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.

As I discussed in a recent post, RSS is an essential building block for the upcoming Rogue Scholar Scholarly Blog Archive. RSS makes it easy to import blog posts (both metadata and content) automatically and is supported by all blogging platforms.

The science blog archive that I have started to work on (see previous posts) finally has a name: the Rogue Scholar. I picked this name because I liked the description in the Urban Dictionary. A person with extensive knowledge pertaining to various subject matters that extends beyond formal education. This person often gathers knowledge from various sources, such as media, friends, casual reading or the internet.

Another follow-up post, extending three earlier posts (see references), on the Scholarly Blog Archive that Front Matter is building and that I plan to launch in the first half of 2023. I have been thinking about the building blocks that make this blog archive work: Diamond Open Access Diamond open access (OA) is an open access business model in which no fees are charged to either authors or readers.

In a blog post last week I talked about what I am currently working on, namely a) helping to make it easier (and safer) to run the InvenioRDM digital repository software in Docker container infrastructure, and b) working on converting the bolognese metadata conversion Ruby gem to Python to enhance InvenioRDM functionality.