Christian Martinez, an adjunct faculty member in Brooklyn College’s M.S. in Psychological Research Program and alumnus of the CUNY Graduate Center, has developed nycOpenData, a new open‑source R package designed to dramatically simplify how students, educators, journalists, and researchers access the NYC Open Data platform. Since its release, nycOpenData has been downloaded more than 600 times and has been featured by major data‑science outlets, including RBloggers, R Weekly, Stats and R, and Medium. Martinez created the package last semester while teaching the course Reproducible Psychological Research, where students used NYC Open Data to develop original research papers on topics ranging from public health to urban infrastructure. The package is now being used again this semester in Special Topics: Experimental Psychology, a continuation of the earlier course. Student involvement has become a defining feature of the project. Last semester’s cohort produced a full collection of research papers using NYC Open Data, which has just been approved by CUNY’s Open Educational Resources (OER) librarians and will be deposited into the OER library this semester. This term, students will take their engagement a step further: Each will contribute code directly to the nycOpenData package, becoming software developers as well as researchers. Martinez describes the project as part of a broader effort to strengthen data literacy and reproducible research practices across CUNY. By integrating open‑source development into coursework, he aims to give students hands‑on experience with tools that support transparent, community‑driven science.
