Published in Front Matter

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive starts 2024 with an important release: all blog posts (more than 13,000) are now available for download in Markdown, ePub, and PDF formats. This builds on work completed in December to store the full text of every Rogue Scholar blog post in Markdown format in the Rogue Scholar backend. Combined with the metadata in YAML format, these posts can now be downloaded via the Rogue Scholar API, e.g.

References

Computer and information sciences

Archiving individual science blog posts

Published

Sometimes we want to preserve a blog post to read or reuse later. There are generic tools for that purpose, including read-it-later apps such as Instapaper or Pocket. For scholarly blog posts, the right place can also be a reference manager, which stores the content and the metadata, especially if a DOI was registered for each blog post. Reference managers can store full-text documents and typically use PDF as the file format.

Computer and information sciences

Archiving Rogue Scholar blogs with the Internet Archive

Published

Blogs participating in the Rogue Scholar science blog archive are now archived in the Internet Archive. Starting November 1st, Rogue Scholar is participating in the Internet Archive Archive-It service and all archived blogs can be found here. Archiving of all blog posts, associated HTML pages, and media will automatically happen every six months, with the first round of archiving well underway.

Computer and information sciences

ePub WordPress plugin released today

Published

The Beyond the PDF workshop took place a little over a week ago. One take-home message for me was that ePub is a very interesting document format for scholarly publishing and has several advantages over PDF. The workshop had a wonderful spirit to do something , and in this spirit I wrote a WordPress plugin that automatically creates ePub files from blog posts.

Natural sciences

Resilience: another advantage of openly-licensed content

Published in A blog by Ross Mounce
Author Ross Mounce

As you may have seen in the news, the British Library has been affected by a significant cyberattack. Many of the digital services it provides have gone down and stayed down for many weeks now, whilst investigations take place. I have a lot of sympathy for the BL staff. As has been observed, public services can be a relatively easy target.