On April 16, 2025, the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board met for the third time since it started in January 2024. Since the last Advisory Board Meeting on October 24, Rogue Scholar has achieved several important milestones.
In February, the Rogue Scholar Statistics page was relaunched as Rogue Scholar Dashboard, displaying key indicators such as the number of participating blogs and archived blog posts, as well as the percentage of posts with ORCID and ROR identifiers, references, or funding.
The Advisory Board suggested adding filters to better highlight more recent data.
In January and February, Rogue Scholar improved the reference extraction and references display, finding references in about 5% of posts. Using the Crossref Cited-By service, Rogue Scholar also started collecting and displaying citations of Rogue Scholar posts. The kcite WordPress plugin that simplifies the generation of DOI references was very helpful, but hasn’t been updated in many years. While the numbers of references and citations are still small, linking to other scholarly content via references and citations further integrates scholarly blogs into the broader scholarly record.
The Advisory Board discussed archiving formats for the full-text of blog posts. Rogue Scholar in 2024 started experimenting with PDF and ePub, but this functionality is not yet integrated with the InvenioRDM repository platform. The Advisory Board felt that the JATS format may not be necessary or beneficial for blog content.
The Advisory Board next discussed starting a webinar series on best practices for science blogs, focusing on specific blogging platforms. A first webinar for WordPress bloggers in German was proposed.
Finally, the Advisory Board discussed Rogue Scholar funding. Rogue Scholar is a Diamond Open Access infrastructure with no costs to authors and readers. Seeking grant funding is an option, and Rogue Scholar has so far archived more than 30,000 blog posts, including some highly visible science blogs. One challenge with seeking grant funding is the missing non-profit status for Front Matter, the organization behind Rogue Scholar.
