The Rogue Scholar is now open for business

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched with limited functionality on April 3rd. Interested science blogs can go to the sign-up page, provide some basic information via the sign-up form, and then will be added to the Rogue Scholar archive within two business days.

To be included in the service, your blog needs to:

be about science or scholarship and written in English or German (more languages will follow later, reach out to me if you can help),
make the full-text content available via RSS feed and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY).

Blogs that have signed up for the service (more than twenty so far) are listed in the Rogue Scholar catalog of science blogs that launched last week. And since yesterday summaries of the latest fifteen blog posts of each blog are also available.

Blog posts displayed at the Rogue Scholar

These summaries (precisely the information you get in the RSS feed) serve two purposes:

for readers: learn more about that particular science blog. Reading the full-text post or other blog posts is only one click away
for blog authors and Rogue Scholar staff: tweak the blog and/or Rogue Scholar if there are issues with archiving.

The screenshot highlights several considerations when using the RSS Feed to archive a science blog in the Rogue Scholar:

optional but desired metadata, e.g logo, description, and language for blogs or description, tags, and feature image for blog posts
handling authors, including full names instead of usernames, multiple authors, and author identifiers (ORCID)
handling DOIs, including exposing them in the RSS feed, and making sure no DOI exists for the post yet

The Rogue Scholar is now open for business, and I hope the limited functionality (or minimum viable product) launched this week makes it an attractive service for blog readers and authors to try out. The next big milestone is the launch of the full-text index for searching and archiving, and that is planned to happen within the next three months. Followed by DOI registration for blog posts.