The science blog archive Rogue Scholar is launching an Editorial Board to handle submissions of new blogs, and oversee editorial management of existing blogs, e.g. blogs or individual posts that should be retracted or no longer archived.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive accepts new blogs via a submission form and after acceptance doesn‘t interfere with what participating blogs publish or how often. If participating blogs stop publishing it doesn‘t expect a notification. While this adhoc workflow generally worked for the 200 blogs accepted into Rogue Scholar so far, there are some issues that can be improved:

  • Processing of submissions of new blogs takes too long and with no clear feedback loop,
  • Blog posts written in languages other than German and English are hard to understand for me, and I am more comfortable in some scientific disciplines than others,
  • The decision for acceptance of a new blog is ultimately the decision of a single person (me),
  • The requirements in the submission form are frequently ignored (e.g. supported language, number of posts, or use of AI),
  • The kinds of new blogs we want to see has not been clearly articulated, and no systematic active blog recruitment is happening.

My hope is that the new Rogue Scholar Editorial Board will address these issues. Starting this week all new submissions will be processed once a month on the 15th, with time for additional questions before the decision if a submission is unclear. The submission form has added a question to describe the blog in a free-text field to provide more context. And I am looking for volunteers to join the Editorial Board, so that the workload and governance can be shared by more people. I hope to have an Editorial Board with 3-5 additional people setup until the end of the year, and I am looking for volunteers comfortable in other languages and scientific disciplines. This Editorial Board will supplement the work of the Rogue Scholar Advisory, and the Board of the non-profit organization once the Rogue Scholar non-profit launches. This is potentially two half days of volunteer work every month, but it is hopefully rewarding work. Until the Editorial Board is in place I will process blog submissions alone at the 15th of every month.

Please reach out via Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you want to join the new Editorial Board.

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