Beyond the Journal: OJS as a Platform for Non-Traditional Scholarly Outputs - A Use-Case
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Hi everyone, my name is Rosario Coughlin. I am a scholarly publishing librarian at Queen's University in Ontario here in Canada. So briefly today I'd like to talk about thinking again beyond the journal or the traditional journal using OJS as a platform for non-traditional scholarly outputs, a use case at Queen's.
00:28
Great, can you all hear me? I'm gobbling up my minutes. So four points in four minutes. Briefly building a non-traditional journal using OJS 3.0.2, managing the upgrade to that new version, using it as a platform for a non-traditional journal and developing outreach beyond.
00:48
So in about the spring of this year I was approached by one of our founding OJS publishers. It's a journal called Encounters in the Theory and History of Education. They said they wanted to start publishing a new and radically different digital section in their otherwise reasonably traditional journal.
01:06
So we started with a couple of questions, as is always good in life. I wanted to get a sense from the, you know, how do you want your readers to engage with the content in this new digital section that they'd be creating? You know, what sort of experiences did you want them to have with the content? What
01:23
would be the form and delivery mode of the content, so the format, the types, etc. And the question in my mind, you know, to what extent does an out of the box solution like OJS meet these needs? So we have about 15 faculty, whoops, faculty and student-led journals at Queen's using OJS. This
01:44
was really the prompt that forced us to move from OJS 2.0 to OJS 3.0. So we're quite excited by that new version. When I asked them, you know, to sort of give me a sense of what they were looking for, this is the kind of thing that they wanted. So four key things. They wanted it to be visual, to be integrated, to enable reader
02:05
interaction, it was keenly going to be reader-centric, and yeah, reader and author-centric content. Some of the things that they wanted was the ability to be able to integrate digital methods and or digital media. So they said we want text analysis, text topic modeling, computer vision image analysis, GIS analysis,
02:28
or any form of network analysis to be enabled in this new digital vision, if you like. The kinds of digital media, interaction with visual displays, data visualization was something
02:43
that they wanted really to bring to the fore, and to enable interactive narratives. So to enable a kind of real-time exchange and commentary between authors, creators, and the readers themselves. They placed a fairly reasonable technical demand on their authors for would-be submissions.
03:01
They were hoping that, again, it would attract submissions from authors that were fairly comfortable using JavaScript. And they also asked for a level of autonomy with the platform, that it would support WordPress and that they would be able to sort of get into the backend workings. So it was the prompt for us to do our upgrade, a little bit on how we managed that process.
03:26
It was a fairly kind of painless process. I put together a guide all about the new version. We developed a kind of timeline and a plan. Keenly for our journals, planning of the upgrade and clear communication really served us well. I also developed a blog to keep them up to date with how that process was going.
03:46
A couple of points on using OJS as a non-traditional platform. It offers greater editorial flexibility. That was a real sell for this new version, which has gone down really well. Improved look and feel to the journals, much more updated.
04:03
The functionality supports, though more or less, the traditional journal structure, that traditional kind of article form. I think we are sort of wanting to push the limits on maybe positioning it as more of a digital humanities infrastructure. So I guess, in many senses, it largely is a traditional journal platform.
04:24
Should it be built in a way that supports more flexible digital humanities projects? Could it be? For obvious reasons, as a hosted service at Queens, we have some practical limits on the extent of autonomy that we could give to this publisher to actually delve into the back end of our hosted site.
04:45
Keenly security and other considerations there. The editor's perspectives. This new digital issue, it hasn't been published yet, so they're still receiving submissions. So I can't really show you the end product. But the feedback has been very strong.
05:02
So really, they really like the fact that OJS3, it really streamlines the editorial process. So feedback for our PKP colleagues, thumbs up there. It makes it easier for anyone in the editorial team to really see where a submission is along the way.
05:20
Just at the bottom, I wanted to highlight, so this came from Katie Brennan, the editor. The easier it is to run the back end functions of the journal, the more time and energy that they have to put into the final product. And actually think about the future of that journal. The person responsible for the new digital section, so it's not yet published, but yes, they have received submissions in HTML,
05:45
including video, image, and some interactive data visualization written in JavaScript. OJS3 allowed the author to submit this digital work with these interactive features, which is great. One improvement, the ability for the authors to submit multiple images at once, rather than one at a time.
06:07
Where do we go from here? We really want to build on our gains. So in OJS2, it was a hard sell. I'm approached by lots of student journals, our early career researchers. They're often very savvy using flexible platforms like WordPress.
06:24
OJS2 really was a turn-off, and I found it hard to sell this sort of service and product with them. I'm hopeful that OJS3 will be able to beat the bushes there and attract some new authors. Need to keep adding value to the service. I'm working on minting DOIs, and analytics are going to be key.
06:43
So usage analytics, want to build up our services there. Really, I want to get out there and target both the willing and those that are unaware that libraries are engaged in the publishing process in this way. I'm mindful that I want to keep my messaging short and active, so really encourage uptake. Not just tell them about OJS, but encourage them to actually use it.
07:04
A learning experience from this journal team. They had some quite high demands. I need to manage those expectations and keep listening. Thank you very much.