DOAJ Plugin and multi-language articles

Hi,

the DOAJ Plugin gets language information (for the tag ‘language’ in the export file) from the field ‘language’ in table ‘articles’.

Yet this field contains more than one language code for articles that are available in multiple languages, e.g. “en; de; es”. In these cases, the codes are not recognized by the DOAJ Plugin and no language tag is created.

Would it be possible to adapt the DOAJ Plugin to enable it to extract the first code in the list, e.g. in the function ‘mapLang’ in DOAJExportDom.inc.php?

We currently have the problem that our articles are displayed in German instead of English in the Directory of Open Access Journals. If the language tag is missing, DOAJ choses the first entry for title and abstract.

best,
Carola

1 Like

Hi,
I suggest you fix this in code if you will always use the same language.
First take a backup file and then change DOAJExportDom.inc.php line 62

XMLCustomWriter::createChildWithText($doc, $root, 'language', DOAJExportDom::mapLang($article->getLanguage()), false);

to

XMLCustomWriter::createChildWithText($doc, $root, 'language', 'German', false);

I am not sure about the DOAJ schema for writing languages or locales (German or de or de_DE), you should just set the correct string in place according to their standards.

Hi @alirezaaa,

thank you for your suggestion but we prefer an inherent solution over code changes to some of our installations. And I assume others would profit as well if the DOAJ plugin would be compatible with multi-language articles.

best,
Carola

Hi @carola

Hmmm… Yes, in case that there are several languages in the article metadata language field, the function is not working properly and probably no language element is exported in DOAJ XML. I opened a new issue for that, s. DOAJ language export · Issue #1690 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub.
I am actually not sure if we should base the language on this metadata field, because the editors could enter the languages in arbitrary sequence, like FQS is doing it alphabetically. Everywhere else in the system we use the article locale, i.e. the locale in which the article is submitted, but unfortunately, also this can be wrong, because the editors does not pay attention to that when submitting the article and/or when importing them (using import ´QuickSubmit plugin) :frowning: I’ll see what Alec suggests and can then repair it accordingly.

Thanks!
Bozana

1 Like

Hi all,

I would suggest using the article locale $article->getLocale(). The language field is not standardized or machine-readable, but the locale is. Other parts of the system rely upon it for similar purposes.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher and @bozana,

the article locale is the submission language, isn’t it? Is it possible to change in the GUI after submitting the article? I did not find anything.

best,
Carola

Hi @carola,

The article locale should be the submission language. If it’s not currently possible to change it, then that should also be added.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @carola

The changes are merged into the ojs-dev-2_4 branch and you could test if that works for you :slight_smile:

Best
Bozana

Hi @bozana,

DOAJ just wrote:

DOAJ will pick up only one language tag and that is always the
first one presented in the XML.

Sorry, I did not know this before, I thought the language tag determines what language they pick.

But regardless of that, taking the submission language to determine what language is picked may also not be a good solution. If you want all entries in DOAJ to have an Englisch title and abstract, you would have to change the submission language in OJS. So in some cases, you would have to set the submission language to “English” even if the article text is not available in English.

I would prefer a solution that is specific to the DOAJ plugin, e.g. having a checkbox on the DOAJ export page where you can pick the export language.

best,
Carola

Hi @bozana and @carola, it is the same issue that I already reported: DOAJ export plugin.
I think that it can be useful for the development of the new DOAJ export plugin
andrea

Hi @carola and @marchitelli

Thanks a lot for the information! I’ve just send an e-mail to ask if it matters what language journal registers to DOAJ – if DOAJ has any preferences/policies/requirements… there. When I get the answer, I will either implement a possibility to chose a preferred language (and if the metadata in this language does not exist I will take the article locale), or to just take article locale. For the XML format and for the moment I would probably implement it so, that that language is on the first place, followed by the others. For JSON format used in the CRUD API, DOAJ expects only one title and abstract i.e. there is no possibility to submit multiple languages, thus just that one will be registered.

Best,
Bozana

Hi @bozana,

I see that DOAJ registration is completely automatic in OJS 3.1. Great!

Do you still have plans to implement a possibility to chose a preferred language? We now have a case where the submission language is always Spanish, but the title and abstract in DOAJ should be in English.

best,
Carola

Hi @carola,

This is not a high priority on our list. I opened a new issue for that: DOAJ export in prefered language · Issue #3119 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub, so you can track it there…

Thanks!
Bozana

Hi @bozana,

thank you!

best,
Carola

@carola @asmecher @bozana

Good afternoon.
We have a similar situation. The magazine’s website is bilingual (Russian and English). The main language for displaying pages is English, but the language of the magazine is Russian.
As a result, when creating a file for DOAJ, it is the Russian language and all meta-data that is chosen, which is not quite acceptable, since the journal has the potential to attract international authors and develop outside of its country in the future.
Did you find a solution to make DOAJ files English-language (after all, all this data is entered when creating pages of articles and is available)?
We will be very grateful for your help!

Sincerely, Yuri.

Hi @Yuriy_Kadatski,

I think we’re waiting on some underlying support on the DOAJ side before we can add multilingual support to OJS’s DOAJ export; Dom from DOAJ is active on the Github issue linked above, so you might ping him there to see if there’s any news.

Thanks,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

@asmecher
And how do I make sure that when creating an XML file for DOAJ, the first language I need is the one I need?
Again, it fills in 2 languages (Russian and English). On the site, English is selected by default, but as I understand it, this does not affect the export.
Where else can I change something? We won’t have any other languages, so I can change them directly in the code, but I just need to know where and what so as not to ruin everything.
Thanks!

Hi @Yuriy_Kadatski,

The export XML is formulated by plugins/importexport/doaj/filter/DOAJXmlFilter.inc.php; you’d need to make changes there.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team