Rogue Scholar has added author affiliation metadata

This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has added author affiliation name and ROR ID to the DOI metadata of about 2,500 of its 15K blog posts registered with Crossref. This makes Front Matter (the Crossref member registering Rogue Scholar DOIs) one of the top 10 ROR early adopters in Crossref metadata.

Author affiliations were implemented using the ORCID metadata of blog post authors (available for 40% of blog posts). If affiliation information was available in the ORCID record with start and end dates, and unless multiple affiliations existed in parallel, the blog post publication date then was used to retrieve the corresponding affiliation information.

This is an early implementation but several issues need to be resolved going forward:

• blog posts authors might not want to provide their ORCID ID or affiliation,
• The ORCID record contains no affiliation information (in the Employment or Education sections), or there are no start and end dates,
• Some ORCID records still contain Ringgold institutional identifiers instead of ROR IDs, despite ORCID having discontinued support for Ringgold IDs in August 2023,
• Some affiliations of Rogue Scholar authors have no ROR ID for various reasons, including Front Matter because it is currently a single-person organization,
• the affiliation lookup via ORCID can be further automated,
• the affiliation information is currently only shown in Rogue Scholar API, but not in the web frontend.

In the coming weeks and months I will work with Rogue Scholar blog post authors to provide their ORCID ID (this is of course optional, but supported for all participating blogs), and update the affiliation information in their ORCID record. I will also update the internal workflow at Rogue Scholar to enable multiple parallel affiliations, as I know of a few Rogue Scholar authors who fall into this category.

This work further improves the metadata quality for blog posts that Rogue Scholar is helping provide. And it shows that better metadata does not automatically mean more work for authors. Several metadata elements need further work, e.g. references (currently 1,100 blog posts with references), relationships (currently 481 blog posts with relationship information), or funding (currently 95 blog posts with funding information), but Rogue Scholar is demonstrating that persistent identifiers (DOI, ORCID, ROR) and relevant metadata for blog posts is feasible, affordable, and works at scale with 15K blog posts registered to date.