Plug-in for Editing Article Metadata

[robinhood1362]

Hi all,

Problem: Article metadata are automatically set for each article. Imported articles and those which have been processed out of the online system and then submitted to OJS by the Editor role get the wrong article metadata (Date submitted; date available online; the latter for articles which are added after an issue is published, where all later-added articles get the "old" date from when the issue was published).

Suggestion: A plug-in to edit the article metadata.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Sina

[jmacgreg]

Hi Sina,

Unless I'm missing something, those values aren't particularly important metadata values, but should be set at the actual time of publication within OJS. Can you confirm 1) where you are seeing these values, so I know we're talking about the same thing; and 2) exactly what you want the values to correspond to (when articles were submitted to the system via import; or when they were submitted to the journal in general).

Cheers,
James

[robinhood1362]

Hi James,

These metadata are inserted on the Abstract page's "HTML header metadata tags" for each article published in OJS. OJS also makes use of such data under Stats & Reports (Journal Management).

Article metadata are actually important. Some services like Google Scholar, show the publication date in search results, and in case of back issues (imported) "publication date" becomes wrong because it reflects the date it was published through OJS. Also, this may be replicated when one inadvertently deletes an issue, and then publishes it again, and the original "intended" publication date is replaced with a newer date. Google Reader, as another example, shows a received/published date (on the left hand corner) when available, and viewing the OJS RSS feed with this reader, in case of articles processed out of the OJS, "received date" are not the actual date. In addition, "Items published" in 2009, for example, in Stats & Reports (Journal Management) might incorrectly show over a hundred, when this figure only reflects the imported back issue items of previous years.

It is true OJS should set the dates automatically as it does, but for the cases explained, I am looking for a way to be able to correct these data.

Sina

[cnelson]

Hi - I'd like to strongly second Sina that these metadata are vastly important when dealing with citation indexes and other systems that rely on published dates (rather than date submitted to or modified by OJS). On a local front, we are currently having problems getting date-based subscription access to our issues and articles, and having the ability to control the article metadata would be really appreciated. If I can't manage to change the article published date in OJS, we'll have to rewrite the XML and redo the import altogether - which is a pain.

Please consider allowing for more customization of article AND issue metadata. Thanks so much.

C Nelson

[jmacgreg]

Hi Sina, C Nelson,

Consider me properly chastened. I'll forward this thread on to our developer Florian, who is/will be overhauling the metadata and citation framework for OJS and the rest of our apps. He'll be able to give you a better idea on what might be possible here, now and in the future.

Cheers,
James

[jerico]

Hi Sina and C Nelson,

I agree with you both that getting the publication date right when exporting into external databases is important.

What's the "right" publication date depends on the specific context of the journal, though. I can think of situations in which both solutions make sense:
1) setting the publication date to the import date and (the way the import currently works)
2) setting the publication date to some other prior date corresponding to publication e.g. in an offline version of the article
can be valid, depending on the special situation and context of the journal (the way, Sina would like the import to work)

As James said we are currently working in overhauling and strongly improving our meta-data support. The meta-data changes are primarily driven by the migration of Lemon 8 functionality (document & bibliographic reference parsing and lookup) but they are designed in a way that will make it much easier to support additional standards-based meta-data with any application object (articles, papers, journals, issues, etc.) in the future. You can already see many meta-data changes in the code repository. It will take another 3-6 months, however, until the first (citation based) changes will appear in OJS.

For the moment being you'll have to manually customize the import plug-in or the article submission process (PHP-knowledge required) if you want to change the logic of the import or enter additional meta-data. The required change in the import plug-in is probably rather simple. And of course it's better to get the import right than to manually edit the exported XML later.

Sorry that I couldn't present a ready solution yet...

Kind regards,
Florian

[cnelson]

Hi James and Florian,

Thanks for your attention to this matter! I understand if you don't have an immediate answer, but am glad to see that this will be taken into consideration in the future. Inter-communication between all the myriad journal, cataloging and citation systems depends so heavily on metadata sharing that having more control over these aspects is important to us. Thank you.

Here, we were finally able to figure out exactly what data we needed to have, and had to reimport to get all the settings correct. It was a pain, but definitely easier than changing each of 8000 articles by hand manually anyway, had the ability even been there :)

Thanks for your prompt responses again - it's a pleasure to work with you all on this project.

C Nelson