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@larnsce larnsce released this 02 Oct 10:06
· 6 commits to main since this release

This release makes the build of the datasets reproducible and prepares
monthly data updates. The data of the six datasets of 0.4.0 changes only
through the fixes listed below, and aqua joins as the seventh dataset.
No new journal issues are added yet; the first monthly update follows as
0.6.0.

Coverage

Five datasets are updated monthly from now on. uncnewsletter and
datapapers are frozen: still built with every release, no longer
updated.

Dataset Updates Articles Years Latest issue
washdev monthly 1,173 2011 to 2026 Vol. 16 Issue 6
ws monthly 4,884 2001 to 2026 Vol. 26 Issue 6
jwh monthly 2,013 2003 to 2026 Vol. 24 Issue 6
aqua monthly 1,819 1998 to 2026 Vol. 75 Issue 6
ploswater monthly 434 2022 to 2026 Vol. 5 Issue 7, published up to 2026-07-06
uncnewsletter frozen 173 2020 to 2023 newsletter ceased in May 2024
datapapers frozen 8 2018 to 2025 harvested on 23 July 2026

Reproducible build

  • The datasets are built by a targets pipeline from the raw snapshots and
    decision sheets committed in data-raw/, with the package versions
    pinned in renv.lock. One command rebuilds everything:
    Rscript data-raw/build.R. Manual corrections moved from the code into
    decision sheets keyed on the article identifier.

  • A validation gate checks every dataset before anything is written:
    documented columns, a unique key, no email addresses or credentials,
    statement text wherever a statement is flagged, UN country names, and no
    article lost since the last release.

  • A workflow on GitHub rebuilds the datasets on every push and pull request
    and fails when they differ from the committed data
    (data-raw/check_reproducible.R).

  • Zenodo files the release as a dataset in the openwashdata community,
    from the new .zenodo.json. The releases 0.1.0, 0.3.0 and 0.4.0 were
    never archived there.

New features

  • New dataset aqua: all 1,819 articles of the journal AQUA - Water
    Infrastructure, Ecosystems and Society in the journal's online archive,
    1998 to 2026, with the same columns as ws and jwh. 539 articles carry
    a data availability statement; 529 of these map to a shared das_type
    and the remaining 10 keep their full text and are listed in
    data-raw/aqua-das-review.csv.

    The 0.4.0 notes said AQUA needed a re-scrape because its statement text
    had never been captured. That was wrong. The statements were in the raw
    snapshot all along. The build read the snapshot with guessed column
    types, the journal's first statement sits beyond the rows a guess looks
    at, so the statement column was read as logical and came back empty. The
    build now states every column type (#52).

Bug fixes

  • washdev: 33 correspondence author countries were three letter ISO codes
    ("IND", "GBR") in a column that otherwise holds United Nations country
    names. 32 are now the UN name. The 33rd, an affiliation in Taiwan, is
    missing, as it already was in the first author column: the UN names have
    no entry for it. The article is listed in
    data-raw/washdev-country-review.csv.

  • ploswater: two articles appeared twice
    (10.1371/journal.pwat.0000024 and 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000520), each as
    two rows identical in every column. The dataset now has 434 rows, one
    per article. The cause was a search query paged without a sort order.

  • Credentials are removed from the text of the datasets. Where a statement
    linked a restricted Zenodo record through an access token, the token
    parameter is now dropped and the plain record URL kept; up to v0.4.0 the
    URL kept the parameter with a placeholder value and did not resolve
    (ploswater, one article). Where authors wrote a password into their
    statement, such as the login of an FTP site, the password is replaced by
    [removed] and the rest of the sentence kept (ploswater and ws, one
    statement each).

  • ws: one data availability statement kept an author email address in
    das_type. The masking of addresses inside text, introduced in v0.4.0,
    skipped that column because it is a factor. The address is now masked
    there as it already was in das.

Changes

  • washdev, ws, jwh: the levels of das_type now list the shared
    statement types first ("available in online repository", "in paper",
    "on request"), followed by the statements no rule mapped. Before, the
    three types sat scattered among the statements in alphabetical order.
    Values are unchanged; code that relies on the integer codes of the factor
    needs checking.

  • Credentials are removed from the raw snapshots in data-raw/, as they
    already were from the datasets. The download links of supplementary files
    in washdev.csv, ws.csv, jwh.csv and aqua.csv lose their signed
    query and keep the file path (1,752 links of 1,532 articles, all expired
    since August 2026). In ploswater.csv the access tokens in the URLs of
    one statement are dropped. A password that authors wrote into their
    statement is replaced by [removed] (ploswater.csv and ws.csv, one
    statement each). The scrapers apply the same rules to new articles. The
    datasets are unchanged. The git history was not rewritten, so commits up
    to and including v0.4.0 still hold these values.

  • The raw snapshots (washdev.csv, ws.csv, jwh.csv, aqua.csv and
    ploswater.csv) no longer have the columns first_author_email and
    correspondence_author_email, and the scrapers no longer collect author
    email addresses. Contact addresses that some article pages print after
    the affiliation are masked in the same way as in the datasets
    (washdev.csv 10 articles, aqua.csv 4), and the scraper masks them in
    new articles. No other value in the snapshots changed, and the datasets
    are unchanged.

    The git history was not rewritten. Commits up to and including v0.4.0
    still hold the removed values, and the archive of v0.0.1 on Zenodo holds
    the email columns of washdev.csv. Addresses that authors wrote inside a
    data availability statement stay in the raw statement text, which is the
    published statement, and are masked in the datasets as before.

Data acquisition

  • The scraper of the IWA journals is incremental. A run lists the journal
    issues again from the newest known publication year, scrapes the issues
    that are missing from the raw snapshot, and reads the two most recent
    issues again to fetch articles that were added late. An
    issue that the site lists before its articles are online is asked for
    again on the next run. The functions that decide what a run fetches are
    tested without network.

  • The scraper stores an issue complete or not at all, and writes no row for
    an article whose page was not read. A page counts as read only when the
    site served the kind of page that was asked for. Its "Not Found" page
    loads completely too and was taken for an article without authors,
    statement or supplement, or for an issue without articles.

  • washdev is scraped by the same scraper as ws, jwh and aqua
    (data-raw/iwa_scraping.R). The separate data-raw/washdev_scraping.R
    and the runner data-raw/run_iwa_scrapes.R are removed. The old washdev
    scraper read a throttled page as "no more issues" and stored an
    article that failed to load as an empty row. The index column that the
    first Python scraper left in data-raw/washdev.csv is removed. The
    dataset washdev is unchanged.

  • The signed download links of supplementary files, which work for about
    three weeks, are written to data-raw/private/, which is not committed.
    data-raw/suppfiles_download.R reads them there.

  • One command runs the monthly acquisition for every live source:
    Rscript data-raw/update_sources.R. It runs the four IWA journals in
    sequence with a cooldown, then PLOS Water, each as its own R process. A
    source that fails does not stop the others, and data-raw/update-log.csv
    records per journal and run how many journal issues and rows were added.

  • The PLOS Water downloader can run incrementally. It failed on the second
    run, because it read the existing snapshot with guessed column types and
    could not combine the publication date with the new rows. It now pages
    the search in a fixed sort order and keeps one row per DOI. The two
    repeated rows are removed from data-raw/ploswater.csv; the dataset has
    been without them since the fix listed above. The unsorted paging had
    also skipped two articles (10.1371/journal.pwat.0000223 and
    10.1371/journal.pwat.0000302). They enter the dataset with the next data
    update.

  • A workflow opens an issue on the 5th of each month with the checklist of
    the monthly data update (data-raw/monthly-data-update.md).

Documentation

  • The help pages and the README say which datasets are updated monthly and
    which are frozen, and the README has a coverage table that is computed
    from the datasets.

  • uncnewsletter: the citations column is now described in the help page
    and the data dictionary. It has been in the dataset since its first
    release without documentation. The source of the counts is not recorded.