Mathew,

In my case (i) editor-in-chiefs assign other (section) editors and (ii) all editors assign/create reviewers. As an admin, I shouldn’t have to create reviewer accounts. So they should also have some possibility to manage user accounts, at least of some types. This complicates a bit the workflow I imagine, and I haven’t been searching for any user management extensions for WordPress so far. Alternatively, as I wrote earlier, maybe we don’t need reviewers accounts at all? Maybe some secure link being sent to reviewer to a page with the work and some simple form would fit the bill? OJS allows such an option (but nevertheless reviewer needs account, s/he just doesn’t have to use it to proceed with review).

I wouldn’t seek for just simpler version of OJS made with WordPress. I would see the need for two independent solutions (well, they could be dependent, it’s just a matter of developing). The first tool would be just for reviewing purposes, allowing to handle reviews for more than one editorial team (= journal). The second would be for repository. Why such distinction? Because repository could contain additionally other materials, not necessarily only those reviewed. Just one repository for all types of materials. I find it practical from my experience with publishers. I use OJS, but it’s closed for other works, like books, proceedings, reports, so on. Then we need to set up, e.g., DSpace for those other types of publications/materials. Pointless… I would prefer to have these two independent tools. There would be also some publisher main website, where all editorial policies would be included.

I’m not a coder, well from time to time I do coding for some simpler tasks, but if I could help somehow with such project, let me know. And I keep on searching for tools letting me accomplish my plans, at least for some time yet. I’d like to avoid having to use independent platforms for often overlapping tasks (like OJS and repository).

Best,

Peter

From: Radical Open Access [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mathew Arthur
Sent: Saturday, January 13, 2018 11:45 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: WordPress and digital repositories

Piotr,

1) We assign reviewers on the fly rather than from a predetermined list. We're just now reckoning with how to better handle this. Right now, when we assign a reviewer to an article, I manually add the user with the role of "Contributor" (which we have renamed in functions.php as "Reviewer"), which gives them access to certain pages and forms (namely the review submission interface) on the frontend of the site. We are considering having a reviewer self-registration using the default WordPress registration form but on a private page and adding some logic into the theme functions to assign the "Reviewer" role (this looks promising: https://gist.github.com/yassiryahya/1391773).

2) As for providing metadata/harvesting endpoint, right now we aren't. The issues and each article have DOI and to some extent this is harvestable through our DOI provider. OAI implementation on WordPress should be pretty simple though. Here are few options off the top of my head:

• A) Leverage the WordPress RSS feed and use functions or a plugin to convert the RSS output to the OAI-PMH/DCMI xml schema (there is a plugin that does this albeit with some limitations here: https://github.com/LincolnUniLTL/rss2oai)
• B) Create a page template that uses $_GET and URL parameters to mimic the OAI verbiage (eg. site.com/my-oai-page?verb=identify) such that for each "verb" parameter a different xml template is served. The page template would have to output text/xml headers, but then making the xml would be easy—especially with Type's field rendering template tags.
• C) Maybe this is the option I would choose. Use a preexisting OAI-PMH Data Provider server script like https://github.com/opencultureconsulting/oai_pmh that has accommodated for all the endpoints (or "verbs") and reads from directories of flat xml files. Then write some logic into functions.php that hooks into the before or after post save/update [add_action( 'post_updated', 'some_function', 10, 3 );] that writes an xml file (that has been generated by a script that populates the OAI-DC schema [http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc.xsd] with custom field values for that particular post from Types or whatever custom field plugin). Depending on how post types are organized and what taxonomies (categories, etc) are being used, the xml would save into a different directory (the OAI-PMH server script I've linked to uses the directory name as metadata prefix, the filename as identifier, and the filemtime as datestamp)

There are probably any number of ways to handle this—it would definitely be worth looking into developing a WordPress OAI-PMH 2.0 plugin. On that note, Annotum really doesn't work for me and I find it counterintuitive (for our journal anyways, I'm sure it works well for other uses)—so I'm always thinking about developing a plugin that converts WordPress into something like a lightweight version of OJS.

Warmly,

Mathew Arthur

Co-Editor-in-Chief, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry

On Sat, Jan 13, 2018 at 1:53 PM, Piotr Otręba <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Dear Mathew,

I knew there are WordPress enthusiasts who adopt this software to manage editorial workflow 😊

I’m impressed by your work. Thanks for this guide and helpful hints, which I studied and have a few further questions:

1. How in your journal the process of assigning reviewers is handled? Do you have a set of reviewers known in advance, so that their accounts may be created earlier by the admin, or, like in our journal, editor may choose the editor from a list of already registered users or may register new reviewer account, which obviously makes things more complicated. So I thought if reviewers accounts are needed at all, maybe some secure sharing with reviewers would be sufficient… open review would be the simplest approach, well… at least technically. Assigning editors by other editors and reviewers by editors is for me the biggest challenge now. From my Oasis testing so far, it’s not so flexible.
2. Is your published content exposed via oai? Can you export it as xml, e.g., to DOAJ? I think it is crucial for any implementation of editorial workflow software to make the published material compatible with some standards allowing to easily share the content.

I use Toolset, great and powerful plugin.

Best,

Peter

From: Radical Open Access [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mathew Arthur
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2018 9:58 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: WordPress and digital repositories

Piotr,

We’ve been using WordPress to manage submission-through-publication (for online and print) workflow for Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry. We wrestled with whether to use OJS 3 and, eventually, landed on WordPress—not because OJS was lacking in features but because, from the perspective of onboarding new editors and reviewers, it was too robust. Theming OJS was also a roadblock. I want to share a few words about our development process in/with WordPress and I’ve attached some inline screenshots to illustrate. In case inline images aren’t working, here is a Google Document with my comments and screenshots. No pressure of course to read on or respond—I have lots to say about WordPress.

Using WordPress with only a few plugins (which I’ll detail later on) and filters in the theme functions.php file, the Capacious platform includes a robust online article submission, revision, and online publishing architecture. Each submission entity is tracked throughout review, editorial, and typesetting processes all the way through to publication and each article and all its associated blind review comments, edits, and assets are accessible from an intuitive administrative dashboard. Article pdfs are generated dynamically from the same submission entity and assigned a digital object identifier (DOI).

I’ll talk a little about the plugins we are using and also about which plugins didn’t work—the first being Oasis Workflow. Our problem here: we couldn’t make our workflow fit the way Oasis works, there were too many screens to click through, I didn’t like how the plugin was styled differently from the WordPress admin theme, and managing permissions for editors, reviewers, and submitters seemed far too complex across use-cases. In the end, we chose to move all of the reviewer and submitter interactions to the frontend and keep the backend (the WordPress admin area) for editorial staff only. We wanted non-technical users to be able to do everything from a single screen. Simple.

The big lesson in trying to sync up how we wanted things to work with how the plugins available had already coded in decisions and limitations was that we would have to outline our workflow exactly the way we wanted it and somehow bend WordPress to our needs. So we mapped out our end-to-end process with sticky notes and started from there. As I see it, in knowledge-sharing projects, the trick is to make a provisional map of relationships between humans, texts, and processes then to make a kind of partial (not always perfect) translation into WordPress’ data scheme by thinking in terms of custom post types, taxonomies (categories and tags), and custom fields within each post type. I’ve written about this in detail here—from the perspective of building knowledge-sharing apps for arts-based institutions, but the logic seeps into other domains, I’m sure.

A while back, I tried my hand at doing something like this when organizing sources for my master’s thesis. Using only the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin to make custom post types/fields and funcitons.pgp to style the WordPress admin panel, I was able to make a rudimentary document management system/repository (DMS) that catalogued and stored PDF articles with citations and annotations. The guiding logic here was: all one needs is a simple form that corresponds to intelligently organized database fields and an intuitive frontend presentation of the data. ACF offers some hooks that let developers add custom field sets to the frontend theme as a form that saves data into the custom fields that have been set up for any post type or custom post type. Basic, yes, but it worked:

For Capacious, building off this experiment, we built a map of what kinds of WordPress custom post types (articles, reviews, revisions), taxonomies (issues, sections), and users (editors, reviewers, authors) we needed and what kinds of attributes would “live” inside these entities as custom fields (for “articles” for example, we would need author, affiliation, abstract, keywords, etc.) While setting up custom types and fields can be done in the functions.php theme file, we decided to use the Toolset Types plugin to speed up the setup (Advanced Custom Fields or ACF is also a good contender)

We then used Admin Menu Editor to organize the WordPress admin sidebar with our new custom post types and taxonomies. (Of course, this can also be done with filters in functions.php).

Next, we renamed the default WordPress user roles in funcitons.php so that they would be legible to our users both on the front and backends.

We also used the “Custom Statuses” feature in Oasis Workflow to set up some custom post type statuses for articles, reviews, and revisions. We didn’t use any other functionality from Oasis—too many clicks!

We then used Contact Form 7 to build out a series of simple and easy to use front end forms for authors, reviewers, and author revisions. These forms save data into the custom fields we set up using Toolset Types. Types also offers easy-to-use template tags in order to display the custom field data in the WordPress theme.

The plugin also generates emails notifications to authors, editors, and reviewers with further instructions, links to author and reviewer guidelines, etc…

We wanted to be able to see an article with all its reviews and revisions in the WordPress post listing screen. Because each of these “entities” is a custom post type, we simply created a unique ID field. When a submission comes in through the frontend form, a unique ID is generated and stored in the field. Then, when the article is sent out for review the blind reviewer receives the ID which they enter into the review submission form. And, any revisions by the author are also submitted using the ID. Magically, a tiny chunk of code in functions.php links up all posts across post types that share a common unique ID and, using the manage_posts_columns WordPress filter, the post admin screen for the “article” post type now displays all related “posts” from “review” and “revision” post types.

We used the same admin columns and metabox filters and hooks to customize the custom post listing pages for the “review” and “revision” custom post types. We also used the Color Admin Posts plugin to colour code articles, reviews, and revisions according to workflow status.

The Global Metabox Order plugin allowed us to arrange all the taxonomy and other metaboxes and custom fields (that we had created for each post type in the Toolset Types plugin) on the post edit screen in such a way that they appeared identically for each user. Normally, one would have to hardcode the order in functions.php, but with the plugin it is a simple as an admin user dragging the metaboxes and fields into the desired order.

Finally, we used DK PDF to generate PDFs on the fly from WordPress posts (our “articles” custom post type). DK is built on mPDF, a php HTML to PDF framework that offers a lot of options for customizing fonts and layout. Despite making many customizations, I wasn’t happy with the autogenerated “feeling” of the article PDFs the plugin was generating. I ended up making a very rudimentary JavasScript that downloads everything between <article></article> on our journal article pages as XML. The “download XML” link only shows up for admin users. I then load the XML file into Adobe InDesign in order to populate an article template that I designed in InDesign using typesetting features unavailable (or unreliable) in HTML/CSS.

I hope something in here might be helpful—and I'm always keen to have conversations about bending and breaking WordPress.

Warmly,

Mathew Arthur

Co-Editor-in-Chief, Capacious

On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 10:43 AM, Piotr Otręba <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Dear Ulrich,

I appreciate your quick response. I know Annotum, but it is no longer developed. I will for sure check the plugins you mentioned. I see a great potential with WordPress and I'm a bit surprised there are so few extensions for academics, and especially for small publishers/libraries. I often see they implement complex software like DSpace or OJS and have problems with keeping them, upgrading, and using. And usually the core thing with such projects is to be able submit an item (single or in a batch) and to expose/export/share metadata (let's say OAI and XML to be able to export metadata to various databases) – but for these we don't need very complex software. All the other complex workflows, functionalities, xml-based publishing are predominantly not needed for these smaller publishers or libraries. I'm just about switching from OJS 2 to OJS 3, the very crucial step, and this is why I started digging more toward WordPress. Not maybe related directly to repository, but I am just about to start testing Oasis Workflow plugin for WordPress which allows to organize editorial workflows, for which I see a potential to set up editorial and review workflow for academic journals. I also came across Export WordPress data to XML/CSV, which also handles custom fields, so maybe this could be used for exporting metadata. Maybe we could list some other extensions which could make a base for tailoring various services related to publishing (repositories, reviewing, etc.)? I don’t restrict myself to free software, but usually the plugins are affordable, and so-called free software like DSpace or OJS are free just to get, not to maintain (it's not I am not impressed by this software).

Best,

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Radical Open Access [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ulrich Herb
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2018 8:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: WordPress and digital repositories

Dear Piotr,


a good topic that I have already dealt with. I used annotum in the past to run journals as a test, but it is outdated, http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2011/06/30/annotum-publishing-with-wordpress-soon-coming-to-a-journal-near-you/. As far as I se, there are unfortunately only several plugins that simulate some repository functions in parts, e.g. ScholarPress Coins, Enhanced Publication, OAI-ORE Resource Map. However, these have very few users, so it is difficult to say how reliable and sustainable they are. Perhaps a crowd funding campaign for a wordpress-repository theme/plugin might be an option ...


best

Ulrich

----- Am 11. Jan 2018 um 17:32 schrieb Piotr Otręba [log in to unmask]:

Hello,



I have just joined the list and have a question whether anyone has been using WordPress for maintaining digital repository of articles/books? I use this cms, along with other software like DSpace or for managing publishing workflow like Open Journal System. Now I am planning a new scientific repository, for which I am testing Omeka. However, keeping many platforms may be problematic for smaller publishers, and usually the software offers far too much than is actually needed and used. WordPress is simple and extendable, and offers multisite functionality, which may be used to structure various activities. Are there any decent extensions allowing to use it as a digital repository?



Best,

-----

Piotr
--
Dr. Ulrich Herb
Saarlaendische Universitaets- und Landesbibliothek Referent für elektronisches Publizieren und Open Access, Drittmittel-Projekte http://www.sulb.uni-saarland.de/de/service/publikationsangebote/
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