We’ve a peer-review journal and we migrated to OJS earlier this year; we use a section “Article” to define the submissions that will be peer-reviewed in the regular OJS workflow.
We’re trying to include the preprint option to our journal, mainly because it’s a feature that sooner or later will be requested by indexing sources.
But we want to keep it simple for now (we’re confident that our authors will not use preprint at a regular basis) and we went down a different road: create a section “Preprint” that authors can select in the submission form; “preprint” will bypass the peer-review process and will be published “as it is” after an editor validation.
But we believe that someone who submits a preprint will also want it to be peer-reviewed and properly published in a journal issue. So, my question is: is it possible to use the preprint submission and duplicate it as a regular submission so that it can be peer-reviewed?
We wanted something like this:
Autor makes a preprint submission, saying if he wants to get a peer-review of the article → an editor validates the preprint → preprint is published with its own DOI → if the author said he wants the article to be peer-reviewed, then the system makes a duplicate submission as “article”, which follows the regular workflow → article is published in a journal issue, getting its own DOI.
Interesting use case. The tricky part might be is, if you start a submission off in one section, but then want to transfer it to another, you’d limit your ability to have it undergo a review process. Here’s how you might go about this: if you set up on section that doesn’t utilize review (e.g. Preprints), and then submit the article to that section, publish it, and then, after you decide that it’s ready to undergo review, unpublish it, transfer it to another section, undertake the review process, and then publish it as a new article once the review and other parts of the editorial workflow have been completed. I am not 100% certain that it would work this way - but it might be worth trying. Perhaps you could test this out and report back on what you find out?
OJS isn’t really designed to work with preprints in this manner (that’s why we have OPS ), which is geared towards more pre-print specific workflows.
Yes, we seriously considered installing OPS and use the SWORD plugins to “connect it” to OJS, but that would represent two systems instead of one. If we start to get a lot of preprints, we’re definitely going to OPS.
But we expect only a few “preprint” submissions, so we’ll try to get it working inside OJS.
Your workflow advice makes sense, but we need to have the two articles published: the preprint and the final article after review process, “connecting” the DOIs (Relationships between different research objects - Crossref). Is this achievable using your method?
I´ll do some more tests and I’ll post our feedback here!
), which is geared towards more pre-print specific workflows.