SWORD-based submission?

[mcyzyk]

Question: Is there any work being done toward enabling SWORD-based submissions directly into OJS? I know there is a SWORD plugin for export, but I'm wondering about SWORD-based submissions.

Best regards,

Mark Cyzyk
Johns Hopkins University

[jmacgreg]

Hi Mark,

I don't believe there's any work being done on our end; but if you have the resources, we'd be able to help out in the third-party development of such a plugin. My knowledge of the SWORD protocol is limited: AFAIK, it's mainly a way to speed up repository deposits. Would allowing SWORD deposits to OJS (which can of course be used as a sort of article repository, though not necessarily in the same sense as DSpace, ePrints, etc.) offer some sort of quicker functionality than our current Article&Issue import plugins? If you could sketch a bit more of a use-case I'd appreciate it, and would be able to offer something more in the way of suggestions.

Cheers,
James

[mcyzyk]

Thanks, James,

Here is, in a nutshell, the use case:

http://www.codeplex.com/OfficeSWORD/

Basically I'm wondering how useful it might be if authors could submit directly into OJS from within their word processors (in this case MS Word, but I'm betting there will soon be other such plugins for, e.g., OpenOffice, LaTeX, etc.).

Mark

[mj]

Hi Mark,

One of the features I'm working on at the moment is a plugin which will allow automatic document conversion on submission; so, for example, the journal could specify that all documents are automatically turned into, eg. OpenDocument regardless of submission format. Part of this work includes the addition of plugin hooks in the submission classes, so it should be possible to develop new plugins that modify the submission process, including submitting directly from a word processor, eg. directly from a Google Docs document, or via OfficeSWORD. As with most of our development, if we receive substantial feedback around any specific features that the community would like to see, we'll try to fit it into an upcoming release.

MJ

[mcyzyk]

Thank you, MJ!

I reported this to my team here and here was their immediate reply:

Do they have an ETA on getting these hooks in place?

However, I also wrote up my concerns about the whole notion of SWORD submission into a publication system:

This sounds promising. BUT it also sounds like those hooks into the submission system are not, right now, present. More, I've been thinking about this and am not sure how OJS would know which journal a SWORD transmission is being submitted TO, or, for that matter, who is actually doing the submitting, i.e., so if a packet is submitted via SWORD and OJS opens it up, it would then have to somehow know which internal author ID and journal ID to map the submission to up front, so this would entail the external Submitter knowing these things to being with, which he naturally wouldn't. This isn't a problem with SWORD per se, it's a problem with blindly submitting into a system that would normally demand one do all sorts of things (set up a User account, pick which journal to submit to, etc.) via their Web interface.

So question: Is SWORD submission into a software like OJS even advisable, or do you think it best to keep the two genres -- repositories and publishing systems -- separate?

Mark

[mj]

Hi Mark,

There are a number of new hooks in the upcoming OJS 2.3 release that might be appropriate for this purpose. If you or your team has any specific places in the workflow and/or code that a hook would be useful, we'd be happy to consider it for inclusion in a future release.

As for your concerns about SWORD submission, I think you've hit the crux of the issue. I can see a case, eg. for OfficeSWORD to deposit a manuscript directly to an institutional repository, especially in the case of institutions that have a mandate to do so, but OJS is a different tool in many ways. There may be some overlap between IRs and publishing systems, but to my understanding the former tend to focus more on archival curation and the latter on workflow management.

I guess the main question I'd have is what specific goals a SWORD submission to OJS is intended to achieve, and how/whether SWORD is the best protocol to be using to accomplish them. Specifically, I'm curious as to how it would differ from, eg. using a "standard" file upload, or the XML import mechanism to make submissions to OJS. It might be worth re-visiting the case that found you considering the idea in the first place, and see if that helps clarify things at all.

MJ

[mcyzyk]

MJ,

I'm back, and hot on the trail of this SWORD submission thing.

Basically, what is required by the project I'm working on is a SWORD interface to OJS. I've read the OJS Technical Manual, learned about plugins, and perused the various hooks in 2.2. I've also downloaded/installed Stewart Lewis's SWORD Library for PHP: http://php.swordapp.org/

Now it's just a matter of somehow fitting it all together!

To adhere to the SWORD protocol, a service must enable to things: (1) It must respond to a GET request with a properly structured service document listing the 'collections' (which I will translate as 'individual journals') in the repository' ('OJS'). And (2) it must allow a deposit of an article into one of these collections -- in our case we will presuppose an account within OJS for use by the author has already been initialized, so the author will be submitting his username/password along with his document for deposit via SWORD.

I'm thinking the hooks already exist in OJS 2.2 for me to write a plugin, a generic plugin, something that would have a public-Web interface, to accomplish these two goals?

Your suggestions and guidance would be greatly appreciated. (Er, and I guess I should mention that I've not written in PHP before, much less written an OJS plugin, so I'm definitely a newbie at this.)

Mark

[mj]

Hi Mark,

You're probably right that a generic plugin and the PHP sword library are the right tools to build an interface such as you're describing, but I'm still unclear as to what specifically you're looking to accomplish with a SWORD interface to OJS for the project you're working on. If you could provide some more details around what you're looking to do exactly and why, I may be able to provide some better guidance.

MJ

[mcyzyk]

MJ,

I have been tasked with ensuring that a submission can be made, via SWORD, directly into a "publication system" (and I have naturally chosen OJS for this) from a forthcoming Microsoft Word plugin and a LaTeX plugin we are creating here. Both these plugins speak SWORD.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that the user making the submission already has an account in OJS and knows his credentials which will be submitted along with his document.

So I'm thinking I can use the PHP SWORD library to initially accept a submission. It will then pass everything off to an as-yet-to-be-written OJS Generic Plugin which will insert the doc into OJS in the appropriate places. That's the part where I must launch into action! I'm thinking the UserDAO::_returnUserFromRow and AuthorSubmissionDAO::_returnAuthorSubmissionFromRow hooks will figure prominently? I'm not seeing a hook for actually doing a submission, though. Something like AuthorAction::uploadRevisedVersion, but one that does an initial INSERT and not an UPDATE. Maybe the hooks I need are not there???

Mark

[mcrider]

Hi Mark,

I don't know anything about SWORD submissions, but on the OJS end, you might be interested in a plugin I recently wrote that is in CVS for the 2.3 release. You can find information here on how to checkout this release (OJS devel/2.3).. The plugin is in the plugins/importexport/quickSubmit/ directory (incidentally, the type of plugin you describe would probably work best as an import export plugin, not generic). The Quick Submit plugin allows managers to quickly publish articles or put them in the editor's queue--It could probably be reverse engineered pretty easily for your requirements.

Cheers,
Matt

[mcyzyk]

Thanks Matt! I will look into your plugin.

And Matt and MJ, FYI here is something our lead architect wrote, a partial summary of the recent Open Repositories conference, that describes more clearly what were are trying to do:

Pablo Fernicola gave a presentation describing work on an authoring add-in for Microsoft Word on the Windows platform. The add-in, currently in beta, will support ORE, SWORD, and the Publishing tagset of the NLM DTD. We have been working with Pablo on the ORE components of the add-in. This technology will allow an author to create a document, link it with data and rich media, describe the relationships of this components, and submit the package to a repository -- all without leaving Microsoft Word. While other approaches will be needed for other authoring environments (e.g., LaTeX), these tools go a long way to lowering the barriers to contributing and reusing content.

Replace the word "repository" in this paragraph with "publishing system" and this pretty much describes what we are trying to do and the motivation for doing it.

Best regards,

Mark

[mj]

Hi Mark,

Well, as I say, repositories and publishing systems are significantly different beasts (especially with respect to submission), but ignoring that for a moment, it sounds to me from your architect's description that the main advantage you're looking to see from using SWORD is allowing the user to submit to OJS from Word using this add-in, as opposed to saving the document, eg. to their desktop, and then uploading it into OJS as is done presently (ie. one step instead of two). I'll openly admit that the skeptic in me doesn't quite understand why this approach would be substantially easier, but if there's demand among authors for this kind of functionality, then to be sure it's something we'd like to enable.

We have been in open communique with Pablo for quite a while, and of course are very supportive of his team's efforts to provide tools for producing rich NLM-XML content for publication within OJS. The main issue I'd see is figuring out how to handle authentication against OJS from the add-in, and then building an OJS plug-in (most likely a gateway-class) to provide a SWORD interface for submission, rather than file upload. I'm also not sure how the Word add-in would provide the requisite article metadata to OJS (which is also done manually at present), so it might be worth contacting Pablo's team to see what their thoughts are on using SWORD in this way.

Hope this helps,
MJ