Moving multiple single installation journals to a single OJS

[ramon]

Hello guys,

We are planning to improve our experience with OJS as a portal.
For this, unfortunately, we are planning to move our incubated journals, 13 individual OJS installations, to a single OJS installation.
I'm also planning to try to preserve all the historical data and in-process submissions, instead of using the import/export feature, as we'd loose submission in transit, logs and archived stuff.

One possible problem is that some journals are in different versions, and probably none are using the current OJS version.
Is upgrading to the latest version essential, necessary, optional?

So, if you have any clues, suggestions, ideas or instructions, that would be a great shortcut.
If otherwise impossible or impractical, please tell us so, so we can plan the export-import process with each journal individually.

_______________________________
Ramón Martins Sodoma da Fonseca
Analista em C&T
Coordenação de Tecnologias de Informação
Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia - IBICT
Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia - MCT

[ramon]

Hello all,

No one has ever faced this issue?
Or everybody that uses OJS as a multijournal installation started that way?

We'd like to hear experiences from those situations, such as server setups, problems or issues faced and policies for hosting, access, customizations made, etc.

_______________________________
Ramón Martins Sodoma da Fonseca
Analista em C&T
Coordenação de Tecnologias de Informação
Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia - IBICT
Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia - MCT

[mcrider]

Hi Ramon,

There is no good way to do this, unfortunately. You could either use the import/export plugin (and lose lots of data, e.g. workflow information), or try to merge the information on a database level (which I wouldn't recommend to anyone unless they are very patient and thorough). We have been talking about a more complete import/export plugin, that exports all workflow data for exactly this sort of purpose, but this is unlikely to appear in the wild anytime soon.

Cheers,
Matt

[asmecher]

Hi all,

There are a couple of threads elsewhere on the forum discussing this in more detail. A database translation isn't impossible, and we will have to address it eventually, but I wonder if there isn't a tool out there somewhere to accomplish this by configuration rather than by coding or by a lot of manual work.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[raickonen]

Can you give more details in that? I didn't find informations about that in Forum.

From my perspective, using the same version in an single installation and the portal:

-Import the journal
-Import articles, one by one.
What else? Maybe I can build a script in PHP or bash to do that.

Luciano
UFRGS

[asmecher]

Hi Luciano,

As Matt describes, you could definitely use the import/export tools, but those only include the published content of the journal (articles, galleys, etc.) but not workflow content (reviews, roles, copyediting assignments and comments, etc.).

If you want to preserve everything, it'll involve a lot more work. See this thread for some discussion.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team