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Martin Fenner

Martin Fenner

Martin Fenner founded Front Matter, an organization that offers software development and hosting for the scholarly community, in August 2021. He launched the science blog archive Rogue Scholar using the InvenioRDM repository platform as a backend in April 2023. He started the metadata standard for scholarly metadata Commonmeta in March 2024.

Martin was the Technical Director of the DOI registration agency DataCite from 2015 until July 2021. Martin helped launch and maintain the infrastructure for the Research Organization Registry (ROR) from 2018 until 2021. From 2012 to 2015 he was the technical lead for the PLOS Article-Level Metrics project. He was an inaugural board member of the ORCID board from 2010 to 2012.

Martin has a medical degree from the Free University of Berlin and is a Board-certified medical oncologist.

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Featured publications

  1. Ochsner, C., Pampel, H., & Fenner, M. (2026, July 28). Ten simple rules for scholarly blogging. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.54900/xn57k-gyw73
  2. Fenner, M., Crosas, M., Grethe, J. S., Kennedy, D., Hermjakob, H., Rocca-Serra, P., Durand, G., Berjon, R., Karcher, S., Martone, M., & Clark, T. (2019). A data citation roadmap for scholarly data repositories. Scientific Data, 6(1), 28. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-019-0031-8
  3. Fenner, M., Oing, C., Dieing, A., Gauler, T., Oechsle, K., Lorch, A., Hentrich, M., Kopp, H. G., Bokemeyer, C., & Honecker, F. (2018). Everolimus in patients with multiply relapsed or cisplatin refractory germ cell tumors: results of a phase II, single-arm, open-label multicenter trial (RADIT) of the German Testicular Cancer Study Group. Journal of Cancer Research and Clinical Oncology, 145(3), 717–723. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00432-018-2752-z
  4. Fenner, M., Lowenberg, D., Jones, M., Needham, P., Vieglais, D., Abrams, S., Cruse, P., & Chodacki, J. (2018). Code of practice for research data usage metrics release 1. PeerJ Inc. https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26505v1
  5. Fenner, M. (2016, December 15). Cool DOI's. https://doi.org/10.5438/55e5-t5c0
  6. Fenner, M. (2016, November 1). Announcing the Organization Identifier Project: a Way Forward. https://doi.org/10.5438/tnhx-54cg
  7. Fenner, M. (2013). What Can Article-Level Metrics Do for You? PLoS Biology, 11(10), e1001687. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001687
  8. Fenner, M., Gómez, C. G., & Thorisson, G. A. (2011). Key Issue: Collective Action for the Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID). Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community, 24(3), 277–279. https://doi.org/10.1629/24277
  9. Fenner, M. (2009, February 17). Author Identifiers: Interview with Geoffrey Bilder. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/ckzhw-fp313
  10. Fenner, M. H., Parrish, J. E., Boyd, Y., Reed, V., MacDonald, M., Nelson, D. L., Isselbacher, K. J., & Shioda, T. (1998). MSG1 (melanocyte-specific gene 1): mapping to chromosome Xq13.1, genomic organization, and promoter analysis. Genomics, 51(3), 401–7. https://doi.org/10.1006/geno.1998.5383