This week I am celebrating two big work anniversaries: 19 years of science blogging with the first blog post on August 3, 2007. And five years of Front Matter, the organization that I started on August 2, 2021.

Science blogging

Science blogging has now been part of my life for almost twenty years, and it has become my preferred way of communicating science, or in my case scholarly infrastructure. I am trained as a medical oncologist, but for various reasons with a few exceptions (e.g. here or here) never really blogged about my work. Medical oncology is much more exciting now than 19 years ago with all the progress made in developing targeted therapies that are both more effective and with fewer side effects.

But for me science blogging was always something else, something that allowed creativity and experimentation, which were difficult when treating patients with cancer. And 2007 was the golden age of blogging – here roughly defined as the lifetime of Google Reader from October 2005 until July 2013 – when so much was going on. I started my blog with Nature Network, the social network for scientists launched by Nature Publishing Group a few months before, with many bloggers based in or around London, and organizing the Science Blogging London conference in August 2008. From 2009-2014 I was a co-organizer of the conference (renamed to Science Online London to describe the broader focus) and that was a deeply satisfying experience. One outcome of that time is answers to the question why do we blog? by 34 science bloggers. One response was from Maxine Clarke, Publishing Executive Editor of Nature at the time and dying far too early from cancer in 2012, and a big influence on my early blogging.

In September 2010 I moved my blog to the new PLOS Blogs blogging network at a time when new (science) blogging networks seemed to launch every few months. PLOS Blogs was much smaller and I was in the community of many excellent science writers, which often felt intimidating. Around that time, PLOS had launched the Article-Metrics Project (ALM), and I had interviewed Peter Binfield, at the time managing editor of PLOS ONE, about PLOS ONE and ALM.

The PLOS connection, my understanding of blogging and social networks, and me hacking the open source PLOS Article Metrics Server in the ScienceCard project as a contribution to Mendeley/PLOS API Binary Battle led to PLOS offering me a job as technical lead for the Article-Level Metrics project, a big gamble for both sides, as I would be working remotely from Germany with the dev team in San Francisco – at a time when remote work was much less common than it is today. I decided to take the job, become a full-time software developer, and stop working as a medical oncologist in April 2012.

The work was funded by a Sloan Foundation grant and it was an exciting time on many levels working mainly with Jennifer Lin, Rich Cave and later John Chodacki, but also saw the decline of blogging and the rise of social networks, in particular Twitter and Facebook. One fundamental misalignment was that PLOS is a publisher and not a scholarly infrastructure provider, so the success of Article-Level Metrics depended on other publishers also adopting the software. One way forward were the discussions with Crossref to adopt the software as a service, which ultimately led to Crossref Event Data service. Science blogs were always part of Article-Level Metrics, but never played a prominent role compared to social media (in particular Twitter and Mendeley) and usage stats.

In May 2015 I received an email while vacationing in Australia about a job opening at DataCite, the DOI registration agency based in Hannover, just a subway ride away from my home. DataCite had received EU funding and Executive Director Trisha Cruse was looking to fill two positions, including a Technical Director. On August 1, 2015 I started working for DataCite, which was both a huge opportunity and challenge, as we basically had to rebuild the whole infrastructure over the next several years with an initial staff of four. In my first week in the job we started the DataCite blog with an initial blog post on August 3.

The many things we built at DataCite during my time as Technical Director would be material for another blog post, but it was a great time for many reasons, and I learned a lot (for example this, this, this, this, and this). In the spring of 2021 I felt it was time to move on, and to take things into my own hands.

Front Matter

One challenge working on scholarly infrastructure is that work tends to be on important but mostly invisible plumbing, and I wanted to do work a little bit closer to actual users and use cases. In April 2019 CERN partnered with 10 other organizations to start work on InvenioRDM, a research data management platform based on Zenodo and Invenio v3 Framework. This looked like a good fit, as InvenioRDMs internal metadata is based on the DataCite Metadata Schema, and the technology choices and the people I knew at CERN were familiar.

The other big idea was to build infrastructure for scholarly blogs, addressing three key gaps:

  • long-term archiving is often missing, in particular for self-hosted blogs,
  • DOIs and scholarly metadata for blog posts are rarely used,
  • Finding content across many different blogs is notoriously difficult.

On August 1, 2021 I started the organization Front Matter as sole proprietor and in the middle of the COVID pandemic. A few days later on August 5, the first Long-Term Support version of InvenioRDM was released and I joined the project as participating partner. Over the coming months I learned as much as I could about InvenioRDM (written in Python/Flask and Javascript/React) and started building tools for blogging infrastructure. In October 2021 I started registering DOIs for my own blog. In November I helped launch the Upstream Force11 blog as one of its editors. In parallel I accepted contract work for two interesting projects with Crossref and Swinburne University in Australia.

Then on January 21, 2022 something else happened. When I woke up I couldn't properly use my right arm and leg and my speech was blurry. My wife quickly drove me to the emergency room where a stroke was diagnosed. I spent the next five months in the hospital (including an intensive care unit twice) and rehabilitation. I was lucky that I was able again to walk with own legs when I went home in early June – to a different home that had an elevator instead of stairs two floors up. By that time the strength in my right side had returned, I had lost 20 kg, and I was able again to eat, wash and dress myself. I slowly recovered the following months, and by September was able to gradually pick up work again. In October 2022 my father died after having lived seven years with the complications of a stroke in 2015 - also on January 21.

This experience not only changed everything in my daily life, but also made be appreciate more what is really important in life: a loving wife, family and friends, and work that you really care about. In the last four years my health has greatly improved and I am almost as fit as before the stroke. Working in the kitchen or with the computer is no problem. I have shortness of breath after bigger exercises because of a massive pulmonary embolism in the hospital, and my sense of balance is still impaired, and still do weekly physical therapy.

In early 2023 I started work on what became the Rogue Scholar science blog archive, and in April 2023 accepted the first blogs. The initial versions were built on a custom platform, over time adding features such as an API, full-text search, and subject classification. Starting November 2023, all Rogue Scholar blog posts were archived by the Internet Archive Archive-It service.

In September 2024, Rogue Scholar started migrating to the InvenioRDM repository platform, combining the two major themes I had when I started Front Matter. The process is only complete once blog feed parsing and processing – currently a separate Python library – is also merged into InvenioRDM.

Rogue Scholar has an advisory board since February 2024, in October 2024 endorsed the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and in November 2025 decided to become a German non-profit organization, a process that still hasn't been completed (my fault). Rogue Scholar is a Diamond Open Access infrastructure with no fees to authors and readers and all content available with an Creative Commons CC-BY license. A membership model is the most realistic option for becoming a sustainable scholarly infrastructure, and that goal is realistic to reach in the not to distant future.

The best option for Front Matter to generate revenue and support me is currently contract work with a focus on InvenioRDM Customization and help with hosting, adding DOI registration functionality to existing repository or journal platforms, and help with collecting and storing research information. The last five years have not been easy, but Front Matter is going in the right direction with several exciting projects underway. Please reach out (contact info on the Front Matter homepage) if you need help with the InvenioRDM repository software or related projects.

References

  1. Fenner, M. (2007, August 3). Open access may become mandatory for NIH-funded research. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw1q
  2. Fenner, M. (2021, August 2). Front Matter officially launches today. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r87krmh-97aq74v-ag5x0
  3. Fenner, M. (2009, December 20). Increased cancer risk following computed tomography scans. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw3h
  4. Fenner, M. (2010, March 22). Cancer and the media. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw4r
  5. Fenner, M. (2008, August 31). Science blogging is the new email. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cwb6
  6. Fenner, M. (2008, November 30). Why do we blog and other important questions, answered by 34 science bloggers. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/8gj67xy-yz5r80q
  7. Campbell, P. (2013). Maxine Clarke (1954-2012). Nature, 493(7430), 13–13. https://doi.org/10.1038/493013b
  8. Fenner, M. (2010, September 1). Welcome to Gobbledygook. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw5n
  9. Fenner, M. (2009, August 15). PLoS One: Interview with Peter Binfield. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw36
  10. Fenner, M. (2011, September 28). Announcing ScienceCard. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw6a
  11. Bilder, G. (2014, February 24). Many Metrics. Such Data. Wow. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.64000/96snc-ye031
  12. Fenner, M. (2015, August 3). Data-Driven Development. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r79tt01-97aq74v-ag55w
  13. Fenner, M. (2015, October 26). Auto-Update Has Arrived! Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r796hz1-97aq74v-ag4f3
  14. Fenner, M. (2016, July 5). Relaunching DataCite Search. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r79yhah-97aq74v-ag5fv
  15. Fenner, M. (2017, October 18). Announcing DataCite DOI Fabrica. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r7adsah-97aq74v-ag5mp
  16. Fenner, M. (2018, September 18). COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data Usage Metrics release 1. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r7ae7bh-97aq74v-ag5qn
  17. Fenner, M. (2019, March 28). Introducing the PID Graph. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/ewrv712-2k7rx6d
  18. Nielsen, L. H. (2019, April 29). InvenioRDM: A turn-key open source research data management platform. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.63517/jxhdr-c2050
  19. Fenner, M. (2021, August 5). First InvenioRDM Long-Term Support (LTS) version released today – and Front Matter is joining as a participating partner. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r8c26t1-97aq74v-ag66m
  20. Fenner, M. (2021, October 14). The Front Matter blog now uses DOIs. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/rb7xw01-97aq74v-ag7qh
  21. Chodacki, J., Hendricks, G., Ferguson, C., & Fenner, M. (2021, November 22). Welcome to Upstream: The new space for scholarly community discussion on all things open. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.54900/rckn8ey-1fm76va-qsrnf
  22. Fenner, M. (2022, July 28). I spent the last five months in the hospital. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/bkkzj8g-gd14mb6
  23. Fenner, M. (2023, April 4). The Rogue Scholar is now open for business. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/z9v2s-bh329
  24. Fenner, M. (2023, October 30). Starting November, all Rogue Scholar blog posts will be archived by the Internet Archive. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/hhtx0-wb293
  25. Fenner, M. (2024, September 2). Rogue Scholar migrates to InvenioRDM. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/sdazp-kzn55
  26. Fenner, M. (2024, February 8). Introducing the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/9yf86-p8541
  27. Fenner, M. (2025, October 20). Rogue Scholar follows the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/m65a8-6sm21
  28. Fenner, M. (2025, November 3). Rogue Scholar is becoming a German Non-Profit Organization. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/rftfk-qv692