Today I am happy to announce the first beta release of InvenioRDM Starter. InvenioRDM is an open source repository management platform developed by more than 25 organizations coordinated by CERN. The release of the next major version (v12.0) will happen in a few weeks, with the second release candidate released on May 31st. InvenioRDM Starter aims to make installing InvenioRDM easy via a prebuilt Docker image and Docker Compose file.

This week I updated the submission form for the Rogue Scholar science blog archive to clarify that participating blogs can't be journals (or books). Journals and journal articles have many similarities to blogs and blog posts, but they are something different, and out of scope for the Rogue Scholar science blog archive. One feature that can differentiate a journal from a blog is that journals often have volumes and issues.

Starting this week, all DOIs for the Rogue Scholar blog posts are registered and updated using the new commonmeta Go library, replacing the commonmeta Python library. Authors and readers of blogs archived by Rogue Scholar shouldn't notice a difference, but going forward this change will make it easier to manage the DOIs (close to 16K DOIs for currently 93 blogs) registered for Rogue Scholar blog posts.

The Commonmeta standard for scholarly metadata continues towards version 1.0 with some important changes in version v0.14, released this week. And metadata for all DOIs from Crossref and DataCite can now be retrieved in commonmeta format via a new web service.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive is built with Open Source software, starting with Javascript in June 2023 and adding an API written in Python in October 2023. This week I am releasing the first version of commonmeta written in Go to simplify the Rogue Scholar backend.

This week the references included in currently 1,123 Rogue Scholar blog posts have become much more powerful, as they now include the full set of scholarly metadata. These metadata are displayed in the Rogue Scholar web pages and can be fetched via an open API. One of my favorite personal blog posts – about the 10th anniversary of PLOS ONE, reference lists, and the X-Files TV series written in 2016 – nicely demonstrates this new functionality.

From the start last year one important goal for the Rogue Scholar science blog archive was to make it easy to use for blog authors and readers. Today I want to focus on another aspect: keep it simple to run Rogue Scholar infrastructure. To address that goal I started development work last week to further simplify one important aspect of Rogue Scholar infrastructure: metadata conversion.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has been collecting the references of blog posts since June 2023, and has registered Crossref DOIs for 1,114 blog posts with references as of today.

Last week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive reached another milestone with 15,000 (15,332 as of today) science blog posts. These posts come from 86 participating blogs with 69% written in English and 28% in German.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive is launching a new pricing plan this week: Project . Blogs that participate in the Project plan get all the benefits of the existing Team plan – unlimited blog posts with DOI registration, full-text search, and long-term archiving with the Internet Archive – for a one-time fee of $150.

This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has added author affiliation name and ROR ID to the DOI metadata of about 2,500 of its 15K blog posts registered with Crossref. This makes Front Matter (the Crossref member registering Rogue Scholar DOIs) one of the top 10 ROR early adopters in Crossref metadata.