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?"

Comments

Is it just me, or...

[thecampbeln]

...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!?!

Slashcode.com !

[thecampbeln]

Yep, heard of it before and just now took the time to look into it: SlashCode. Take a gander, as it should do what you need it to do! Good luck!

...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! =)

One Word:

[Anonymous Coward]

ZOPE!

EPrints

[chepati]

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

Open Journal Systems

[Lao-Tzu]

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.

I've written this

[johnseq]

I began working on a project for a consortium of peer-review journals to support online publishing last year, but the effort ran out of funding as we went to alpha. The toolkit we selected (OpenACS) supports the e-commerce and subscriber/anonymous access you describe, multi-journal ASP-style deployment, as well as customizable workflows for peer review. I've written up a draft design document here It's a bit rough, but you should get a sense of what's the projects goals were.

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