In Montreal we had a brief chat concerning preprints in OJS3 together with @jmacgreg and the folks from Crossref. This is my suggestion on how to add a preprints feature to OJS3.
Note that this is not the same thing as having a continuous publishing model, but should be probably considered together with it.
What are preprints?
Publishing article manuscripts before the editorial process has finished and outside the normal issue publication. This could be:
immediately after submission
when the submission is received by the editor (editor assigned)
A fast and simple solution: add a new files grid to the Submission stage of the workflow. The grid would work like the Galleys grid in the production stage.
If you add a file(s) to the Preprints grid, it will tell the system that a preprint of the article is available.
Showing preprints in OJS3
A preprint of an article will be visible if the following are true:
a) There are files available in the Preprints grid
b) The article has not been published yet
There should be two views/handlers:
Preprints page for the journal. This will list all preprints for the given context.
Preprints page for the site. This will list all preprints for the whole site.
The abstract page of a preprint should be different from the published article. It should make clear that it is not a published article.
Question: this could be done with versioning as well, but the problem is that the UI for versioning is now contained in the production tab - not in the stage before review?
I know that PKP has talked about preprints and OJS, but I do not know about the schedule or the way they plan to implement it. Maybe @asmecher has some details?
After writing the description above I started to think that if OJS soon has a versioning feature meaning that it starts to support different versions of the published article, then this is probably the feature that should also include the preprint version of an article. @lilients knows if this has been considered?
Hi @ajnyga, thanks for your thoughts on this topic. I started to adapt the versioning to the latest version of OJS. And we also discussed the preprints recently. I wrote some ideas to the issue: [OJS] Versioning for published articles · Issue #2072 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub. I would be happy if you could have a look and give some feedback.
Since I am not an official representative of PKP, I do not want to announce anything too specific, but maybe @asmecher could?
Regarding OJS, OJS 3.2 will be a step closer to having the ability to publish articles as preprints inside OJS, but it is not a feature that is planned (to my knowledge) to that release. But as I said, there are now technical solutions that will make it easier. Not sure yet if a plugin would be enough to get there in OJS3.2.
