The Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched last week. Going forward the focus is on improving the service and adding more blogs. This includes giving blog authors feedback on how they can improve their RSS/Atom feeds – used by the Rogue Scholar to collect and archive the blog content. Feedback for science blog publishers A good starting point is author information, which often can be improved.

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.

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.

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.

This blog post is a follow-up to a post in September (Fenner 2022a), where I announced that I had started working on an archive for scholarly blog posts based on the InvenioRDM open-source repository software.

Feature images are commonly used for blog posts, including on this blog. We can use our screenshots or photos or stock photos (ideally license free or with an open license) from sites like Flickr, Unsplash, or Pexels. More recently, we can also use artificial intelligence tools such as DALL·E 2 that generate images from a description in natural language.

This blog since earlier this month is no longer using a JAMStack setup but a regular Ghost setup using Ghost Pro for hosting. The primary driver were the new native search and native comments, but I needed to do a little bit of work to keep the DOI registration working. This is done now, and an added benefit is that DOI registration is now straightforward for any blog that uses Ghost as a platform.

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.