Prevent Submission Only Journal from Appearing on Index Page

Description of issue or problem I’m having:
Most of our journals use the submission workflow and publish in OJS. But we were recently approached by a campus journal that was wondering if they would be able to use OJS for the workflow tools, but they still wanted to keep their current publication/distribution solution.

Steps I took leading up to the issue:
It seems like submission only workflow set up is permitted (https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/journal-policies-workflows/en/alternative-uses), so in our sandbox I went to Settings>Distribution>Access and checked “OJS will not be used to publish the journal’s contents online”.

However, this did not remove the journal from the OJS index page. Is there a setting I’m missing or is there no way to exclude a journal from the index page if it is public?

Application Version - e.g., OJS 3.1.2:
OJS 3.3.0.6

Hi @IOPNdev,

There is an option to disallow the site from publicly appearing on the site: Learning Open Journal Systems 3.3 - Site Administration - there is a checkbox in the setup for “Enable this journal to appear publicly on this site” - you’d want to have this unchecked.

The tricky part with this for your use case is that the workflow users would then not have a publicly accessible site that they can go to and. The URL to the login should still work, but they would have to know that exact URL to go to access the login. I suppose you could un-enable this option and see how it works for you.

Best regards,

Roger
PKP Team

Thanks @rcgillis. Yeah, I should have mentioned that in my post. Making the site private/not public was the first thing we tried. But even if we give authors the direct url to register for the journal, the registration redirects to login when the journal isn’t public, so there doesn’t seem to be any way for a new author to register an account with the journal if that box is unchecked.

If we end up supporting this use case, I was thinking that the easiest solution would be to add a checkbox for “show journal on index page” to the admin site settings right below the one you mentioned, and then check against that setting when rendering the index page. Do you have any ideas or feedback on a solution we could implement?

Many thanks,
Alex

Hi @IOPNdev,

Thanks for clarifying. I see how that wouldn’t really work with your use case.

I’m not sure about adding that additional option and what would be involved on the development side of things in order to implement what you’ve suggested. I’ve flagged this post as a “Feature Request” and will request that our developers review this and see what they can suggest.

Best regards,

Roger
PKP Team

This is tricky because sometimes when a journal selects “OJS will not be used to publish the journal’s contents online” they still want/need the journal to appear online, as you’ve found. Although it disables the issue archives, the journal can still publish details about the journal, submission, announcements, etc. So in some cases the site does not want to exclude this journal from the list.

I think there is some wider interest in improving the multi-journal site, but this work isn’t prioritized at this time.

2 Likes

Thanks @NateWr. Yeah, I can definitely see how folks would usually want workflow only journals to appear on the index page. If I do end up needing to support this use case, does the solution I proposed make sense? Or is there an obvious better way to implement it?

1 Like

I support the @IOPNdev’s idea about a public site that’s not indexed directly in the site’s list.

I show my case too.

A journal of ours uses OJS for the peer-review since 2017. At first they published only on paper. Last year they choosed to publish a digital Open Access session too, to promote their researches.

We can’t know which submission will be published on the OA section before we accept it, so we’re still receiving all the submission in the “old” journal and we’re publishing just the selected papers in a “new” OA journal on the same site.

So if you visit our “new” OA journal for the first time and you want to submit your paper, you should go to our “old” journal to start the submission process. I redirect these new authors with a custom link in the main menu and it works. But in our site’s index page we have both “Journal” and “Journal OA” and it’s confusing!

@IOPNdev, we often try to minimize the number of settings, because it’s already pretty high and that makes it difficult to comprehensively test all potential configurations. If you’re thinking about a modification, I’d recommend doing this in a custom theme.

In your custom theme, you can overwrite just the indexSite.tpl file and exclude that journal, either by checking the journal ID or by checking the journal’s publish mode:

{if $journal->getData('publishingMode') !== \APP\journal\Journal::PUBLISHING_MODE_NONE}
   ...
{/if}
3 Likes

Thanks @NateWr, that is exactly the advice I was looking for. I ended up adding a variable to the config for journal ids to be excluded, and then matched against it in the template using the method you described. This way we have the option to support a “submission only” workflow as intended.

1 Like