Catharina Ochsner

Catharina Ochsner, Heinz Pampel

The long-term accessibility and reusability of scholarly knowledge is a central concern of Open Science. Research and infrastructure development in this area have so far focused predominantly on how traditional scientific outputs, such as journal articles, monographs, and conference proceedings, can be preserved and made openly available over time. Alternative forms of scholarly communication such as scholarly blogs, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention, even though they have become an established medium for disseminating research and for fostering dialogue within academia and with the wider public. The lack of preservation of scholarly blogs puts them at a risk of information loss, which poses the threat of leaving a gap in the scholarly record. Prior research has examined how blogs are integrated into information infrastructures and what requirements scholarly bloggers have for an information infrastructure that ensures long-term access to their blogs. What is needed now are recommendations for the implementation of these results into the library practice. Based on a convergent mixed-methods design that merges a quantitative analysis of 866 German scholarly blogs, a qualitative interview study with 13 scholarly bloggers, and an open, participatory review process with the scholarly blogging community, we propose a catalog of requirements for the integration of scholarly blogs into information infrastructures in order to ensure their long-term accessibility, reusability and citeability.

Catharina Ochsner, Heinz Pampel

Scholarly blogs have become an important venue for scholarly communication, yet they remain insufficiently integrated into digital research and information infrastructures, which places their long-term preservation and citability at risk. This study investigates what challenges German scholarly bloggers perceive concerning blog preservation and what requirements they articulate for a sustainable information infrastructure. Drawing on Star and Ruhleder's (1996) dimensions of information infrastructure as a theoretical lens, we conducted and qualitatively analyzed 13 semi-structured interviews with scholarly bloggers. The analysis reveals three connected themes. First, bloggers perceive a structural deficit in institutional responsibility and support: the long-term preservation of blogs is not systematically assumed by libraries, universities, or platforms, while bloggers are not sufficiently supported by their affiliated institutions. Second, bloggers articulate heterogeneous requirements like persistent identifiers, structured metadata, technical interoperability, and organizational sustainability. Third, governance preferences are characterized by distrust toward commercial and public infrastructures, compounded by concerns about geopolitical dependencies on non-European platforms. These findings demonstrate that no single centralized infrastructure can adequately address the diverse and context-dependent needs of bloggers. We argue for a decentralized information infrastructure for scholarly blogs and offer concrete recommendations for information infrastructure facilities, platform providers, bloggers and research performing organizations.