5 Feature Requests: XML, Article-Subm., Reviews, Roles, Mail

[OliverD]

Dear OJS community,

as I am new to OJS (at least having read the OJSinanHour manual) maybe the following questions are already discussed in the forum. If so, please excuse the new topic ...

Are there any plans to extend OJS concerning the following features? These would be very interesting for the academic projects I am currently working in:

(1.) Article data as XML
Together with a module for XSLT transformation (to HTML, to PDF, to ...) this could lead OJS to become a more data orientated tool (rather than the presentation orientated approach up to now - as far as I understand the docs) and use the benefits of XML.

(2.) Asking for a new article (e.g. by the editor)
At the moment, articles can only be submissed by an author. Are there any plans to extend the workflow to the possibility of e.g. the editor asking a special person to write an article about a certain subject? (this could improve the quality of a journal!)

(3.) Real support for reviews (on the level of the data model)
As far as I can see there is no support of reviewed media (books, cd-roms, ...) as an object type of its own. At the moment such bibliographic data (as part of a review article) must be integrated in the title field of an article.
The support of reviewed books would be very important for pure review journals, as you need sorting your (review-)articles according to the reviewed book rather than according to the reviewer.

(4.) Adding new user roles with configurable actions
Are there plans to make user roles freely definable and to freely add workflow parts to these role's responsibilities?

(5.) Flexibility of Email module
- Could the email module be redefined in a way that a certain email would be sent at (after) any workflow position, workflow state or workflow action you want?
- Could the receiver(s) of an email be configurable in each case (e.g. mail automaticly to any member of role xyz)
=> At the end this could lead to a more flexible / configurable workflow as a whole (together with feature 4.)!

As I neither know the activity of the community nor the architecture of the system, answers to the following questions are very welcome:

- Are there any plans yet to add these features in near futures? Who could I contact?
- Could these features be added in an easy, modular way?
- Or would you have to go deeply into the code for that purpose?

Thank you very much for any answers, hints, suggestions ...

Oliver

[asmecher]

Hi Oliver,

1. Article data as XML: this is already coded in CVS. We're also working hard on a number of other XML-related features. If you'd like to try out the XML/XSL-based galley code, see docs/README-CVS for information on how to get the unreleased code; since this part of the system is implemented as a plug-in, you should be able to install it on OJS 2.1.1 (although it's officially untested and unsupported).

2. Article request: There's no specific feature for this, but the journal manager is free to create Author accounts and email the details to the new author. If articles are only to be submitted by invitation, the Journal Manager can disable author self-registration.

3. Support for flexible submission metadata: We're currently overhauling the metadata system to remove some limitations in its multi-lingual capabilities. One thing we're keeping in mind for the future is the ability to extend the current metadata set; this likely won't make it into the next release, but the current overhaul will bring us part-way there.

4. and 5. We've considered features like these, and have decided to avoid making OJS too general of a workflow tool. Our focus is primarily on academic, peer-reviewed publications, and the current workflow is flexible enough to handle many permutations without requiring a lot of out-of-the-box configuration. We're also keeping an eye on new developments like open reviews. Beyond this, we're also building a comprehensive plugin API. While this API is currently limited in its ability to intervene in workflow, such as adding new steps, we hope to increase its capabilities over the next few releases. But in general, when users have requested an addition to the workflow, we've been able to recommend an existing feature or policy with great success.

I'm happy to answer any further questions, and this forum is a good place to be having this discussion, as answers are then available to other curious users.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Open Journal Systems Team