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Front Matter

Front Matter
The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.
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Published

Since last year this blog is powered by the Ghost open source blogging platform. Two important and long-standing shortcomings of the platform were search and comments, which I added via integrating third-party tools (Typesense and Discourse, respectively). In the last several weeks Ghost team has worked hard to add these features to the core platform, described here and here.

Published

The first post on this blog was published on August 3, 2007 (Open access may become mandatory for NIH-funded research). This is post number 465, and in the past 15 years the blog has seen changes in technology and hosting location – but I wrote all posts (with the exception of a few guest posts). The overall theme remained unchanged: technology used in scholarly communication.

Published

The Front Matter blog is launching a new membership model today. In August 2021 this blog started offering optional paid membership via the Buy Me a Coffee service. Unfortunately. two things happened: a) Paypal dropped supporting Buy Me a Coffee for membership payments at the end of last year, and b) there wasn't really any uptake of this support model, even if only charging $3 (or a cup of coffee) per month.

Published

Fresh into 2022, the Front Matter blog today is launching an important new feature: a full-text search of all blog posts. An example query would be for reference manager. As the Front Matter blog has a lot of posts about reference managers, a tag would also have worked in this particular case, but tags are much less flexible and become overwhelming when used too frequently.

Published

In August GitHub added enhanced support for citation-file-format (CFF) to all GitHub repositories. As you can see in the chart below (kindly provided by Stephan Druskat and based on GitHub queries for CFF files), this has led to a significant increase of repositories using CFF files and thus exposing software metadata that go beyond what GitHub provides via other means.

Published

In October Jen Gibson started as the new Executive Director for the Dryad Data Repository. I used the opportunity to ask Jen a few questions about Dryad, challenges with data sharing, and ideas about moving Dryad forward. I was particularly interested in the interview as I served on the Dryad Board of Directors from 2013 to 2016.