Rogue Scholar reaches another milestone with 15,000 science blog posts

Last week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive reached another milestone with 15,000 (15,332 as of today) science blog posts. These posts come from 86 participating blogs with 69% written in English and 28% in German. The most common subject areas are Law with 22%, Computer and Information Sciences with 20% and Earth and related Environmental Sciences with 12%. Wordpress is the dominating blogging platform with 46% of posts on self-hosted Wordpress blogs, and 23% of posts hosted by Wordpress.com. Overall blogs participating in Rogue Scholar are using 10 different blogging platforms.

Three blogs register DOIs with DataCite, and the rest register DOIs with Crossref via Rogue Scholar. The metadata registered with Crossref includes abstract, language, license information, and links to full-text versions in all cases. Fifty percent have at least one author with ORCID ID, and 30% have at least one author affiliation with ROR ID. Seven percent of Crossref metadata have registered references, and one percent includes funding information.

When Rogue Scholar started in April 2023 I would not have imagined this level of adoption, so I am of course very excited. Going forward I will invest more time into improving the metadata quality, and you can expect an announcement about references very soon. The top priority is easy metadata registration for blog authors, but that does not mean that science blog metadata need to be sparse and incomplete.

The other area where more work is needed is financial support. The content from all blogs participating in Rogue Scholar is free to read and reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. I am very reluctant to charge authors, but ask for a one-time fee of $1 per post beyond 50 posts per year (this mostly affects blogs running for many years). With the help of donations and my waiving this $1 per post fee in many cases, I was able to archive all blog posts from participating blogs in the last few months. In February I started a Personal plan that is completely free for personal blogs. Last week I announced a Project plan for blogs of grant-funded projects and hope that some funders and project blogs are interested in that option.

The costs for running Rogue Scholar have remained very reasonable with currently not more than $300 per month, the largest percentage being DOI registration (Crossref) and long-term archiving (Internet Archive). By far the largest cost factor is staff time for development work, support, and outreach. Donations to Rogue Scholar are always welcomed, and the easiest way is via one-time or monthly Ko-fi donations.

References

Fenner, M. (2023). The Rogue Scholar is now open for business. https://doi.org/10.53731/z9v2s-bh329

Fenner, M. (2024). Rogue Scholar launches a free personal plan. https://doi.org/10.53731/bdrgt-cjh09

Fenner, M. (2024). Rogue Scholar launches project plan for grant-funded projects. https://doi.org/10.53731/2kkkq-p4h51