Online Journals and Repositories

Journal publication is currently the major form of scholarly communication, and increasingly many researchers are looking to quality open publishing options to ensure the widest access to their work.

This project aims to improve scholarly communications workflows for the production, preservation and dissemination of electronically published scholarly journals in the Australian higher education and research sector.

The project utilises the Open Journal System (OJS), a powerful Web-based e-journal production environment developed by the Public Knowledge Project in Canada. Through this project the editorial capacity is maintained and the content is managed sustainably through automatic connection and transformation to OAI compliant archival repositories such as DSpace. This connection is facilitated through the RIFF Submission Service, which includes compliance within the METS schema developed by the National Library of Australia.

OJS pre-publication workflows for the editorial processes including call and paper submission, peer review and versioning, leading up to final publication decisions are retained within the OJS framework for the editors. The journal editions, once completed, are migrated onto DSpace. The benefits of this phase of the workflow are that DSpace provides essential services, such as; long-term preservation, persistent identifiers for bibliographic control, and common OAI-PMH search/discovery mechanisms.

Issues around the structure of an individual journal issue (editorial, research articles, reviews etc) needed to be recognised in the submission and metadata descriptions.

To enable some level of branded presentation, an associated part of this project is the development of generic presentation templates and rendering environments. The RIFF Dissemination Service is used in a DSpace environment to present the journals stored in the repository in attractive, user-friendly, presentation using a Manakin styled output.

This project has provided the Australian higher education and research sector with an efficient, low-cost, durable system for the production, preservation and dissemination for scholarly journals that integrates with the repository and data commons framework to improve the impact and access to, the research outputs of the sector.

This project brought together a collaboration of institutions and individuals who are active in facilitating new methods of the publication and storage of research content. The project includes expert staff from The University of Sydney, ANU, the National Library of Australia, University of Technology, Sydney, and the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

Contact:

Project Manager: Ross Coleman
Technical Lead: Gary Browne