Report Rogue Scholar Advisory Board Meeting October 16, 2024

Martin Fenner -

On October 16, 2024, the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board met for the second time since it started in January 2024. Since January Rogue Scholar has achieved several major milestones.

In May, DOI registration was switched to using a new commonmeta Go library. This switch allows faster and more flexible DOI registrations and updates (supporting both Crossref and DataCite), which now routinely happen within minutes of blog post publication.

In July Rogue Scholar dropped all registration fees for authors (before up to 50 posts per year and personal blogs were free) and became a Diamond Open Access platform. Running costs were kept low (about 3000 EUR per year) by continuing to use open-source software, automation as much as possible (e.g. metadata and content extraction and DOI registration), and community participation ­­­. All participating blogs are run by community members, and they write, edit, and publish all posts. Going forward Rogue Scholar will depend on donations and grant funding, similar to other Diamond Open Access infrastructures.

Rogue Scholar continued platform growth with 117 participating blogs and 17,478 blog posts on October 9, 2024. Worth mentioning is an increase in blogs using the Quarto blogging platform and Spanish-language blogs in recent months.

Rogue Scholar migrated to the InvenioRDM open-source repository platform starting in June 2024 and completed the migration of https://rogue-scholar.org in November 2024. Rogue Scholar migrated many existing functionalities to InvenioRDM, including full-text search which is not part of the InvenioRDM platform. InvenioRDM also allowed Rogue Scholar to add new functionalities, in particular aggregation of blog posts around the same topic in communities.

The Rogue Scholar Advisory Board discussed the opportunities and challenges of running Diamond Open Access scholarly infrastructure. It sees the Rogue Scholar platform as mature enough in terms of features and adoption by the scholarly community to seek grant funding going forward.

One area that needs further work is the better two-way integration with participating blogs, in particular integration of the DOIs issued by Rogue Scholar into the blog frontend and backend, but also help with reference management. As 2024 comes to a close, Rogue Scholar looks forward to an exciting 2025.

References

Fenner, M. (2024, February 8). Introducing the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/9yf86-p8541

Fenner, M. (2024, May 13). Going for DOI registration. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/43qt9-x6p52

Fenner, M. (2024, July 15). Rogue Scholar reaches another milestone and drops all registration fees. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/xkfsa-xkk56

Fenner, M. (2024, November 4). Rogue Scholar gets a facelift. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/jg09j-8ng60

Fenner, M. (2024, October 7). Rogue Scholar learns about communities. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/dv8z6-a6s33