This is the first issue of a new monthly newsletter from the Rogue Scholar science blog archive. The newsletter will report on new blogs that have joined the platform, important technical updates in Rogue Scholar infrastructure, community updates, and other news relevant to Rogue Scholar users.

Blogs added to Rogue Scholar

Seven blogs were added in January. These include two Slovenian library blogs, a first blog about pathology, another chemistry blog (bringing the total number of chemistry blogs to five), a digital humanities blog with English and German posts, the blog of the German Infra Wiss Blogs project which studies scholarly infrastructure for science blogs, and the personal blog of long-time collaborator and friend Geoff Bilder. Welcome everybody!

BIBLIOBLOG

O stvareh, ki zanimajo knjižničarje.
Humanities, Slovenian.
https://www.biblioblog.si/

André's slide box

The thoughts and sights of André Lametti — just a pathologist.
Medical and health sciences, English.
https://justapa.thologi.st/

Jeremy Monat, PhD

Scientific software developer.
Chemical sciences, English.
https://bertiewooster.github.io/

Infra Wiss Blogs

Computer and information sciences, German.
https://infrawissblogs.org/

Louche Cannon

Computer and information sciences, English.
https://gbilder.com/

DH Lab

Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG).
History and archaeology, English.
https://dhlab.hypotheses.org/

LISMob

Mobile library and information science.
Computer and information sciences, Slovenian.
https://lismob.blogspot.com/

You can search for all Rogue Scholar blogs (132 as of today) and sort the results by date joined here.

Technical Updates

In January, Rogue Scholar received two important technical updates: blogs can now pre-assign DOIs for their posts, and extraction of blog post references has improved.

Pre-assigning DOIs

Some blogs (nine as of today) participating in Rogue Scholar do their own DOI registration, but for the majority of blogs, Rogue Scholar is doing this for them. The DOIs are generated from a random number and include a checksum, and participating blogs until now had to fetch the DOIs assigned to their posts from the Rogue Scholar API after publication. Starting in January, participating blogs can generate the random DOI string themselves (using a command-line utility) and include the pre-assigned DOI string in their RSS, Atom, or JSON Feed (as blog post guid/id). The process is explained in more detail in two recent blogs (1, 2) and the updated Rogue Scholar documentation.

Improved extraction of references

All Rogue Scholar blog posts are available as full-text documents with an open license (CC-BY). Although references are not included as dedicated fields in the RSS feeds Rogue Scholar uses to automatically collect content and metadata, the full text of posts allows automatic reference extraction. Up until now the automated reference extraction depended on references with links (DOI or URL) and ignored the reference text, typically formatted in one of the many citation styles. This workflow ignored references without a link, and couldn't get detailed metadata from URL links.

Starting in January, Rogue Scholar is using an improved workflow for reference extraction if references are formatted as an HTML list or use the popular citeproc library to generate reference lists (e.g. all Quarto blogs). This improves the quality of reference metadata that are used in DOI registration and shown in the Rogue Scholar repository platform:

About that Saurophaganax paper. https://doi.org/10.59350/ffgmk-zjj78

Reference extraction is described in more detail in a recent blog post and the updated Rogue Scholar documentation.

Community Updates

Starting with this post Rogue Scholar will send monthly updates via newsletter to report the most important changes that happened in the platform. It is highly recommended that all blogs participating in the Rogue Scholar platform – or people interested in science blogs in general – subscribe to this free newsletter. You can do that here and this also gives you the ability to comment on blog posts (newsletter or otherwise).

If you have more detailed questions, especially when you just joined Rogue Scholar with your blog, you can as of this week join the new Rogue Scholar Slack community. This feedback channel is faster than email and allows for group discussions, as multiple bloggers often have the same questions, especially when they just joined.

These two community updates were explained in more detail in a blog post earlier this week. Comments or questions via email, Mastodon, or Bluesky are of course also always welcomed.

Rogue Scholar is a scholarly infrastructure that is free for all authors and readers. You can support Rogue Scholar with a one-time or recurring donation.

References

Fenner, M. (2025, January 13). Including DOIs in RSS Feeds: Implementation. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/m9d5v-xmr74

Fenner, M. (2025, January 16). Persistent identifiers, random strings, and checksums. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/6kfyy-nq280

Wedel, M. (2024, December 22). About that Saurophaganax paper. Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. https://doi.org/10.59350/ffgmk-zjj78

Fenner, M. (2025, January 22). Formatting references in blog posts. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/2j1hr-5xc16

Fenner, M. (2025, January 27). Starting a Rogue Scholar monthly newsletter and Slack Community. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/f117g-8r09