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.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive today has launched a new free Personal Plan : similar to the Starter Plan launched last year, but only for personal (single-author) blogs, and with no limitations on the number of blog posts that can be archived and registered with a DOI per year.

This week the commonmeta-py Python library adds an important new feature: metadata lists. With this feature commonmeta-py no longer only operates on metadata for a single scholarly work (e.g. a journal article, book, dataset, software, or blog post), but can handle lists of scholarly works.

Today the Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched a new feature: Rogue Scholar Preview . This new functionality enables the import of new science blogs into the preview version of the production service, located at https://preview.rogue-scholar.org. This allows users to see how their blog posts will look like in the Rogue Scholar service, and to resolve issues if necessary.

In January 2024 the new Rogue Scholar Advisory Board had its first meeting. It consists of six people with diverse expertise in scholarly blogging. Advisory Board members come from different scholarly disciplines and geographic regions, write in several languages besides English, and have different levels of technical expertise.