The Front Matter blog is launching a new membership model today. In August 2021 this blog started offering optional paid membership via the Buy Me a Coffee service. Unfortunately. two things happened: a) Paypal dropped supporting Buy Me a Coffee for membership payments at the end of last year, and b) there wasn't really any uptake of this support model, even if only charging $3 (or a cup of coffee) per month.

Fresh into 2022, the Front Matter blog today is launching an important new feature: a full-text search of all blog posts. An example query would be for reference manager. As the Front Matter blog has a lot of posts about reference managers, a tag would also have worked in this particular case, but tags are much less flexible and become overwhelming when used too frequently.

In August GitHub added enhanced support for citation-file-format (CFF) to all GitHub repositories. As you can see in the chart below (kindly provided by Stephan Druskat and based on GitHub queries for CFF files), this has led to a significant increase of repositories using CFF files and thus exposing software metadata that go beyond what GitHub provides via other means.

The Force2021 conference will take place from December 7-9. The conference will be virtual, and registration is free. And we will again be hosting a Force2021 hackathon, as co-located virtual event on December 6 and December 10. We will meet for four hours each (1 PM - 5 PM GMT) and will communicate via Zoom.

In October Jen Gibson started as the new Executive Director for the Dryad Data Repository. I used the opportunity to ask Jen a few questions about Dryad, challenges with data sharing, and ideas about moving Dryad forward. I was particularly interested in the interview as I served on the Dryad Board of Directors from 2013 to 2016.

Last Friday the OpenCitations blog published a guest post by Alberto Martín-Martín that describes the coverage by COCI and other open citation data compared to subscription citation indexes. This is an important blog post, as it changes how we think about citations and open metrics.

Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text. – Wikipedia Readability is obviously important for any kind of scholarly communication, from writing papers to blog posts.

The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is a developer friendly, open access journal for research software packages published as open source software. JOSS started publishing in 2016, and has published more than 1,500 articles so far. After five years and that many articles, it is time to have a closer look at how JOSS content is reused.

This blog started registering DOIs for its content with Crossref last week, and all 450+ blog posts so far were registered by Monday morning. This enables the easy import into reference managers (here using Zotero): Using Zotero or any other reference manager this blog post can now be easily cited: 1. Fenner M. The Front Matter blog now uses DOIs. Front Matter. Published online October 14, 2021.

Yesterday I started registering DOIs for all Front Matter blog posts. I have registered 100 blog posts by now, and will have completed the registration process for all 450 blog posts on Monday. The DOIs are registered with Crossref which Front Matter joined in August. The blog posts are registered as posted content, and this is done via the metadata in schema.org format exposed on each blog page.

More than 200 health journals today published an editorial calling for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of nature, and protect health. The editorial can be read for example here (published under a CC-BY Open Access license), and the full list of participating journals can be found here. The COVID Pandemic is currently taking up all our attention.