Control of publication date and journal title in the metadat

[vgabler]

Hi, All,

I currently work with several OJS journals that have elected to publish online their back issues, one with 70 years' worth of back issues. I have encountered several problems with how OJS handles the metadata for back issues. For example, the system automatically generates the publication date as the date that the "publish" button is pushed in OJS. As a result, I have to hand edit the CrossRef XML output to fix the dates, and the "how to cite this item" date is incorrect for all 70 years of back issues. I have not yet found a way to correct that. I also have another journal that began publishing new issue under a revised name, but they are also publishing in OJS their back issues that have the old name. I also am editing the CrossRef metadata by hand for now, but do not know how to address the "how to cite" problem. We are also using an ad hoc method for addressing the title difference on an issue-by-issue basis for the Table of Contents display on the Web site.

A possible work around for the date problem would be to have OJS pull the publication date information from the issue data when creating the issue and article metadata, rather than from the date time stamp for when the publish button is pushed. Is it possible to get a patch for this and have this change made for a future version? Could this somehow also be done for the journal title problem as well, perhaps including an issue data field for journal title with the issue title automatically pre-populating with the text from the Journal Title field in step 1 of the Setup section in the Journal Management pages that can also be edited for each issue?

All best,

Vanessa Gabler

[jayfitzsimmons]

Hi,

I have the same issue as Vanessa. Coincidentally I posted a forum post on this topic (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7180) just a few hours apart from Vanessa's post. Neither of our posts have received any replies yet. Does anyone have any advice for us, or news of a bug report?

Thanks,
Jay

[jmacgreg]

Hi Jay and Vanessa,

This has actually come up separately a few times in the past week or so, and we're investigating ways to deal with the problem. As far as we know, the problem only appears when the Expedited Submission or Quick Submit processes are used to publish back issues -- in those cases, the "date published" element is set as the date/time when the issue as a whole has been published within the system. As far as we can tell, this problem doesn't crop up when back issues are imported using the XML Import/Export plugin, which requires that articles include a date_published element, which is in turn used to populate the metadata correctly. I would appreciate it if you could confirm that this is the case for both of you -- that is, if you could let me know exactly how you have been publishing back issues.

The problem itself is two-fold:

1) correcting invalid metadata that has already been published;
2) ensuring that bad metadata won't get published again .

Problem 2 is relatively easy to solve -- we will be adding the ability to edit articles' date published metadata. (See http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4718, and please CC yourself for future updates -- this bug will be of relatively high priority for us.)

Problem 1 is more difficult than problem 2, although we believe we have found a way to identify incorrect data fairly consistently. If this proves to be the case, we'll be able to at the very least add a check to OJS that will remove the bad data on upgrade. We are investigating whether this data can actually be automatically corrected, but that may be a bit more difficult.

If you have any questions, please let us know. And please do feel free to ping us if you don't hear anything about problem 1 in the near future.

Cheers,
James

[vgabler]

Thanks so much for making this a priority. The answer for number 1 will be very important to us because we have one journal that has already uploaded 70 years' worth of back issues using the QuickSubmit plugin. We also have another journal with about 20 years' worth of back issues (and that journal has published under 3 different variations to the title over that time period).

I can't verify whether the problem also crops up in the XML import/export function because we have never used that. We've only used the expedited submission and QuickSubmit.

All best,

Vanessa Gabler

[jayfitzsimmons]

Thank you very much for working on this. As you suspected, we used the Expedited Submission process in OJS 2.2.4 to submit these back-issue articles. The problem is not as big for me as it is for Vanessa - I only have 8 years of back issues. I've added myself to the bug report cc list.

Thank you again,
Jay

[jmacgreg]

Hi Vanessa, Jay,

I have added two further bug reports that you will want to CC yourselves to:

http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6451
http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6452

Additionally, we would greatly appreciate it if either or both of you are able to help test a fix once we have one. We'll be testing the fix ourselves, of course, but it's also good to see how it works with real-life data. It would be ideal if you have a development/testing version of your live OJS instance to do testing on, but we may be able to do this another way. Do you think you might be able to help us in this way?

Cheers,
James

[vgabler]

Hi, James,

I would be glad to test this once the new functionality is available. And I do have a test site that I can use to do so without risking changes to published/live content. Please let me know when everything is available.

All best,

Vanessa

[jayfitzsimmons]

Thank you very much for this James. I'd be happy to help too, but I don't think I'll be able to because:
1) I don't have any test OJS version - just the live version of our journal.
2) I don't have access to the command prompt for anything that requires that.
3) I'm not very computer literate. So if there is a way for me to do something despite problems #1 and 2, you'd have to spell out the instructions like you would to a 5-yr old (and not one of those smart 5 yr olds either).

Thank you for the work you've put into this. I appreciate it James.
Jay

[jmacgreg]

Hi all,

Jay, no worries -- between UPitt and a few local large installs that we know are having this problem, we should be covered. And thanks again, Vanessa, for volunteering to test! We'll be in touch.

Cheers,
James

[Almadl]

Dear all,
I have a similar problem.

Right now it's possible to change the date of the publication of the Issue (and I did),
but stille the metadata of the articles report the old publication date.
This is most important for the "How to cite item metadata":
some of our journals published their 2011 issue on January 2012,
so the date is wrong.

Do I have to restart the cronjob, reindex or something?
i did the modification yesterday but today the metadata is still the old one.

Thanks all.

Andrea Zanni
University of Bologna

[vgabler]

Andrea is right. Our journals have this problem in "how to cite" and "indexing metadata" with the publication date. We were primarily concerned with the CrossRef XML exports, and those work correctly. It would be ideal to have reading tools integrated to update with this correction, though.

All best,
Vanessa Gabler

[Almadl]

It would be possible to post a bug about this, somewhere?
(I could do it, if you suggest me the wording

Andrea

[jayfitzsimmons]

What a coincidence - I just e-mailed the OJS team about this problem because they host our journal now, asking why our articles' citation information showed as articles' publication date instead of issues' publication date. I'll add my voice to those asking for a change in the way OJS is set up so the default publication date for citation information is issues' dates rather than articles' dates.

In the meantime, here is a way to fix it one article at a time that Matt at OJS told me:

OJS uses the article publication date specified in the 'scheduling' section of the editing page for the submission. If you unset that date, the citation should default to the issue publication date. ... in the future, make sure to set the date to '-' or to a date you want to use.

Jay

[vgabler]

Hi, Jay,

Have you had success with the proposed fix? It doesn't work for me. The Scheduling section in the Editing page of an article metadata contains only a drop-down menu with a list of issues by their title (e.g., Vol. 1, No. 1, 2000). This is already correct for all of the articles, but the "how to cite" function in the reading tools still displays the actual upload/publish date, which is wrong. If you were able to manually correct the reading tool dates, can you please provide me with an explanation of the process?

All best,
Vanessa Gabler

[jayfitzsimmons]

Hi Vanessa,

In my version of OJS (2.3.7) there is another row just below the issue selection row you describe. This second row lists the article publication date. The default is the date I uploaded the article file, but you can scroll to select "-" for each of the month, day, and year, and then record it. This will set the article publication date to the issue publication date. Here is a screenshot showing this.

Screenshot - OJS article date.jpg (10.09 KiB) Viewed 672 times

Jay