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.
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.
