To begin something is difficult; to keep something going is a different challenge. Even when it is the right thing to do, if it does not yield economic benefit in the short term, it may be difficult to sustain. Open science, including open-source software development and open data, is precisely such an example.
Appalachian History On a cold Saturday morning in Anderson County, Tennessee, the Knoxville Iron Company’s Cross Mountain Mine No. 1 blew apart and turned the little coal town of Briceville into a scene of grief and rescue work that lasted ten long days. Eighty-four miners were dead, yet five men emerged alive after fifty-eight hours behind a hastily built barricade.
Breaking the Barrier of Women Coal Miners In the coalfields of eastern Kentucky, where coal seams carved both livelihood and hardship, Diana Baldwin carved history. At just 25 years old, in December 1973, she became one of the first two women, often credited as the first in a union mine, to work underground in a U.S. coal mine.
Appalachian Figures In the spring of 1948, eastern Kentucky sent a familiar courthouse figure to Washington. William Lewis had been a teacher, sheriff, prosecutor, and circuit judge across the upper Cumberland for half a century before he ever took a seat in the U.S. House. When he finally did, at age seventy-nine, he represented the old Ninth District for just the balance of one term, then stepped back home to London.
Appalachian Figures Born in the coal camp country of Yeaddiss in Leslie County, Kentucky, Hugh X. Lewis carried the cadence of the hills into Nashville’s studios, onto syndicated television, and back home to Appalachian radio across six decades.
The science blog archive Rogue Scholar this week started supporting versioning of blog posts. This is a core feature of the InvenioRDM repository platform used by Rogue Scholar, but Rogue Scholar uses DOIs from Crossref rather than DataCite, the default DOI registration agency for InvenioRDM. Crossref versioning was made possible with the Crossref schema 5.4.0 released in March.
In this blog post, Poppy Riddle examines how OpenAlex and Crossref APIs handle key bibliographic metadata elements, focusing on differences in the reporting of abstracts and language attributes.
On September 30, 2025, 11:00 a.m. CEST, we will have a webinar about data journals at WiNoDa. You can find more information here.
Einleitung: Was CoreTrustSeal für Forschende bedeutet und warum Repositorien es brauchen Am 30. September 2025 um 11:00 Uhr CEST findet bei WiNoDa ein Webinar zum Thema Data Journals statt.
Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci!
Appalachian History Where is “Tunnel Hill”? Locals use Tunnel Hill for the crest above a pair of side-by-side railroad bores just northwest of Hazard. On the maps the spot falls within the unincorporated community historically called Dunraven. A quick way to pin it on the ground is the county’s own road index, which lists Tunnel Hill Cemetery in Dunraven.