Feature Request: Keep Record of Journal History

[ramon]

Hello OJS users and PKP Team,

As an enthusiast of all the PKP Suite I have discussed previously with John and his Crew during the PKP Conference and thought it might be worth while discussing the Journal issues here too, to record them.
I'm sorry for cross-posting, but no one apparently read my post in the OJS Discussion forum.

Although I've brought the notion of a Journal Metadata Set before, there is, in my humble opinion, an urgent need to keep records of the historical information of the journal, meaning:
[list=]
[*]General Editors, Editors, and Editorial Team change with time
[*]Editorial Boards and Review Boards change over time
[*]Issue reviewers change and need to be displayed publicly, since they don't get paid and use these records for many purposes (available in Stats & Reports, but if the user loses the role, the records are lost)
[*]Journal information may/will change over time, such as the publication format (annual, monthly, quarterly, etc)
[*]...etc...
[/list]

So, I would consider it a "commercial" advantage if the PKP Suite somehow managed to keep this data stored and publicly available, at least for historical reasons. I believe it may be important for research purposes. Many scholars research the evolution of science, which is recorded mostly in journals as articles. The journal structure is fundamental for this type of statistical data.

OJS SHOULD (or MUST) have a way to keep these records and display them, usually by ISSUE, bringing the information automatically. This may change the structure of the About section of OJS, being displayed by section, instead of having everything in one single page
OR
The About section shows some of the information by ISSUE, which may be easier to implement.

PKP Harvester SHOULD import this data, probably as a SET.

Any comments or ideas?

[jmacgreg]

Hi Ramon,

(and greetings on the forum!)

I brought this matter up at our last meeting on Friday, in conjunction with a discussion on improving OJS' statistics and reporting features. The consensus was that while the ability to track these options within OJS would be useful, said use would be outweighed by the amount of time it would take to code, especially when such matters could be addressed outside of OJS (and displayed as a flat file within OJS itself, or added to a text-box for display, etc.). Basically, at this time, the costs would outweigh the benefits.

I know of a handful of journals that would track this kind of information on a static 'History' page, even before using OJS. Perhaps there is a way this could be massaged into a plugin of some sort?

Cheers,
James

[ramon]

Hello James,

Usually some of my requests very daunting. They are a personal analysis of what the Brazilian community apparently needs.
I would gladly try to take on the task (of course with all of you PKP Programmers help - as Alec did with my Brazilian Government Plugin).

Although I must say that the About page needs work.
Some of the content must be separated into different pages, then the History, Editorial Teams, Editorial and Review Board could be added separately.

How would I create a Plugin that has a paging system, probably similar to the CMS Plugin, but could automate the selection of content (i.e, editorial team, reviewers of the issue)? Could it be automated (probably via cron, or some change in the publishing of an issue!) so that the specific information be recorded in the plugin's table, generating a record of that data? Then, all the manager needs to do is check the data, add other possible content and publish the page.

Is this possible?