Hi everyone,
I am an assistant on a journal publishing project. A participant wants to establish a journal in OJS 3 with Scalar books as at least one of the article types. For those unfamiliar with Scalar, it is an open interactive book platform that supports non-linear narratives. Though the particulars of Scalar are probably not important for this post, more information is available here:
https://scalar.usc.edu/
From what I have seen in other online journals, an OJS journal article page might function as something of a landing page with an abstract and a link to the Scalar book or any other production in the platform. This would be a partial solution to our problem. However, our participant also wants to limit access to the journal to his colleagues and graduate students. I understand this can easily be done in access options; however, I don’t think this will block access to external links embedded in an article (or rather, as an article, in the form of a link to a Scalar book, as discussed above). I would like to know: is there a way within OJS3 or outside of it to allow access to a Scalar book or other site provided through an external link only through an article in a journal to which one is subscribed?
I hope this is clear but please let me know if I need to clarify any points and thanks in advance for any feedback.
Best,
Joshua Lynch
Hi @jlynch21
In fact, OJS can control access to content published within OJS, but can’t control access to content in other platforms. Currently there is no integration in OJS to other plataforms, like Scalar, related to grant or blocka access to contents out of it.
Actually, even it doesn´t exist yet, if you have developers in your team/staff IT that could be a great opportunity to them develop such feature where probably within each application would be requirie the checking of authorization tokens or something similar.
Please, you and your team would be more than welcome to post here in forum looking for guidance from other participants as well.
Regards,
Israel Cefrin
Public Knowledge Project Team
Hi @israel.cefrin
Thanks for your feedback! Though modding OJS3 is within the realm of this project’s possibility, I hope there’s a a perhaps easier solution. I understand this is a bit off topic and maybe out-of-scope for a forum devoted to help for OJS, but could you or someone else advise on an existing possible solution to restricting access to external links within an OJS journal article to users with permission to read that article, even if that solution may be through another system or mode extrinsic to OJS?
Hi @jlynch21
Given you will host part of your content in Scalar then an advisable approach would be check/analyse how it manages third party app. Furthermore, I was reading they have an open API that could be use to integrate an OJS auth or reading privilegies to it.
Please, see it: https://scalar.usc.edu/features/open-api/
Hope it helps you.
Regards,
Israel Cefrin
Public Knowledge Project Team