A proposed workflow for the Archive of Informal Astronomy Communications

archive_of_astro_comm.md

• There is an "Archive of Informal Astronomy Communications" (name TBD);
  • The Archive has an editor and board that is backed by astro libraries and the AAS or similar organizations,
  • The Archive is fundamentally a Zenodo curated community,
  • ADS agrees to index the resources of this Zenodo community,
  • Astronomy blogs apply for affiliation with the Archive as authors (or use an arXiv-like endorsement model).
• The blogger posts an article as usual.
• Only if the blogger deems the post to be relevant to scholarly astronomy discourse do they intentionally submit their article to the Zenodo community (i.e., submission is not automatic so that a grad student who normally blogs astronomy research doesn't get that one blog post about a Taylor Swift concert indexed by ADS). This also implies that articles can be retroactively submitted.
  • The submission consists of the post's content. There is no prescribed format, but it should be easily and openly readable, e.g., plaintext/markdown and images or an ipython notebook. A PDF rendering could also be provided, secondarily.
  • The deposition is made through the Archive's community submission form on Zenodo or through the REST API.
  • The Archive accepts the submission with minimal oversight because the blog is affiliated (trusted). This reduces the Archives's operational cost.
  • The blogger gets a DOI for the article and it is up the blogger to put this DOI in the blog's markup.
• ADS indexes the Archive's resources.
• If the Archive editor/board finds a blog breaching its guidelines there is some mechanism for the blog to lose affiliate status and have articles removed from the Zenodo community and ADS.

what about a pull model, in which a blog post gets pulled to Zenodo and DOIed by an author who wants to cite it -- that way we only arxiv and doi the posts that are in fact worthy of citation?

Wouldn't that depend on the licensing? A blog post is intellectual property. In the absence of an open use license, it's copyrighted; I think it likely that pulling it to Zenodo would violate that copyright.

@davidwhogg Interesting mechanism for auto-moderation. The side-benefit of being indexed by ADS is that ADS provides discoverability outside the social media spheres that blog posts and tweets circulate in. So I think there's value in being indexed before being cited. I'd rephrase your pull mechanism as a way for authors to get materials (blogs/tweets/ipython notebooks/whatever) in a citable format, but it would require the original author's permission for the pull to be completed.

Yes, I was imagining an "opt-in" and then "third-party request" as a form of (in some sense) post-publication review.