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.

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.

Last Friday the OpenCitations blog published a guest post by Alberto Martín-Martín that describes the coverage by COCI and other open citation data compared to subscription citation indexes. This is an important blog post, as it changes how we think about citations and open metrics.

Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text. – Wikipedia Readability is obviously important for any kind of scholarly communication, from writing papers to blog posts.

Two years ago GitHub introduced the ability to sponsor an open source contributor – person or organization. They handle (and pay for) the payment logistics for a one-time or regular contribution. A blog post from June 2019 describes the thinking of the GiHub Sponsors team that went into this service, and the practicalities of using the service are documented here.

The Front Matter blog launched last week and while the content is currently only written by me, I hope this will change in the coming months to include one-time guest posts and regular writers. One challenge is to figure out how to finance the blog in the long run.

DataCite is a DOI registration agency that enables the registration of scholarly content with a persistent identifier (DOI) and metadata. This content can then be searched for, reused, and connected to other scholarly resources. But how does the underlying infrastructure enable this? In this blog post, we will describe what we have built to make this work. This is a fairly technical post, as I tried to go a little deeper into the details.

Metadata are essential for finding, accessing, and reusing scholarly content, i.e. to increase the FAIRness [Wilkinson et al. (2016)] of datasets and other scholarly resources.

In May, the Make Data Count team announced that we have received additional funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for work on the Make Data Count (MDC) initiative. This will enable DataCite to do additional work in two important areas: Implement a bibliometrics dashboard that enables bibliometricians – funded by a separate Sloan grant – to do quantitative studies around data usage and citation behaviors.