Journal publishing with Eprints: another way

I've been very interested to read about the approach that one of our sister JISC projects at Huddersfield has been taking; Graham Stone documents it on the Huddersfield Open Access Publishing blog.

Whereas SAS Open Journals involves interaction between the Open Journals System and the native SAS-Space Eprints, HOAP instead segments the native Eprints for each journal, thus allowing bespoke browsing and landing pages for each journal, and a tweaked deposit process. It seems like a useful model to be using; and there's room for different approaches.

Open Access journal publishing: a workshop

Bookings for this event are now closed.

Who is it for ?
The day will be of interest to editors of existing print journals considering a move to web publication, or a print-and-web solution.
It is also for prospective editors of new journals looking to start out online.

It will be free of charge, and a sandwich lunch will be provided.


Where and when ?
When: Thursday October 20th 2011
Where: Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU
[nearest tube - Russell Square]

Draft programme

12.10 Arrivals and lunch

13.00 Where to start ? Issues for the prospective new journal (Dr Damien Short, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London)

13.20 Moving from print to web: the journal Amicus Curiae (Steve Whittle & Julian Harris, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London)

13.40 Introducing SAS Open Journals (Dr Peter Webster, School of Advanced Study)

14.10 Break

14.15 Group sessions discussing issues of common concern

15.00 Report back and summing up

15.20 Departures

Social networking extensions for SAS-Space

Thanks to our good friends at ULCC, we have now added the SNEEP suite of social networking extensions to SAS-Space, which can be found at the foot of each item’s page. See it in action here.


Users can now do three new things:

Comments. Once users have created a user account for themselves (easily done), they can then make comments on items in the repository. These are publicly visible, along with the comments of others, and shown as in a forum thread.

Tag. Alongside formal Keywords (from authors and SAS-Space staff), users can add tags of particular relevance for them, and view those of others.



All of these tags together form a ‘folksonomy’, a user-generated way of describing the content, and which can be used as another way of browsing for similar material. A click on a tag reveals a list of other items with the same tag.

Notes. Alongside the public Comments and Tags, users can make notes for their own use, which are private to them.

This is an important part of the Open Journals project, as the next step is to see how we might go about integrating this socially generated material in SAS-Space with the journal interface in OJS.

Making the move from print to web

One of the outputs of this project is a case study, documenting the sorts of issues that are likely to recur when journal editors are thinking about making the transition from print to web. This week I am listening to and reflecting on my recording of an excellent meeting with the Amicus Curiae team; the first of two meetings, part of the preparation for that case study.

Discussion was frank and free, and, not surprisingly, took in the central issue of what the relationship should be between the printed edition, which goes to subscribers, and the later electronic edition, which will be free. How long should the gap be, and how central is the journal to the package that subscribers receive ?

We also discussed some very interesting issues about the relationship of print and web editions in relation to the content itself: might articles in the online edition be longer, and/or be supported by appendices ? What about online-only content ?

All these issues will be addressed in the case study document, which should be available in early September.

Conference: Open access publishing in the arts and humanities

This conference on July 15th, organised at the School of Advanced Study in association with SAS-Space, afforded an opportunity to present the SAS Open Journal project, in a session that also featured several other approaches to OA: a discipline-specific repository, a repository for teaching resources, and a new campus-based OA publishing venture.

It also prompted some useful discussions over coffee, not least with other journal editors looking to compare notes on using the OJS system.

Once all the contributions are in, there will be a report on the conference, taking in reactions and impressions of delegates of several different points of view. The programme is on the SAS-Space blog .

Populating OJS from EPrints

Now that a full complement of Amicus Curiae articles has been loaded into the SAS-Space repository, I have been looking at ways to populate the OJS database automatically using the metadata available in the repository.

We are fortunate, as ever, that EPrints provides a wide range of export formats for individual item records and for sets of records. On the Amicus Curiae Collection page, we can see that EPrints gives us the option to export the metadata for the whole collection as a bibliographic citation (plain text or HTML), in formats for reference management software (Reference Manager, BibTex, EndNote) and in several other bibliographic data formats, including Dublin Core and METS.

However, I've chosen to base our process on the EP3 XML format of EPrints, which I've worked with before (when we migrated SAS-Space from DSpace to EPrints). It is the native EPrints export/import format, and arguably contains the most faithful serialisation of item metadata in the repository.

I've now created an XSLT stylesheet that transforms the EP3 XML for the Amicus Curiae collection into the "native.dtd" XML format which is the native import/export format for OJS. The biggest challenge in XSLT was grouping the journal articles by issue number, as required by the OJS native format, but once I'd found a way to do that, the rest is just fiddling about, as it so often is with metadata mapping.

Once the EP3 XML is transformed to OJS format, then, with a Journal already defined in OJS, we can use the OJS import function to import a complete set of issues, each containing its full complement of articles. It's also possible to include a cover image for each issue (if one is available), and the article in PDF form can either be embedded in the XML using Base64 encoding, or linked-to using a URL. Since our articles are already online in the SAS-Space repository, I used the URL option. (It seems that this imports the object into OJS filestore: we will investigate whether it's possible to prevent this, and have the online journal simply link straight to the item in SAS-Space.)

At the moment the XSLT stylesheet is working for our purposes, but offers the intriguing prospect that it could be enhanced to work over any result set in an EPrints repository, and made available as an EPrints Export Plug-in. This way, anyone wanting to quickly assemble, or reassemble, an online journal in OJS, can do so from articles deposited in a repository.

This could be an attractive scenario for anyone trying to retrospectively assemble an online journal from scans of a printed journal: once the materials are deposited in the repository (with sufficient metadata, of course, and, ideally, OCRed), then the data needed to implement a fully working journal in OJS is only a click away.

Existing OJS journal managers might even choose to manage their deposit and review workflow using the repository, and export to OJS when ready. This project gives us an interesting opportunity to compare the two approaches to item submission workflow, and I hope we'll be able to report back on that later.

Preparing the content

The first task that presents itself is preparing the existing back issues of Amicus Curiae that reside in SAS-Space for ingest into the new OJS system.
The first thing that has presented itself is some wrinkles in the metadata; wrinkles that are easy to miss in a repository setting, but on which OJS will rely to order the journal by volume and issue, and so ruthlessly expose.
The second issue has been 'missing' items; articles that whatever reason were not deposited in SAS-Space at the time, but which create very obvious gaps when presented in the new way - so a happy by-product of preparing for OJS has been cleaner data and a good few new articles for the repository.
We should have finished this particular job by the end of June.