Announcing Rogue Scholar Preview

Today the Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched a new feature: Rogue Scholar Preview. This new functionality enables the import of new science blogs into the preview version of the production service, located at https://preview.rogue-scholar.org. This allows users to see how their blog posts will look like in the Rogue Scholar service, and to resolve issues if necessary. Until approved, blogs in preview status don't show up in the production service, don't have DOIs registered for their content, are not archived via Internet Archive, and can easily be removed from Rogue Scholar.

To enable this functionality, work on the Rogue Scholar backend was needed to support some of the key functionalities of the Rogue Scholar service for posts without DOIs and a long-term archiving strategy – for example PDF downloads of full-text content and generation of formatted citations.

Two science blogs are currently included in Rogue Scholar Preview. All posts have a Pending tag, no DOI, but otherwise look similar to regular Rogue Scholar posts:

There are only three minor suggestions in this example: the author ORCID ID could be added, the tag Blog doesn't really make sense for posts imported into Rogue Scholar (this can be fixed in the Rogue Scholar API), and a feature image would be nice. But overall the 10 posts (the default number for the preview import) look good, and I expect the blog (Science in the Open) to soon show up in the Rogue Scholar production service.

Major issues with adding blogs to Rogue Scholar are rare, and are listed in the Rogue Scholar signup form:

One common issue is accessing blog posts beyond the most recent (e.g. the last 10) posts. Some blogging platforms have APIs, or pagination in their Atom/RSS feeds, and it is easy to add this functionality for open source blogging platforms such as Hugo or Jekyll.

Minor issues are more common and typically revolve around authorship:

• multiple authors of posts are not supported in the RSS feed format (and the blogging platform doesn't support Atom feeds),
• the blog post authors are different from the author(s) used by the blogging platform. Sometimes this happens with group blogs, especially with Wordpress (which requires a plugin to enable multiple co-authors).

The new Rogue Scholar Preview service further simplifies full-text search, DOI registration, and archiving for science blogs and demonstrates that scholarly infrastructure doesn't need to be complicated, expensive, and boring.