Rogue Scholar Newsletter April 2025

Martin Fenner -

This is the April issue of the monthly newsletter from the Rogue Scholar science blog archive. The newsletter reports on new blogs that have joined the platform, important technical updates in Rogue Scholar infrastructure, community updates, and other news relevant to Rogue Scholar users.

Blogs added to Rogue Scholar

Nine blogs from six different subject areas were added in April. Welcome everybody! More information about some of the blogs added will follow in the coming weeks.

Open Access News

Social science, English.
https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

Crossref Blog

Computer and information sciences, English.
https://www.crossref.org/blog/

Open Bioinformatics Foundation

Biological sciences, English.
https://www.open-bio.org/

Research Organization Registry (ROR)

Computer and information sciences, English.
https://ror.org/blog/

Netzwerk Fluchtforschung

Social science, German.
https://fluchtforschung.net/de/blog/

kfitz

Humanities, English.
https://kfitz.info/

Jachère Journal

Other humanities, English.
https://jache.re/

Appalachianhistorian.org

History and archaeology, English.
https://appalachianhistorian.org/

Bauhinia Genome

Biological sciences, English.
http://bauhiniagenome.hk/

Technical Updates

Since April 15, Rogue Scholar has shown the full-text of all blog posts in the web interface, after making the full-text available via API since the service's launch.

The full-text continues to be included in Rogue Scholar full-text search, allowing readers to find terms not in the metadata, e.g. National Miners Union in this example from a post published today.

On April 14, I enabled Rogue Scholar web analytics using the Plausible Analytics platform. The platform collects no personally identifiable information and the data are available via a public dashboard:

Public Plausible Analytics dashboard

It is too early to take a deeper dive into the data, including how the traffic to Rogue Scholar compares to the traffic to participating blogs. Both this blog and the Upstream blog also use the Plausible Analytics platform, so in a few months that comparison can take place.

DOI registration has become easier for WordPress blogs, as the DOI is now automatically generated from the blog identifier and the post_id, e.g. https://doi.org/10.59350/fluchtforschung.14743 for the post with the post_id https://fluchtforschung.net/?p=14743. This makes it easier for blogs to display the DOI for each post, as the information is available before publication. This functionality is available to new WordPress blogs and early adopters now, and becomes the standard setting for Wordpress blogs on May 15.

Blogs using static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, Quarto, etc.) have similar functionality since January. Going forward I will add the same pre-registration functionality to the blogging platforms currently missing, e.g. Blogger or Substack.

Community Update

The Rogue Scholar Advisory Board met virtually on April 16. A summary of the discussions and advice will be posted as a blog post in the coming weeks.

The small but growing Rogue Scholar Slack community continues to have interesting conversations that are difficult or impossible over social media or email.

Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding this monthly newsletter.

Rogue Scholar is a scholarly infrastructure that is free for all authors and readers. You can support Rogue Scholar with a one-time or recurring donation or by becoming a sponsor.

References

  1. Fenner, M. (2025, April 14). Rogue Scholar adds full-text content to all blog post web pages. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/f6tvb-se107
  2. Fenner, M. (2025, April 24). DOI registration workflow for a science blog (version 2). Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/fz73s-sv368