Feature request: conference papers (grey literature)

Description of issue or problem I’m having:
Our partners asked if OJS can also be used for managing conferences call-for-papers, reviews and later publication of the presentations. The first two points can well be addressed using OJS. The last point, publication, is, however, problematic: If not in the form of “proceedings” the papers cannot be seen as “articles”, and do not belong to any journal. They are a type of “grey literature”. This becomes a problem when the papers shall get a DOI or be indexed, as every submission is treated as a journal article.

A possible solution may be to extend OJS submission “components”. As of now, these components have to be of the type “Document”, “Artwork”, or “Supplementary Content”. “Document” is the most appropriate. However, “Document”, as I understand it, refers to a journal article. As such, i.e. when the DOI is registered, they are not registered as conference papers, but as journal articles.

I.m.o. what would help would be a new document type, which could then get the appropriate metadata and be registered (by Crossref or datacite) in the correct way. That would make OJS capable to fully represent the workflow for conference submissions and publications.

**Application Version **
OJS 3.3.08

Hi @felixhelix,

Out of curiosity the PKP Publishing Services have been migrating OCS content into OJS, so I’ve left a before and after, which might help to reason about possibilities/problems.

Here’s one OCS conference:
https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/HCOMP/HCOMP13/index

And here’s the same conference, after being converted into an OJS issue:
https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/HCOMP/issue/view/315

Best,
Jonas

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Thanks @jonasraoni for taking this up and sharing the two representations : )

As I wrote, this may be less a problem for (regular) conferences that have their proceedings. In the actual case I am working on, the authors allowed the publication of their conference papers, but do not view them as equal to journal articles. As such, they object to receiving a journal article DOI. This, however, constrains the indexing and distribution of the content. So, again, what I suggest is more flexibility with regard to the content types included in OJS.

While one may argue that this is beyond the scope of OJS, there is probably a lot of grey literature (which I suppose to be by definition OA) that merits to be published in an accessible way. So this should appeal to PKPs mission : )

Your’s
Felix

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Hi @jonasraoni,
can you move this to the feature request section? Or shall I write e a new post?
Yours
Felix

1 Like