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PKP Copenhagen 2023 Sprint Notes released: Setting publication dates for old published content 

By PKP Copenhagen Sprint Working Group "Setting publication dates for old published content" / PKP Communications
Thirty plus community members from around the world gather at the PKP Copenhagen 2023 Sprint to work on PKP software. The group is spread out into three rows with some people standing in the back, and some people sitting in the front. The group is highly diverse, coming from different countries, backgrounds, expertise, and organizations. The photo is in black and white, with the projector screen in the background and the springing tables with chairs in the foreground. The Crossref (sponsor) and Royal Danish Library (host) logos are in the lower right; the PKP 25 year anniversary logo is in the lower left. The main message is about the PKP Copenhagen 2023 sprint notes about importing content into OJS being released.

The fourth set of sprint notes is 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

  • Antti-Jussi Nygård, The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies
  • Alexandra Fogtmann-Schulz, Royal Danish Library
  • John David Didriksen, University of Stavanger

Abstract

Articles and issues have separate published dates in OJS. In some cases when old content has been imported to OJS the dates of the articles and the issues can be incorrect. Setting individual articles’ published dates can be slow when done individually for each article. The group aims to find the existing use cases and suggest a solution for resetting the published dates easily.

Background

Use-cases:

  1. Mismatching dates have been created by accident, the Editor wants to correct the dates to match the issue date
  2. The editor wants to change the issue published date and make sure that all the articles have the same date as well

Description of problem with old issues and article

When creating a new journal issue, the publication date cannot be set. It will automatically be set to the current date when the issue is published. But if you are uploading an old issue of a journal (e.g. because an old printed journal has now been digitized, but you want to publish it with the original print publication date), you need to publish the issue in order to change the publication date for a past date.

When you add articles to the issue via QuickSubmit, you have to set a publication date. If you choose to “Schedule for publication” in an issue that has already been published, the publication date you set for this specific article, will be the date you choose in QuickSubmit. 

If you, however, choose to “Schedule for publication” in an issue that has not been published yet, the date you set in QuickSubmit for the article, will be overwritten by the date when the issue is published. 

We would like the publication date of an article to not be overwritten by the issue publication date if there is an article publication date.

Notes

  • A related recent issue adds the ability to define the Issue publication date before the issue is published and fixes some small bugs in assigning dates to back content: https://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/issues/7165

Goals

Allow Editors to reset the Article publication dates to match the current Issue publication date. This should be a new option in the Issue form. A suggested UI solution is to add a checkbox next to the Date Published field.

Activating the checkbox and saving the form will trigger OJS to reset the Article publication dates according to the Issue published date.

Screenshot of Open Journal System's Issue management wizard featuring a checkbox to reset article publication dates.

Results

GitHub Issue : https://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/issues/9107

Pull request: https://github.com/pkp/ojs/pull/3951

Next Steps

Evaluate:

  • When a change has been made in the publication date, how will this influence the registration in Crossref (DOI), DOAJ, and other upstream services?
  • Is there a way to trigger changes to services like this so updates are discovered?
  • What will be the consequences if they are not corresponding?
  • UI: is the Issue Form the correct place to reset the published dates