All science blogs participating in the Rogue Scholar science blog archive provide a feed (in RSS, Atom or JSON Feed format) that includes not only metadata and full-text content for all archived blog posts, but also metadata about the blog itself. This includes required metadata such as the blog homepage and feed URL, but also an optional description, logo, license, language and science subject area, using the OpenAlex subfield, which maps to the Scopus All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) widely used to classify journals. Rogue Scholar also supports an optional International Serial Number (ISSN) as globally unique identifier for the blog – this blog has ISSN 2749-9952. While I encourage all Rogue Scholar blogs to obtain an ISSN, there are two important limitations of the ISSN:

An alternative approach is using DOIs as globally unique persistent identifier for the blog, and this aligns with using DOIs to register blog posts. The DOI registration agencies Crossref and DataCite support the resource type Journal and some other periodical publication formats (e.g. Book Series, Proceedings Series), but unfortunately not Blog. And they support the optional inclusion of one or more ISSNs.

Until Crossref and DataCite support the resource type Blog, Rogue Scholar will register blogs as resource type Journal, and include the optional ISSN. Front Matter is a Crossref member and can do this for all blogs participating in Rogue Scholar where it registers the DOIs (almost all of them). The Crossref resource type Journal unfortunately doesn't support many metadata (e.g. no subject classification), and Journal is mainly used as a container to describe a collection of Journal Articles. The DOI uses the same DOI prefix as the corresponding blog posts, and the blog slug (unique identifier used everywhere in Rogue Scholar) as the suffix.

The new blog DOI is displayed on the blog community page (e.g. here for this blog), and clicking on the DOI redirects users to the blog homepage (also shown, as is the ISSN).

It will take a few days until the DOIs for all blogs where Rogue Scholar manages DOI registration are registered.

Blog Volumes

Periodical publications typically have page numbers, issues and volumes. While page numbers and issues are typically not used for online publication formats such as blogs, volumes still make sense in a different context. One particular challenge with science blogs that the Rogue Scholar science blog archive tries to address is long-term archiving. While different approaches can address is problem, the basic idea is Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS). And blog volumes – all blog posts from a particular blog from a given year – can simplify long-term blog archiving in multiple places.

This week Rogue Scholar implemented blog volumes for all participating blogs:

Clicking on a year shows all blog posts from that blog published in that year:

Currently this is an automatically generated search in Rogue Scholar. The next step is generating a downloadable file with all content and metadata of the blog posts published in that year that can be archived in Rogue Scholar and elsewhere. I am working on generating these blog volumes in ePub format. These blog volumes will be registered with DOIs using the Crossref Journal Volume resource type (again, Blog Volume as resource type doesn't exist yet, and DataCite also has no Journal Volume ResourceTypeGeneral, Collection is the closest match).

These blog volumes can then be archived also in other repositories, and the ePub format makes reuse easier compare to PDF, as it is much easier to extract content from ePub. It has not escaped our notice that the specific archiving we are postulating immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for a blog when its authors want to migrate to a different blogging platform.

Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments, in particular if you are interested in archiving blogs via blog volumes generated by Rogue Scholar.

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. (2023, September 22). DOI registration workflow for a science blog. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/w6nzs-jta75
  2. Fenner, M. (2023, November 9). Archiving Rogue Scholar blogs with the Internet Archive. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/g60vh-3ng48