This is the January 2026 issue of the monthly newsletter from the Rogue Scholar science blog archive. The newsletter reports on new blogs that have joined the platform, important technical updates in Rogue Scholar infrastructure, community updates, and other news relevant to Rogue Scholar users.

Blogs added to Rogue Scholar

One blog was added in January. Welcome! This brings the number of participating blogs to 190, and the number of archived posts to 49,135 – Rogue Scholar is close to the big milestones of 200 participating blogs with 50,000 posts!

Open Evidence

Perspectives on science, data, and technology that don't fit anywhere else.
Sociology and Political Science, English.
http://chrismarcum.com/marcum-blog/

The a backlog of new blog submissions is still not resolved, so please be patient. You can always reach out via Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky to ask about the status of your submission.

Technical Updates

One focus of the technical work in January was on refining Rogue Scholar Identity and Access Management (IAM) via Keycloak, launched in December. Instead of one-time passwords (a six digit code), Keycloak now sends emails with magic links that automatically sign in the user into Rogue Scholar when clicked in the email (the link expires after 15 min).

Rogue Scholar completed the migration to Coolify Cloud, so that (almost) all services are self-hosted now, making operating Rogue Scholar both simpler and more affordable.

The subject classification using OpenAlex fields, subfields and topic introduced in November was further improved, automatically mapping subfields to OECD Fields of Science (FOS), and providing clickable links to query by FOS, Subfield or Topic, e.g. FOS Computer and information sciences.

Community Updates

Work on Rogue Scholar becoming a German non-profit organization in 2026 is slowly progressing. While we work on the legal documents needed to register as a German non-profit, you can express your interest in joining Rogue Scholar as an individual or organization via a form link (Membership Interest Form) from the footer of every Rogue Scholar page.

Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments.

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

References

  1. Fenner, M. (2025, December 30). Consolidating Rogue Scholar Authentication. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/5q274-3e235
  2. Fenner, M. (2026, January 15). Rogue Scholar now supports passwordless authentication with magic links. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/tb8z7-7ft90
  3. Fenner, M. (2026, January 22). Rogue Scholar migrated to Coolify Cloud. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/dzznx-zkn71
  4. Fenner, M. (2026, January 29). Rogue Scholar is improving subject classification (Version 3). Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/76vm1-yme44
  5. Fenner, M. (2025, November 3). Rogue Scholar is becoming a German Non-Profit Organization. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/rftfk-qv692