What is Rogue Scholar?

Rogue Scholar is an open access archive and registry for science blogs. It preserves science blog posts, makes them citable via DOI, and ensures their long-term discoverability alongside formal scholarly literature.

Why science blogs?

Science blogs are an important but often overlooked part of scholarly communication. Researchers share preliminary findings, discuss methods, explain complex topics to the public, and engage in scientific debate long before — or in parallel to — formal publication. Rogue Scholar gives these contributions the same citability and discoverability as journal articles. In contrast to preprints, scholarly blog posts are often broader in scope, beyond reporting original research. They can include tutorials, opinion pieces, literature reviews, event announcements, and more.

Key features

• DOI registration – Every archived blog post receives a persistent DOI, enabling reliable citations and cross-links. Posts are versioned, with DOIs minted for each version and a concept DOI always resolving to the latest version.
• Structured metadata – Author names, ORCID iDs, affiliations with ROR IDs, subjects, licenses, and publication dates are captured and exposed via standard schemas (DataCite, Crossref, Dublin Core, Schema.org).
• Full-text search – All archived posts are indexed and searchable via full-text search.
• Citation export – Citations can be generated in APA, Chicago, MLA, and many other styles, and exported as BibTeX, RIS, JSON-LD, and more.
• Multilingual support – Posts in any language are archived; language detection and metadata localization are supported.
• Open API – All metadata is freely available via a REST API, enabling integration with reference managers, discovery systems, and research workflows.
• Communities – Blogs can be organized into thematic communities, making it easy to discover related content.

Supported platforms

Rogue Scholar supports ingestion from all major blogging platforms used by researchers, including WordPress, Ghost, Substack, Quarto, Hugo, Jekyll, and others via standard feed formats (RSS/Atom) or direct API integration.

Who is behind Rogue Scholar?

Rogue Scholar is operated by Front Matter and governed by an Advisory Board of researchers and open science advocates. The infrastructure is built on InvenioRDM, the open source repository platform developed by CERN and partners, including Front Matter.