About twice 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.

For this installment, Richard González Alberto of MediSur gives us his thoughts about OJS.

Who we are:

Richard González Alberto, Programmer/Analyst; and editors and staff at MediSur.

Our path to this software was:

The idea of implementing OJS in MediSur was born at our sponsoring institution Infomed, which after a long search on the internet, thought OJS would make a good journal management system for all Cuban medical journals. After some digging on my part, and after I studied OJS to its core I concluded it was indeed the right software for what we intended to do.

The features that help us in particular include:

The online submission system is extremely useful, the online editorial process, reviewers forms were the main features why we selected OJS in the first place. Then, the export/import plugins simplified the export process of the journals to international repositories as much as a single click. OJS structure makes it very easy to develop new plugins, templates, pages, etc.

Features we would love to see in this software include:

• As for the editorial process, improve of the reviewers listing. Find a better way to store them, because it’s very hard to find a good reviewer when assigning a new article.
• OJS should store an article’s full text on its database, my Articles Extras generic Plugin tries to add this functionality, yet it would be better if it was embedded in the editorial process. This would help to add new export plugins for repositories who need the article’s full text.
• If the functionality described above was added, OJS should also add automatic generated galleys. This would eliminate typos, citations problems, and other galleys common issues.
• I see that OJS 2.3 has a new functionality to add references to articles, yet I think it’s very simple. There are many standards to make a reference and a common problem when writing an article is the correct format of these references. But if we split them and add part by part of the reference (like I do on the Articles Extras Plugin), then this should eliminate these common mistakes.

[We have good news for Richard: citation parsing and extraction, as well as full galley generation from XML (including HTML and PDF rendering) is part of our ongoing development plan. See the Lemon8 Roadmap for more details. -Ed.]

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

• We developed the Vancouver Citation Plugin.
• We translated the OJS Help to Spanish.
• We developed the Articles Extras Plugin which adds extra data to the journal articles such as Body, Images and Citations.
• We developed the SciELO export Plugin to export full journal contents to the SciELO Repository.
• We developed multiple blocks which shows where the journal is indexed, documentation, etc. An example can be seen here.
• We made extensive changes to the default look of OJS.
• We are currently working on a Plugin which will show dynamic HTML, PDF and ZIP Galleys, taking advantage of the new functionalities provided by the Articles Extras Plugin.
• We are currently helping to migrate a large number of Cuban journals to OJS.