I am currently test-driving OJS for migration of a journal.
The journal I am working on transitioned through three publication models in the past few decades.
Weekly
Quarterly (4 issues per year/volume)
Article level (Volumes only, no issues, articles accessible via DOI)
I can see from the OJS test drive account, the concept of issues seems to be integrated into the system. Now my questions are:
Is it possible to run OJS without using “issues” feature? I.e., just define volumes and refrain from defining issues inside them? Is it going to break its functionality?
Considering that I am planning to import past volumes as old as 1990’s, is it possible to use different configurations for different eras? (As you can see earlier in this post, we used to have a period where the publication was quarterly and used to have 4 issues per year). I should be able to switch between these different eras
Interesting. You might be able to do this by using just a volume number and not an issue number. I don’t think it would break its functionality, but it might be that issue number is a mandatory field (although I haven’t tested this, I don’t think it is). Some, I know are doing a similar approach with continous publishing - publishing articles as they are released and not as part of a single issue (or even volume). You might want to have a look at this post here: How to publish immediately upon acceptance - #2 by pmangahis
I don’t think that you’d be locked into a single approach with past issues. If you had back issues that did have volume/issue numbers, you could certainly keep those and then use a new model for later issues.
yes, you can set this for each “issue” in the “Issue data” tab, by choosing the corresponding tick marks for what shall be displayed.
E.g. we have one journal that just uses the year (they have no volumes), and articles are published on a rolling basis.
Another journal has volumes, but it has the following issue sequence annually: 1-2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7-8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
Because OJS allows this flexibility, one can change the publication scheme at any time.
Internally, the “issues” have an id, but the Issue data tab defines what is displayed both in the frontend and the backend.
We have done just this for our journal, GEUS Bulletin. We (now) use a running publication model with one annual volume plus additional ad-hoc special issues. We publish them as separate volumes, with no issue number. But we have on occasion, published a volume in 2 issues and here we assigned issue numbers. We don’t plan to do that regularly, but it is possible.
We also imported a large back catalogue of old journal titles (geusjournals.org), each hosted as a unique journal in OJS. Each of these has different configurations, some use issues, some just a volume number, some both depending on what was published. These titles go back to 1893, so the mode of publishing varied a lot over time!
Thanks for your helpful advice. Apparently with a publication that dates back to 1893, you must have encountered all possible scenarios! I’ll definitely look at your publication to learn more.