Cloning journal in OJS 3.0.2.0

[vvucic]

Hello,

I would like to have option of cloning journal since sometimes several journals are issued by the same institution and many data are practically the same. Thus, it is much easier to clone and do little modifications that always do from scratch.
That could be useful in situation when journal does have a lot of submissions (several hundreds) that are divided in special issues defined ans separate journals. Cloning journals could be useful since we do not need to always put the same data again for each journal/issue.
Thanks

[ctgraham]

I don’t want to hijack the general suggestion of cloning journal settings, but I’m curious as to what considerations would motivate publishing a “special issue” as a separate journal.

[vvucic]

There is journal which does receives more than 450 submissions per year. Due to the fact that they cannot process so much submissions there is always queue of more than 850 submissions total. Since they do have special issues or supplements too that are edited by guest editors with various technical backgrounds.
Thus, we use one installation of OJS for submissions only and we divided special issues, supplements and regular issues as different journals in order to prevent that 4-5 people of different technical backgrounds manage more than 800 submissions. By doing so, we divided tasks of editors to edit only submissions they receive for their own issue (in our case journal). Consequently, there is much smaller risk to mess up submissions, reviews and scheduling for publication.
But, all those “journals” are actually the same and all author guidelines and other info about the journal should be the same. However, we can do it by hand and copy/paste all information.
I am curious to see is there any shorter way to do that so that is easier to handle that in situations when journal does have a large amount of submissions or in situations when one institution issues several journals about similar disciplines and it happens that many fields/information about the journal are identical.

Thanks

[ctgraham]

Typically the role of Section Editor is used to refine the responsibility for a specific set of articles. A Section Editor would not see all 800 submissions, but only those relevant to the Section Editor. What constraints do you have which prevent this kind of segmentation?

[vvucic]

All of them submit articles to section Articles and there are many of them all the time. Thus, it is not easy to keep that tidy, especially having in mind that some guest editors are not familiar with on line submissions.

It could be good to separate submission on an issue basis which will enable editors to let authors to be tidy and submit to thematic issues, supplements directly.
Instead, we treat issues as separate journals to make it tidy.
Do you have any additional advise?
Thanks

[ctgraham]

For a similar request and discussion, see also:

OJS: how can guest editors be assigned to special journal issues?

Hi, We are using OJS for the management of the publication workflow of our journal. So far, our journal has been accepting submissions without categorizing them. Now, we’re investigating how we could distinguish between “research articles” and “project/tool notes”. From what I read in the documentation, this should be done with “sections” in OJS. So far, so good. Only, so far, we’ve been (mis?)using sections to define journal issues, making it possible to: group articles for one issue in a de…

and

[OJS 2.4.8.-1] assigning editors to issues

Hi @klausru, Currently that’s something you’ll have to do manually – i.e. the Editor in Chief (or equivalent) would need to assign the issue’s Section Editors and/or Editors to particular submissions that they intended for publication in the issue. This is an approach we may automate in the future, but haven’t prioritized yet. Regards, Alec Smecher Public Knowledge Project Team

I think the current workaround is to create a dedicated section for the special issues, but there seems to be cause to consider issue-level editor assignments. If this were available, would you still need this “journal cloning” functionality?

[vvucic]

We would not need cloning if it would be possible to make it that author choose section such as : Special Issue in…
which will enable section editor who is actually Guest editor, to manage them separately. But, the main idea is that numerous submissions should be separated in order to avoid mixing them up.
Thus, that separation is the key issue. The cloning is just assistance if separation assumes creation of completely different entity i.e issue/journal that is created from scratch.
Thanks