pre-publication of articles - feature request

[gabriela]

Hello,

We recently had an interesting feature request from one of the journal managers; I thought I should share it with the community:


“One of the features we've been wondering about is the possibility of pre-publication of articles, before an issue comes out. We're starting to get a string of articles in the production pipeline, and it would be nice to have them available to our subscribers before publication of the official issue. I notice that several online journals have a "pre-publication" section for articles that are ready but not slated for publication for several more months.

The way I would envision such a thing working is that I would upload the article info and PDF as I already do. At the same time as uploading the author, abstract, etc info, I would also upload a "pre-publication" version of the PDF file (e.g. page numbers might not be correct and/or a "pre-pub" watermark might be on the pages). After plugging it into the publishing queue for a specific issue, I would also have an option to flag the article for pre-publication. It would then appear in a pre-publication section of the journal page (similar to the "current" and "archive" sections, but just a straightforward list of all the pre-pub articles), with the option to view the pre-publication PDF file. Once I'm ready to publish the issue, I would upload the final PDF file(s), hit the "publish issue" button, and (simultaneously) the issue would be published and the associated pre-pub articles would disappear from the pre-publication page.”


Gabriela

[jmacgreg]

HI Gabriela,

Thanks for your detailed request! Pre-prints/pre-publication has been raised before -- see viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3401 for some discussion on how to publish preprints with OJS as it currently stands, which you may want to pass along to your journal manager. However, if you see a strong inclination towards a more formal handling of preprints, I would ask you to submit this feature request to our bug tracker at http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/. And of course, if you have time to look into developing this as a plugin, we'd be very happy to provide assistance.

Cheers,
James