Readability is obviously important for any kind of scholarly communication, from writing papers to blog posts. I have written about scientific writing before (e.g. Scientific writers can help publish good papers, Books about Science Writing, Do you know the Flesch score of your papers?), and writing scholarly content that is understandable is something that can be taught and learned.

The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is a developer friendly, open access journal for research software packages published as open source software. JOSS started publishing in 2016, and has published more than 1,500 articles so far. After five years and that many articles, it is time to have a closer look at how JOSS content is reused.

This blog started registering DOIs for its content with Crossref last week, and all 450+ blog posts so far were registered by Monday morning. This enables the easy import into reference managers (here using Zotero): Using Zotero or any other reference manager this blog post can now be easily cited: 1. Fenner M. The Front Matter blog now uses DOIs. Front Matter. Published online October 14, 2021.

Yesterday I started registering DOIs for all Front Matter blog posts. I have registered 100 blog posts by now, and will have completed the registration process for all 450 blog posts on Monday. The DOIs are registered with Crossref which Front Matter joined in August. The blog posts are registered as posted content, and this is done via the metadata in schema.org format exposed on each blog page.

More than 200 health journals today published an editorial calling for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of nature, and protect health. The editorial can be read for example here (published under a CC-BY Open Access license), and the full list of participating journals can be found here.

On August 19, GitHub announced software citation support in GitHub repositories. Citation information provided by users (using a CITATION.cff YAML file in the root directory of the default branch) is parsed and made available as bibtex file or formatted citation, currently supporting the APA citation style.

Two years ago GitHub introduced the ability to sponsor an open source contributor – person or organization. They handle (and pay for) the payment logistics for a one-time or regular contribution. A blog post from June 2019 describes the thinking of the GiHub Sponsors team that went into this service, and the practicalities of using the service are documented here.

The Front Matter blog launched last week and while the content is currently only written by me, I hope this will change in the coming months to include one-time guest posts and regular writers. One challenge is to figure out how to finance the blog in the long run.

The open source research data management platform InvenioRDM today announced the first Long-Term Support (LTS) release, usable on production services. And I am joining the effort as a participating partner via Front Matter, the organization I started this week.

Front Matter describes the content preceding the main text of a book or journal. In science, several research journals, including PLOS Biology, Nature, and Science, have Front Matter sections, used for news, opinions, and other content that are not research articles.

After six years as DataCite Technical Director, I am both sad and excited to announce that I will be leaving DataCite, beginning a new adventure as an independent developer for the invenioRDM project on August 1st. My focus will remain on research data management, but with a different angle. A lot has changed since 2015 at DataCite in general, and the DataCite technical architecture in particular.