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.
Yesterday I released version 0.13 of the commonmeta-py library on PyPi. The major new feature is a command-line interface for all metadata conversions, and the metadata validation with the Commonmeta JSON Schema has finally been fixed. The command-line interface takes any supported persistent identifier or file as input, and returns the metadata in the desired format as output.
The Rogue Scholar science blogging archive joined the fediverse in August of last year. This week I want to report on an updated strategy for Rogue Scholar, and what it means for science blogs participating in Rogue Scholar. In August I launched a Mastodon instance at Rogue Scholar Social that accepted Science Blog bots as accounts, (semi-)automatically publishing summaries of blog posts via Rogue Scholar.
On Wednesday DataCite released version 4.5 of the DataCite metadata schema. Today I released updated versions of the commonmeta Ruby and Python libraries that fully support the new schema. You can install them via Rubygems and PyPI, respectively.
Last week I reported a small change to the Rogue Scholar science blog submission form. By asking for the homepage URL of the blog instead of the feed URL, I hope to make it easier for users to register their blog. At the same time, I fixed a bug in the submission form, caused by an issue with the database backend. Unfortunately, that bug fix didn't work as expected.
Yesterday I had to fix a bug in the Rogue Scholar registration form (a software regression that happened over the holidays related to database row level security). This was a reminder that registering a science blog with the Rogue Scholar science blog archive should be quick and painless. Today I made one change that hopefully simplifies registration: Ask for the blog homepage instead of the RSS feed URL.
Last week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive added export of blog post content in various formats (Markdown, ePub, PDF, JATS XML). This week Rogue Scholar is improving the existing metadata export, and adding metadata export in Schema.org JSON-LD format.
On Monday the Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched the export of blog posts in PDF and other formats. Over the last few days I have been busy improving the PDF output, and today I am releasing a new version, available for all the more than 13K science blog posts archived by Rogue Scholar. The PDF is generated using the open source Pandoc universal document converter in combination with the Weasyprint library.
On Monday the Rogue Scholar science blog archive added support for exporting the blog posts in various formats: markdown, ePub, and PDF. Today I am adding another export format: JATS XML, the standard format for scholarly articles. JATS is again automatically generated with the Pandoc universal document converter, with some initial tweaks of the Rogue Scholar metadata.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive starts 2024 with an important release: all blog posts (more than 13,000) are now available for download in Markdown, ePub, and PDF formats. This builds on work completed in December to store the full text of every Rogue Scholar blog post in Markdown format in the Rogue Scholar backend. Combined with the metadata in YAML format, these posts can now be downloaded via the Rogue Scholar API, e.g.
