![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2026/10/Bildschirmfoto-2026-10-12-um-12.50.16.png\")
The science blog archive Rogue Scholar is paying for the Internet Archive Archive-It service to help archive participating blogs since October 2023. This week a deeper integration is launching, linking blog posts to the archived versions in the Rogue Scholar record sidebar, and linking the blog community to the Archive-It collection.
Rogue Scholar is archiving every blog post from participating blogs as HTML and PDF attachment using the PDF/A-3A archival format. The PDFs have the full-text HTML and Schema.org metadata embedded as attachments, making extraction of content and metadata much easier. The PDFs are automatically imported into the Zotero reference manager thanks to a nice intergration with Crossref and OpenAlex.
The Archive-It service archives websites, including blogs, as Web ARCive (WARC) archives, which nicely complements the approach using archival PDFs. In the past few weeks I have worked on an invenio module (invenio-archive-it) that integrates Rogue Scholar \u2013 or any other repository using the InvenioRDM repository platform \u2013 with Archive-it. The module provides two links:
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2026/10/Bildschirmfoto-2026-10-12-um-12.33.45.png\")
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2026/10/Bildschirmfoto-2026-10-12-um-12.37.32.png\")
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2026/10/Bildschirmfoto-2026-10-12-um-12.42.36.png\")
Implementing this for all currently 207 participating blogs will take until the end of the year. Mainly because the process is not yet fully automated and needs some configuration work in the Archive-It web interface. But the end result is long-term archiving of participating science blogs in multiple formats and places, complementing the use of DOIs and metadata for blog posts of participating blogs.
Please reach out via Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have questions about the archiving blog posts.
The inaugural general assembly for the Rogue Scholar non-profit that will govern the science blog archive will take place on December 16, either virtually or in person at the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) in Berlin.
The main purpose of the General Assembly will be to approve the bylaws and elect officers, both needed by German law to start a non-profit. The registration form and agenda will follow in the next two weeks, but I want to give people to plan in advance, in particular so close to the holidays. There will be time to discuss topics of general interest to the science blogging community, and I look forward to topic suggestions.
Please reach out via Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have questions about the General Assembly.
Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web. When Wave was first announced May 28 at the Google I/O conference, many people immediately saw its potential as a great collaboration tool for scientists:
We based our first impressions on the material available online, especially the video of the Google Wave presentation at Google I/O. The problem is, Wave is currently only available to selected developers, and will not be generally available until the end of the year. Wave is currently not even beta software and was announced now so that third-party developers have enough time to build (and test) extensions to Wave.
Those of us being invited to SciFoo (which took place July 10-12 at Google) were lucky not only in attending a great conference, but also in getting a Wave account. Wave product manager Steph Hannon gave us an introduction to Wave on the first evening, and Cameron Neylon organized a session about Wave the next day. The session was mainly about the Wave extensions that we scientists would need (and I'm sure that Cameron will blog about that), but we could also ask two developers from the Wave team a lot of questions.
After using Wave for one week, I obviously have a much better feeling for how it can help scientists to communicate and collaborate. The best way to start is to think of Wave as email on steroids. Wave is web-based (which means that it currently only works when you have an internet connection) with a nice interface similar to Gmail or other webmail products. One big advantage over email is that all reply messages are directly connected to the original message (similar to comments on a blog). This is especially helpful for longer email threads and when more than two people are involved.
But Wave is also instant messaging. You see a small green dot next to your contacts that are currently online, and you can see them typing in real-time (which looks really creepy the first time you see that).
And Wave is also like a Wiki. You can not only respond to a message, but everybody participating in the Wave can also change the original message (and several people can work on the same message simultaneously). This works great for things such as listing all the blog posts about SciFoo.
The combination of wiki-style editing plus comments make Wave an interesting alternative to project management tools such as Basecamp. And this means that Wave can also be used to work on longer documents \u2013 something that the Wave developers regularly do for documentation, etc. Wave documents can also contain images, videos, links, etc. Wave supports different fonts, text colors, bold and italic text, and four different heading levels (for titles and subtitles).
But in contrast to most online collaboration tools, Wave can be extended with additional functionality that scientists require. Bibliographic references would be an obvious example, and here tools such as Google Docs or Adobe Buzzword fall short.
Wave extensions come in the form of gadgets (that work on the client) and robots (that work on the server). Wave gadgets are XML files, whereas robots can currently be developed in either Java or Python. Other programming languages (PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc.) for robots will soon become possible when robots no longer have to be hosted on Google App Engine. Using the tools provided by Google, writing a robot is actually not that difficult and it took me only an hour to have a sample \"Hello World!\" robot running in Wave. It will obviously take weeks or months to develop more sophisticated robots (e.g. for management of bibliographic references), but I'm sure that a number of exciting science-related extensions will be ready by the time Wave becomes publicly available later this year.
We plan a session with a live Wave demo at the Science Online London conference in August so that more scientists and science communicators become familiar with Wave. About 10 people that registered for the conference already have Wave accounts and I hope that some of them will come up with interesting science-related robots or gadgets. If you are a Wave user, you can reach me at mfenner@wavesandbox.com. And if you want to develop great science-related extensions for Wave, please contact Cameron Neylon.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/8ey1pyb-bdqppv7","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/8ey1pyb-bdqppv7","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1247875200,"rid":"q9x05-s9e13","summary":"Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web. When Wave was first announced May 28 at the Google I/O conference, many people immediately saw its potential as a great collaboration tool for scientists:Ricardo Vidal: Using Google Wave to surf the streamsMe: Google Wave \u2013 don't forget the scientistsCameron Neylon: OMG! This changes EVERYTHING!","tags":["Meeting Report"],"title":"Using Google Wave for a week \u2013 it's still great!","updated_at":1790920423,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/posts/using-google-wave-for-a-week-its-still-great/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Martin Fenner","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"community_id":"15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8","created":1672531200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/front_matter","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/atom","filter":null,"generator":"Ghost","home_page_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/","issn":"2749-9952","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.53731","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"front_matter","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"Front Matter","updated":1791802965,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Front Matter","blog_slug":"front_matter","content_html":"This is the February 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.
No blog was added in February. This leaves the number of participating blogs to 190, the number of archived posts has grown to 49,342 \u2013 Rogue Scholar is getting closer to the big milestones of 200 participating blogs with 50,000 posts!
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.
One focus of the technical work in February was on translations \u2013 the Rogue Scholar website is now translates into 11 languages with blog posts in nine languages. The translations still need lots of refinements but include many areas that were previously not translated, e.g. the sidebar on the homepage, footer, and subject areas. The homepage now shows the most recent posts in the selected language:
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2026/03/Bildschirmfoto-2026-03-05-um-09.38.13.png\")
As you can see in the screenshot, the landing page now also shows summary statistics that were previously available on a separate dashboard page. All numbers use live data, and clicking on them returns a search result for that data.
Rogue Scholar is powered by the InvenioRDM open source repository software, and last week the InvenioRDM community met for its annual partner meeting in Graz, Austria. Watch the Invenio blog \u2013 also archived in Rogue Scholar \u2013 for a report in the coming weeks. One important topic was the next major release (v14) of the software in June. Rogue Scholar is running the latest pre-release version of the software \u2013 see the Rogue Scholar footer for the current version.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive continues to grow, with seven new blogs added this month and more than 24,000 archived blog posts. Luckily, onboarding new blogs is mostly automated, with the Rogue Scholar API handling the blog setup and blog post ingestion from RSS feeds.
Some questions frequently come up and I try to improve the Rogue Scholar documentation to address them. Email is central to the onboarding process and when questions arise later. I like the interaction via email, as I learn to know the blog authors and their specific usage cases. These emails rarely contain sensitive information, so they could also be handled in a public forum using a platform such as Discord, Slack, Mattermost, Discourse, or GitHub Discussions. This has the benefit of addressing the same question to a group of blog authors, and blog authors bringing in their specific perspective, e.g. with a particular blogging platform.
This week I started a Rogue Scholar Slack community to enable these group conversations. The community is free to join via this link, which also appears on the footer of every Rogue Scholar page. The community has two channels: #general for announcements and general discussion and #help for specific questions and issues regarding Rogue Scholar. Please join the new Slack community if you have questions and/or are interested in giving feedback regarding new features of the Rogue Scholar platform. We can add more channels if more specific needs arise, e.g. for particular languages (German, Spanish, and French are the most popular languages besides English), or specific blogging platforms (WordPress, Hugo, Blogger, and Jekyll are the most popular platforms).
This blog is a good source to follow the development of the Rogue Scholar platform and it can be read via RSS feed or email newsletter. For people who prefer less frequent updates than the roughly one new post per week, I am starting a monthly newsletter that you can subscribe to separately with a first issue planned this Thursday. You can subscribe here.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/f117g-8r09","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/f117g-8r09","image":"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/01/newsletter.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1737936000,"rid":"tht2p-y5c55","summary":"The Rogue Scholar science blog archive continues to grow, with seven new blogs added this month and more than 24,000 archived blog posts. Luckily, onboarding new blogs is mostly automated, with the Rogue Scholar API handling the blog setup and blog post ingestion from RSS feeds. Some questions frequently come up and I try to improve the Rogue Scholar documentation to address them.","tags":["Rogue Scholar"],"title":"Starting a Rogue Scholar monthly newsletter and Slack Community","updated_at":1790920423,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/posts/starting-rogue-scholar-monthly-newsletter-slack/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Martin Fenner","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"community_id":"15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8","created":1672531200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/front_matter","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/atom","filter":null,"generator":"Ghost","home_page_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/","issn":"2749-9952","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.53731","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"front_matter","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"Front Matter","updated":1791802965,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Front Matter","blog_slug":"front_matter","content_html":"Next week the InvenioRDM community will meet in Hamburg for five days to discuss the open source repository platform. Front Matter has been part of the InvenioRDM community since August 2021, and Rogue Scholar relaunched on the InvenioRDM platform in October 2024.
The last workshop of the InvenioRDM partners took place in March 2024 in M\u00fcnster, so this is the first meetup where I am running a production instance of InvenioRDM. I hope to share some of the things I learned running Rogue Scholar, talk about the customizations that may be of interest to other InvenioRDM instances, and ask many questions. On the first day of the workshop we will have a session where InvenioRDM instances can present the highlights of what they are doing in 5 minutes, and today I have uploaded my slides to Zenodo, which is of course the repository where it all started. Here are some of the special Rogue Scholar features I want to highlight:
Some of the questions I have for the InvenioRDM community include:
If you are a Rogue Scholar user and have topics or questions I should discuss in Hamburg, let me know via email or Slack.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has improved the subject classification of blog posts, using an open approach to subject classification developed by CWTS and OpenAlex, and combining this with the widely used OECD Fields of Science.
Classification of scholarly works into defined subject areas is important for two groups of use cases:
A good example of the first use case is a study recently published by Catharina Ochser and colleagues about scholarly blogs in Germany, and one of the main outcomes was the disciplinary distribution of these blogs:
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/12/jd-02-2025-0053001.png\")
The majority of the blogs they found were in the humanities and social sciences. One important reason for this is de.hypotheses, the German-language version of the large blog portal Hypotheses, offering hosting and other services to humanities and social sciences blogs.
Five years ago in the Make Data Count project, we were interested in the subject classification of research data, as usage of datasets is highly dependent on community size and community standards. One big problem was that the standardized subject classification of datasets was mostly lacking, so we started making this easier for DataCite members: push for the OECD Fields of Science as the standard subject area vocabulary that can be mapped from other vocabularies, and show the OECD Fields of Science as a facet in the search results of DataCite Search.
The second use case is primarily driven by readers. After reading an interesting science blog post, they might want to read more posts with similar content. Or they have an idea about the content they are looking for, but it is poorly described using keywords. Blogging platforms have long provided this functionality, but have been limited to a single blog and have used old technology, rather than semantic search.
Rogue Scholar launched OECD Fields of Science subject area support for every blog post in February of this year. While this was a good start, there were three significant shortcomings:
When submitting a blog to be archived by Rogue Scholar, one of only a few questions I ask blog authors is for the subject area of their blog using the OECD Fields of Science list. Similar to the subject classification of journals rather than journal articles (which, unfortunately is more often done), this approach has limitations, in particular for multidisciplinary blogs/journals. One prominent example in Rogue Scholar is the SVPOW blog, which has been writing about sauropods since October 2007, but also frequently publishes about Open Access.
The six top-level and 42 second-level subject areas in the OECD Fields of Science are good enough for many high-level questions, such as R&D spending or doctoral students per country and/or over time. But for more fine-grained questions, more granularity in the subject classification is needed. There are for example almost 20,000 social science and almost 5,000 computer and information science blog posts in Rogue Scholar, which give a very broad picture.
Using a more granular subject area classification applied to each publication is a major challenge, as can for example be seen in the major curation effort needed to classify the biomedical literature into Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) at PubMed.
The third major limitation is that publishers can't easily distribute subject classification information, as Crossref metadata can't hold that information. DataCite is better in this regard, but unfortunately subject area metadata is still only included in a small fraction of DataCite DOIs.
For Rogue Scholar, I always envisioned a semi-automated approach based on machine learning and human curation of edge cases. Having the full-text of all blog posts available in machine-readable form makes this possible, but picking the right subject area classification and building a classification workflow from scratch are still major challenges.
The ideal subject area classification is more granular than OECD, covers all scholarly disciplines, is widely used (and documented), and openly available. My main candidate five years ago, when I did the subject area work for DataCite, was the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) Fields of Research with more than 1000 subject areas, and used for example by the repository Figshare. The German Research Foundation (DFG) Subject Areas used by the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data), on the other hand, have some limitations, primarily that they were developed for a different use case - panels for grant evaluation.
The CWTS/OpenAlex classification announced in January 2024 with about 4500 topics categorized into subfields and fields that map to the All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) is a very attractive alternative, especially since OpenAlex uses it, makes an open API available, and more importantly makes the pre-trained model available for download with an Apache 2.0 open source license. This makes it straightforward to run the classifier on Rogue Scholar infrastructure and not depend on external APIs with associated costs and rate-limits.
In January 2025, OpenAlex published a blog post describing the mapping of OpenAlex subfields to the OECD Fields of Science, providing a bridge to the widely used OECD classification.
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/11/3849275338_dec5fa17a1_k.jpg\")
Like many interesting collaborations, a conversation with Nees Jan van Eck from CWTS at a Dagstuhl seminar on Open Scholarly Information Systems in September was the trigger for me to finally start the work on using machine learning to classify Rogue Scholar blog posts into subject areas.
Two months later I now have a classifier running with the CWTS/OpenAlex model provided via Hugging Face, and integrated into the Rogue Scholar infrastructure.
The InvenioRDM repository platform that powers Rogue Scholar has built-in subject classification with the OECD Fields of Science since v6.o released in August 2021, but this can easily be extended with custom vocabularies. Rogue Scholar now has these four hierarchical OpenAlex vocabularies built in:
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/12/subject_areas.png\")
Any InvenioRDM instance can install these vocabularies in yaml format and make them available in the record editor and API, and I will also include them in the InvenioRDM Starter pre-built Docker image.
I have used the subfields (that map to ASJC) to classify all participating blogs, and updated the Rogue Scholar submission form to use the OpenAlex subfields instead of the OECD Fields of Science. Please fill out the form (also linked from the footer of every Rogue Scholar page) if you don't agree with the suggested subfield (multiple subfields are not yet supported).
Rogue Scholar has created communities for each of the 252 subfields, and has reused existing OECD subject communities where it makes sense. It will take a few weeks before all blog posts are properly sorted into these new OpenAlex subfield communities.
![\"\"](\"https://media.tenor.com/xFRvGx7feb4AAAAC/sorting-hat.gif\")
The OpenAlex classifier is now running in the Rogue Scholar infrastructure and has started classifying using the blog post title and abstract (as the model was trained with this information). After classifying a few hundred blog posts, I found a score of at least 0.25 to be a good cutoff. With lower scores the number of false-positives was too high, whereas with higher scores (e.g. 0.40) the number of false-negatives was too high. More systematic testing of cutoff scores will follow in a few months, but it is clear that more than half of the classified posts currently have a score that is too low, and false-positives have to be removed. An example of the latter is a post about the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information that was classified as topic Optics and Image Analysis with a score of 0.40.
What I found so far is that non-English language posts classify well (14% are in other languages), and that posts that can't be classified are often not sciency enough, e.g. they talk about an upcoming webinar or general tools or techniques.
The OpenAlex subfield(s) are then mapped to OECD Fields of Science using the mapping from OpenAlex to link Rogue Scholar blog posts to systems using that subject classification.
The subfield of the blog and the topic of the post, together with the corresponding topic subfield(s) and OECD Fields of Science (FOS) are shown in the sidebar of the Rogue Scholar post \u2013 again it will take a few weeks to generate this information for all posts.
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2026/01/Bildschirmfoto-2026-01-29-um-09.45.31.png\")
The post is also added to the corresponding subfield communities, in the example above Information Systems and Conservation. The community ID corresponds to the OpenAlex subfield ID (here 1206), and OpenAlex IDs can also be used in Rogue Scholar Search:
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2026/01/Bildschirmfoto-2026-01-29-um-09.54.25.png\")
Similarly you can click on the OECD FOS or Topic in the sidebar to trigger a Rogue Scholar Search by that OECD FOS or OpenAlex Topic, respectively. In the latest version, search results are automatically sorted by publication date rather than best match.
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2026/01/Bildschirmfoto-2026-01-29-um-09.51.30.png\")
As I mentioned before, the next few months will be spent updating the subject classification data, improving the automatic subject classification, and generally respond to user feedback. I am also happy to share this work \u2013 both the OpenAlex subject vocabularies and self-hosted machine learning model \u2013 with other InvenioRDM instances.
For community validation I wrote an integration into the Rogue Scholar Slack (join via this link) using the workflow automation service n8n, also self-hosted on Rogue Scholar infrastructure.
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/11/Bildschirmfoto-2025-11-26-um-13.19.44.png\")
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/11/Bildschirmfoto-2025-11-26-um-13.24.22.png\")
As this might also be of interest to other repositories running the InvenioRDM software, I also built a similar integration into the Inveniosoftware Discord server, testing the classification with a few Zenodo records:
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/11/Bildschirmfoto-2025-11-26-um-13.37.03.png\")
As I am using the same metadata and classifier model as OpenAlex, I can compare their classifications \u2013 all Rogue Scholar posts should be archived in OpenAlex. The example post Reinvestigating the reported transition state structure of a concerted triple H-tunneling mechanism was classified into topic Chemical Reactions and Isotopes by both OpenAlex and Rogue Scholar. Also interesting is a systematic comparison of abstracts and full-text for classifier input, preliminary testing didn't show much difference, and the model was trained with abstracts.
Finally, this approach (OpenAlex subfield and topic classification and pre-trained model made available with an open license) can also work for other Crossref members interested in subject classification, and might convince Crossref to add subject area classification to the metadata schema, something the recently launched Crossref Metadata Advisory Group is thinking about.
In 2026 Rogue Scholar will use this new infrastructure to address important use cases around Understanding and Discovery.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding this work, and join the Rogue Scholar Slack if you want to provide feedback on concrete classifications.
This is the November 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.
Two blogs were added in November. Welcome! These two blogs have special meaning for me, as I am on the dblp Steering Committee, and Front Matter is an InvenioRDM project partner, with the software powering the Rogue Scholar repository platform. This brings the number of participating blogs to 187, and the number of archived posts to 47,882.
A blog about the dblp computer science bibliography.
Information Systems, English.
https://blog.dblp.org/
Follow news and updates from the Invenio community.
Information Systems, English.
https://inveniosoftware.org/
The focus of the technical work in November was on improving subject classification, described in detail in a blog post this week. Rogue Scholar is migrating from the OECD Fields of Science to the CWTS/OpenAlex subject classification and uses automatic topic classification based on blog post title and abstract. 7,695 blog posts have already been classified, with 28.8% having a score of at least 0.25. Those topics are being displayed and linked in Rogue Scholar:
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/12/Bildschirmfoto-2025-12-05-um-17.41.12.png\")
Following the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) self-assessment in October, Rogue Scholar in November started work on becoming a German non-profit organization in 2026. The process will take a few months, and many details have yet to be worked out.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments.
Social media and privacy have a complicated relationship, as using social media implies giving up at least some privacy. And the value of a social networking site is directly related not only to the number of users, but also the extend of personal data that the site has collected. All this is of course not unique to social networking tools for scientists, but conducting science using online tools is different from connecting to friends or people with similar personal interests with these tools. One area where privacy issues are particularly prominent is the creation of unique identifiers for scientists, and here I'm involved in the ORCID initiative. We need a discussion about required privacy standards, and about the limitations of privacy that we accept in order to increase our scientific productivity.
I've collected a couple of thoughts below. They are of course only starting points for a discussion, and I welcome any comments and suggestions.
Social networking sites for scientists can be quite useful for anonymous users, e.g. for reading of blog or forum posts. Users should not be required to sign up for a service just for reading a public message or looking at the public part of a user profile. Many social networking sites unfortunately require a user account these activities, and they often nag users to \"complete their personal profiles\", i.e. to provide as much personal information as possible.
I've randomly checked five social networking sites for scientists, and they all provide a privacy policy:
The privacy policy should make clear what user data the service is collecting, whether the service is providing these user data to third parties, and should provide an email address for further privacy questions.
All personal data that a user uploads should be owned by the user, and the privacy policy should make this clear. This implies that a user should be allowed to cancel an account and delete all personal information (surprisingly difficult with most social networking sites), and that the user decides which part of the personal data is shared with others, and with whom.
To give users control over their privacy settings, these settings should default to not being public for everything beyond the most basic information, and they should not change over time (The Evolution of privacy on Facebook).
Obviously, there is a large grey area. If I comment on a blog post by someone else, who owns this comment, and who should be allowed to delete this comment \u2013 me, the author of the blog post, and/or the provider of the social networking site? And who owns my usage data of a service, how often I logged in, my activity in the service, etc.?
The social networking site should make all efforts necessary to protect the personal data of a user. There are examples where this has gone wrong, and this includes examples involving scientists (Fake Facebook pages spin web of deceit).
Update 5/25/10: I didn't see it when I wrote the post, but last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users (thanks to Renny Guida for the link).
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw53","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw53","image":"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2022/08/2404940312_e759c4030d.jpeg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1274659200,"rid":"bzs05-bfg71","summary":"Social media and privacy have a complicated relationship, as using social media implies giving up at least some privacy. And the value of a social networking site is directly related not only to the number of users, but also the extend of personal data that the site has collected.","tags":["Feature"],"title":"On Privacy","updated_at":1790920422,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/posts/on-privacy/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Martin Fenner","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"community_id":"15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8","created":1672531200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/front_matter","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/atom","filter":null,"generator":"Ghost","home_page_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/","issn":"2749-9952","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.53731","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"front_matter","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"Front Matter","updated":1791802965,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Front Matter","blog_slug":"front_matter","content_html":"This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has received two important updates: full-text search becomes the default search configuration, and blog authors can now self-manage basic settings of their Rogue Scholar blog community.
Rogue Scholar has long supported full-text search of all its content. With this update, users no longer have to specify that they want to search in the full-text content using the content: prefix. All queries now automatically search the full-text, e.g. this query for the term xanadu: https://rogue-scholar.org/search?q=xanadu.
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/07/Bildschirmfoto-2025-07-30-um-18.15.11.png\")
You still can specify content: if you want to search only in the full-text, similar to how you can specify other fields to search in. And you can search either all of Rogue Scholar or a specific community. See the Rogue Scholar search guide for details.
With the latest update the basic settings of Rogue Scholar blog communities can be managed by blog authors. They need a Rogue Scholar account and have to accept an invitation (send an email) as manager of the blog community. The basic blog settings (name, short description, website, and profile picture) are automatically extracted from the blog RSS feed. Still, they can be overridden in the blog community form, for example to add a profile picture if that is not included in the feed.
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/07/Bildschirmfoto-2025-07-30-um-17.18.48.png\")
Registration of new blogs still requires filling out a separate form (found here), and the automatic blog post extraction can't be configured in the community form. Blog community managers also can't update their posts in Rogue Scholar, but they can submit their blog posts to one or more topic communities (such as R or Book Review) using the Communities sidebar settings.
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/07/Bildschirmfoto-2025-07-30-um-17.29.05.png\")
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding these updates.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/jeatk-t8t07","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/jeatk-t8t07","image":"https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1472512946974-cc09a294e210?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDIwfHxzZWFyY2h8ZW58MHx8fHwxNzUzODkyMzE1fDA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1753833600,"rid":"emsb2-fwt40","summary":"This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has received two important updates: full-text search becomes the default search configuration, and blog authors can now self-manage basic settings of their Rogue Scholar blog community.Full-text search as default Rogue Scholar has long supported full-text search of all its content.","tags":["Rogue Scholar"],"title":"Rogue Scholar Updates: full-text search as default and basic blog self-management","updated_at":1790920422,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/posts/rogue-scholar-updates-full-text-search-blog-self-management/","version":"v1"}}],"items":[{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Martin Fenner","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"community_id":"15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8","created":1672531200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/front_matter","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/atom","filter":null,"generator":"Ghost","home_page_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/","issn":"2749-9952","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.53731","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"front_matter","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"Front Matter","updated":1791802965,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Front Matter","blog_slug":"front_matter","content_html":"The science blog archive Rogue Scholar is paying for the Internet Archive Archive-It service to help archive participating blogs since October 2023. This week a deeper integration is launching, linking blog posts to the archived versions in the Rogue Scholar record sidebar, and linking the blog community to the Archive-It collection.
Rogue Scholar is archiving every blog post from participating blogs as HTML and PDF attachment using the PDF/A-3A archival format. The PDFs have the full-text HTML and Schema.org metadata embedded as attachments, making extraction of content and metadata much easier. The PDFs are automatically imported into the Zotero reference manager thanks to a nice intergration with Crossref and OpenAlex.
The Archive-It service archives websites, including blogs, as Web ARCive (WARC) archives, which nicely complements the approach using archival PDFs. In the past few weeks I have worked on an invenio module (invenio-archive-it) that integrates Rogue Scholar \u2013 or any other repository using the InvenioRDM repository platform \u2013 with Archive-it. The module provides two links:
Implementing this for all currently 207 participating blogs will take until the end of the year. Mainly because the process is not yet fully automated and needs some configuration work in the Archive-It web interface. But the end result is long-term archiving of participating science blogs in multiple formats and places, complementing the use of DOIs and metadata for blog posts of participating blogs.
Please reach out via Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have questions about the archiving blog posts.
The inaugural general assembly for the Rogue Scholar non-profit that will govern the science blog archive will take place on December 16, either virtually or in person at the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) in Berlin.
The main purpose of the General Assembly will be to approve the bylaws and elect officers, both needed by German law to start a non-profit. The registration form and agenda will follow in the next two weeks, but I want to give people to plan in advance, in particular so close to the holidays. There will be time to discuss topics of general interest to the science blogging community, and I look forward to topic suggestions.
Please reach out via Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have questions about the General Assembly.
Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web. When Wave was first announced May 28 at the Google I/O conference, many people immediately saw its potential as a great collaboration tool for scientists:
We based our first impressions on the material available online, especially the video of the Google Wave presentation at Google I/O. The problem is, Wave is currently only available to selected developers, and will not be generally available until the end of the year. Wave is currently not even beta software and was announced now so that third-party developers have enough time to build (and test) extensions to Wave.
Those of us being invited to SciFoo (which took place July 10-12 at Google) were lucky not only in attending a great conference, but also in getting a Wave account. Wave product manager Steph Hannon gave us an introduction to Wave on the first evening, and Cameron Neylon organized a session about Wave the next day. The session was mainly about the Wave extensions that we scientists would need (and I'm sure that Cameron will blog about that), but we could also ask two developers from the Wave team a lot of questions.
After using Wave for one week, I obviously have a much better feeling for how it can help scientists to communicate and collaborate. The best way to start is to think of Wave as email on steroids. Wave is web-based (which means that it currently only works when you have an internet connection) with a nice interface similar to Gmail or other webmail products. One big advantage over email is that all reply messages are directly connected to the original message (similar to comments on a blog). This is especially helpful for longer email threads and when more than two people are involved.
But Wave is also instant messaging. You see a small green dot next to your contacts that are currently online, and you can see them typing in real-time (which looks really creepy the first time you see that).
And Wave is also like a Wiki. You can not only respond to a message, but everybody participating in the Wave can also change the original message (and several people can work on the same message simultaneously). This works great for things such as listing all the blog posts about SciFoo.
The combination of wiki-style editing plus comments make Wave an interesting alternative to project management tools such as Basecamp. And this means that Wave can also be used to work on longer documents \u2013 something that the Wave developers regularly do for documentation, etc. Wave documents can also contain images, videos, links, etc. Wave supports different fonts, text colors, bold and italic text, and four different heading levels (for titles and subtitles).
But in contrast to most online collaboration tools, Wave can be extended with additional functionality that scientists require. Bibliographic references would be an obvious example, and here tools such as Google Docs or Adobe Buzzword fall short.
Wave extensions come in the form of gadgets (that work on the client) and robots (that work on the server). Wave gadgets are XML files, whereas robots can currently be developed in either Java or Python. Other programming languages (PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc.) for robots will soon become possible when robots no longer have to be hosted on Google App Engine. Using the tools provided by Google, writing a robot is actually not that difficult and it took me only an hour to have a sample \"Hello World!\" robot running in Wave. It will obviously take weeks or months to develop more sophisticated robots (e.g. for management of bibliographic references), but I'm sure that a number of exciting science-related extensions will be ready by the time Wave becomes publicly available later this year.
We plan a session with a live Wave demo at the Science Online London conference in August so that more scientists and science communicators become familiar with Wave. About 10 people that registered for the conference already have Wave accounts and I hope that some of them will come up with interesting science-related robots or gadgets. If you are a Wave user, you can reach me at mfenner@wavesandbox.com. And if you want to develop great science-related extensions for Wave, please contact Cameron Neylon.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/8ey1pyb-bdqppv7","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/8ey1pyb-bdqppv7","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1247875200,"rid":"q9x05-s9e13","summary":"Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web. When Wave was first announced May 28 at the Google I/O conference, many people immediately saw its potential as a great collaboration tool for scientists:Ricardo Vidal: Using Google Wave to surf the streamsMe: Google Wave \u2013 don't forget the scientistsCameron Neylon: OMG! This changes EVERYTHING!","tags":["Meeting Report"],"title":"Using Google Wave for a week \u2013 it's still great!","updated_at":1790920423,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/posts/using-google-wave-for-a-week-its-still-great/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Martin Fenner","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"community_id":"15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8","created":1672531200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/front_matter","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/atom","filter":null,"generator":"Ghost","home_page_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/","issn":"2749-9952","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.53731","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"front_matter","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"Front Matter","updated":1791802965,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Front Matter","blog_slug":"front_matter","content_html":"This is the February 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.
No blog was added in February. This leaves the number of participating blogs to 190, the number of archived posts has grown to 49,342 \u2013 Rogue Scholar is getting closer to the big milestones of 200 participating blogs with 50,000 posts!
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.
One focus of the technical work in February was on translations \u2013 the Rogue Scholar website is now translates into 11 languages with blog posts in nine languages. The translations still need lots of refinements but include many areas that were previously not translated, e.g. the sidebar on the homepage, footer, and subject areas. The homepage now shows the most recent posts in the selected language:
As you can see in the screenshot, the landing page now also shows summary statistics that were previously available on a separate dashboard page. All numbers use live data, and clicking on them returns a search result for that data.
Rogue Scholar is powered by the InvenioRDM open source repository software, and last week the InvenioRDM community met for its annual partner meeting in Graz, Austria. Watch the Invenio blog \u2013 also archived in Rogue Scholar \u2013 for a report in the coming weeks. One important topic was the next major release (v14) of the software in June. Rogue Scholar is running the latest pre-release version of the software \u2013 see the Rogue Scholar footer for the current version.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive continues to grow, with seven new blogs added this month and more than 24,000 archived blog posts. Luckily, onboarding new blogs is mostly automated, with the Rogue Scholar API handling the blog setup and blog post ingestion from RSS feeds.
Some questions frequently come up and I try to improve the Rogue Scholar documentation to address them. Email is central to the onboarding process and when questions arise later. I like the interaction via email, as I learn to know the blog authors and their specific usage cases. These emails rarely contain sensitive information, so they could also be handled in a public forum using a platform such as Discord, Slack, Mattermost, Discourse, or GitHub Discussions. This has the benefit of addressing the same question to a group of blog authors, and blog authors bringing in their specific perspective, e.g. with a particular blogging platform.
This week I started a Rogue Scholar Slack community to enable these group conversations. The community is free to join via this link, which also appears on the footer of every Rogue Scholar page. The community has two channels: #general for announcements and general discussion and #help for specific questions and issues regarding Rogue Scholar. Please join the new Slack community if you have questions and/or are interested in giving feedback regarding new features of the Rogue Scholar platform. We can add more channels if more specific needs arise, e.g. for particular languages (German, Spanish, and French are the most popular languages besides English), or specific blogging platforms (WordPress, Hugo, Blogger, and Jekyll are the most popular platforms).
This blog is a good source to follow the development of the Rogue Scholar platform and it can be read via RSS feed or email newsletter. For people who prefer less frequent updates than the roughly one new post per week, I am starting a monthly newsletter that you can subscribe to separately with a first issue planned this Thursday. You can subscribe here.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/f117g-8r09","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/f117g-8r09","image":"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2025/01/newsletter.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1737936000,"rid":"tht2p-y5c55","summary":"The Rogue Scholar science blog archive continues to grow, with seven new blogs added this month and more than 24,000 archived blog posts. Luckily, onboarding new blogs is mostly automated, with the Rogue Scholar API handling the blog setup and blog post ingestion from RSS feeds. Some questions frequently come up and I try to improve the Rogue Scholar documentation to address them.","tags":["Rogue Scholar"],"title":"Starting a Rogue Scholar monthly newsletter and Slack Community","updated_at":1790920423,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/posts/starting-rogue-scholar-monthly-newsletter-slack/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Martin Fenner","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"community_id":"15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8","created":1672531200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/front_matter","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/atom","filter":null,"generator":"Ghost","home_page_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/","issn":"2749-9952","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.53731","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"front_matter","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"Front Matter","updated":1791802965,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Front Matter","blog_slug":"front_matter","content_html":"Next week the InvenioRDM community will meet in Hamburg for five days to discuss the open source repository platform. Front Matter has been part of the InvenioRDM community since August 2021, and Rogue Scholar relaunched on the InvenioRDM platform in October 2024.
The last workshop of the InvenioRDM partners took place in March 2024 in M\u00fcnster, so this is the first meetup where I am running a production instance of InvenioRDM. I hope to share some of the things I learned running Rogue Scholar, talk about the customizations that may be of interest to other InvenioRDM instances, and ask many questions. On the first day of the workshop we will have a session where InvenioRDM instances can present the highlights of what they are doing in 5 minutes, and today I have uploaded my slides to Zenodo, which is of course the repository where it all started. Here are some of the special Rogue Scholar features I want to highlight:
Some of the questions I have for the InvenioRDM community include:
If you are a Rogue Scholar user and have topics or questions I should discuss in Hamburg, let me know via email or Slack.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has improved the subject classification of blog posts, using an open approach to subject classification developed by CWTS and OpenAlex, and combining this with the widely used OECD Fields of Science.
Classification of scholarly works into defined subject areas is important for two groups of use cases:
A good example of the first use case is a study recently published by Catharina Ochser and colleagues about scholarly blogs in Germany, and one of the main outcomes was the disciplinary distribution of these blogs:
The majority of the blogs they found were in the humanities and social sciences. One important reason for this is de.hypotheses, the German-language version of the large blog portal Hypotheses, offering hosting and other services to humanities and social sciences blogs.
Five years ago in the Make Data Count project, we were interested in the subject classification of research data, as usage of datasets is highly dependent on community size and community standards. One big problem was that the standardized subject classification of datasets was mostly lacking, so we started making this easier for DataCite members: push for the OECD Fields of Science as the standard subject area vocabulary that can be mapped from other vocabularies, and show the OECD Fields of Science as a facet in the search results of DataCite Search.
The second use case is primarily driven by readers. After reading an interesting science blog post, they might want to read more posts with similar content. Or they have an idea about the content they are looking for, but it is poorly described using keywords. Blogging platforms have long provided this functionality, but have been limited to a single blog and have used old technology, rather than semantic search.
Rogue Scholar launched OECD Fields of Science subject area support for every blog post in February of this year. While this was a good start, there were three significant shortcomings:
When submitting a blog to be archived by Rogue Scholar, one of only a few questions I ask blog authors is for the subject area of their blog using the OECD Fields of Science list. Similar to the subject classification of journals rather than journal articles (which, unfortunately is more often done), this approach has limitations, in particular for multidisciplinary blogs/journals. One prominent example in Rogue Scholar is the SVPOW blog, which has been writing about sauropods since October 2007, but also frequently publishes about Open Access.
The six top-level and 42 second-level subject areas in the OECD Fields of Science are good enough for many high-level questions, such as R&D spending or doctoral students per country and/or over time. But for more fine-grained questions, more granularity in the subject classification is needed. There are for example almost 20,000 social science and almost 5,000 computer and information science blog posts in Rogue Scholar, which give a very broad picture.
Using a more granular subject area classification applied to each publication is a major challenge, as can for example be seen in the major curation effort needed to classify the biomedical literature into Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) at PubMed.
The third major limitation is that publishers can't easily distribute subject classification information, as Crossref metadata can't hold that information. DataCite is better in this regard, but unfortunately subject area metadata is still only included in a small fraction of DataCite DOIs.
For Rogue Scholar, I always envisioned a semi-automated approach based on machine learning and human curation of edge cases. Having the full-text of all blog posts available in machine-readable form makes this possible, but picking the right subject area classification and building a classification workflow from scratch are still major challenges.
The ideal subject area classification is more granular than OECD, covers all scholarly disciplines, is widely used (and documented), and openly available. My main candidate five years ago, when I did the subject area work for DataCite, was the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) Fields of Research with more than 1000 subject areas, and used for example by the repository Figshare. The German Research Foundation (DFG) Subject Areas used by the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data), on the other hand, have some limitations, primarily that they were developed for a different use case - panels for grant evaluation.
The CWTS/OpenAlex classification announced in January 2024 with about 4500 topics categorized into subfields and fields that map to the All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) is a very attractive alternative, especially since OpenAlex uses it, makes an open API available, and more importantly makes the pre-trained model available for download with an Apache 2.0 open source license. This makes it straightforward to run the classifier on Rogue Scholar infrastructure and not depend on external APIs with associated costs and rate-limits.
In January 2025, OpenAlex published a blog post describing the mapping of OpenAlex subfields to the OECD Fields of Science, providing a bridge to the widely used OECD classification.
Like many interesting collaborations, a conversation with Nees Jan van Eck from CWTS at a Dagstuhl seminar on Open Scholarly Information Systems in September was the trigger for me to finally start the work on using machine learning to classify Rogue Scholar blog posts into subject areas.
Two months later I now have a classifier running with the CWTS/OpenAlex model provided via Hugging Face, and integrated into the Rogue Scholar infrastructure.
The InvenioRDM repository platform that powers Rogue Scholar has built-in subject classification with the OECD Fields of Science since v6.o released in August 2021, but this can easily be extended with custom vocabularies. Rogue Scholar now has these four hierarchical OpenAlex vocabularies built in:
Any InvenioRDM instance can install these vocabularies in yaml format and make them available in the record editor and API, and I will also include them in the InvenioRDM Starter pre-built Docker image.
I have used the subfields (that map to ASJC) to classify all participating blogs, and updated the Rogue Scholar submission form to use the OpenAlex subfields instead of the OECD Fields of Science. Please fill out the form (also linked from the footer of every Rogue Scholar page) if you don't agree with the suggested subfield (multiple subfields are not yet supported).
Rogue Scholar has created communities for each of the 252 subfields, and has reused existing OECD subject communities where it makes sense. It will take a few weeks before all blog posts are properly sorted into these new OpenAlex subfield communities.
The OpenAlex classifier is now running in the Rogue Scholar infrastructure and has started classifying using the blog post title and abstract (as the model was trained with this information). After classifying a few hundred blog posts, I found a score of at least 0.25 to be a good cutoff. With lower scores the number of false-positives was too high, whereas with higher scores (e.g. 0.40) the number of false-negatives was too high. More systematic testing of cutoff scores will follow in a few months, but it is clear that more than half of the classified posts currently have a score that is too low, and false-positives have to be removed. An example of the latter is a post about the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information that was classified as topic Optics and Image Analysis with a score of 0.40.
What I found so far is that non-English language posts classify well (14% are in other languages), and that posts that can't be classified are often not sciency enough, e.g. they talk about an upcoming webinar or general tools or techniques.
The OpenAlex subfield(s) are then mapped to OECD Fields of Science using the mapping from OpenAlex to link Rogue Scholar blog posts to systems using that subject classification.
The subfield of the blog and the topic of the post, together with the corresponding topic subfield(s) and OECD Fields of Science (FOS) are shown in the sidebar of the Rogue Scholar post \u2013 again it will take a few weeks to generate this information for all posts.
The post is also added to the corresponding subfield communities, in the example above Information Systems and Conservation. The community ID corresponds to the OpenAlex subfield ID (here 1206), and OpenAlex IDs can also be used in Rogue Scholar Search:
Similarly you can click on the OECD FOS or Topic in the sidebar to trigger a Rogue Scholar Search by that OECD FOS or OpenAlex Topic, respectively. In the latest version, search results are automatically sorted by publication date rather than best match.
As I mentioned before, the next few months will be spent updating the subject classification data, improving the automatic subject classification, and generally respond to user feedback. I am also happy to share this work \u2013 both the OpenAlex subject vocabularies and self-hosted machine learning model \u2013 with other InvenioRDM instances.
For community validation I wrote an integration into the Rogue Scholar Slack (join via this link) using the workflow automation service n8n, also self-hosted on Rogue Scholar infrastructure.
As this might also be of interest to other repositories running the InvenioRDM software, I also built a similar integration into the Inveniosoftware Discord server, testing the classification with a few Zenodo records:
As I am using the same metadata and classifier model as OpenAlex, I can compare their classifications \u2013 all Rogue Scholar posts should be archived in OpenAlex. The example post Reinvestigating the reported transition state structure of a concerted triple H-tunneling mechanism was classified into topic Chemical Reactions and Isotopes by both OpenAlex and Rogue Scholar. Also interesting is a systematic comparison of abstracts and full-text for classifier input, preliminary testing didn't show much difference, and the model was trained with abstracts.
Finally, this approach (OpenAlex subfield and topic classification and pre-trained model made available with an open license) can also work for other Crossref members interested in subject classification, and might convince Crossref to add subject area classification to the metadata schema, something the recently launched Crossref Metadata Advisory Group is thinking about.
In 2026 Rogue Scholar will use this new infrastructure to address important use cases around Understanding and Discovery.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding this work, and join the Rogue Scholar Slack if you want to provide feedback on concrete classifications.
This is the November 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.
Two blogs were added in November. Welcome! These two blogs have special meaning for me, as I am on the dblp Steering Committee, and Front Matter is an InvenioRDM project partner, with the software powering the Rogue Scholar repository platform. This brings the number of participating blogs to 187, and the number of archived posts to 47,882.
A blog about the dblp computer science bibliography.
Information Systems, English.
https://blog.dblp.org/
Follow news and updates from the Invenio community.
Information Systems, English.
https://inveniosoftware.org/
The focus of the technical work in November was on improving subject classification, described in detail in a blog post this week. Rogue Scholar is migrating from the OECD Fields of Science to the CWTS/OpenAlex subject classification and uses automatic topic classification based on blog post title and abstract. 7,695 blog posts have already been classified, with 28.8% having a score of at least 0.25. Those topics are being displayed and linked in Rogue Scholar:
Following the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) self-assessment in October, Rogue Scholar in November started work on becoming a German non-profit organization in 2026. The process will take a few months, and many details have yet to be worked out.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments.
Social media and privacy have a complicated relationship, as using social media implies giving up at least some privacy. And the value of a social networking site is directly related not only to the number of users, but also the extend of personal data that the site has collected. All this is of course not unique to social networking tools for scientists, but conducting science using online tools is different from connecting to friends or people with similar personal interests with these tools. One area where privacy issues are particularly prominent is the creation of unique identifiers for scientists, and here I'm involved in the ORCID initiative. We need a discussion about required privacy standards, and about the limitations of privacy that we accept in order to increase our scientific productivity.
I've collected a couple of thoughts below. They are of course only starting points for a discussion, and I welcome any comments and suggestions.
Social networking sites for scientists can be quite useful for anonymous users, e.g. for reading of blog or forum posts. Users should not be required to sign up for a service just for reading a public message or looking at the public part of a user profile. Many social networking sites unfortunately require a user account these activities, and they often nag users to \"complete their personal profiles\", i.e. to provide as much personal information as possible.
I've randomly checked five social networking sites for scientists, and they all provide a privacy policy:
The privacy policy should make clear what user data the service is collecting, whether the service is providing these user data to third parties, and should provide an email address for further privacy questions.
All personal data that a user uploads should be owned by the user, and the privacy policy should make this clear. This implies that a user should be allowed to cancel an account and delete all personal information (surprisingly difficult with most social networking sites), and that the user decides which part of the personal data is shared with others, and with whom.
To give users control over their privacy settings, these settings should default to not being public for everything beyond the most basic information, and they should not change over time (The Evolution of privacy on Facebook).
Obviously, there is a large grey area. If I comment on a blog post by someone else, who owns this comment, and who should be allowed to delete this comment \u2013 me, the author of the blog post, and/or the provider of the social networking site? And who owns my usage data of a service, how often I logged in, my activity in the service, etc.?
The social networking site should make all efforts necessary to protect the personal data of a user. There are examples where this has gone wrong, and this includes examples involving scientists (Fake Facebook pages spin web of deceit).
Update 5/25/10: I didn't see it when I wrote the post, but last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users (thanks to Renny Guida for the link).
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw53","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw53","image":"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2022/08/2404940312_e759c4030d.jpeg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1274659200,"rid":"bzs05-bfg71","summary":"Social media and privacy have a complicated relationship, as using social media implies giving up at least some privacy. And the value of a social networking site is directly related not only to the number of users, but also the extend of personal data that the site has collected.","tags":["Feature"],"title":"On Privacy","updated_at":1790920422,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/posts/on-privacy/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Martin Fenner","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"community_id":"15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8","created":1672531200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/front_matter","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/atom","filter":null,"generator":"Ghost","home_page_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/","issn":"2749-9952","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.53731","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"front_matter","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"Front Matter","updated":1791802965,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Front Matter","blog_slug":"front_matter","content_html":"This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has received two important updates: full-text search becomes the default search configuration, and blog authors can now self-manage basic settings of their Rogue Scholar blog community.
Rogue Scholar has long supported full-text search of all its content. With this update, users no longer have to specify that they want to search in the full-text content using the content: prefix. All queries now automatically search the full-text, e.g. this query for the term xanadu: https://rogue-scholar.org/search?q=xanadu.
You still can specify content: if you want to search only in the full-text, similar to how you can specify other fields to search in. And you can search either all of Rogue Scholar or a specific community. See the Rogue Scholar search guide for details.
With the latest update the basic settings of Rogue Scholar blog communities can be managed by blog authors. They need a Rogue Scholar account and have to accept an invitation (send an email) as manager of the blog community. The basic blog settings (name, short description, website, and profile picture) are automatically extracted from the blog RSS feed. Still, they can be overridden in the blog community form, for example to add a profile picture if that is not included in the feed.
Registration of new blogs still requires filling out a separate form (found here), and the automatic blog post extraction can't be configured in the community form. Blog community managers also can't update their posts in Rogue Scholar, but they can submit their blog posts to one or more topic communities (such as R or Book Review) using the Communities sidebar settings.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding these updates.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/jeatk-t8t07","guid":"https://doi.org/10.53731/jeatk-t8t07","image":"https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1472512946974-cc09a294e210?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDIwfHxzZWFyY2h8ZW58MHx8fHwxNzUzODkyMzE1fDA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1753833600,"rid":"emsb2-fwt40","summary":"This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has received two important updates: full-text search becomes the default search configuration, and blog authors can now self-manage basic settings of their Rogue Scholar blog community.Full-text search as default Rogue Scholar has long supported full-text search of all its content.","tags":["Rogue Scholar"],"title":"Rogue Scholar Updates: full-text search as default and basic blog self-management","updated_at":1790920422,"url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/posts/rogue-scholar-updates-full-text-search-blog-self-management/","version":"v1"}],"out_of":641,"page":1,"per_page":10,"total-results":641}