In August v.12.0 of the InvenioRDM turn-key research data management repository was released, the first long-term support (LTS) release of the open source software since January 2023. This release enabled the migration of the Rogue Scholar infrastructure to the InvenioRDM platform, a process that will take the next four months. Deployment The first stage of the migration was setting up the InvenioRDM production infrastructure.
Version 7 of the open source reference manager Zotero was released last Friday. Read the linked announcement for details, but the most excited feature for me is an improved built-in reader with ePub support. Zotero allows you to store metadata and full-text publications and while PDF is the standard format for journal articles and preprints, books (and book chapters) are more commonly distributed as ePub files.
Earlier this month the Rogue Scholar science blog archive reached another important milestone: 100 science blogs registered and archived (with in total 16,179 posts). Rogue Scholar launched twelve months ago and this rate of adoption of the service has greatly surpassed my expectations. To celebrate this milestone, Rogue Scholar will drop all fees for blog authors going forward.
Today I am happy to announce the first beta release of InvenioRDM Starter. InvenioRDM is an open source repository management platform developed by more than 25 organizations coordinated by CERN. The release of the next major version (v12.0) will happen in a few weeks, with the second release candidate released on May 31st. InvenioRDM Starter aims to make installing InvenioRDM easy via a prebuilt Docker image and Docker Compose file.
This week I updated the submission form for the Rogue Scholar science blog archive to clarify that participating blogs can't be journals (or books). Journals and journal articles have many similarities to blogs and blog posts, but they are something different, and out of scope for the Rogue Scholar science blog archive. One feature that can differentiate a journal from a blog is that journals often have volumes and issues.
Starting this week, all DOIs for the Rogue Scholar blog posts are registered and updated using the new commonmeta Go library, replacing the commonmeta Python library. Authors and readers of blogs archived by Rogue Scholar shouldn't notice a difference, but going forward this change will make it easier to manage the DOIs (close to 16K DOIs for currently 93 blogs) registered for Rogue Scholar blog posts.
The Commonmeta standard for scholarly metadata continues towards version 1.0 with some important changes in version v0.14, released this week. And metadata for all DOIs from Crossref and DataCite can now be retrieved in commonmeta format via a new web service.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive is built with Open Source software, starting with Javascript in June 2023 and adding an API written in Python in October 2023. This week I am releasing the first version of commonmeta written in Go to simplify the Rogue Scholar backend.
This week the references included in currently 1,123 Rogue Scholar blog posts have become much more powerful, as they now include the full set of scholarly metadata. These metadata are displayed in the Rogue Scholar web pages and can be fetched via an open API. One of my favorite personal blog posts – about the 10th anniversary of PLOS ONE, reference lists, and the X-Files TV series written in 2016 – nicely demonstrates this new functionality.
From the start last year one important goal for the Rogue Scholar science blog archive was to make it easy to use for blog authors and readers. Today I want to focus on another aspect: keep it simple to run Rogue Scholar infrastructure. To address that goal I started development work last week to further simplify one important aspect of Rogue Scholar infrastructure: metadata conversion.