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?"
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 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 The version distributed by the author is somewhat out of date and has a number of undocumented bugs that you need to work around.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
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."
I know I will be moderated down but I would actually advise against slashcode, for several reasons. First you basically need a dedicated machine (I know it's not entirely true, but it's a pain in the ass). Second, installation is a major pain, and almost never works the first time you try it. Third, extensibility, and customization (e.g. internationalization) is limited and hard to implement.
I recommend going with one of the nuke clones. I have recommended below Xaraya, which is still in development phase. If you want something ready to go, use Postnuke or Envolution. They have hundreds of external modules, can be installed in 10 minutes, are true content management systems (not just a weblog), have internationalization support, full templating, and you can use a provider for less than $10/month.