Importing Journal Archives

[breckenr]

Dear OJS community.

First let me say thank you for an extraordinarily useful and well designed publishing tool.

I do, inevitably, have a problem. My university is considering OJS as a tool for publishing all the locally supported journals; there are many reasons why it would work well to do this. However, the process of importing past issues into archives for each journal (which is where much of the value of the online journal project resides) is very difficult.

Most of these journals have spreadsheets or MS Access databases of their old content. I've found that generating XML sheets to comply with the OJS native.dtd is far too difficult to be able to recommend that each journal committee take it on. I've tried to work through http://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?t=731&highlight=import+xml
but can't see that this will work either. On the other hand, there must, surely, be hundreds of journals with similar problems. I'd be very interested to hear what solution people have adopted. It'd also be good to hear if there are plans to simplify the process of importing archives. Allowing imports from an open-source bibliographic tool would be a particularly useful feature.

Yours, with thanks,

keith

[ramon]

Keith,

Our experience in Brasil is that most journals do not have a "system" with database to hold their data. The easiest way to load the previous issues is to simulate the submission process and jumping unecessary steps (this worked fine for version 1.1.10). Haven't tested this process on 2.1.1 yet, but I believe it may be easier, since it allows to create back issues as well.

Registering an Editor as Author will make the process easier, as s/he can upload the files, fill in the Metadata, and then remove the first author, who should be the Editor.

In your case, I would try as hard as possible to create a script that generates the content in the DTD required, since you have it in a database.