Metadata are an important feature of every scholarly resource. For science blog posts – which are published with far fewer resources than for example journal articles or books – there is an additional requirement: make the metadata collection as painless as possible.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive is open to science blogs that want to be enhanced by adding long-term archiving, DOI registration, and full-text search. The currently 56 participating blogs represent a broad spectrum of topics, people, and communities. Today I want to go into more detail into one particular Rogue Scholar use case: science blogs for grant-funded projects.
In previous blog posts such as the one published earlier this week, I discussed the various elements involved in registering a DOI for a science blog post.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive is adding important functionality to existing science blogs. The first step after a blog has signed up with Rogue Scholar is archiving the content. This is not only needed for long-term preservation but also enables full-text search and DOI registration with meaningful metadata.
In our previous post we announced we are now archived in Rogue Scholar, a new service that provides full-text search, long-term archiving, DOIs and metadata for science blogs such as ours. In the process of going back through our more than 300 posts over 12-years of blogging we thought we would highlight our favourites.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive received a small update today with the following changes: optionally filter blog posts by language, added support for all OECD fields of science and technology, and searching by DOI.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive continues to grow. It is closing in on 50 science blogs (currently 45), 3,000 blog posts (currently 2,944, of which 2,775 have a DOI), and 250 (currently 212) blog posts with references registered with Crossref. I have set up eleven Mastodon bots for Rogue Scholar blogs after announcing the feature last week.
Today I am happy to announce that the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has joined the Fediverse, the federated social network that communicates using the ActivityPub protocol. I have launched a Mastodon instance at Rogue Scholar Social that accepts Science Blog bots as accounts, publishing summaries of blog posts. Science blogs are typically read by going to the blog homepage with a web browser or using an RSS reader.
This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive reached another big milestone: 2,000 blog posts archived (2,242 as of today). This was achieved by adding new blogs (now 39) but, more importantly, by archiving older posts from the participating blogs.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive adds important functionality to existing science blogs, namely archiving, full-text search, and DOI registration. While a lot of effort has gone into making Rogue Scholar as affordable as possible by using Open Source software, automation, and involving the community, it still costs money to build and run scholarly infrastructure, including scholarly infrastructure for science blogs.