Multiple issues open at once?

Software Support
1

Dear all,

Apologies if this is answered elsewhere, but I can’t find information on this particular question. Please redirect me if it is answered in the Forums or Documentation.

We are running OJS 3.1.2.1; I am an editor rather than the site’s administrator. We run two issues of the journal in most years (for us, year = volume); one is a general submission issue and one a topic special issue. Ideally, we would be able to keep both issues open at once (can select one to be “current” and one not, that’s unimportant) so that we can build both issues sequentially as submissions are accepted and published. However, in OJS 2 we were constrained to a single issue at a time, and it appears to me that the same continues in OJS 3: we can have multiple back issues and future issues, but only a single current issue.

Any suggestions for easy workarounds? Would publishing one issue and then quickly unpublishing it to add an article, then republishing it, be a good workaround, or create a mess? I know it would at the least require us to change our subscriber notifications.

Many thanks for your help and creative ideas.

Best wishes,
Mac Marston
Ethnobiology Letters (Ethnobiology Letters)

2

Hello,

is your problem that only one issue can appear under the ‘current issue’ tab?
Because you can build more than one issue in parallel. You can always add more submissions to a published issue (back issue), so it would be no problem to have both issues published and sort upcoming articles to one or the other throughout the year.

3

Dear Heike,

Thank you for the suggestion - that might be a usable workaround. Again, we’re new to OJS 3 and don’t fully understand how it differs from OJS 2 in this regard.

Yes, the single current issue tab is not ideal, but we could live with that, I believe.

Do you happen to know whether newly published articles assigned to a back issue, rather than the current issue, will generate notifications/announcements to subscribers in the same way that articles assigned to the current issue do currently?

Many thanks,
Mac

4

Hi,

only the publication of an issue does generate a message to the users (if you check the respective box). Adding articles to a published issue does not generate additional messages, unfortunately. We have a bit of a problem with alerting users to newly published content but I think the OJS team is working on a suitable workflow for this publish-as-you-go model .