The EJME plugin: improving OJS for articles with data

The EJME project has wrapped up and delivered! To quote the press release from SURFfoundation: "Enhanced Publications now possible with Open Journal Systems - Research results published within tried-and-tested system using plug-ins". That's all great, and so is the documentation, but aimed at those in the know already. A little more explanation is needed.


Who is EJME for?
Any journal that uses OJS for publishing and that wants to make it possible to have data files attached to articles (and as of December 2011, that's 11,500 Journals!).

What does it do?
Three things:

1. improves the standard OJS handling of article 'attachments': files are available to editors and peers during the review process, and the submission process has been made (a little) easier; 
2. plays nicely with external data repositories: an attachment can be a link to a file residing elsewhere (but work just like an internal OJS attachment in the review and publishing stage), and an internal attachment that an author has submitted with the article can also be submitted to a data repository, creating a 'one-stop-shop' experience for the author;
3. on publication, it automagically creates machine-readable descriptions of an article and its data files (in tech-speak: these are small XML files, so-called Resource Maps, in the OAI-ORE standard). These can be harvested by aggregators such as the Dutch site Narcis that can then do more great and wonderful things with it, for example slick visualizations.

Great, but I only want some of that!
That's perfectly possible. If you want only improved handling, they're included in the latest OJS version. The other two are in separate plug ins, install only what you need. Though I do recommend to install the resource map plug-in, it won't require any work after installing.

What does it cost?
Just like OJS itself, the plug-in is open source and free of cost. Installation is as easy as most OJS plug-ins.

What does the journal have to do?
Of course, software is only a tool. The real question is deciding what to do with it. Does the journal want a mandatory Data Access policy? Is there a data repository in the field to cooperate with? Once these questions are answered, the journal policy and editorial guidelines will need to changed to reflect them.

Why would my journal want data along with articles?
As science becomes more and more data-oriented (and that includes the humanities), publishing data along with articles becomes essential for the peer review system to function. There have been too many examples lately of data manipulation that would have been found out by reviewers if they would have checked the data. And for that, they need access to the data. Reviewers of course won't change their habits suddenly once data is available to them, but it's a necessary first step.
(There are many other reasons, both carrots and sticks, for the greater good or the benefit of journal and author, but IMHO this is the pivotal point).

Q: Why name it EJME, such a silly name?
Enhanced Journals Made Easy was a little optimistic, I admit. Enhanced Journals Made (A Little) Easier would have been better. You live and learn!


Want to know more about EJME? Get started with the documentation.

OR09: Repository workflows: ICE-TheOREM, semantic infra for theses

Open Repositories 2009, day 2, session 6b.

ICE-TheOREM - End to End Semantically Aware eResearch Infrastructure for Theses

Jim Downing (University of Cambridge), Peter Sefton (University of Southern Queensland)

Summary: great concept, convincing demonstration. Excellent stuff.

Part if ICE project, a JISC funded experiment with ORE.

[paper] (seems stuck behind login?)

Importance of ORE: “ORE is a really important protocol – it has been missing for the web for most of its life so far.” (DH: Amen!)

Motivations for TheOREM: check ORE – is it applicable and useful? What are different ways of using? How do SWORD and ORE combine?

Pracitally: improving theses visibility, embargoes as enabler.

Interesting: in the whole repository system, the management of embargoes is separated from the repository by design. A special system serves resourcemaps for the unembargoed, IR polls these regularly. Interesting: this reflects the real-world political issues, and makes it easier to bring quite radical changes.

Demonstrator (with the Fascinator) with one thesis, with reference to data object: molecule description in chemical markup language (actual data).

Simple authoring environment in openoffice Writer (Word is also supported), stylesheet + convention based approach. When uploaded, the doc is taken apart to atomistic xml objects in Fedora. The chemical element is a separate object with relation to the doc, versioning etc.

Embargo metadata is written as text in the doc (on title page; date noted using convention,KISS approach), and a style (p-meta-date-embargo) is applied. The thesis is again ingested - and voila, the part of the thesis with embargo is now hidden.

This simple system also allows dialogue between student and tutor - remarks on the text - to be embedded in the document itself (and hidden to the outside by default). It looks deceivingly like Words's own comments, which I imagine will ease the uptake.

Sidenote: policy in this project is that only submitter can ever change embargo data. So it is recommended to use openID rather than institutional logins, as PhD graduates tend to move on, and then nobody can change it anymore.

Q (from Les Carr): supervisors won’t like to have their interaction with students complicated by tech. What is their benefit?

A: automatic backing up is a big benefit, also of the workflow (ie. the comments in the document text). We *know* students appreciate it. Supers may not like it but everyone else will, and then they’ll have to.

(note DH: this is of course in the sciences, it will be an interesting challange to get the humanities to adhere to stylesheet and microformatting conventions)

Q: can this workflow also generate the ‘authentic and blessed copy’ of the final thesis?

A: Not in project scope, we still produce the pdf  for that. In theory this might be a more authentic copy, but they might scream at the sight of this tech.