Can an article's URL change following upgrade/maintenance?

Software Support
1

Hi all,

We received an email from a journal editor who claims that links to articles that they included in their curriculum spring of this year are suddenly no longer valid and go to the wrong articles. Can links to issues or articles change? To me this sounds strange. The links are all folder based and once an issue has been created it would require a lot of system level renaming of files and folders to change them no?

Short of them having entered the wrong URLs what could have happened?

We have made no changes to the OJS installation after autumn of last year (Nov/Dec).

Best regards
Geir Rosset
Oslo
Norway

2

Hi @geirrosset,

Article URLs shouldn’t change unless e.g. the OJS installation has been moved to a different directory or something similar; do you have an example of the sort of change they’ve encountered?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

One thing that could change the URL of an article would be the enabling and use of the “Public Id”, but even then the old URL should still work.

4

I called our tech guy to talk this through. At first we couldn’t figure
it out, but then we remembered that in order to fix a problem we had
been seeing for the past two years - that OJS would not display non
ASCII characters correctly - we had to emigrate to a fresh install of
OJS using XML. That’s when all the links changed.

5

Yes, exporting Articles and Issues from one OJS instance and importing them into a new OJS instance will not necessarily preserve the system assigned numbering. Are you able to work with the updated URLs?

6

Everything works as it should, but obviously we have no control over who has bookmarked what or who has used articles and URLs in their publications (and are now wrong)…

7

I know this is an old topic but I didn’t want to start a new one when my question is the same - can I just check that a straightforward upgrade from 2.4.8.X to the latest 3.X (not a new/migrated installation) will retain existing article URLs? Obviously, we want previously bookmarked and cited URLs to still work.

Thanks!

Matt

8

Hi @matthewbarr,

Yes, URLs are unchanged. The only exception is for supplementary files, for which the data model in OJS 3.x is different than the one from 2.x; for these, OJS will automatically redirect to the new URLs.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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