Books for Review, Objects for Review, and OJS 3.X

Software Support
1

Hey folks,

We have a few journals on our hosting service that are longtime, prolific, users of the now deprecated Books for Review plugin. We will be migrating these journals to 3.X eventually, and are wondering about recommendations for the best strategy for planning a migration path for them. Some questions for anyone familiar with OFR/BFR and OJS 3X:

  1. it looks like some version of Objects for Review (or OFR-like functionality) is in the GitHub milestone for 3.1 - is there a good chance it will be part of the 3.1 release?
  2. what’s our best strategy for future planning? Should we be getting them off BFR and onto OFR now, which would mean we could work on solving this problem (From 'Books for Review' to 'Objects for Review')? Or does it make more sense to have them keep using the deprecated (but functional) BFR plugin, wait for a release with some OFR functionality, and then work on exporting the data from BFR into a 3.X version of OFR at that time?

Thanks!
Sonya

2 Likes
2

Hi @sfbetz,

I think your colleague has been asking similar questions over on this thread: 2 books for review questions

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

Yes! Seeking some clarification on her behalf, esp re: #2.

4

I think it boils down to if there’s any value in us putting resources towards finding a good way to move data between BFR and OFR right now? Or should we hold off until post 3.1 and reassess then? If answer is “wait and see” or “we could use help with X” that’s also useful for us to know.

5

Hi @sfbetz,

We don’t have concrete plans for these plugins at the moment, so for the moment I’d suggest continuing to use whatever you’re using. There are a number of plugins we’re interested in forward-porting – first in line are probably SWORD, PubMed, and a few others, and as we work down the list we’ll come to less common plugins like Objects For Review.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

6

I’ve been accompanying this and other related threads for some time, noticing as the “Consider ‘Objects for Review’ plugin for forward porting #1718” task has been moved gradually from milestone 3.0.1 to 3.2. I’d just like to underline the importance of this plugin - offering books available for review to the public is a critical function for our journal (and many others we know). This is the main reason we’ve held off from moving to the 3x series, which is a shame because there are so many other excellent reasons for us to upgrade now. So: one more vote to put this at the top of the forward-porting list! Thanks for all your hard work!

1 Like
7

Hi @EBL,

Thanks – feedback like this will help us to prioritize future work. Currently our highest priority is the release of OJS 3.1, which includes some major features like subscriptions/payments, a new Javascript toolset, customizable menus, etc.; once this milestone is complete and the big priorities it introduces are wrapped up, we’ll be able to look again at some new priorities for OJS 3.2 and onwards.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

1 Like
8

Dear @asmecher,

Now that OJS released 3.1.1.4, are there any plans to implement Objects for Review anytime soon?

9

At a developer sprint, @ajnyga and @lilients started working on this as a plugin: GitHub - ajnyga/objectsForReview

It seems that there are some open to do’s until it can be used in production: Additions needed for first release · Issue #1 · ajnyga/objectsForReview · GitHub

10

yes, going to push more additions by the end of this month. Just been busy with other work.

11

Many thanks for the update, @ojsbsb and @ajnyga!

13

Hi all, wondering if we have an update on this functionality yet now that we are in OJS 3.2. We are still desperately awaiting that functionality for our journal. Many thanks for your work on this @ajnyga!