This is a periodic newsletter of the interesting things we’ve seen and what we are thinking about in open source policy analysis.

Biden tax analysis using Tax-Calculator and OG-USA gains recognition. In our previous newsletter, we reported on an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) report by Kyle Pomerleau (AEI), Jason DeBacker (University of South Carolina), and Richard Evans (Rice University) that assessed the economic effects of Joe Biden’s new tax proposal. Since its release, the report has gained recognition and has been cited by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, The Wall Street Journal, and others.

An open-source COVID-19 interactive modeling tool focused on testing. The public health analytics company Color has released an interactive modeling tool based on an open-source SEIRS+ model framework that simulates possible impacts of mass testing at different cadences (e.g., daily or weekly) on the spread of COVID-19. Link

A centralized source for COVID-19 data. Researchers from the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and HEC Montréal, Canada, have created an open-source R package that aggregates COVID-19 data from a number of widely used data sources to be queried from multiple programming languages. Link

UMass Amherst creates a WiFi-based contact-tracing app. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have released an open-source tool for WiFi-based COVID-19 contact tracing of students on college campuses. This contact-tracing software boasts an advantage over traditional bluetooth-based apps because it does not require individuals to sign up for an app installed on their smartphones. Link

A graphical user interface–based program for creating reproducible scientific figures from individual charts. Richard Gerum from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg published in the Journal of Open Source Software on his project Pylustrator, which allows users to create scientific figures from separate individual charts using a graphical user interface and generates the corresponding Python code to reproduce the figures. The package allows researchers to create code for reproducible figures. Link

Edited by Matt Jensen, Peter Metz, and Jacob Chuslo