Rogue Scholar reaches another milestone and drops all registration fees

Earlier this month the Rogue Scholar science blog archive reached another important milestone: 100 science blogs registered and archived (with in total 16,179 posts). Rogue Scholar launched twelve months ago and this rate of adoption of the service has greatly surpassed my expectations. To celebrate this milestone, Rogue Scholar will drop all fees for blog authors going forward. Rogue Scholar content was always free to read, but by dropping the fees for all authors (including blogs that published more than 50 posts per year), Rogue Scholar becomes a Diamond Open Access platform, consistent with current trends in scholarly publishing.

Rogue Scholar currently has no stable long-term funding, so this change creates challenges sustaining the platform in the long run in the future. Three strategies will be important:

• running Rogue Scholar for twelve months means I have a fairly good understanding of the effort and costs involved in running a science blog archive, and important steps are planned to further improve the archive in the coming months,
• not charging readers or authors using Rogue Scholar doesn't mean that Rogue Scholar doesn't need revenue sources. Rogue Scholar will continue to accept one-time and regular donations (e.g. via the donation button in the menu bar), and I will increase efforts to receive funding from organizations who want to support Diamond Open Access and in particular scholarly blogs,
• the work on Rogue Scholar is very instrumental for other work Front Matter is doing on scholarly infrastructure, and making Rogue Scholar free to readers and authors can be seen as my contribution to the next generation of scholarly infrastructure, which is more open, more diverse, and less technically challenging.