Software for Online Peer-Review Journals?

Posted by Cliff on Monday December 2, 2002 @03:57PM from the content-management-with-a-slight-twist dept.

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?"

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Re:One Word: by aagha · 2002-12-03 00:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

I did a ton of research on content management systems to build our system. I looked extensively at Zope and a lot of other systems, but at the end of the day decided on a home-grown solution since our needs where very specialized and we needed tons of flexability. Also (and a huge factor for us), was our dev team was all Java guys, and Zope is PHP (I'm not saying that's bad!). We just wanted to use the expertise we had on hand.

Take a serious look at Zope. If our needs hadn't been so specialized and if we didn't have to put up with the ramp-up time of learing PHP, I think we'd probably have gone with it.

Another system I seriously looked at was Cofax:

http://www.cofax.org/

Its quite robust, and used by some pretty large newspapers.

At the end of the day, you want a system which meets as many of your needs as possible. We didn't settle for Cofax or Zope because they met only about 85% of our needs, so we built our own. But having gone through the experience (not that it wasn't fun), if you can use something like Zope to meet 95%+ of your needs, go with it!

Good luck!