Redirection issue with multi-journal site

Software Support
1

We have an installation of a multi-journal ojs 3.2. Each journal has its own url (not a subdomain).
https://journal1.com/article/view/11
https://journal2.com/article/view/22

We noticed that if we try appending a valid submission id of one of the journals to the other journal’s url, we can still display the content of the journal instead of getting 404.

Like:
https://journal1.com/article/view/22
https://journal2.com/article/view/11

This brings confusion and journal managers are not happy about it.

Can you please advise?

Thanks

2

How are the following keys in your config.inc.php?

  • base_url (for the main website)
  • base_url[*] (for every Journal)

Also, what are the Journals’ abbreviations, in Journal settings? Every Journal should have it’s own abbreviation which should be included in the URLs.

Finally, what webserver are you using?

Janio

3

Hi @janiosarmento,

Thanks for your replay. Each journal manager wanted their own selected url. So we set the urls in the config file. The abbreviations are not in the journal urls. The format is something like below:

base_url = “https://journal.library.com”
base_url[“abc”] = “https://alphajournal.com”
base_url[“xyz”] = “https://betajournal.com”

However below redirections happen also:
https://journal.library.com/index.php/abc >> https://alphajournal.com
https://journal.library.com/index.php/xyz >> https://betajournal.com

The abbreviations are set in the journal settings and used in the config file as above.
We use apache.

Best Regards
Ghazal

4

Hi @asmecher,

Is this an expected behavior with the current settings as the journals share the same database? Shouldn’t it be considered as a bug?

This even causes searches in Google Scholar to return results in more than one site, which only one is valid. That is how we found out about this issue.

Even if I added a RewriteRule for that specific article in the site’s apache config to be redirected to 404, Google Scholar still has the invalid url listed. I tried disabling and enabling Google Scholar plugin for both of the journals. Not sure it will take some time to reindex. However the original issue is there till I add rewrite rules for the whole site which is a very big task.

Regards
Ghazal

5

Any update on this? Has anyone faced this issue? Not sure if I have posted in the right place.

I managed to write plugin to do the redirection to the right journal. However some Google Scholar results still show incorrect journals as well as the right one.

Regards
Ghazal