Alec, I guess I am confused. Why would you have functionality in 2.x and not carry it into 3.x? And, all your questions were defined in 2.x pay per view.
Hi @radjr,
Certain functionality that was in OJS 2.x (the Objects For Review, SWORD, and Lucene plugins; gift, fast-track, and pay-per-view payment handling; double-sidebar layout options; etc) were not rewritten for OJS 3.x. Some of these are concretely planned for OJS 3.x – for example, the SWORD plugin is already underway. Third parties are tackling others, e.g. the Lucene plugin at Free University Berlin. Other elements do not yet have concrete plans e.g. the pay-per-view functionality.
We are limited in developer resources and prioritizing what makes the cut is a constant challenge. Essentially pay-per-view has limited use in our community and is less central to our mandate. We’re always open to co-development in the spirit of open source.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
I guess the answer to my question is that 2.x and 3.x are substantially different architectures?
What do you need to make this happen?
Hi @radjr,
What do you need to make this happen?
The best case would be for someone to develop this functionality and submit it for review/inclusion via Github as an open source contribution, as that would represent minimal burden for the PKP dev team. (Make sure you’re working with someone reputable if you do this, and ideally with at least a little bit of OJS experience.)
Failing that, PKP Publishing Services does contract work, generally in a way that rolls the results into the next release of the open source project.
Thanks,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
please pm me directly so we can discuss. Thanks!
Hi Alec, has Pay-per-view been implemented in OJS 3.x yet? Thanks!
Alec, why does the 3.x demo show the following?
Reader Fees
Selected options, along with their descriptions and fees (which can be edited below), will appear in About the Journal under Policies, as well as at points where payment is required.
Purchase Issue
Purchase Article
Only Restrict Access to PDF version of issues and articles
Hi @radjr (& others),
I’ve reviewed the settings and done some testing and I’m happy to report that OJS 3.1.2-1 does support pay-per-view! There is one cosmetic issue that you may want to patch ([OJS 3.1.1] Article button doesn't change style in case of login - #5 by asmecher) – a fix is available there, and will be fixed in the next release of OJS.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
OMG, Bless you Alec! You are a lifesaver! Thanks. We can now migrate!
Do you know when the patch that is discussed will be included in the released version?
Many thanks!
Hi @radjr,
Our next releases will be OJS 3.1.2-2 and 3.2.0, and the patch will be included in both. The 3.2.0 release is planned for late this year, and 3.1.2-2 will likely come out before that, but specific scheduling is discretionary (we generally wait for either an accumulation of small issues, or a few big ones, to justify a release). In the meantime there’s a patch at the link above that you can apply to the latest release that will resolve it.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
@ asmecher Since OJS 3.1.2 and OJS 3.1.2-1 are essentially same, is there a quick fix that implements the pay-per-view feature in OJS 3.1.2 as well?
Secondly, does the pay-per-view work with manual payments? (We still didn’t get PayPal to work in OJS 3.1.2.)
Finally, I suggested in another request that we be enabled creating one-time download links for the purchaser - both for automated and manual payments. Any plans for that?
Hi @teog,
Pay-per-view is already in OJS 3.1.2, but given the various fixes and tweaks that went into OJS 3.1.2-1, you might consider upgrading anyway.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
Thanks asmecher, but you probably meant PayPal payments then? The question, however, was about manual payments. It is the fact that OJS 3.2.1 does not have pay-per-view for manual payments. There’s no additional feature whatsoever for manual payments in any version of OJS so upgrade won’t do the trick.
What’s the manual payment option for, really? It would be more honest from developers if you just called it “no payments” but it seems you tried to make it sound like an alternative to PayPal, but it’s not. It’s nothing really - no options, no features, no instructions, no technical documentation. Alone in a desert, more like it.
Which brings me back to the old question of alternative payment methods to PayPal - as there are dozens of equally or more reliable services out there nowadays - but you developers (and whoever is behind your project) seem more keen to promote PaylPal than offering a fair and truly open platform.
Glad to see you’re back from “a few weeks off” in just a day when financial matters are being questioned.
@teog, your post comes across as extremely hostile. @asmecher has taken time away from his time off to generously reply to your question.
Our code of conduct requests everyone to contribute to a positive and respectful atmosphere in this forum. Please use care and respect in the tone of your comments.
@ctgraham you know I’ve been more than positive and constructive for months. But when most important questions get ignored no matter how you rephrase them, things start to seem a little awkward.
For clarity, I have found your posts to be often insightful in identifying opportunities for improvement in UI/UX, but also often frustrated and dismissive of the developers contributing (both professionally and as volunteers) to this project. I would encourage you to express your frustration in constructive ways, especially being careful of rude jabs and snark.
The manual payments option is a carry over from OJS 2.x, where it allowed staff to note a payment on behalf of a user for subscriptions. I’m not immediately familiar with payments within OJS, but if you are not seeing a way to enter a manual payment in 3.1.2, it is likely that the implementation remains incomplete for the pay-per-view use-case.
We are a small team with limited resources trying to build and support a community around making scholarship public. We are open to plugins supporting payment methods beyond PayPal, but realistically this is most likely to come from either an interested development partner, or from sponsored development, or from the payment vendor’s developers.
Speaking as part of the PKP Technical Committee, we aim to make the process and the platform free/libre and open. Remember, though, that there are multiple perspectives and interests here. For example, you are clearly very interested in reader payments; but this section of the code is very foreign to me, as this is not a priority for my university. Nevertheless, we’re all trying to contribute together, for the best.
Me frustrated? lol Nah, I’m not the one who replies to a 2-liner with four paragraphs of text. And I’m not the one who suddenly returned from “a few weeks” off within hours after the main question was asked.
And the main question is… To recap, a wise man once said: “When in doubt, follow the money!” - so I think I’ve seen enough over the past few months to conclude that PayPal is probably behind this project, one way or another. Don’t take me wrong, it’s a nice looking project, but minus PayPal. With PayPal/lack of transparency (and you guys making sure it’s just PayPal and nothing else - not even manual payments), it’s not a project but a Trojan Horse made by PayPal Inc. to get behind the enemy lines, in what must look to PayPal as a little new business adventure. Simple as that. Real motivation usually is best hidden in plain sight.
After all, the fast-growing industry of 30,000+ academic journals is a new market that a finance business like PayPal would love to tap into. And they did, didn’t they? I mean, 2+ million articles per year times all the fees, royalties, intellectual property gray areas and so on - makes for some head-spinning amounts of cash. It’s in the tens of billions, annually. Imagine if all that spilled into PayPal’s purse, slowly but surely, under the auspices of the humanitarian, open society, equality for all (except when it comes to dough), blah blah… Not to mention 10s if not 100s of millions tahat PKP already placed into the PayPal bank accounts starting from OJS2 - was it a decade ago? All while you guys play the Oh-We’re-So-Poor-Practically-Homeless-Developers-Who-Do-This-Out-Of-Kindness-From-Our-Hearts, Mother-Theresa type of gig…
Don’t bother showing me the exit. I already requested that my account be closed.
Happy trails. Sorry you seem to be exiting on a sour note.
You, or any future readers, can “follow the money” for PKP with our public Annual Reports, available here:
https://pkp.sfu.ca/about/organization/
If PayPal is secretly funding us, they are doing a spectacular job hiding it, and we are doing a terrible job setting them up for a windfall of the scholcomm market with our commitment to reimagining scholarly publication as a cooperative and open endeavor.
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