomas.Kalibera at r-project.org>
- BioConductor: <maintainer at bioconductor.org>
- R Foundation: <Torsten.Hothorn at r-project.org>
- R Forwards: <Heather.Turner at r-project.org>
Copy received news items into the news folder of the issue. Only a subset of the above will be received for each issue. Most will send news every second issue.

Write the editorial for the issue. This should be saved as <issue>/news/editorial/editorial.Rmd.

For each article in the issue:

Move any correspondence to correspondence folder (e.g., motivation letter, rejoinder, etc.)
Check that the supplementary file list is correct.
Copyedit using
```
rj::llm_copyedit(<article_id>)
```
This needs an OpenAI API key stored in .Renviron as OPENAI_API_KEY. Check the copyediting carefully, as the AI can make mistakes. It is usually pretty good on the main article, but often messes up the bib file.
For articles with an Rmd file, make sure it renders to both pdf and html. output should be set to:
```
output:
  rjtools::rjournal_article:
    toc: no
    self_contained: yes
```
Many authors include LaTeX-specific or html-specific elements that cause problems. These need to be converted to work in both outputs.
For articles containing a tex file, but no Rmd file, use texor to create the Rmd file:
```
texor::latex_to_web("<path to article folder>")
```
- The conversion to Rmd can be fragile, especially if authors have defined their own LaTeX macros, or use additional packages. Also tables, equations and equation cross-referencing can need fixing.
- The Rmd file created only generates an html output. The original tex file is used to produce the pdf output.
If you encounter problems that you can’t solve yourself, ask the Technical Editor for assistance.

When an article is ready, copy to the rjournal.github.io repo using
```
rj::publish_article("<article_id>", <volume>, <issue>)
```
This will also assign a “slug” (the id of the published article), which is added to the DESCRIPTION file. This slug will be used for the folder name in the rjournal.github.io “_articles” folder. It will also create a zip file of supplementary material from the list of files in the DESCRIPTION.

For any news item:

rj::publish_news("<folder path>", <volume>, <issue>)

When all articles and news items are copied over, build the issue using
```
rj::publish_issue("<issue id>")
```
This will create the issue folder in the rjournal.github.io repo, and generates the issue page with links to all articles and news items.
Build the issue by rendering _issues/<issue id>.Rmd in the rjournal.github.io repo. This publishes to the _web folder.
Commit and push the changes to the rjournal.github.io repo, to automatically trigger deployment to rjournal.github.io

The Technical Editor will issue a pull request to merge the master branch of the repo into the published branch. Once approved, this will then trigger a cron job to update https://journal.r-project.org.

Once papers are online, register DOIs with https://doi.crossref.org/ using username rfou and password provided by previous editor. Click on “Upload submissions”, then “Metadata” and upload the doi.xml file located in the _issues/<issue_id> folder.
Update RJournal.bib using update_bib.R in the rjournal.github.io repo.
Announce the new issue on any social media channels used by the R Journal.