Download articles from outside OJS

[cruiz]

Dear all,
I am quite new to OJS, and not used to php language...
I am installing a new ojs site, and I would like to change the link to download articles. Instead of downloading them from OJS, via PDF of HTML, I would like to download them directly from an external repository. We plan to manage all the editorial process with OJS, and we will also store the definitive version of each article in it. But we would like to provide a link to the URL of the article in this external repository, so that it can only be downloaded from it.

I would like to ask you if there is any plug-in which offers this facility, and if not, if you think it would be technically possible to do so. I would be very grateful if you could give me a clue! I have tried searching in the forum, but did not find anything suitable.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Cristina

[jmacgreg]

Hi Cristina,

There is no plugin that currently accomplishes this; however, a quick workaround (without even needing to edit any code) would be to only publish abstracts in your journal, with the abstract itself including embedded hyperlinks to the content in your repository.

Cheers,
James

[jmacgreg]

One more note -- would you be able to give us a bit more detail on what your repository is, and how you would prefer OJS interrelate with it? We have been working on various ways to interoperate between eg. DSpace and OJS, but usually the operation is one way: content is published in OJS, and then automatically deposited in the repository on the other end, rather than the other way around. If you could give us more detail on your use case, we'd love to hear it and may be able to take it into consideration.

Cheers,
James

[cruiz]

Hi James,

Thank you very much for your answer! We plan to work with Social Science Research Network (SSRN). We will set up our own site to manage the journal (i.e. issues, submissions, subscriptions…), but will also store all the articles in SSRN, to broaden the visibility of the papers. I have planned to upload each paper to SSRN, once the last version of the article is ready to be published.

To download the article, your idea of including in the abstract a link to the article in SSRN can work quite easily. My original idea was offering a link to SSRN directly in the issue content table, instead of the PDF or HTML link provided automatically in it, if possible. It could be something similar to this

Title of the article ABSTRACT DOWNLOAD (link to SSRN)
Author

I hope I explained the matter properly, but if I didn’t, please, let me know!

Thank you very much in advance for your help!

Cristina

[jmacgreg]

Hi Cristina,

Thanks for the extra detail. Do you know if SSRN allows for batch or automated additions to their database? I ask because it'd be interesting to see if there would be a way to have OJS interoperate semi-automatically with SSRN somehow, either pre- or post-publication. We do have some plugins that allow for other DBs to ingest information from OJS -- metadata and data. For example, we're planning on comprehensively supporting the SWORD protocol. Having the ingest function automated would save you some hassle -- logging in, adding metadata and uploading data would all be handled automatically.

Regarding your question about including a link: this would be a little more difficult, and would involve some coding. You could probably figure out a way to print out the contents of the article's abstract field, but that would really only suit if there wasn't any information besides the link itself. Something like the following added to templates/issue/issue.tpl in the correct place (say line 61 in OJS 2.3.1) would display the full abstract contents:

Code: Select all

{$article->getLocalizedAbstract()|strip_unsafe_html}

... But this would be only slightly easier than the solution I described previously; you'd have to maintain the fix; and it'd be hard to sacrifice the full use of your abstract field. You could always create another metadata field within OJS to store the SSRN URL, but this would be more complex. Let me know if you have development resources on hand, and we can suggest how to go about doing this.

Cheers,
James