I have just read the post announcing that OJS 3.2 is already available. It is bringing some changes that seem to be very interesting. I would like to make a pair of questions about them.
The versioning feature, as far as I understand, will allow editors to publish different versions of an article. Actually, you will not be able to editing the article’s information anymore, once it has been published. Instead, you create a new version. But what if the editor wants to change an article in order to solve a silly mistake and therefore it is quite pointless keeping the original version? Isn´t any way to editing it without creating a new version? Maybe unpublishing the articles, writing the changes, and then publishing it again?
There is another change, which I welcome very much, that is the Article and Editorial Statistics. My question is, will 3.2 version allow us to publicly show this statistis on journals site as OJS 2.x used to do by going to About>Statistics?? As far as I know, this feature was lost in the transition from OJS 2.x to OJS 3.1 and I found it quite interesting.
Please, let me know if I am misunderstanding something.
Many thanks to all those who have made 3.2 possible.
You can use the Unpublish button to unpublish a version, edit it, and republish it. We designed it this way to discourage this practice, but we didn’t rule it out. Even if you think that a change may be a minor typo, keep in mind that the existing version may already have been picked up by third-parties (eg - Crossref, Google Scholar, OAI) so you may need to manually ensure that third-party deposits are updated.
Not yet, but this is a common request and one that I think we will get to. We can’t just take what’s shown in the backend and put it on the frontend because these statistics are calculated with each request. Making them public could quickly bring down a server due to the strain of lots of people looking at them all at once. Our plan is to build in some sensibly cached statistics that can be shown on the frontend.
Thanks so much for your helpful and quicly answer, NateWr.
Do you mean that by versioning the articles they will be automatically updated by third-parties?? If so, it’d very helpful.
And, another question about how this feature works: will you have to upload the article’s galley every time you make a new version even if the changes only apply to the information and not the galley, or is it possible that the new version uses the old galley as it has not changed??
At the moment we do not process any automated updates when a new version is released, but I know that we plan to do so with Crossref.
In other cases, third parties like Google Scholar or anyone who uses your journal’s OAI endpoint will be responsible for deciding how they choose to update records. Some may simply scan for the latest changes and save them again. But others may specifically look to see if a new version is published in order to know whether they should update their records.
We don’t know how these parties will respond. So far Google Scholar has told us they only really care that the article landing page stays up-to-date with the latest content. But I can’t say if that will change or what other services might choose to do.
When you create a new version, a deep copy is made which includes the galleys. You do not need to replace your galleys for a new version unless those galleys have changed.