This is the first issue of a new monthly newsletter from the Rogue Scholar science blog archive. The newsletter will report on new blogs that have joined the platform, important technical updates in Rogue Scholar infrastructure, community updates, and other news relevant to Rogue Scholar users.Blogs added to Rogue Scholar Seven blogs were added in January.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive continues to grow, with seven new blogs added this month and more than 24,000 archived blog posts. Luckily, onboarding new blogs is mostly automated, with the Rogue Scholar API handling the blog setup and blog post ingestion from RSS feeds. Some questions frequently come up and I try to improve the Rogue Scholar documentation to address them.
References are an essential element of scholarly publications.
Continuing the work on streamlining the DOI assignment for new blog posts in the Rogue Scholar science blog archive, I discovered and fixed a major bug. Rogue Scholar DOIs strings are generated from a random number and include a checksum. It turns out that this checksum was wrong, affecting all Rogue Scholar posts generated with the commonmeta Go library between May 2024 and today.
Last week I wrote about the options we have for including DOIs in RSS feeds. This week is implementation time. Starting today, the Atom feed of this blog includes the DOI in the Atom<id> metadata field.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive depends on RSS feeds to automatically collect metadata and content. Atom, JSON Feed, and JSON APIs (e.g. for the WordPress, Ghost, or Substack platforms) are closely related to RSS. The Rogue Scholar API understands these different formats and regularly (currently every 10 min) checks participating blogs for new or updated content and associated metadata.
December has seen good growth in the number of blogs participating in the Rogue Scholar science blog archive, with 10 blogs joining in the last three weeks. Here you can find all Rogue Scholar blogs, sorted by join date, and the December 2024 additions are listed below.
On October 16, 2024, the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board met for the second time since it started in January 2024. Since January Rogue Scholar has achieved several major milestones. In May, DOI registration was switched to using a new commonmeta Go library. This switch allows faster and more flexible DOI registrations and updates (supporting both Crossref and DataCite), which now routinely happen within minutes of blog post publication.
Last Friday I attended a workshop by the Infra Wiss Blogs project in Berlin.
Starting this week, users of the science blog archive Rogue Scholar can sign in into the service using their ORCID credentials.
The latest update of the Rogue Scholar science blog archive this week improves the finding and tracking of science blog post references, both on the website and in the API. This update again takes advantage of functionality of the InvenioRDM repository platform, with some minor tweaks.
