From issues publication to article based (publish as you go) publication

Software Support
1

Hello all,
Wondering if a journal can change from an issue based publication to a publish-as-you-go, article based publication?
Best,

2

I think I’ve heard talk at PKP regarding more formal support for publish-as-you-go in the megajournal context.

It the current release, you can always publish into an existing issue. There is support for publish-as-you-go copyright year assignment in Journal Setup, Step 3.2.

1 Like
3

Thanks @ctgraham I guess that’s the best we can have right now, am content with that.
Best,

4

Hello,

we changed this with our Journal of Applied Botany and Food Quality when we started using OJS. Before that, the journal was printed in two issues per year. Now, we still publish issues but only electronically and each issue starts with the beginning of the year. Throughout the year, we add articles to this active issue as they pass the reviewing and layout process. So at last, the issue number becomes unimportant since it is one issue per year and the year is way more informative than an issue number. Alas, we cannot remove the issue number since it shows the long history of the journal.
Big advantage of publish as you go: faster indexing in other databases and hence, faster citation of the work. Publication speed is an important criterion for authors nowadays.

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5

Hi @heike_riegler,

It’s a work-around, but OJS doesn’t require you to maintain a strict issue schedule. You could create an issue with a title “Current Publications” or similar, and schedule articles to it as they become ready. Then, when the “Current Publications” issue gets fairly full, you could rename it to “Vol X Issue Y”, and create a new “Current Publications” issue for the next batch.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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6

This is something we’d like to have for our journal, too. We have two “issues” a year and publish as soon as an article is finished. But the articles should better be sorted in chronologically order, and there is a need for “collections”, too, as this other thread is correctly suggesting:

I would love to see move OJS a bit more in the megajournal direction. PLOS, PeerJ & Co are very attractive to authors and should have a bit of a role-model character.

7

@CH_, you may want to follow the megajournal feature request in Github.

1 Like
8

Hi Alex,

We just switched to publish-as-you-go. Ran into my first kink, though: since we paginate as we go, the forced section ordering is now interfering with that by placing different article type before articles that have already been published in this issue.

Is there a way to preserve article types, but disable section ordering?

Thanks,
Pietro

9

Hi @pmichelu,

Not without modifying OJS, I’m afraid, though this might get some official support in the future. This might be a good opportunity for a child theme that overrides the default presentation of content – see e.g. https://pkp.sfu.ca/2017/02/14/announcing-a-new-ojs-3-theme-and-expanded-theming-documentation/ for some documentation on theming.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

10

Understood - thanks.

Is there a way to simply disable section ordering?

If so, we could then just manually label articles in the documents themselves.

Best,
Pietro

11

Hi @pmichelu,

There’s some active discussion on requirements in the relevant github issue – please feel free to participate there as we collect ideas.

For a quick solution, one idea might be to use the Web Feed plugin, which generates RSS/Atom feeds based on the most recent publication date (this is the data and sorting you want). You might be able to present this data in an overridden issue template using a child theme.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team