Slashdot Mirror
Software for Online Peer-Review Journals?
candiman asks: "I am involved in developing a peer-reviewed journal to serve a large group of researchers who currently have no publication that suits their needs. To keep costs (both production and subscription) down we are looking to do it online, with one or two printed editions each year. We are a not-for-profit organization - we aim to break even, not make money. As the most web savvy person involved I am charged with developing the actual system. To save on wheel development time I have been looking for existing, free (beer and speech), management systems. We need something that is (relatively) easy to use for tech (but not web) savvy people. It must be easily extendable as the journal grows in size. It must be standards based (we don't want to be locked into any sort of proprietary formats). The ability to support subscribers and the ability to maintain both free and subscriber sections would also be useful (we are planning to charge a low annual subscription to access the journal's most recent edition - after three months the papers will be released to the free area). Does the Slashdot community have an suggestions or experience in this area?"
...would SlashDot's own codebase work for this? All you would need to do is restrict who is allowed to sign up for an account and tweak the moderator point system, but other then that, wouldn't a SlashDot-esque site do you just fine?
Funny revelation, considering this was asked on SlashDot!?!
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
ahhhh home time.
It seems to me that the slashcode ( the code that runs this sit ) might be what you need. This seems perfect for handling what you need. Im sure that this will help you down the road if you ever need to handle the kind of volume slashdot does.
...and oh yea, my first 'first post'!?! It does feel as warm and fuzzy as I thought it would... (and I even had time to spell check! =)
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
ZOPE!
seems to me like you just gave a program description for PHP/POST NUKE. While these systems have been developed to provide an easy way to maintain a slashdot-esque site, with just a little modification, either of these programs should suit your needs nicely. I have tried both PHP and POST NUKE and have found that I prefer PHP NUKE, however both of these programs are small (5 or so meg I belive) and extremely easy to install (un tar them into your web directory, create a MySQL database and run a simple install script) so it should be easy to play around with both and decide which will work best for you.
/. around, what more you could possibly have to put on a blog.
On a side note, I think it would be really great to see someone use these for something other than a blog site, after all, with
Everyone so far has said "slashcode". I don't think that's a good idea. I doubt the kind of "peer review features" offered here will help, and I doubt it's easy to extend to what you want. The same goes for PHP-Nuke and others.
Here's a slightly less obvious answer. LWN is doing something a little closer to what you're talking about. They have subscription and delayed release for non-subscribers. They are planning to release their code, which is based on Quixote.
You have given very little information, so perhaps you can expect only answers like "slashcode" and "LWN". It depends on many things including the subject matter of the journal, what sort of mark-up and formatting is involved, and how much special typesetting you want in the printed editions. If it's not-for-profit, how about staying out of dead trees altogether?
I wish journals -- and websites -- would keep it simple.
I've already used GNU EPrints for two projects here at work and it almost exactly fits your description. It's 100% perl based and can be extended or shrunk as much as your perl skils allow. It's initially subscriber based, but there are some areas which are accessible to non-subscribers. The system doesn't come with support for payments because it is written in the spirit of free peer2peer review tradition and the only requirement to being a subscriber is the ability to create an account. I would imagine though that it'd be relatively easy to adapt it to have a fee-based access mode.
Don't know if this is what you need but it sounds pretty close.
chepati
Check out the University of BC's Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems. I've heard good things about it. It runs on PHP and MySQL, and should be pretty easy to setup. They have a demonstration online you can take a look at.
Hmm something (free-web) in php that uses mysql to do (journals) Newsletters...
http://gregory.kokanosky.free.fr/phpmynewsletter/
you're welcome
1+1+1=3 ended up at phpMyJournal, but that's a toy "diary" thing.
I used a gnu licensed set of python files called cyberchair (http://www.cyberchair.org/) to manage the submission and review process for a small conference last year. If you know python, it is relatively easy to set up. The version distributed by the author is somewhat out of date and has a number of undocumented bugs that you need to work around. However, I found that it was reasonably functional after some tinkering. Basically cyberchair saved me a lot of time since it takes care of collecting abstracts, author information etc. Also you can set it up to request reviewers to use a web form to submit their reviews, generate overviews for conference chair and reviewers, etc.
As for scalability, it is all pretty light weight and basically only requires apache and a recent version of python. It should be relatively easy to adapt this for a journal. After all the review process for journals is similar to that of conferences.
The guy who developed cyberchair also runs a small service company that can arrange the whole thing for you (including webhosting if needed) for a reasonable fee. This is actually the route I recommend unless you have too much spare time. For budgetary reasons, this was not feasible in my case unfortunately.
There's a few similar opensource packages for managing conferences that I can't remember the name of right now but I'm sure google will help you with that.
Jilles
I'm a bit unclear as to precisely what you're asking. Most respondents seem to think that you want open reviews (by anyone who is subscribed to the journal) on the site. I read it as "We'll have traditional peer-review journal but all distribution (everything from submission of articles for consideration, to distribution of the articles to reviewers, to publication of the journal) will take place online."
Which interpretation is correct?
If the latter, I don't see this as being a particularly complex issue. Basically all that you would want to do is standardize on a format (I'd recommend LaTeX or TeX; others will suggest DocBook). Documents would be emailed or submitted via the website and it would be the responsibility of the website's maintainer(s) to make sure that copies get archived, maintained, and distributed appropriately. As to the site's backend, there may be some pre-fab solutions out there but your needs are so simple that you could roll your own PHP or CGI without much difficulty.
In other words (if my interpretation is correct), I don't think that you want to change the actual submission and review process; rather, you just want to make use of the internet as a distribution mechanism. And if that's the case, your needs are really quite simple.
I'd like to add that, as an academic myself, I'm quite interested in what you're doing. Drop me an email if you'd like to discuss this further.
Darn, where did my moderation points go? :(
Another advantage to using eprints is that it uses the OAI protocol to provide an external XML based interface to your site. This allows central "harvesters" to harvest the meta-data from your site and allow ease of centralised access and searching of multilpe e-print archives.
For more information on OAI... see the FAQ
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
From http://www.dspace.com :
"Welcome to DSpace, a newly developed digital repository created to capture, distribute and preserve the intellectual output of MIT.
For the user: DSpace enables easy remote access and the ability to read and search DSpace items from one location: the World Wide Web.
For the contributor: DSpace offers the advantages of digital distribution and long-term preservation for a variety of formats including text, audio, video, images, datasets and more. Authors can store their digital works in collections that are maintained by MIT communities.
For the institution: DSpace offers the opportunity to provide access to all the research of the institution through one interface. The repository is organized to accommodate the varying policy and workflow issues inherent in a multi-disciplinary environment. Submission workflow and access policies can be customized to adhere closely to each community's needs."
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/startajo urnal
- The 'closed' peer review process
- The 'open' publishing process
Slashcode integrates the two, using an open peer review process, and might be an interesting way of presenting the information, but if you want a 'traditional' journal process, and format, you are probably better to use two separate process.One would be a document sharing system, for the peer review process, the other a publishing system. Generally, systems seem to do one of these nicely, but rarely both.
My vote would be to go with the slashcode, as I think the open peer review process is intrinsically more valid, and slashcode has had a lot of geeks trying to break it, and perl is easy to customise.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
If you'd like the code, I'd be happy to share it with you. I'd love to see it make it into production, and it's possible that the original sponsors might be able to make resources available to see it happen. Click the mail link on my blog if you want to get in touch.
John
Check out Xaraya, a promising Nuke clone. It's still in development phase but you should be able to take the codebase and extend from there your modules. There are several others nuke cms (phpnuke, postnuke, envolution...). The open source cms development is still in an evolving phase due to repeated forks.
You might try using Bricolage. It's open source, based on mod_perl and Mason, and it seems like it would do most of what you're looking for.
A lot of conferences use the EDAS system for handling the peer review process. I've not been an admin, but it has worked well as a reviewer for conferences like IEEE Infocom, Globecom, etc.
I'd think Twiki with a custom skin and several webs would do what you want.
Twiki has some features that aren't in the traditional Wiki like access and revision control.
Check it out at http://www.twiki.org/
Demo
I found this after reading your message. Sounds pretty much like what you need:
http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/ojs/
the codebase reviews YOU!