German OJS 3 Workshop Report

By Dulip Withanage

From  the 5th to 6th of October,  Heidelberg University Library conducted an OJS 3 workshop for developers and technical experts in German-speaking countries. The workshop was organized under the umbrella of the OJS-de.net project, a multi-university, journal publication facilitation and assisting project for German universities, granted by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

30  academics representing 12 German universities/research institutes, one Swiss university, and  Bozana Bokan representing PKP, participated in the Workshop, consisting of a half-day conference with talks about open access software development and a 3-hour software sprint.  

5 speakers focused on OJS, mainly on the current status of the OJS 3 software development,  software development of the OJS-de.net project, mass import of articles, a latex plugin and XML-first publication automation. One speaker presented a research  publication platform in the humanities. Program information can be  found here:

http://www.ojs-de.net/veranstaltungen/entwickler-workshop-2017/index.html

17 programmers and interested academics participated in the software sprint. Participants suggested 11 topics, from that 4 topics were selected for direct implementation. Epicur plugin, a URN-based export plugin for the German national Library was implemented and documented with the maximum user participation, giving first-time OJS programmers an insight into OJS 3 plugin-development. A second group investigated the script-based installation of Docker-container for OJS 3 and documented the results.

A third group worked on the ORCID-Plugin enhancement, a joint effort to standardize and improve  ORCID plugins for both OMP and OJS. The remaining group worked on the enhancement and testing of  Heidelberg Monograph Publication Tool (heiMPT), an XML-First publication tool for both monographs and journal articles.

Participants were also interested in the following topics, which was agreed to be specified, or discussed in the near future. Those topics are design plugins, annotation plugin, browse plugin similar to OJS 2 and a news/notifications plugin. Further interesting topics included  the support for controlled vocabularies, support for markdown and the possibility to extend the general metadata support. For a complete list of the working document please visit https://goo.gl/taQjZe.

Close cooperation between software developers was emphasized throughout the workshop and a strategy was planned to further enhance the cooperation in the software development level.  Working document will be maintained and current status will be updated. The developer mailing list  ojs-dev-dach@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de for German-speaking software developers will feature a quarterly report of the OJS development in the participating institutes and a slack channel will be set up as an instant messaging service communication.

OJS-de.net invites all the German speaking  OJS / PKP  programmers to join the mailing list and participate, ask questions and share the knowledge to establish a long-term sustainable PKP product programmers network in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

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