I am a big fan of dog food, and I wrote about this topic already seven years ago: Eating your own dog food is a slang term to describe that an organization should itself use the products and services it provides. One of the major projects I am working on right now is the Rogue Scholar science blog archive that launched at the beginning of the month.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched last week. Going forward the focus is on improving the service and adding more blogs. This includes giving blog authors feedback on how they can improve their RSS/Atom feeds – used by the Rogue Scholar to collect and archive the blog content. Feedback for science blog publishers A good starting point is author information, which often can be improved.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched with limited functionality on April 3rd. Interested science blogs can go to the sign-up page, provide some basic information via the sign-up form, and then will be added to the Rogue Scholar archive within two business days.

The Rogue Scholar blog archive today released its first catalog of science blogs, a total of nineteen science blogs that signed up for the Rogue Scholar via submission form and met the inclusion criteria: * The blog is about science and in English or German (more languages will follow later, reach out to me if you can help). * The full-text content is available via RSS feed and distributed using a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY).

While the launch of the Rogue Scholar blog archive is still a few months away (happening in the second quarter of this year), I want to give an update on the ongoing work. The Rogue Scholar blog archive will improve science blogs in important ways, including full-text search, DOIs and metadata, and long-term archiving. The central piece of the underlying infrastructure is the InvenioRDM open source repository software.

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. Commonmeta is inspired by two initiatives: Codemeta and Commonmark.

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.