![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/10/Bildschirmfoto-2025-10-27-um-17.48.07-1.png\")
The science blog archive Rogue Scholar started the process of becoming a German non-profit organization in 2026. This blog post summarizes the reasoning and the main steps needed to achieve this.
Two weeks ago, I published a self-assessment of how Rogue Scholar adheres to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). Major gaps were identified in the areas of governance and sustainability. To address these gaps, a major step forward would be to start a non-profit membership organization. The need to take this step at some point was obvious to me since I launched Rogue Scholar in April 2023. With the basic service operating and on a good path forward with 50,000 science blog posts archived by the end of the year, the time has arrived to make this step.
Starting a non-profit membership organization in Germany means starting a Verein, or registered association. The steps involved to formally register the association are clearly laid out and mainly involve the following:
It helps that I have worked for non-profit organizations most of my professional life. Not only public universities, but also a non-profit publisher (PLOS), and two membership organizations (ORCID and DataCite), with the latter also being a German Verein. Interestingly, Research Organization Registry (ROR), an initiative that I helped launch in early 2019, is not a membership organization.
Running a non-profit organization in Germany requires more paperwork compared to, for example, Belgium or the Netherlands, mainly to obtain and keep charitable status. This means a good amount of work for the founding board, especially the president and treasurer.
One important question is the rights and responsibilities of members. As individuals or groups of people, rather than formal organizations, run many science blogs, membership has to be open to all legal entities, individuals and organizations. Membership fees should differentiate between individuals and organizations, and include at least two tiers for small and large organizations, for example:
Rogue Scholar is a Diamond Open Access infrastructure with no fees to readers or authors. This means that membership can't be a requirement for a science blog to be archived in Rogue Scholar, but rather that membership comes with other benefits. Members not only help support a unique open scholarly infrastructure but also have a say in the governance of the organization via the general assembly, participation in the board, and potentially working groups going forward.
For Rogue Scholar to achieve sustainability, membership fees are an important element. Two other aspects are also important:
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding Rogue Scholar becoming a non-profit membership organization.
This is the October 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.
Ten blogs were added in September. Welcome! More blogs are on the waitlist and will be added soon. This brings the number of participating blogs to 184, and the number of archived posts to 47,385.
Quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures at the University of Edinburgh.
Computer and information sciences, English.
https://qec.codes/
Bioinformatics lessons learned the hard way, bugs, gripes, and maybe topical paper reviews too...
Biological Sciences, English.
https://blastedbio.blogspot.com/
Technical notes from the interface between bioinformatics and cheminformatics by Chris Southan.
Biological Sciences, English.
https://cdsouthan.blogspot.com/
Computer and information sciences, English.
https://anil.recoil.org/notes
Notes on nature poking.
Biological Sciences, English.
https://naturepoker.wordpress.com/
Social science, English.
https://antoinevernet.com/blog/
Computer and information sciences, English.
https://c-monaghan.github.io/posts/
Economics and business, English.
https://marberts.github.io/blog/
Exploring the art and science of working with development and humanitarian data.
Social science, English.
https://juan-torresmunguia.netlify.app/blog/
R\u00e9flexions sur l'\u00e9volution, la biodiversit\u00e9 et la vie.
Natural sciences, French.
https://evologie.netlify.app/
This week, Rogue Scholar added support for contributions beyond authorship in collaboration with the ropensci blog. The contributor roles editor, translator, and interviewee are now supported in Rogue Scholar (all) and Crossref (editor, translator) metadata.
The blog post describes the work needed in the blog Atom or JSON Feed to include these new contributor roles. Over the coming months, more roles will be added, including roles from the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CrediT). Crossref is planning to add CrediT support to its metadata schema in 2026.
On October 20, Rogue Scholar published a self-assessment using the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), summarized below:
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/10/Bildschirmfoto-2025-10-31-um-17.51.44.png\")
Major gaps exist in the areas of governance and sustainability, and work is underway to improve this. Stay tuned for a blog post next week.
The project Infra Wiss Blogs in October published two papers (one English and one German) studying science blogs in Germany. They found that the majority of science blog in Germany are from the Humanities and Social Sciences, in part because a large number of blogs from de.Hypotheses.
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/10/jd-02-2025-0053001.png\")
The Rogue Scholar Slack continues to have interesting discussions on a variety of topics. Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding this monthly newsletter.
With this blog post, the science blog archive Rogue Scholar starts the formal process to adhere to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). To do so, an organization has to perform a self-audit of its compliance with the principles, with a focus on principles and not hard rules. POSI was updated to version 2.0 this October, with the changes marked up in a separate document.
In the coming weeks, I hope to finish this document with feedback from blogs participating in Rogue Scholar, other users, and the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board that meets in November. Below is an overview of where I think Rogue Scholar already adheres to POSI (\ud83d\udfe2), some work is still needed (\ud83d\udfe1), or where major gaps exist (\ud83d\udd34). I then describe the major gaps and the work that is needed in more detail.
\ud83d\udfe2 Coverage across the scholarly enterprise
\ud83d\udd34 Stakeholder governed
\ud83d\udfe2 Non-discriminatory membership
\ud83d\udfe1 Transparent governance
\ud83d\udfe1 Cannot lobby
\ud83d\udd34 Living will
\ud83d\udfe1 Regular review of purpose and community value
\ud83d\udfe1 Transparent operations
\ud83d\udfe2 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
\ud83d\udd34 Goal to generate surplus
\ud83d\udd34 Establish and maintain financial reserves guided by policy
\ud83d\udfe2 Mission-consistent revenue generation
\ud83d\udfe2 Revenue generated from services, not data
\ud83d\udd34 Volunteer labour
\ud83d\udd34 Transition planning
\ud83d\udfe2 Open source
\ud83d\udfe1 Ensure open and secure data accessibility within legal and ethical constraints\ud83d\udfe1 Available and preserved
\ud83d\udfe1 Patent non-assertion
\ud83d\udfe2 Prioritise interoperability and open standards to ensure continuity and resilience
A board-governed organisation drawn from the stakeholder community builds confidence that the organisation will make decisions driven by community consensus and a balance of interests. Rogue Scholar has had an Advisory Board since January 2024, but no board-governed organization structure. This is the most critical shortcoming for Rogue Scholar, and work is underway to address this in the coming months.
To build trust, organisations should establish and communicate clear commitments regarding their long-term stewardship responsibilities, including the principles by which assets, data, resources, services, and staff would be responsibly transferred to a successor or the organisation or service wound down. This is another major shortcoming of Rogue Scholar, but can't be addressed until stakeholder governance is in place. By using paid services from the Internet Archive (content archiving) and Crossref (metadata registration and archiving), central aspects of the Rogue Scholar science blog archive will live on even if the service stops to exist.
To weather economic, social and technological volatility, organisations and services need financial resources beyond immediate operating costs. As a Diamond open access infrastructure with no fees to authors or readers, Rogue Scholar struggles to generate surplus even for immediate operating costs. Thanks to the reliance on open source software and the automated workflows ingesting blog content and metadata, operating costs are moderate, and donations are a big help. Going forward Rogue Scholar will make it easier for organizations and individuals to contribute financially, linked to the planned board-governed organizational structure mentioned above.
Organisations and services should have a clear policy on maintaining financial reserves, including the purpose, minimum and maximum level, and governance of these funds. Again, this is a consideration for a future board-governed organizational structure.
Organisations that rely on volunteers and their labour should recognise this as a valuable resource for the organisation's long-term viability, and factor it into sustainability planning and risk management. Volunteer labour is a central element for Rogue Scholar operations, as all participating blogs are maintained without contributions (time and/or infrastructure) from Rogue Scholar, which focuses on archiving existing scholarly blogs. Running the Rogue Scholar archive also depends on volunteer labour, but good progress has been made migrating the service to the InvenioRDM platform. Rogue Scholar benefits from the work of the InvenioRDM community both for new features and bug fixes. Going forward, more functionalities can be migrated to InvenioRDM, in particular, the extraction of content and metadata from blog feeds, and volunteer labour contributions to Rogue Scholar can be specified.
Organisations that are heavily dependent on a limited number of individuals should take steps to reduce their dependence on these individuals, including via transition and succession planning, so that the organisation is not at risk of collapse in the event of their departure. Rogue Scholar was started by me in 2023, and it depends heavily on my personal involvement. While I have no intentions to reduce my involvement in Rogue Scholar, the organization has to evolve and involve more people, e.g. evaluating new blog submissions or working on funding opportunities, and start work on transition and succession planning.
These organizations following POSI have written blog posts about it that have been archived in Rogue Scholar. These blog posts provide good context to what Rogue Scholar tries to achieve with adopting POSI:
There are more blog posts about POSI (e.g. from Crossref), you can find them in the Open Infrastructure community. If your organization has committed to POSI and you have written a blog post about it, reach out if you want your blog archived by Rogue Scholar.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding Rogue Scholar following the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, ideally until November 4.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has introduced authentication with passkeys and will disable local accounts on September 15. Reading Rogue Scholar content has always been free and never required user accounts or cookie permissions. This is true both for web and API usage.
Science blogs participating in Rogue Scholar also don't require user accounts, but only a contact email, and the initial registration of the blog is via a web form. The import of new or updated blog posts into Rogue Scholar happens automatically via RSS feed or JSON API integration, and there is no ability to update blog posts archived in Rogue Scholar outside of that workflow.
Rogue Scholar offers user accounts that everyone can sign up for. They are currently only intended for blog authors, and two weeks ago their functionality was expanded. Rogue Scholar blog posts are organized around communities, and there are three community types:
The blog community includes basic information about the blog, such as name, description and logo. This information is automatically extracted from the blog feed, but in some cases manual curation is desired, e.g. to include a description or logo that the feed does not provide. Blog authors with a Rogue Scholar account, and after they have received an invitation as community manager, can now manage this information themselves:
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-07-30-um-17.18.48.png\")
Going forward Rogue Scholar will also allow blog authors to provide more information, such as the blog default OECD Field of Science (currently provided in the blog registration form) and International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), currently provided via email.
Topic communities aggregate blog posts from multiple blogs around a common topic, typically referred to as a tag or category in blogs. These tags/categories have naturally evolved as folksonomy rather than a centrally defined taxonomy, and fully automatic classification of blog posts into topics is neither desired nor easily achievable. For these reasons, manual curation of topics is needed, and currently this requires user accounts. Blog authors who are community managers of their blog can submit blog posts to topic communities, or manage the communities the blog post is included.
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-08-12-um-08.52.06.png\")
The creation of topic communities currently requires an admin account, but if people are interested in becoming Rogue Scholar community managers, creating new topic communities, or adding blog posts to topic communities where they are not the author, please reach out to me.
Subject communities are automatically added to blog posts based on the blog subject area, and user accounts are not relevant here. Going forward, I want to enable automatic classification based on blog post content, and inclusion in more than one subject community. We can take advantage of the new collections feature introduced in InvenioRDM v13 earlier this month.
Now that I have explained that user accounts are not required to use Rogue Scholar, but there are important use cases where they are needed, we can talk about how user accounts are managed in Rogue Scholar. Users can register for a user account with Rogue Scholar in one of two ways:
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-08-12-um-07.55.29.png\")
Authentication via ORCID is a widely used authentication workflow in the scholarly community that is free (no ORCID organizational membership required) and built into the InvenioRDM platform.
Depending on a single external authentication service is not desirable, as not all users will have an ORCID (e.g. group or admin accounts), and this would make it impossible to sign in to Rogue Scholar if the ORCID service is temporarily down. ORCID is primarily a service to provide unique identifiers to scholars, and not an identity provider (IdP) that provides single sign-on services.
One option is to provide authentication via local accounts with username/password, but that is both potentially insecure without additional measures such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and inconvenient without a password manager. The InvenioRDM platform that Rogue Scholar uses has built-in local account management, but not built-in multi-factor authentication or other more advanced functionalities. Many InvenioRDM instances use an external authentication service that integrates with InvenioRDM.
ORCID authentication is implemented via the OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication protocol, and OIDC can be used with many other third-party logins, including GitHub, which is built into InvenioRDM. For Rogue Scholar I wanted to implement a local OIDC provider that I can configure and control. The most popular authentication service for InvenioRDM for this use case is probably Keycloak. Keycloak is a powerful and well-tested open-source solution for identity management, but it is almost too complex for smaller instances such as Rogue Scholar. For these reasons, Rogue Scholar went with Pocket ID,
A simple and easy-to-use OIDC provider that allows users to authenticate with their passkeys to your services.
Pocket ID depends on passkeys, a secure and user-friendly authentication method that is (slowly) becoming a new authentication standard.
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-07-23-um-17.33.10.png\")
Pocket ID authentication for Rogue Scholar was launched three weeks ago, and the service is hosted at https://auth.rogue-scholar.org. The setup was straightforward, and Pocket ID supports some advanced features currently not needed by Rogue Scholar, e.g. restricting user groups, LDAP integration, or a REST API.
With the launch of Pocket ID authentication, registration for new local accounts has been disabled, and login via username/password will be disabled on September 15. Users with existing local accounts can link their accounts to ORCID and/or passkeys until that date.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding Rogue Scholar authentication.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has supported ORCID and DOI identifiers for linking to authors and blog posts since its launch. Starting this week, these two identifiers can also be used to navigate within the Rogue Scholar archive.
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-08-17-um-10.12.21.png\")
ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a free, unique, persistent identifier (PID) for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities.
ORCID for Researchers
One third (32.71%) of science blog posts in Rogue Scholar are linked to the ORCID of at least one of their authors. Searching Rogue Scholar by ORCID returns a list of all blog posts authored by that person, e.g. using my ORCID:
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-08-17-um-10.19.12.png\")
Starting this week, clicking on an author name with an ORCID icon in Rogue Scholar will return all records (co-)authored by that author:
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-08-17-um-10.29.41.png\")
This feature works in both search results and single record views. For authors without an ORCID (e.g. organizational authors), Rogue Scholar continues to return a search result by name, which is the built-in behavior of the InvenioRDM repository platform. Clicking on the ORCID icon continues to link to the ORCID profile page for that author.
All blog posts in Rogue Scholar have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) assigned to them to uniquely identify the blog post and include relevant metadata. These metadata can optionally include references (currently 5.04% of Rogue Scholar posts) that again can use DOIs. Citations of Rogue Scholar posts (currently 1387 citations of 763 blog posts) using their DOI are also shown in the Rogue Scholar record.
Starting this week, clicking on the title of a DOI reference or citation in the Rogue Scholar record returns all records using that DOI as identifier, reference, or citation, with the Rogue Scholar record on top of the list.
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-08-17-um-10.47.20.png\")
Clicking on the title of the citation returns a search result with the cited Rogue Scholar post and also the citing post. Clicking on the DOI link continues to link to the scholarly work with that DOI.
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-08-17-um-10.50.56-1.png\")
This also works in the case of references or citations that are not Rogue Scholar posts (most of them):
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-08-17-um-11.03.58.png\")
Clicking on the title of reference #6 returns a search result with all Rogue Scholar records referencing or citing that DOI:
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-08-17-um-11.08.55-1.png\")
The first search result is the record where I clicked the link. The second search result is another Rogue Scholar blog post referencing the same Scientometrics paper.
Implementing DOI linking within Rogue Scholar poses an interesting user interface challenge. I decided to always return search results instead of directly linking to the Rogue Scholar record. By including references and citations in the search results, Rogue Scholar will always return at least one result, but may show more Rogue Scholar records referencing the same blog post or other scholarly work.
This additional functionality around Rogue Scholar references hopefully encourages more Rogue Scholar bloggers to include formal references with their posts. My goal for 2026 is to have 10% Rogue Scholar posts include references (currently 5.04%). Including formal references in blog posts is straightforward, but so far has not been a best practice. Some Rogue Scholar blogs already have high percentages of posts with references, including Research Group Information Management @ Humboldt-Universit\u00e4t zu Berlin (40 posts, 75%), Henry Rzepa's Blog (518 posts, 61%), or chem-bla-ics (499 posts, 39%), and this blog (590 posts, 33%).
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding Rogue Scholar ORCID or DOI linking.
Fenner, M. (2025, August 4). Rogue Scholar citation tracking launches to production. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/zyg15-qv911
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/yjq4w-5yr32","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/yjq4w-5yr32","image":"https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1694596747902-626600534e80?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDU0fHxsaW5raW5nfGVufDB8fHx8MTc1NTQxNzYxNnww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1755475200,"reference":[{"id":"https://doi.org/10.53731/zyg15-qv911","unstructured":"Fenner, M. (2025, August 4). Rogue Scholar citation tracking launches to production. Front Matter."}],"rid":"7q7gg-bc004","summary":"The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has supported ORCID and DOI identifiers for linking to authors and blog posts since its launch. Starting this week, these two identifiers can also be used to navigate within the Rogue Scholar archive.","tags":["Rogue Scholar","Metadata"],"title":"Rogue Scholar links records via ORCID and DOI","updated_at":1763198842,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/rogue-scholar-links-records-via-orcid-and-doi/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"content_html":"This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive experienced major upgrade pains, and Rogue Scholar search became unavailable from Tuesday until Thursday. I tried to upgrade to a pre-release version (13.0.0b4.dev0) of the InvenioRDM repository software, and ran into multiple issues. Going back to the previously installed v12.1.0 took longer than anticipated, mainly because of issues with the Opensearch index.
This morning Rogue Scholar is almost working normally again, except for the blog communities, which will take until Monday to be fixed.
The primary reason for upgrading the InvenioRDM software was so that I could integrate Crossref DOI registration, based on work I completed last week. The experience with installing a pre-release version of InvenioRDM told me a few things:
Integrating Crossref DOI registration into InvenioRDM requires a current development version of InvenioRDM, which is currently v13.x, ahead of the last released version v12.1. As InvenioRDM v13.0 will be released in a few weeks, I will wait with that work until v13.0 is released and Rogue Scholar is updated to that version. There is additional DOI registration work needed, as Rogue Scholar not only registers DOIs with Crossref, but uses multiple DOI prefixes (not yet supported in InvenioRDM) and also accepts blog posts with DOIs registered externally with DataCite.
After growing to more than 40,000 blog posts in recent months, the Rogue Scholar infrastructure, particularly the Opensearch search index, needs a hardware upgrade. I will take this opportunity to also change my deployment strategy and tooling, and will start to use Kamal to deploy the InvenioRDM software to a dedicated server (provided by Hetzner).
Rogue Scholar uses metrics and logging provided by Prometheus/Grafana and error reporting provided by Sentry. More work is needed to improve this observability to better handle incidents such as this week's upgrade issues.
Fenner, M. (2025, May 27). Major update on Commonmeta Crossref DOI registration. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/69k7z-w7030
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/9nam9-w9k29","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/9nam9-w9k29","image":"https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1695345132969-172357b69b87?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDJ8fHN0b255JTIwcGF0aHxlbnwwfHx8fDE3NDkyMDMwNDV8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1749168000,"reference":[{"id":"https://doi.org/10.53731/69k7z-w7030","unstructured":"Fenner, M. (2025, May 27). Major update on Commonmeta Crossref DOI registration. Front Matter."}],"rid":"nbrv9-fwh12","summary":"This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive experienced major upgrade pains, and Rogue Scholar search became unavailable from Tuesday until Thursday. I tried to upgrade to a pre-release version (13.0.0b4.dev0) of the InvenioRDM repository software, and ran into multiple issues. Going back to the previously installed v12.1.0 took longer than anticipated, mainly because of issues with the Opensearch index.","tags":["Rogue Scholar"],"title":"Rogue Scholar upgrade pains","updated_at":1763148257,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/rogue-scholar-upgrade-pains/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"content_html":"References are an important element of scholarly metadata, and that is also true for science blog posts. Currently 5.06% of all Rogue Scholar posts include at least one reference, which are then registered with Crossref metadata.
Citations are the counterpart of references. When other scholarly works are cited in the references of a scholarly work, this citation information can be communicated to the cited work.
Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge.
Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)
The first step is making the references metadata openly available in Crossref metadata, and thanks to the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and the work of many publishers, nearly 100% of all references are now open by default.
The next step is aggregating all these references by the cited work. Crossref members receive this information via the Crossref Cited-By service, other aggregators are OpenCitations and OpenAlex, and of course a number of commercial services.
Rogue Scholar is collecting citations to its blog posts via the Crossref Cited-By service every week and makes that information available with each record, and with a search filter. As of today, there are 1,392 citations of 766 Rogue Scholar posts (1.65%). You can get basically the same information from OpenAlex or other aggregators.
DataCite references and citations add several challenges to this. A small number of Rogue Scholar blogs register their own DOI metadata and use DataCite for this. DataCite metadata use related_identifiers with a number of relation_types instead of references, which adds ambiguity, e.g. what relation_types should be treated as references (probably Cites and References, but maybe also IsSupplementedBy). There are also relation_types for the inverse relation (IsCitedBy, IsReferencedBy) with the challenge that a repository has to update these metadata after publication as citations happen. And aggregators face the same problems. In addition, services such as OpenAlex are still building up workflows to index DataCite metadata at scale.
For science blogs where Rogue Scholar registers the DOI metadata, the above is not relevant. The challenge is to provide reference metadata in a format Rogue Scholar can understand. Besides experimental support for a JSON Feed extension (as RSS, Atom.,or blogging platform JSON APIs don't support references), this means extracting the references from the full-text content.
Luckily references in scholarly documents follow an established format: a section called references (or similar) at the end of the document, followed by one or more references. The recommendation by Rogue Scholar is to format these references as an ordered or unordered HTML list (<ol> or <ul> tag), as this is easier to parse than a list of <div> or <p>. The citation style (there are thousands) doesn't matter, but the reference should include a link to the DOI or URL of the cited resource.
Reference metadata can be generated by copy/paste from your favorite reference manager, or can be automatically generated. From the popular blogging platforms only Quarto can generate references (what they call citations, a common confusion). With Wordpress, the most popular blogging platform in Rogue Scholar, you can use a plugin to automate reference generation. Either Zotpress, which tightly integrates with the reference manager Zotero, or kcite.
Kcite works by collecting reference metadata for DOIs, PubMed, or random web resources via the Greycite service. Greycite was discontinued years ago, and the plugin was last updated 12 years ago, so that the plugin is no longer working with current PHP and Wordpress versions.
The plugin makes it very easy to cite DOI resources, just use a Wordpress shortcode in a blog post:
[cite]10.59350/xqerh-wam97[/cite]The Rogue Scholar blogger (and Advisory Board member) Henry Rzepa has made heavy use of the plugin for many years, and ultimately convinced me to update the plugin. Last week, I did that and released a fixed kcite version. You can download the latest version (1.7.97) here as zip file, that you can upload to your Wordpress instance:
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-08-25-um-13.36.23.png\")
A more streamlined installation via the plugin installer requires this fork to become the official kcite plugin, something I am working on.
The focus on the initial work was compatibility with recent versions of PHP (8.4) and Wordpres (6.8.2). The included citeproc.js Javascript file was updated to the latest version (1.4.61), and the citation styles and locales used are the latest versions.
The plugin by default works in server mode, where references are formatted with a generic template. In client mode, the built-in citeproc.js processor is used to generate references with richer metadata. I included a fix to properly show the name of Rogue Scholar blogs. An example reference list in client mode generated by the plugin is shown below:
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/08/Bildschirmfoto-2025-08-25-um-13.45.42.png\")
A lot more work is needed with testing the plugin, and potentially adding more functionality, especially the following:
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding references, citations, or the kcite plugin.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/326tr-95k32","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/326tr-95k32","image":"https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1584266049120-f8c39aaaccb1?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDQzfHxyZWZlcmVuY2VzfGVufDB8fHx8MTc1NjExNjMzMHww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1756080000,"reference":[{"id":"https://doi.org/10.59350/xqerh-wam97","unstructured":"Rzepa, H. (2024, March 21). Internet Archeology: reviving a 2001 article published in the Internet Journal of Chemistry. Henry Rzepa's Blog."}],"rid":"t0rtr-9tk51","summary":"References are an important element of scholarly metadata, and that is also true for science blog posts. Currently 5.06% of all Rogue Scholar posts include at least one reference, which are then registered with Crossref metadata. Citations are the counterpart of references. When other scholarly works are cited in the references of a scholarly work, this citation information can be communicated to the cited work.","tags":["Rogue Scholar","Metadata"],"title":"Adding references to Wordpress posts: updated kcite plugin","updated_at":1763147102,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/adding-references-to-wordpress-posts-updated-kcite-plugin/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"content_html":"On April 16, 2025, the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board met for the third time since it started in January 2024. Since the last Advisory Board Meeting on October 24, Rogue Scholar has achieved several important milestones.
In February, the Rogue Scholar Statistics page was relaunched as Rogue Scholar Dashboard, displaying key indicators such as the number of participating blogs and archived blog posts, as well as the percentage of posts with ORCID and ROR identifiers, references, or funding.
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/09/data-src-image-5130cdf2-4865-484f-90f0-1b9033ece85d.png\")
The Advisory Board suggested adding filters to better highlight more recent data.
In January and February, Rogue Scholar improved the reference extraction and references display, finding references in about 5% of posts. Using the Crossref Cited-By service, Rogue Scholar also started collecting and displaying citations of Rogue Scholar posts. The kcite WordPress plugin that simplifies the generation of DOI references was very helpful, but hasn't been updated in many years. While the numbers of references and citations are still small, linking to other scholarly content via references and citations further integrates scholarly blogs into the broader scholarly record.
The Advisory Board discussed archiving formats for the full-text of blog posts. Rogue Scholar in 2024 started experimenting with PDF and ePub, but this functionality is not yet integrated with the InvenioRDM repository platform. The Advisory Board felt that the JATS format may not be necessary or beneficial for blog content.
The Advisory Board next discussed starting a webinar series on best practices for science blogs, focusing on specific blogging platforms. A first webinar for WordPress bloggers in German was proposed.
Finally, the Advisory Board discussed Rogue Scholar funding. Rogue Scholar is a Diamond Open Access infrastructure with no costs to authors and readers. Seeking grant funding is an option, and Rogue Scholar has so far archived more than 30,000 blog posts, including some highly visible science blogs. One challenge with seeking grant funding is the missing non-profit status for Front Matter, the organization behind Rogue Scholar.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/taha2-fvd76","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/taha2-fvd76","image":"https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1525384197403-b43d320d748a?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDMwfHxhcHJpbHxlbnwwfHx8fDE3NTg3MDk4MDV8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1758672000,"rid":"f0zw5-zzr41","summary":"On April 16, 2025, the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board met for the third time since it started in January 2024. Since the last Advisory Board Meeting on October 24, Rogue Scholar has achieved several important milestones.","tags":["Rogue Scholar"],"title":"Report Rogue Scholar Advisory Board Meeting April 16, 2025","updated_at":1763146410,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/report-rogue-scholar-advisory-board-meeting-ap-16-2024/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"content_html":"This week, the Rogue Scholar science blog archive started registering DOIs and metadata with Crossref using the InvenioRDM repository platform rather than relying on external tooling. InvenioRDM has of course supported DOI registration with DataCite for a long time, so this adds another option for repositories hosting reports, preprints, dissertations, or other textual documents.
Rogue Scholar has registered content with Crossref since its launch two years ago (more than 45,000 blog posts to date), and migrated to the InvenioRDM repository platform 12 months ago, but it always relied on external tooling for Crossref integration. This new Crossref integration into InvenioRDM simplifies the DOI registration workflow. The main difference for Rogue Scholar blog authors and readers is that automatic DOI registration has become faster, happening within a few minutes after a blog post on a participating blog is published or updated.
Rogue Scholar checks the RSS feeds of participating blogs for new or updated content every 10 minutes. When new or updated content is found, uploading the post to InvenioRDM and registering/updating a DOI and metadata with Crossref now happens in 1-2 minutes (depending on how many posts have to be updated at the same time). Further improvements in the time it takes to register blog posts with InvenioRDM and Crossref will depend on improving the monitoring of RSS feeds, e.g. by adding a push mechanism (triggered by the blog when content is updated) instead of the current pull mechanism.
The InvenioRDM platform supports versioning of content, which is particularly important for datasets and software, but also relevant for text documents such as blog posts. Examples include major new versions of content, possibly after having received feedback via peer review using the Publish, Review, Curate workflow. Other use cases are corrections and retractions. Crossref added version information to its metadata schema with the 5.4.0 release in March, and I am currently testing this functionality in the Rogue Scholar Staging server:
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/09/Bildschirmfoto-2025-09-11-um-09.41.21.png\")
One challenge is that the InvenioRDM Crossref integration supports multiple DOI prefixes, so this is a bit more work compared to the DataCite integration only supporting one DOI prefix. In addition, versioning adds complexity to DOI suffix generation. Luckily, the built-in InvenioRDM tooling uses the same DOI naming scheme that Rogue Scholar has used since its launch, but going forward, Rogue Scholar will no longer support custom DOI suffixes that I introduced for WordPress and Substack blogs. Several blogs participating in Rogue Scholar do their own DOI registrations, and those DOIs (what InvenioRDM calls externally managed DOIs) will not be versioned.
Crossref DOI registration uses the commonmeta-py Python package to generate Crossref XML metadata and a fork of the invenio-rdm-records package to integrate with InvenioRDM. After completing versioning support and more testing, the functionality will be merged into the InvenioRDM core functionality, and the discussion with the other InvenioRDM maintainers has started. Soon, every InvenioRDM instance will be able to use Crossref DOI registration with a simple configuration setting (and Crossref member credentials), very similar to how DataCite DOI registration works.
The science blog archive Rogue Scholar this week started supporting versioning of blog posts. This is a core feature of the InvenioRDM repository platform used by Rogue Scholar, but Rogue Scholar uses DOIs from Crossref rather than DataCite, the default DOI registration agency for InvenioRDM.
Crossref versioning was made possible with the Crossref schema 5.4.0 released in March. Adding Crossref DOI support to InvenioRDM means that you can now use InvenioRDM with Crossref in basically the same way as DataCite before, with the important limitation that Crossref only supports text-based content types such as journal articles, books, or preprints. There are two reasons to consider Crossref instead of DataCite when using InvenioRDM: a) a pricing model (in particular the annual fee) that better aligns with smaller organizations, and b) better integration of the metadata into downstream services such as OpenAlex.
![\"\"](\"https://blog.front-matter.io/content/images/2025/09/Bildschirmfoto-2025-09-29-um-08.33.16.png\")
InvenioRDM by default uses one DOI prefix per repository, whereas Rogue Scholar and the InvenioRDM Crossref integration use one DOI prefix per InvenioRDM community. Rogue Scholar uses blog communities to group blog posts by blog, and mapping DOI prefixes to communities makes sense. Using a dedicated DOI prefix per blog allows easier migration of DOI registration later on, e.g. from Crossref to DataCite or to/from a prefix not managed by Rogue Scholar. Some Rogue Scholar blogs register their own DOIs they are treated in InvenioRDM as external DOIs without versioning.
Versioning is essential for content types such as datasets or software, but less critical for blog posts. Still, there are some important use cases:
The first three use cases happen occasionally and have so far been handled with a major update of the blog post (with optionally stating what has changed), or with a new blog post without a formal relation to the previous version. Peer review of blog posts is still very rare but happens, and the added versioning support makes Rogue Scholar (together with long-term archiving and assigning DOIs) a suitable platform for peer-reviewed blog posts.
As Rogue Scholar is currently archiving the full-text of all posts with image links (and separately via the Internet Archive Archive-It service), storing the images themselves as file attachments will require new blog post versions, and this is planned for the coming months.
Rogue Scholar automatically imports blog post metadata and content via blog RSS feeds (or Atom, JSON Feed, or a JSON API). Unfortunately there is no standard metadata in these feeds to indicate the blog post version. As a workaround for static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, Quarto, etc.), we can customize the RSS or Atom feed by adding a link attribute that points to the previous version of the post:
<link rel=\"prev\" href=\"https://doi.org/10.5555/12345\" />For JSONFeed, you can add custom metadata (starting with an underscore) to an item (post):
\"_prev_id\": \"https://doi.org/10.5555/12345\" />For blogs with a JSON API (e.g. WordPress) one could extend the API to include the GUID/ID of the previous version of the post. This is more work and not always possible, e.g. because the blogging platform uses proprietary software (Blogger, Substack, etc.). For the time being, it is probably easiest to do versioning semi-manually. Please send an email to support if you have published a blog post with Rogue Scholar that is a new version of another post.
The science blog archive Rogue Scholar started the process of becoming a German non-profit organization in 2026. This blog post summarizes the reasoning and the main steps needed to achieve this.
Two weeks ago, I published a self-assessment of how Rogue Scholar adheres to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). Major gaps were identified in the areas of governance and sustainability. To address these gaps, a major step forward would be to start a non-profit membership organization. The need to take this step at some point was obvious to me since I launched Rogue Scholar in April 2023. With the basic service operating and on a good path forward with 50,000 science blog posts archived by the end of the year, the time has arrived to make this step.
Starting a non-profit membership organization in Germany means starting a Verein, or registered association. The steps involved to formally register the association are clearly laid out and mainly involve the following:
It helps that I have worked for non-profit organizations most of my professional life. Not only public universities, but also a non-profit publisher (PLOS), and two membership organizations (ORCID and DataCite), with the latter also being a German Verein. Interestingly, Research Organization Registry (ROR), an initiative that I helped launch in early 2019, is not a membership organization.
Running a non-profit organization in Germany requires more paperwork compared to, for example, Belgium or the Netherlands, mainly to obtain and keep charitable status. This means a good amount of work for the founding board, especially the president and treasurer.
One important question is the rights and responsibilities of members. As individuals or groups of people, rather than formal organizations, run many science blogs, membership has to be open to all legal entities, individuals and organizations. Membership fees should differentiate between individuals and organizations, and include at least two tiers for small and large organizations, for example:
Rogue Scholar is a Diamond Open Access infrastructure with no fees to readers or authors. This means that membership can't be a requirement for a science blog to be archived in Rogue Scholar, but rather that membership comes with other benefits. Members not only help support a unique open scholarly infrastructure but also have a say in the governance of the organization via the general assembly, participation in the board, and potentially working groups going forward.
For Rogue Scholar to achieve sustainability, membership fees are an important element. Two other aspects are also important:
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding Rogue Scholar becoming a non-profit membership organization.
This is the October 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.
Ten blogs were added in September. Welcome! More blogs are on the waitlist and will be added soon. This brings the number of participating blogs to 184, and the number of archived posts to 47,385.
Quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures at the University of Edinburgh.
Computer and information sciences, English.
https://qec.codes/
Bioinformatics lessons learned the hard way, bugs, gripes, and maybe topical paper reviews too...
Biological Sciences, English.
https://blastedbio.blogspot.com/
Technical notes from the interface between bioinformatics and cheminformatics by Chris Southan.
Biological Sciences, English.
https://cdsouthan.blogspot.com/
Computer and information sciences, English.
https://anil.recoil.org/notes
Notes on nature poking.
Biological Sciences, English.
https://naturepoker.wordpress.com/
Social science, English.
https://antoinevernet.com/blog/
Computer and information sciences, English.
https://c-monaghan.github.io/posts/
Economics and business, English.
https://marberts.github.io/blog/
Exploring the art and science of working with development and humanitarian data.
Social science, English.
https://juan-torresmunguia.netlify.app/blog/
R\u00e9flexions sur l'\u00e9volution, la biodiversit\u00e9 et la vie.
Natural sciences, French.
https://evologie.netlify.app/
This week, Rogue Scholar added support for contributions beyond authorship in collaboration with the ropensci blog. The contributor roles editor, translator, and interviewee are now supported in Rogue Scholar (all) and Crossref (editor, translator) metadata.
The blog post describes the work needed in the blog Atom or JSON Feed to include these new contributor roles. Over the coming months, more roles will be added, including roles from the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CrediT). Crossref is planning to add CrediT support to its metadata schema in 2026.
On October 20, Rogue Scholar published a self-assessment using the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), summarized below:
Major gaps exist in the areas of governance and sustainability, and work is underway to improve this. Stay tuned for a blog post next week.
The project Infra Wiss Blogs in October published two papers (one English and one German) studying science blogs in Germany. They found that the majority of science blog in Germany are from the Humanities and Social Sciences, in part because a large number of blogs from de.Hypotheses.
The Rogue Scholar Slack continues to have interesting discussions on a variety of topics. Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding this monthly newsletter.
With this blog post, the science blog archive Rogue Scholar starts the formal process to adhere to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). To do so, an organization has to perform a self-audit of its compliance with the principles, with a focus on principles and not hard rules. POSI was updated to version 2.0 this October, with the changes marked up in a separate document.
In the coming weeks, I hope to finish this document with feedback from blogs participating in Rogue Scholar, other users, and the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board that meets in November. Below is an overview of where I think Rogue Scholar already adheres to POSI (\ud83d\udfe2), some work is still needed (\ud83d\udfe1), or where major gaps exist (\ud83d\udd34). I then describe the major gaps and the work that is needed in more detail.
\ud83d\udfe2 Coverage across the scholarly enterprise
\ud83d\udd34 Stakeholder governed
\ud83d\udfe2 Non-discriminatory membership
\ud83d\udfe1 Transparent governance
\ud83d\udfe1 Cannot lobby
\ud83d\udd34 Living will
\ud83d\udfe1 Regular review of purpose and community value
\ud83d\udfe1 Transparent operations
\ud83d\udfe2 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
\ud83d\udd34 Goal to generate surplus
\ud83d\udd34 Establish and maintain financial reserves guided by policy
\ud83d\udfe2 Mission-consistent revenue generation
\ud83d\udfe2 Revenue generated from services, not data
\ud83d\udd34 Volunteer labour
\ud83d\udd34 Transition planning
\ud83d\udfe2 Open source
\ud83d\udfe1 Ensure open and secure data accessibility within legal and ethical constraints\ud83d\udfe1 Available and preserved
\ud83d\udfe1 Patent non-assertion
\ud83d\udfe2 Prioritise interoperability and open standards to ensure continuity and resilience
A board-governed organisation drawn from the stakeholder community builds confidence that the organisation will make decisions driven by community consensus and a balance of interests. Rogue Scholar has had an Advisory Board since January 2024, but no board-governed organization structure. This is the most critical shortcoming for Rogue Scholar, and work is underway to address this in the coming months.
To build trust, organisations should establish and communicate clear commitments regarding their long-term stewardship responsibilities, including the principles by which assets, data, resources, services, and staff would be responsibly transferred to a successor or the organisation or service wound down. This is another major shortcoming of Rogue Scholar, but can't be addressed until stakeholder governance is in place. By using paid services from the Internet Archive (content archiving) and Crossref (metadata registration and archiving), central aspects of the Rogue Scholar science blog archive will live on even if the service stops to exist.
To weather economic, social and technological volatility, organisations and services need financial resources beyond immediate operating costs. As a Diamond open access infrastructure with no fees to authors or readers, Rogue Scholar struggles to generate surplus even for immediate operating costs. Thanks to the reliance on open source software and the automated workflows ingesting blog content and metadata, operating costs are moderate, and donations are a big help. Going forward Rogue Scholar will make it easier for organizations and individuals to contribute financially, linked to the planned board-governed organizational structure mentioned above.
Organisations and services should have a clear policy on maintaining financial reserves, including the purpose, minimum and maximum level, and governance of these funds. Again, this is a consideration for a future board-governed organizational structure.
Organisations that rely on volunteers and their labour should recognise this as a valuable resource for the organisation's long-term viability, and factor it into sustainability planning and risk management. Volunteer labour is a central element for Rogue Scholar operations, as all participating blogs are maintained without contributions (time and/or infrastructure) from Rogue Scholar, which focuses on archiving existing scholarly blogs. Running the Rogue Scholar archive also depends on volunteer labour, but good progress has been made migrating the service to the InvenioRDM platform. Rogue Scholar benefits from the work of the InvenioRDM community both for new features and bug fixes. Going forward, more functionalities can be migrated to InvenioRDM, in particular, the extraction of content and metadata from blog feeds, and volunteer labour contributions to Rogue Scholar can be specified.
Organisations that are heavily dependent on a limited number of individuals should take steps to reduce their dependence on these individuals, including via transition and succession planning, so that the organisation is not at risk of collapse in the event of their departure. Rogue Scholar was started by me in 2023, and it depends heavily on my personal involvement. While I have no intentions to reduce my involvement in Rogue Scholar, the organization has to evolve and involve more people, e.g. evaluating new blog submissions or working on funding opportunities, and start work on transition and succession planning.
These organizations following POSI have written blog posts about it that have been archived in Rogue Scholar. These blog posts provide good context to what Rogue Scholar tries to achieve with adopting POSI:
There are more blog posts about POSI (e.g. from Crossref), you can find them in the Open Infrastructure community. If your organization has committed to POSI and you have written a blog post about it, reach out if you want your blog archived by Rogue Scholar.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding Rogue Scholar following the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, ideally until November 4.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has introduced authentication with passkeys and will disable local accounts on September 15. Reading Rogue Scholar content has always been free and never required user accounts or cookie permissions. This is true both for web and API usage.
Science blogs participating in Rogue Scholar also don't require user accounts, but only a contact email, and the initial registration of the blog is via a web form. The import of new or updated blog posts into Rogue Scholar happens automatically via RSS feed or JSON API integration, and there is no ability to update blog posts archived in Rogue Scholar outside of that workflow.
Rogue Scholar offers user accounts that everyone can sign up for. They are currently only intended for blog authors, and two weeks ago their functionality was expanded. Rogue Scholar blog posts are organized around communities, and there are three community types:
The blog community includes basic information about the blog, such as name, description and logo. This information is automatically extracted from the blog feed, but in some cases manual curation is desired, e.g. to include a description or logo that the feed does not provide. Blog authors with a Rogue Scholar account, and after they have received an invitation as community manager, can now manage this information themselves:
Going forward Rogue Scholar will also allow blog authors to provide more information, such as the blog default OECD Field of Science (currently provided in the blog registration form) and International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), currently provided via email.
Topic communities aggregate blog posts from multiple blogs around a common topic, typically referred to as a tag or category in blogs. These tags/categories have naturally evolved as folksonomy rather than a centrally defined taxonomy, and fully automatic classification of blog posts into topics is neither desired nor easily achievable. For these reasons, manual curation of topics is needed, and currently this requires user accounts. Blog authors who are community managers of their blog can submit blog posts to topic communities, or manage the communities the blog post is included.
The creation of topic communities currently requires an admin account, but if people are interested in becoming Rogue Scholar community managers, creating new topic communities, or adding blog posts to topic communities where they are not the author, please reach out to me.
Subject communities are automatically added to blog posts based on the blog subject area, and user accounts are not relevant here. Going forward, I want to enable automatic classification based on blog post content, and inclusion in more than one subject community. We can take advantage of the new collections feature introduced in InvenioRDM v13 earlier this month.
Now that I have explained that user accounts are not required to use Rogue Scholar, but there are important use cases where they are needed, we can talk about how user accounts are managed in Rogue Scholar. Users can register for a user account with Rogue Scholar in one of two ways:
Authentication via ORCID is a widely used authentication workflow in the scholarly community that is free (no ORCID organizational membership required) and built into the InvenioRDM platform.
Depending on a single external authentication service is not desirable, as not all users will have an ORCID (e.g. group or admin accounts), and this would make it impossible to sign in to Rogue Scholar if the ORCID service is temporarily down. ORCID is primarily a service to provide unique identifiers to scholars, and not an identity provider (IdP) that provides single sign-on services.
One option is to provide authentication via local accounts with username/password, but that is both potentially insecure without additional measures such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and inconvenient without a password manager. The InvenioRDM platform that Rogue Scholar uses has built-in local account management, but not built-in multi-factor authentication or other more advanced functionalities. Many InvenioRDM instances use an external authentication service that integrates with InvenioRDM.
ORCID authentication is implemented via the OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication protocol, and OIDC can be used with many other third-party logins, including GitHub, which is built into InvenioRDM. For Rogue Scholar I wanted to implement a local OIDC provider that I can configure and control. The most popular authentication service for InvenioRDM for this use case is probably Keycloak. Keycloak is a powerful and well-tested open-source solution for identity management, but it is almost too complex for smaller instances such as Rogue Scholar. For these reasons, Rogue Scholar went with Pocket ID,
A simple and easy-to-use OIDC provider that allows users to authenticate with their passkeys to your services.
Pocket ID depends on passkeys, a secure and user-friendly authentication method that is (slowly) becoming a new authentication standard.
Pocket ID authentication for Rogue Scholar was launched three weeks ago, and the service is hosted at https://auth.rogue-scholar.org. The setup was straightforward, and Pocket ID supports some advanced features currently not needed by Rogue Scholar, e.g. restricting user groups, LDAP integration, or a REST API.
With the launch of Pocket ID authentication, registration for new local accounts has been disabled, and login via username/password will be disabled on September 15. Users with existing local accounts can link their accounts to ORCID and/or passkeys until that date.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding Rogue Scholar authentication.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has supported ORCID and DOI identifiers for linking to authors and blog posts since its launch. Starting this week, these two identifiers can also be used to navigate within the Rogue Scholar archive.
ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a free, unique, persistent identifier (PID) for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities.
ORCID for Researchers
One third (32.71%) of science blog posts in Rogue Scholar are linked to the ORCID of at least one of their authors. Searching Rogue Scholar by ORCID returns a list of all blog posts authored by that person, e.g. using my ORCID:
Starting this week, clicking on an author name with an ORCID icon in Rogue Scholar will return all records (co-)authored by that author:
This feature works in both search results and single record views. For authors without an ORCID (e.g. organizational authors), Rogue Scholar continues to return a search result by name, which is the built-in behavior of the InvenioRDM repository platform. Clicking on the ORCID icon continues to link to the ORCID profile page for that author.
All blog posts in Rogue Scholar have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) assigned to them to uniquely identify the blog post and include relevant metadata. These metadata can optionally include references (currently 5.04% of Rogue Scholar posts) that again can use DOIs. Citations of Rogue Scholar posts (currently 1387 citations of 763 blog posts) using their DOI are also shown in the Rogue Scholar record.
Starting this week, clicking on the title of a DOI reference or citation in the Rogue Scholar record returns all records using that DOI as identifier, reference, or citation, with the Rogue Scholar record on top of the list.
Clicking on the title of the citation returns a search result with the cited Rogue Scholar post and also the citing post. Clicking on the DOI link continues to link to the scholarly work with that DOI.
This also works in the case of references or citations that are not Rogue Scholar posts (most of them):
Clicking on the title of reference #6 returns a search result with all Rogue Scholar records referencing or citing that DOI:
The first search result is the record where I clicked the link. The second search result is another Rogue Scholar blog post referencing the same Scientometrics paper.
Implementing DOI linking within Rogue Scholar poses an interesting user interface challenge. I decided to always return search results instead of directly linking to the Rogue Scholar record. By including references and citations in the search results, Rogue Scholar will always return at least one result, but may show more Rogue Scholar records referencing the same blog post or other scholarly work.
This additional functionality around Rogue Scholar references hopefully encourages more Rogue Scholar bloggers to include formal references with their posts. My goal for 2026 is to have 10% Rogue Scholar posts include references (currently 5.04%). Including formal references in blog posts is straightforward, but so far has not been a best practice. Some Rogue Scholar blogs already have high percentages of posts with references, including Research Group Information Management @ Humboldt-Universit\u00e4t zu Berlin (40 posts, 75%), Henry Rzepa's Blog (518 posts, 61%), or chem-bla-ics (499 posts, 39%), and this blog (590 posts, 33%).
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding Rogue Scholar ORCID or DOI linking.
Fenner, M. (2025, August 4). Rogue Scholar citation tracking launches to production. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/zyg15-qv911
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/yjq4w-5yr32","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/yjq4w-5yr32","image":"https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1694596747902-626600534e80?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDU0fHxsaW5raW5nfGVufDB8fHx8MTc1NTQxNzYxNnww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1755475200,"reference":[{"id":"https://doi.org/10.53731/zyg15-qv911","unstructured":"Fenner, M. (2025, August 4). Rogue Scholar citation tracking launches to production. Front Matter."}],"rid":"7q7gg-bc004","summary":"The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has supported ORCID and DOI identifiers for linking to authors and blog posts since its launch. Starting this week, these two identifiers can also be used to navigate within the Rogue Scholar archive.","tags":["Rogue Scholar","Metadata"],"title":"Rogue Scholar links records via ORCID and DOI","updated_at":1763198842,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/rogue-scholar-links-records-via-orcid-and-doi/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"content_html":"This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive experienced major upgrade pains, and Rogue Scholar search became unavailable from Tuesday until Thursday. I tried to upgrade to a pre-release version (13.0.0b4.dev0) of the InvenioRDM repository software, and ran into multiple issues. Going back to the previously installed v12.1.0 took longer than anticipated, mainly because of issues with the Opensearch index.
This morning Rogue Scholar is almost working normally again, except for the blog communities, which will take until Monday to be fixed.
The primary reason for upgrading the InvenioRDM software was so that I could integrate Crossref DOI registration, based on work I completed last week. The experience with installing a pre-release version of InvenioRDM told me a few things:
Integrating Crossref DOI registration into InvenioRDM requires a current development version of InvenioRDM, which is currently v13.x, ahead of the last released version v12.1. As InvenioRDM v13.0 will be released in a few weeks, I will wait with that work until v13.0 is released and Rogue Scholar is updated to that version. There is additional DOI registration work needed, as Rogue Scholar not only registers DOIs with Crossref, but uses multiple DOI prefixes (not yet supported in InvenioRDM) and also accepts blog posts with DOIs registered externally with DataCite.
After growing to more than 40,000 blog posts in recent months, the Rogue Scholar infrastructure, particularly the Opensearch search index, needs a hardware upgrade. I will take this opportunity to also change my deployment strategy and tooling, and will start to use Kamal to deploy the InvenioRDM software to a dedicated server (provided by Hetzner).
Rogue Scholar uses metrics and logging provided by Prometheus/Grafana and error reporting provided by Sentry. More work is needed to improve this observability to better handle incidents such as this week's upgrade issues.
Fenner, M. (2025, May 27). Major update on Commonmeta Crossref DOI registration. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/69k7z-w7030
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/9nam9-w9k29","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/9nam9-w9k29","image":"https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1695345132969-172357b69b87?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDJ8fHN0b255JTIwcGF0aHxlbnwwfHx8fDE3NDkyMDMwNDV8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1749168000,"reference":[{"id":"https://doi.org/10.53731/69k7z-w7030","unstructured":"Fenner, M. (2025, May 27). Major update on Commonmeta Crossref DOI registration. Front Matter."}],"rid":"nbrv9-fwh12","summary":"This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive experienced major upgrade pains, and Rogue Scholar search became unavailable from Tuesday until Thursday. I tried to upgrade to a pre-release version (13.0.0b4.dev0) of the InvenioRDM repository software, and ran into multiple issues. Going back to the previously installed v12.1.0 took longer than anticipated, mainly because of issues with the Opensearch index.","tags":["Rogue Scholar"],"title":"Rogue Scholar upgrade pains","updated_at":1763148257,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/rogue-scholar-upgrade-pains/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"content_html":"References are an important element of scholarly metadata, and that is also true for science blog posts. Currently 5.06% of all Rogue Scholar posts include at least one reference, which are then registered with Crossref metadata.
Citations are the counterpart of references. When other scholarly works are cited in the references of a scholarly work, this citation information can be communicated to the cited work.
Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge.
Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)
The first step is making the references metadata openly available in Crossref metadata, and thanks to the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and the work of many publishers, nearly 100% of all references are now open by default.
The next step is aggregating all these references by the cited work. Crossref members receive this information via the Crossref Cited-By service, other aggregators are OpenCitations and OpenAlex, and of course a number of commercial services.
Rogue Scholar is collecting citations to its blog posts via the Crossref Cited-By service every week and makes that information available with each record, and with a search filter. As of today, there are 1,392 citations of 766 Rogue Scholar posts (1.65%). You can get basically the same information from OpenAlex or other aggregators.
DataCite references and citations add several challenges to this. A small number of Rogue Scholar blogs register their own DOI metadata and use DataCite for this. DataCite metadata use related_identifiers with a number of relation_types instead of references, which adds ambiguity, e.g. what relation_types should be treated as references (probably Cites and References, but maybe also IsSupplementedBy). There are also relation_types for the inverse relation (IsCitedBy, IsReferencedBy) with the challenge that a repository has to update these metadata after publication as citations happen. And aggregators face the same problems. In addition, services such as OpenAlex are still building up workflows to index DataCite metadata at scale.
For science blogs where Rogue Scholar registers the DOI metadata, the above is not relevant. The challenge is to provide reference metadata in a format Rogue Scholar can understand. Besides experimental support for a JSON Feed extension (as RSS, Atom.,or blogging platform JSON APIs don't support references), this means extracting the references from the full-text content.
Luckily references in scholarly documents follow an established format: a section called references (or similar) at the end of the document, followed by one or more references. The recommendation by Rogue Scholar is to format these references as an ordered or unordered HTML list (<ol> or <ul> tag), as this is easier to parse than a list of <div> or <p>. The citation style (there are thousands) doesn't matter, but the reference should include a link to the DOI or URL of the cited resource.
Reference metadata can be generated by copy/paste from your favorite reference manager, or can be automatically generated. From the popular blogging platforms only Quarto can generate references (what they call citations, a common confusion). With Wordpress, the most popular blogging platform in Rogue Scholar, you can use a plugin to automate reference generation. Either Zotpress, which tightly integrates with the reference manager Zotero, or kcite.
Kcite works by collecting reference metadata for DOIs, PubMed, or random web resources via the Greycite service. Greycite was discontinued years ago, and the plugin was last updated 12 years ago, so that the plugin is no longer working with current PHP and Wordpress versions.
The plugin makes it very easy to cite DOI resources, just use a Wordpress shortcode in a blog post:
[cite]10.59350/xqerh-wam97[/cite]The Rogue Scholar blogger (and Advisory Board member) Henry Rzepa has made heavy use of the plugin for many years, and ultimately convinced me to update the plugin. Last week, I did that and released a fixed kcite version. You can download the latest version (1.7.97) here as zip file, that you can upload to your Wordpress instance:
A more streamlined installation via the plugin installer requires this fork to become the official kcite plugin, something I am working on.
The focus on the initial work was compatibility with recent versions of PHP (8.4) and Wordpres (6.8.2). The included citeproc.js Javascript file was updated to the latest version (1.4.61), and the citation styles and locales used are the latest versions.
The plugin by default works in server mode, where references are formatted with a generic template. In client mode, the built-in citeproc.js processor is used to generate references with richer metadata. I included a fix to properly show the name of Rogue Scholar blogs. An example reference list in client mode generated by the plugin is shown below:
A lot more work is needed with testing the plugin, and potentially adding more functionality, especially the following:
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding references, citations, or the kcite plugin.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/326tr-95k32","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/326tr-95k32","image":"https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1584266049120-f8c39aaaccb1?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDQzfHxyZWZlcmVuY2VzfGVufDB8fHx8MTc1NjExNjMzMHww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1756080000,"reference":[{"id":"https://doi.org/10.59350/xqerh-wam97","unstructured":"Rzepa, H. (2024, March 21). Internet Archeology: reviving a 2001 article published in the Internet Journal of Chemistry. Henry Rzepa's Blog."}],"rid":"t0rtr-9tk51","summary":"References are an important element of scholarly metadata, and that is also true for science blog posts. Currently 5.06% of all Rogue Scholar posts include at least one reference, which are then registered with Crossref metadata. Citations are the counterpart of references. When other scholarly works are cited in the references of a scholarly work, this citation information can be communicated to the cited work.","tags":["Rogue Scholar","Metadata"],"title":"Adding references to Wordpress posts: updated kcite plugin","updated_at":1763147102,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/adding-references-to-wordpress-posts-updated-kcite-plugin/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"content_html":"On April 16, 2025, the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board met for the third time since it started in January 2024. Since the last Advisory Board Meeting on October 24, Rogue Scholar has achieved several important milestones.
In February, the Rogue Scholar Statistics page was relaunched as Rogue Scholar Dashboard, displaying key indicators such as the number of participating blogs and archived blog posts, as well as the percentage of posts with ORCID and ROR identifiers, references, or funding.
The Advisory Board suggested adding filters to better highlight more recent data.
In January and February, Rogue Scholar improved the reference extraction and references display, finding references in about 5% of posts. Using the Crossref Cited-By service, Rogue Scholar also started collecting and displaying citations of Rogue Scholar posts. The kcite WordPress plugin that simplifies the generation of DOI references was very helpful, but hasn't been updated in many years. While the numbers of references and citations are still small, linking to other scholarly content via references and citations further integrates scholarly blogs into the broader scholarly record.
The Advisory Board discussed archiving formats for the full-text of blog posts. Rogue Scholar in 2024 started experimenting with PDF and ePub, but this functionality is not yet integrated with the InvenioRDM repository platform. The Advisory Board felt that the JATS format may not be necessary or beneficial for blog content.
The Advisory Board next discussed starting a webinar series on best practices for science blogs, focusing on specific blogging platforms. A first webinar for WordPress bloggers in German was proposed.
Finally, the Advisory Board discussed Rogue Scholar funding. Rogue Scholar is a Diamond Open Access infrastructure with no costs to authors and readers. Seeking grant funding is an option, and Rogue Scholar has so far archived more than 30,000 blog posts, including some highly visible science blogs. One challenge with seeking grant funding is the missing non-profit status for Front Matter, the organization behind Rogue Scholar.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/taha2-fvd76","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/taha2-fvd76","image":"https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1525384197403-b43d320d748a?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDMwfHxhcHJpbHxlbnwwfHx8fDE3NTg3MDk4MDV8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1758672000,"rid":"f0zw5-zzr41","summary":"On April 16, 2025, the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board met for the third time since it started in January 2024. Since the last Advisory Board Meeting on October 24, Rogue Scholar has achieved several important milestones.","tags":["Rogue Scholar"],"title":"Report Rogue Scholar Advisory Board Meeting April 16, 2025","updated_at":1763146410,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/report-rogue-scholar-advisory-board-meeting-ap-16-2024/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"content_html":"This week, the Rogue Scholar science blog archive started registering DOIs and metadata with Crossref using the InvenioRDM repository platform rather than relying on external tooling. InvenioRDM has of course supported DOI registration with DataCite for a long time, so this adds another option for repositories hosting reports, preprints, dissertations, or other textual documents.
Rogue Scholar has registered content with Crossref since its launch two years ago (more than 45,000 blog posts to date), and migrated to the InvenioRDM repository platform 12 months ago, but it always relied on external tooling for Crossref integration. This new Crossref integration into InvenioRDM simplifies the DOI registration workflow. The main difference for Rogue Scholar blog authors and readers is that automatic DOI registration has become faster, happening within a few minutes after a blog post on a participating blog is published or updated.
Rogue Scholar checks the RSS feeds of participating blogs for new or updated content every 10 minutes. When new or updated content is found, uploading the post to InvenioRDM and registering/updating a DOI and metadata with Crossref now happens in 1-2 minutes (depending on how many posts have to be updated at the same time). Further improvements in the time it takes to register blog posts with InvenioRDM and Crossref will depend on improving the monitoring of RSS feeds, e.g. by adding a push mechanism (triggered by the blog when content is updated) instead of the current pull mechanism.
The InvenioRDM platform supports versioning of content, which is particularly important for datasets and software, but also relevant for text documents such as blog posts. Examples include major new versions of content, possibly after having received feedback via peer review using the Publish, Review, Curate workflow. Other use cases are corrections and retractions. Crossref added version information to its metadata schema with the 5.4.0 release in March, and I am currently testing this functionality in the Rogue Scholar Staging server:
One challenge is that the InvenioRDM Crossref integration supports multiple DOI prefixes, so this is a bit more work compared to the DataCite integration only supporting one DOI prefix. In addition, versioning adds complexity to DOI suffix generation. Luckily, the built-in InvenioRDM tooling uses the same DOI naming scheme that Rogue Scholar has used since its launch, but going forward, Rogue Scholar will no longer support custom DOI suffixes that I introduced for WordPress and Substack blogs. Several blogs participating in Rogue Scholar do their own DOI registrations, and those DOIs (what InvenioRDM calls externally managed DOIs) will not be versioned.
Crossref DOI registration uses the commonmeta-py Python package to generate Crossref XML metadata and a fork of the invenio-rdm-records package to integrate with InvenioRDM. After completing versioning support and more testing, the functionality will be merged into the InvenioRDM core functionality, and the discussion with the other InvenioRDM maintainers has started. Soon, every InvenioRDM instance will be able to use Crossref DOI registration with a simple configuration setting (and Crossref member credentials), very similar to how DataCite DOI registration works.
The science blog archive Rogue Scholar this week started supporting versioning of blog posts. This is a core feature of the InvenioRDM repository platform used by Rogue Scholar, but Rogue Scholar uses DOIs from Crossref rather than DataCite, the default DOI registration agency for InvenioRDM.
Crossref versioning was made possible with the Crossref schema 5.4.0 released in March. Adding Crossref DOI support to InvenioRDM means that you can now use InvenioRDM with Crossref in basically the same way as DataCite before, with the important limitation that Crossref only supports text-based content types such as journal articles, books, or preprints. There are two reasons to consider Crossref instead of DataCite when using InvenioRDM: a) a pricing model (in particular the annual fee) that better aligns with smaller organizations, and b) better integration of the metadata into downstream services such as OpenAlex.
InvenioRDM by default uses one DOI prefix per repository, whereas Rogue Scholar and the InvenioRDM Crossref integration use one DOI prefix per InvenioRDM community. Rogue Scholar uses blog communities to group blog posts by blog, and mapping DOI prefixes to communities makes sense. Using a dedicated DOI prefix per blog allows easier migration of DOI registration later on, e.g. from Crossref to DataCite or to/from a prefix not managed by Rogue Scholar. Some Rogue Scholar blogs register their own DOIs they are treated in InvenioRDM as external DOIs without versioning.
Versioning is essential for content types such as datasets or software, but less critical for blog posts. Still, there are some important use cases:
The first three use cases happen occasionally and have so far been handled with a major update of the blog post (with optionally stating what has changed), or with a new blog post without a formal relation to the previous version. Peer review of blog posts is still very rare but happens, and the added versioning support makes Rogue Scholar (together with long-term archiving and assigning DOIs) a suitable platform for peer-reviewed blog posts.
As Rogue Scholar is currently archiving the full-text of all posts with image links (and separately via the Internet Archive Archive-It service), storing the images themselves as file attachments will require new blog post versions, and this is planned for the coming months.
Rogue Scholar automatically imports blog post metadata and content via blog RSS feeds (or Atom, JSON Feed, or a JSON API). Unfortunately there is no standard metadata in these feeds to indicate the blog post version. As a workaround for static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, Quarto, etc.), we can customize the RSS or Atom feed by adding a link attribute that points to the previous version of the post:
<link rel=\"prev\" href=\"https://doi.org/10.5555/12345\" />For JSONFeed, you can add custom metadata (starting with an underscore) to an item (post):
\"_prev_id\": \"https://doi.org/10.5555/12345\" />For blogs with a JSON API (e.g. WordPress) one could extend the API to include the GUID/ID of the previous version of the post. This is more work and not always possible, e.g. because the blogging platform uses proprietary software (Blogger, Substack, etc.). For the time being, it is probably easiest to do versioning semi-manually. Please send an email to support if you have published a blog post with Rogue Scholar that is a new version of another post.