When checking out my Google Scholar profile today, I noticed that, if a blog post is cited, it will be counted as an article by Google Scholar. This is interesting for several perhaps conflicting reasons:
- These items are (often) not digitally preserved and have unstable URLs
- These items are not peer reviewed (does this matter? probably not)
- These items are not "amplified" by traditional publishers
- These items are not locatable through traditional library discoverability channels
- These items are not deposited in institutional repositories (and eprints has no "blog post" option) [this would aid with point #1 if it did]
These are just observations, not criticisms and certainly not meant to start another meta discussion. I was just intrigued that Google just went and counted it. If the preservation options were sorted, this would be an extremely interesting development...
However, a little further digging reveals that I'm not the only one thinking about this. C. Titus Brown wrote a python script to use the FigShare API to deposit a blog post on their site, to assign it a DOI (which is not to do with citeability) and to get it safely preserved in the CLOCKSS archive.
Edit:
Here's a proposed mock-up of how this could work (if you felt like translating posts into JATS XML):
Cite this article
Please include the DOI in your citation: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.942283
You can view this post's XML with lens.