[OJS 2.4.8.-1] assigning editors to issues

Dear all

Is it possible to assign editors to issues? Currently I see that I can assign certain editors to sections, but I would like to do that with future issues. Our journal (www.medienpaed.com) regularily produces special issues, each being edited by a different individual or group of (in the sense of) guest editors - similar to edited volume books. Of course I could do a workaround and create a section for each future issue.
But that leads to the second part of my question:
Would it be possible to assign editors to past issues, or just keeping them from the production process, and foremost displaying those editors in the metadata? This should result in something like:

Rummler, Klaus. 2014. ‘Foundations of Socio-Cultural Ecology: Consequences for Media Education and Mobile Learning in Schools’. Edited by Dorothee M. Meister, Theo Hug, and Norm Friesen. MedienPĂ€dagogik: Zeitschrift FĂŒr Theorie Und Praxis Der Medienbildung, no. 24 Pedagogical Media Ecologies (July): 1–17. http://medienpaed.com/article/view/173.

Thanks so much
Klaus

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Hi @klausru,

Currently that’s something you’ll have to do manually – i.e. the Editor in Chief (or equivalent) would need to assign the issue’s Section Editors and/or Editors to particular submissions that they intended for publication in the issue. This is an approach we may automate in the future, but haven’t prioritized yet.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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Thanks @asmecher . We followed your recommendation and had great success and experiences with it. But as OJS made a lot of progress since, I would like bring the issue up again with my very initial thought.

In our journal we’ve had and will have even more cases where structures and characteristics of edited books and journal issues are mixed. Generally, most of our “special issues” have editors or could be compared to edited volumes. Technically, I would wish to be able to associate editors, like in OMP, to issues and their resp. chapters (or issues and their articles).
My question is now - as the current versions of OMP and OJS are getting more and more similar - whether it would even be thinkable to copy the feature of volume editors, and maybe even series, to OJS? The most crucial feature would be to dissiminate these editors in the metadata (doi, coins, doaj, etc.).
Our scientific board just recently decided that we would like to produce our own edited volumes (like the journal) plus dissimination as books via print-on-demand.
As a workaround, or as a solution I am planning to install OMP parallel to OJS in order to represent the book as a book with its chapters. The chapters themselves will or might be “produced” within OJS, just because authors and reviewes are more familiar with OJS and because the management and dissimination of metadata is much better in OJS (as journal articles) than chapters in OMP. OPM’s advantage is the dissemination of books as books (in their metadata).
Of course we’d like to avoid these double tracks.
Do you have any thoughts about this: editors in OJS, representing edited volumes in OJS and / or OMP. Any comments are welcome.

All the best

Hi @klausru,

As you note, there is general convergence between OJS and OMP. This is intentional for a couple of reasons: we want to share more code between the applications to make maintenance more efficient, and we want to gradually blur the lines between types of content. Eventually you could imagine OJS and OMP being more like configurations and less like distinct applications – but that’s a long-term goal and we’re a ways from being able to mix articles and monographs together.

In the meantime, I think an installation of each is probably the best idea. It’ll take some effort to avoid a confusing similarity between the two areas; I’ll give that a good think and see if I can post some suggestions, but I suspect you’ve already thought it through further than I have.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Thanks @asmecher for the feedback.
Just for the record, I will post this as a feature request (editors in ojs) as I think that edited volumes will have a decreasing impact in the future. Many edited volumes are already hard to distinguish from special issues in journals. Both have a bunch of guys curating a certain topic for a cetain publication platform over a short peroid of time. This is why I think that the feature might be interesting for other journals, too.

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Dear all, dear @asmecher , @rvdb , @Marie-Helene , @carola
If you would like to support the feature of having issue editors, please take part in this survey !ERROR and vote.
More info about the survey at: https://pkp.sfu.ca/2021/02/10/ojs-development-priorities-survey/

All the best
Klaus