The first set of sprint notes are now available from the PKP Copenhagen Sprint, hosted by the Royal Danish Library in June, 2023.
Sprints involve PKP community members coming together in diverse groups to work on PKP software and support. The Royal Danish Library hosted eight working groups at the PKP Copenhagen Sprint last June. This is a summary of one such group’s work.
Group Members
- Magnus Annemark, Lund University Libraries
- Ronald Steffen, Freie Universität Berlin (Free University Berlin) / Berlin Universities Publishing
- Pia Spriensma, University Groningen Press
- Mark Huskisson, PKP / OPERAS
- Gazi Yücel, TIB Hannover
- Jonas Raoni, PKP
- Jan Willem Wijnen, Openjournals.nl
- Ramana Fragola, Kungl Biblioteket (National Library of Sweden)
Abstract
Independent journals and societies have successfully switched from other platforms to PKP’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) in the past. In order to improve solutions for migrating journal content from other platforms to OJS, this working group set goals aimed at understanding the current state of art and existing tools, as well as undertaking conceptualization, documentation, and development. Results included formulation of requirements that an ideal content import tool would meet, a comparison of selected tool features, and a decision on the most suitable tool at the moment. The next steps include development of a new importer plugin.
Background: why is this topic important?
- To serve existing journals and societies that wish to be transferred in bulk to OJS from different platforms and sources.
- WordPress, Opus, Jats, retro scans without existing metadata, institutional repositories, and commercial publishers are some examples of places where communities may seek to transfer from.
- Reasons for transfer include benefits of digital archiving and providing quality, reach and access.
Goals
- Give an overview on the current state of art
- Provide a short overview / documentation of the existing tools
- Develop concepts on how to improve solutions to import content into OJS
Results
The working group formulated requirements to be met by an ideal content import tool as follows:
- Bulk import should be possible with or without metadata.
- Documentation on how to import data and provide metadata are required.
- Process should be simple and not require a technical background.
- Maintenance of the tools should be guaranteed.
The group evaluated the existing tools for content import, compiled the current “state of the art”, and compared the features of selected tools in the table below under consideration of the actual uses-cases of the group members.
| Tool | |||
| Feature | QuickSubmit | CSV Importer | TSV Importer |
| code repository | on GitHub | on GitHub | on GitHub |
| maintained by | Alec Smecher – GitHub | Erik Hanson – GitHub | Antti-Jussi Nygård – GitHub |
| supported OJS versions | 3.3 | 3.3 | 3.2 |
| format | manual input | CSV | XLSX |
| documentation | NO | YES | YES |
| can import users / groups? | NO | YES | NO |
| multiple issues in one document | not applicable | NO | YES |
| support for references? | YES | NO | NO |
| multiple language support? | not applicable | NO | YES |
| interface | Native plugin (UI) | Command line (CLI) | Command line (CLI) |
The working group agreed that a spreadsheet as a source of the content to be imported is sufficiently user friendly and decided that the import of user data should not be the focus.
However, the existing tools were implemented for specific use cases and miss out with respect to some of the above defined requirements. In particular when it comes to maintenance of third party plugins. Also, existing tools only work on the command line and are not known / documented in the community. The workflow of the csv and tsv importer plugins using OJS NativeXML format seems practical but not suitable with respect to the future development of OJS.
In addition to evaluating the features of existing plugins, the group evaluated different ways of extending these tools to make them better suited for the general community. They found that the Quicksubmit plugin is not sufficiently modular in design to be extended for bulk import. In particular with new features coming with OJS 3.4 (job queues), the effort of extending the QuickSubmit plugin might be too big.
This group agreed that, due to its features and the use of Excel spreadsheets, the tsv importer plugin currently is the most suitable plugin for content import and prepared a suggestion for a brief documentation that could be added to the PKP Docs to make the existing tools more visible.
Next Steps
Members of the group are interested in combining efforts to develop a new importer plugin based on the tsv importer plugin. As the Publicera (Sweden) already has a version of the plugin working with OJS 3.3 this will be the starting point for future developments. In a first step (for OJS 3.3) minor additions have been discussed. For OJS 3.4 a new version of the plugin employing newly available OJS features, such as REST API for a CLI version or job queues for an OJS plugin version, will be developed.
Thanks
Thank you to the working group for all its effort on importing content into OJS, and for sharing its notes. Our thanks to the Royal Danish Library for hosting the sprint, and to the PKP community, both in attendance at the sprint and elsewhere, for their valuable guidance. We are also grateful to Crossref for sponsoring this event.
