About once a month PKP will send a list of general questions to a user of our software who is doing interesting things, such as publishing in interesting ways; special customizations; plugin or development work; extended institutional integration work; and so on. The resulting questionnaire will be published on this page, and publicized on our blog. Prospective candidates for these interviews can send an email to pkp-support [AT] pkp.sfu.ca.

This month, Marc Bria Ramírez of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and the editors and staff at Athenea Digital and Quaderns de Psicologia write about their work with OJS.

Our path to this software was:

We searched the Internet, blogs and forum comments to drive us to some e-magazine management systems. After testing them all, OJS was our choice.

The features that help us in particular include:

Workflow assistance is extremely useful for or magazine stuff, specially the management of the original articles and reviews. OJS is great at facilitating the communication with authors and between the staff at any level (editors, reviewers...).

Features we would love to see in this software include:

Some ideas:

• On-line creation of the magazine: To automatize the creation of the final HTML/PDF of the article (Lemon-8 could be useful in this sense?).
• Interface improvement for workflow: A more visual workflow will let every user (specially authors) to know fast in which step is the article and which will be the next one. We submitted this proposal here.
• More alerts: OJS 2.2.2 was a big improvement in this sense and now the interface helps to localize what need attention, but our staff believe more alerts are needed. For instance, when the author sends the text back to the editor, it's not warned. [Note: Notification management has been extensively updated in the soon-to-be-released OJS 2.3, as has the number of events that trigger notification. -J.M.]
• Dashboard: In this sense ("know what do you need to pay attention"), a dashboard would help to take a fast look of what every role has to be reviewed. [Note: This functionality is also included in OJS 2.3: users will be able to see active tasks for each role by glancing quickly at their user home page. -J.M.]

We have been doing some interesting things with this software. For example:

• We moved to OJS two magazines:
  • Athenea Digital
  • Quaderns de Psicologia (will be released soon)
• We have developed a new thesaurus plugin to integrate OJS with TemaTres.
• We helped to translate OJS to Catalan.
• We created a OJS template page to show where it is indexed, which is very important for online publications.

Thanks to Marc Bria and his team for contributing so much to OJS, and for taking the time to let us know what they are doing! Again, prospective candidates for these interviews can send an email to pkp-support@pkp.sfu.ca.