Following recent announcements of the commonmeta standard for scholarly metadata and a Python package that converts several metadata formats (commonmeta-py), today I am happy to announce commonmeta-ruby, a Ruby gem and command-line tool to convert scholarly metadata using commonmeta as the internal format.

This week I launched Commonmeta , a new scholarly metadata standard described at https://commonmeta.org. Commonmeta is the result of working on conversion tools for scholarly metadata for many years. One conclusion early on was that these conversions are many-to-many, so it becomes much easier to have an internal format that is the intermediate step for these conversions.

Talbot is a Python package I started working on at the end of 2022 and plan to release to the Python Package Index (PyPi) in March. Talbot converts scholarly metadata in various formats, including Crossref, DataCite, Schema.org, BibTeX, RIS, and formatted citations – the complete list of supported formats is here. Talbot is a Python version of the Bolognese Ruby gem that I worked on with my DataCite colleagues starting in 2018.

These guidelines are recommendations for authors of scholarly blogs to help with long-term archiving, discoverability, and citation of blog content. They are modeled after the publication A Data Citation Roadmap for Scholarly Data Repositories, where many of the same guidelines apply, and where I was the first author and co-chair of the corresponding Force11 working group.

On Wednesday this week I am launching the Front Matter Gazette , a weekly newsletter that highlights exciting science stories from around the web. The linked content highlighted in the newsletter is published elsewhere and is free to read whenever possible. The newsletter requires a paid subscription (available here), 5 €/month or 50 €/year with a thirty-day free trial and free subscriptions on request.

Science blogs have been around for at least 20 years and have become an important part of science communication. So are there any fundamental issues that need fixing?Barriers to Entry Blogging platforms are mature at this point, and the technology is not imposing barriers to entry for most people.

As I discussed in a recent post, RSS is an essential building block for the upcoming Rogue Scholar Scholarly Blog Archive. RSS makes it easy to import blog posts (both metadata and content) automatically and is supported by all blogging platforms.

The science blog archive that I have started to work on (see previous posts) finally has a name: the Rogue Scholar . I picked this name because I liked the description in the Urban Dictionary.

Another follow-up post, extending three earlier posts (see references), on the Scholarly Blog Archive that Front Matter is building and that I plan to launch in the first half of 2023. I have been thinking about the building blocks that make this blog archive work:Diamond Open Access Using this term sounds strange in the context of scholarly blog posts, but it means that scholarly blog infrastructure should be free to publish and free to read.

In a blog post last week I talked about what I am currently working on, namely a) helping to make it easier (and safer) to run the InvenioRDM digital repository software in Docker container infrastructure, and b) working on converting the bolognese metadata conversion Ruby gem to Python to enhance InvenioRDM functionality.

This blog post is a follow-up to a post in September (Fenner 2022a), where I announced that I had started working on an archive for scholarly blog posts based on the InvenioRDM open-source repository software.