Next week the InvenioRDM community will meet in Hamburg for five days to discuss the open source repository platform. Front Matter has been part of the InvenioRDM community since August 2021, and Rogue Scholar relaunched on the InvenioRDM platform in October 2024.

The last workshop of the InvenioRDM partners took place in March 2024 in Münster, so this is the first meetup where I am running a production instance of InvenioRDM. I hope to share some of the things I learned running Rogue Scholar, talk about the customizations that may be of interest to other InvenioRDM instances, and ask many questions. On the first day of the workshop we will have a session where InvenioRDM instances can present the highlights of what they are doing in 5 minutes, and today I have uploaded my slides to Zenodo, which is of course the repository where it all started. Here are some of the special Rogue Scholar features I want to highlight:

  • All records are scholarly blog posts, in multiple languages and covering all subject areas. This makes Rogue Scholar different from both an institutional repository (research outputs from a specific institution) and a disciplinary repository (research outputs in a specific subject area). Rogue Scholar is similar to preprint servers such as arXiv or bioRxiv, but with a broader scope in the subject area.
  • Almost everything in Rogue Scholar is automated, from extracting content and metadata from participating blogs, to uploading content to Rogue Scholar and DOI registration with Crossref.
  • Rogue Scholar offers full-text search of all its content, a functionality that is not common in other InvenioRDM instances. The main reason for this is of course that full-text search is difficult to implement if content is not text, or in formats where searching is difficult (e.g. CSV or PDF).
  • Rogue Scholar tracks the citations of its content and shows them to users. This is done differently from other InvenioRDM instances, as Rogue Scholar uses DOIs from Crossref rather than DataCite and takes advantage of the Crossref Cited-by service.
  • More recently Rogue Scholar has improved the faceting/aggregation of search results, e.g. by affiliation or publication year. This makes it very easy to visualize key repository indicators in a dashboard.

Some of the questions I have for the InvenioRDM community include:

  • further consolidation of Python package management with uv, including support for the site local folder,
  • improve Javascript bundling by replacing webpack with a modern alternative such as Rspack,
  • override UI React components. Documented but I am struggling with the workflow,
  • using other programming languages besides Python and React/Javascript for InvenioRDM, in particular Golang,
  • simpler ways to collect use COUNTER-compliant usage stats (views and downloads) that don't use log file processing,
  • interest in simplifying the InvenioRDM stack by replacing Elasticsearch/Opensearch with the pg_search Postgres extension.

If you are a Rogue Scholar user and have topics or questions I should discuss in Hamburg, let me know via email or Slack.

References

  1. Fenner, M. (2021, August 5). First InvenioRDM Long-Term Support (LTS) version released today – and Front Matter is joining as a participating partner. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r8c26t1-97aq74v-ag66m
  2. Fenner, M. (2024, October 14). The Rogue Scholar migration to InvenioRDM is taking shape. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/a7v8h-8px31
  3. InvenioRDM Partner Meeting Summary, March 2024—Inveniosoftware.org. (n.d.). Retrieved March 19, 2025, from https://inveniosoftware.org/blog/2024-04-23-april-project-meeting-update/
  4. Fenner, M. (2025). Rogue Scholar InvenioRDM Workshop 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.15050863
  5. Fenner, M. (2025, March 10). Working on the Rogue Scholar dashboard. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/wtvvs-f4h04