RSS on Crossref

Scholarly blogs and their place in the research nexus

Lena Stoll — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you are reading this blog on our website, you may have noticed that alongside each post we now list a Crossref DOI link, which was not the case a few months ago (though we have retroactively added DOIs to all older posts too). You can find the persistent link for this post right above this paragraph. Go on, click on it, we’ll wait.

Are you back here? Good. As you probably expected, the DOI link for this post resolves to the post itself, and you should use it anytime you want to cite this post. But the DOI does more than just point readers to this page––it is part of a rich metadata record that includes the authors’ ORCID iDs, the publication date, and more. In other words, the posts on this blog are part of what we call the research nexus: the open network of relationships connecting research outputs, people, organisations, and actions.

Crossref research nexus vision

Why blogs deserve a place in the scholarly record

A blog post may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of scholarly outputs. But scholarly blogs have been around since at least the early 2000s and have carved out a niche for themselves as a type of “grey literature” that allows researchers to write about research in a way that may not fit neatly into more traditional, peer-reviewed publishing venues, but also is too long-form for social media. Science blogs can give readers a window into ongoing work that isn’t ready to publish yet, serve as a self-publishing venue, or allow researchers to comment on others’ work and recent developments in science and science communication. These kinds of perspectives add crucial context to the scholarly record that should not be overlooked.

However, as Martin Fenner explained at the #Crossref2023 annual meeting, blogs have largely not benefitted from the metadata and long-term archiving solutions that tend to be applied to more “traditional” forms of publishing. As a result, most blogs have been left out of the scholarly record. But in recent years, there have been some efforts in the community to change this. Earlier this year, ORCID added support for the work type blog post, among others, to align more closely with the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) vocabulary of resource types.

At our 2025 midyear community update, we asked our community what content types they saw as growing in importance. Blog posts were mentioned several times as a ‘trending’ record type, and as one that members would like to see support for in the Crossref system.

Eating our own dog food

We had already been thinking for a while about how our own blog should be a part of the research nexus. We started out by manually uploading XML files through our Admin tool for each post. We did this for a few months and quickly found, like many of our members do, that this can be a laborious and error-prone process.

In the product management world, the process of using the products you usually spend your time building and maintaining is often referred to as dogfooding. The idea is that firsthand experience makes it easier to understand your end users’ needs and feel their pain - and we have certainly found that registering metadata for our blog posts has reinforced the importance of making manual registration easier for our members, but also of supporting and enabling machine-to-machine integrations.

What did we do?

The Crossref website, which includes this blog, uses an open-source static site generator named Hugo. Rather than using a content management system (CMS), we edit the website content in Markdown format using code editors. Whenever we start working on a post for this blog, we not only write the content of the post itself, but also include some front matter for the page, which contains some key metadata about the post.

The front matter of a recent post on this blog

We wanted this metadata to be part of the research nexus. But then there was also the question of archiving. Our membership terms state that:

The Member shall use best efforts to contract with a third-party archive or other content host (an “Archive”) (a list of which can be found here) for such Archive to preserve the Member’s Content and, in the event that the Member ceases to host the Member’s Content, to make such Content available for persistent linking.

So we knew that if this blog was to be part of the scholarly record, we would need to ensure that it would be available in perpetuity, even if www.crossref.org were to go offline one day.

Doing this properly was starting to look like a sizeable project!

Fortunately, we knew that others had already done some great work in this field, so we would not have to start from scratch. After considering our options, we opted to integrate our blog with an established workflow for registering blog metadata: the Rogue Scholar service.

The Rogue Scholar was launched in 2023 by Martin Fenner as an archive for scholarly blog posts, hosted by Front Matter. Rogue Scholar improves science blogs in important ways, including full-text search, long-term archiving, and DOIs and metadata, such as versions and relationships along with identifiers such as ORCID iDs and ROR IDs. It provides the necessary tools to treat blog posts as research outputs through better attribution, preservation, and discoverability.

How did we do it?

Rogue Scholar works on the basis of consuming RSS and ATOM feeds (you may remember them from the days of getting headlines direct to your browser or feed reader). We created a new feed, including the proposed DOI as each entry’s id: and taking full advantage of the ATOM format by listing the post’s authors and including their ORCID iDs. We also provide the entire post as the entry’s <content> to allow for full-text indexing and archiving.

The XML feed entry for a recent post on this blog

For each post, we generate and assign a unique DOI under the Crossref prefix 10.64000. The Rogue Scholar integration then registers the DOI along with the metadata of the post as posted content. If you are interested in getting a similar workflow set up for your blog, you can read more in the Rogue Scholar blog and documentation.

What does the future hold for scholarly blogs?

Researchers are increasingly sharing their early work, or commenting on others’ work, in less formal ways, and if you look at the growth in the number of blogs covered in the Rogue Scholar platform in just a couple of years, it seems like science blogging is here to stay and will only increase. We believe that this practice is an integral part of a healthy scholarly ecosystem, and it needs to be represented in the research nexus.

The Crossref input schema does not include a blog work type, but we are planning to add it as a subtype of posted content in our next schema update. We will discuss this and other plans and ideas in the metadata advisory group that we are currently forming.

If you have thoughts on the role of blogs in the public discourse around science and science communications, or you would like to share your experience of registering metadata for your blog, let us know by commenting below. Your comments will be threaded in our community forum for discussion.

Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers

Geoffrey Bilder — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that a Crossref working group has released a set of best practice recommendations for scholarly publishers producing RSS feeds.

Variations in practice amongst publisher feeds can be irritating for end-users, but they can be insurmountable for automated processes. RSS feeds are increasingly being consumed by knowledge discovery and data mining services. In these cases, variations in date formats, the practice of lumping all authors together in one <dc:creator> element, or generating invalid XML can render the RSS feed useless to the service accessing it.

The recommendations intended to facilitate good practice in the production and provision of TOC RSS Feeds. The guidelines include general recommendations for good practice, specific recommendations on the use of RSS Modules and an example RSS TOC feed. Ultimately, we expect that industry wide adoption of these best practices will help drive more traffic to publisher web sites. Note that most of these recommendation can also be applied to non-TOC RSS feeds such as thematic feeds, automated search result feeds, etc.

Real PRISM in the RSS Wilds

Tony Hammond — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Alf Eaton just posted a real nice analysis of ticTOCs RSS feeds. Good to see that almost half of the feeds (46%) are now in RDF and that fully a third (34%) are using PRISM metadata to disclose bibliographic fields.

The one downside from a Crossref point of view is that these feeds are still using the old PRISM version (1.2) and not the new version (2.0) which was released a year ago and blogged here. That version supports the elements prism:doi for the bare DOI, as well as prism:url for the DOI proxy server URL.

There are still some improvements to be made in serving up these feeds (as Alf’s analysis shows for record type), but overall things are looking pretty good. 🙂

RSS Good Practice Guidelines

Tony Hammond — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I just wanted to flag up here Lisa Rogers’ recent review article on RSS in FUMSI (the online magazine for information professionals published by Free Pint Ltd)

RSS and Scholarly Journal Tables of Contents: the ticTOCs Project, and Good Practice Guidelines for Publishers

Especially of interest is the diagram in Fig. 2 which breaks out the metadata elements that might be encountered in a rich web feed. Worthwhile pointing out that this reflects current practice and that under the item elements one would soon hope to see publishers routinely adding in prism:doi (with the bare DOI as value) and prism:url (with DOI target URL as value) from the PRISM 2.0 vocabulary published earlier this year. Publishers should also be aware of the new PRISM Usage Rights vocabulary which is expected to be published some time in the new year.

mod_prism (Updated)

Tony Hammond — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just put up for comment a revised mod_prism (0.3) of the existing mod_prism RSS 1.0 module. This is now updated to the current PRISM version (v2.0) which was released in February ’08 and reissued with Errata in July ’08. The current mod_prism draft is registered here.

The new draft charts all (five) versions of the PRISM specification (v1.0-v2.0) and maps PRISM terms to RSS 1.0 elements. Though not required as such for use of terms within an RSS 1.0 feed, an RSS 1.0 module does allow for easy housekeeping as well as providing usage guidelines and examples for how to use PRISM terms within an RSS 1.0 feed.

The main interest for Crossref members will be the opportunity to update their current RSS 1.0 feeds to include the new PRISM terms prism:doi and prism:url. I blogged earlier here about prism:doi as it first appeared. The suggestions I put forward there were subsequently incorporated into the Errata for 2.0 which were published in July and are avaliable as a zip file here.

I would be very interested in receiving any feedback. I guess I should add to the v1.2 example of an RSS item in the draft an example also of a v2.0 RSS item which makes use of both prism:doi and prism:url.

RSC’s Project Prospect v1.1

rkidd — Thu, 31 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We updated our Project Prospect articles today to release v1.1, with a pile of look & feel improvements to the HTML views and links. The most interesting technical addition is the launch of our enhanced RSS feeds, where we have updated our existing feeds for enhanced articles. These now include ontology terms and primary compounds both visually (as text terms and 2D images) and within the RDF - using the OBO in OWL representation and the info:inchi specification mentioned here by Tony only a few weeks ago.

The enhanced entries will soon become more common as we concentrate our enhancements on our Advance Articles, but the current example below from our Photochemical and Photobiological Sciences feed is lovely. RDF code after the jump - just as beautiful to the parents…

So the RDF code for the OBO terms and InChIs looks like this:

<tt><br /> <rdf:li><br /> <content:item rdf:about="info:inchi/InChI=1/C20H28O/c1-16(8-6-9-17(2)13-15-21)11-12-19-18(3)10-7-14-20(19,4)5/h6,8-9,11-13,15H,7,10,14H2,1-5H3/b9-6-,12-11+,16-8+,17-13+"/><br /> </rdf:li><br /> <rdf:li><content:item rdf:about="http://purl.org/obo/owl/CL#CL:0000210"/><br /> </rdf:li><br /> </tt>

We now have over five hundred 2007 articles enhanced, so we’ve brought the majority back into controlled access. There are always examples from each journal freely available.

New-Look Web Feeds from Nature

Tony Hammond — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I just posted this entry on Nascent, Nature’s Web Publishing blog, about Nature’s new look for web feeds which essentially boils down to our using the RSS 1.0 ‘mod_content’ module to add in a rich content description for human consumption to complement our long-standing commitment to machine-readable descriptions. We are thus able to deliver full citation details in our RSS feeds as XHTML in CDATA sections for humans and as DC/PRISM properties for machines, the whole encoded in our feed format of choice - RSS 1.0. Note also that we declared our intention to publish parallel feeds in Atom which again will carry both human- and machine-readable citations. Further details on the RSS 1.0/Atom paired feeds will be posted here in the near future.

Perhaps of special note we have added in the DOI in our descriptions in standard Crossref citation format and linked it to the DX resolver.

Remixing RSS

Tony Hammond — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Niall Kennedy has a post about the newly released Yahoo! Pipes. As he says:

“Yahoo! Pipes lets any Yahoo! registered user enter a set of data inputs and filter their results. You might splice a feed of your latest bookmarks on del.icio.us with the latest posts from your blog and your latest photographs posted to Flickr.”

He also warns about possible implications for web publishers:

“Yahoo! Pipes makes it easy to remove advertising from feeds or otherwise reformat your content.”

Note: As yet, I have not been able to access the site. Interested to learn if anybody else has and what their experiences have been.

RSS Validator in the Spotlight

Tony Hammond — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Sam Ruby responds to Brian Kelly’s post about the RSS Validator and its treatment of RSS 1.0, or rather, RSS 1.0 modules. As Ruby notes:

“There is no question that RSS 1.0 is widely deployed. RSS 1.0 has a minimal core. The validation for that core is pretty solid.”

Not sure if I’d seen that RSS comparison table before, but it is reassuring. (Oh, and see the really simple case off to the right. 😉

Good point, anyway about contributing test cases. I guess we should really submit a PRISM test case. And yes, the Validator is somewhat buggy as some recent testing confirms. On which more later.

Couple Web Feeds to Note

Tony Hammond — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Sorry to be somewhat backwards, but just in case any folks didn’t already know there’s a couple new feeds set up recently (or at least they’re newish to me 🙂

News from STM (from the STM Association)
- eFoundations (from Andy Powell and Pete Johnston at Eduserv Foundation in the UK)

Wiley Does RSS, Too!

Tony Hammond — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This post blogged by Rafael Sidi at EEI. Wiley are now dishing out RSS feeds. And moreover from a cursory inspection (see e.g. here for the American Journal of Human Biology) it seems like they are putting out RSS 1.0 (RDF) and DC/PRISM metadata. Don’t know if there’s anyone from Wiley who can comment on this. But this really is the best news. (Now, who else can we get to join the party. 😉

[Editor’s update: Link to Wiley was broken and removed. January 2021]