Rogue Scholar launches project plan for grant-funded projects

Martin Fenner -

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive is launching a new pricing plan this week: Project. Blogs that participate in the Project plan get all the benefits of the existing Team plan – unlimited blog posts with DOI registration, full-text search, and long-term archiving with the Internet Archive – for a one-time fee of $150.

As discussed in a blog post last September, science blogs from grant-funded projects have particular needs:

  • Grant-funded projects have a strong desire to communicate their outputs and activities, and science blogs are an established and popular format to do that,
  • Funders want grant-funded projects to demonstrate the impact of these outreach activities in terms of views, citations, and social media metrics,
  • Because of the time-limited funding and staffing blogs from grant-funded projects run a particularly high risk of disappearing from the public web and thus the scholarly record.

Rogue Scholar can help grant-funded projects to address these needs. All posts from participating blogs are archived in Rogue Scholar infrastructure and the Internet Archive Archive-It service when blogs for grant-funded projects are no longer maintained (and the DOIs of blog posts will redirect to the archived versions). The Rogue Scholar full-text search makes the discovery of relevant content much easier, and the DOIs with rich metadata allow grantees and funders to see all blog posts funded by a particular grant or funder. The blog of the THOR project demonstrates how that works, including all outputs funded by the project grant in the Crossref REST API, and the archived versions in Archive-It.

The Project plan adds two new functionalities to Rogue Scholar:

  • Usage stats for all blog posts via the Plausible service, a privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative included with all Project plans. The Upstream blog as well as this blog have used the Plausible service for more than two years and have made the usage stats available to everybody.
  • Citation counts for all blog posts via the Crossref cited-by service are also included with all Project plans. Integration into Rogue Scholar will launch in June for the first anniversary of the Rogue Scholar launch. As with usage stats, citations will be made available to all users without requiring payment or authentication.

Because of the rapidly changing landscape of social media platforms (X, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc.) Rogue Scholar is not offering any social media metrics at this time.

To simplify payment for the Project plan, the plan costs a one-time fee of $150 and is good for all project blog posts made during the project (for up to five years). The project should ideally sign up with the Project plan at the beginning of the project to allow tracking of usage stats, but not after the project blog no longer has a publicly available RSS feed and website. Payment is via the Ko-fi service, and can be made by the project, the funder (so that interested funders can pay for more than one project), or any third party that wants to support project blogs. Please reach out to Front Matter support if you are interested or have questions.

References

Fenner, M. (2023). Use cases for science blogs: Grant-funded projects. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/mh9a1-dw902