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?"

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 [slashcode.com]. 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! =)

Re:Slashcode.com !

[an_mo]

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.

Two processes vs. one process

[Sad Loser]

There are two separate process going on here

1. The 'closed' peer review process
2. The 'open' publishing process

Slashcode integrates the two, using an open peer review process, and might be an interesting way of presenting the information, but if you want a 'traditional' journal process, and format, you are probably better to use two separate process.

One would be a document sharing system, for the peer review process, the other a publishing system. Generally, systems seem to do one of these nicely, but rarely both.

My vote would be to go with the slashcode, as I think the open peer review process is intrinsically more valid, and slashcode has had a lot of geeks trying to break it, and perl is easy to customise.

Site Management

[liqnitro]

It seems to me that the slashcode ( the code that runs this sit ) might be what you need. This seems perfect for handling what you need. Im sure that this will help you down the road if you ever need to handle the kind of volume slashdot does.

One Word:

[Anonymous Coward]

ZOPE! [zope.org]

Re:One Word:

[aagha]

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!

Re:One Word:

[aagha]

Oops. I forgot. Zope is Python, not PHP.

I think it must be some kind of secret because it took me about 10 minutes to find this info on their site.

not slashcode; perhaps LWN

[merriam]

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 [lwn.net] 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 [mems-exchange.org].

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.

EPrints

[chepati]

I've already used GNU EPrints [eprints.org] 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

EPrints gives you OAI...

[Manic Miner]

Darn, where did my moderation points go? :(

Another advantage to using eprints is that it uses the OAI protocol to provide an external XML based interface to your site. This allows central "harvesters" to harvest the meta-data from your site and allow ease of centralised access and searching of multilpe e-print archives.

For more information on OAI... see the FAQ [openarchives.org]

Open Journal Systems

[Lao-Tzu]

Check out the University of BC's Public Knowledge Project [pkp.ubc.ca]'s Open Journal Systems [pkp.ubc.ca]. 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.

cyberchair

[jilles]

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.

Can you clarify?

[rubinson]

I'm a bit unclear as to precisely what you're asking. Most respondents seem to think that you want open reviews (by anyone who is subscribed to the journal) on the site. I read it as "We'll have traditional peer-review journal but all distribution (everything from submission of articles for consideration, to distribution of the articles to reviewers, to publication of the journal) will take place online."

Which interpretation is correct?

If the latter, I don't see this as being a particularly complex issue. Basically all that you would want to do is standardize on a format (I'd recommend LaTeX or TeX; others will suggest DocBook). Documents would be emailed or submitted via the website and it would be the responsibility of the website's maintainer(s) to make sure that copies get archived, maintained, and distributed appropriately. As to the site's backend, there may be some pre-fab solutions out there but your needs are so simple that you could roll your own PHP or CGI without much difficulty.

In other words (if my interpretation is correct), I don't think that you want to change the actual submission and review process; rather, you just want to make use of the internet as a distribution mechanism. And if that's the case, your needs are really quite simple.

I'd like to add that, as an academic myself, I'm quite interested in what you're doing. Drop me an email if you'd like to discuss this further.

Re:Can you clarify?

[jilles]

Actually I would recommend against insisting on a particular format. Not everybody is a tex fan and I don't know anyone who ever worked with docbook. It's content that matters, not the format. You don't want to scare away interested authors by putting all sorts of constraints on the wordprocessor. IEEE and ACM for instance no longer do this, instead they have guidelines for formatting your document and templates for most popular wordprocessors are available.

I mostly work with framemaker and sometimes with ms word. It always pisses me off if TeX is required. It's not my problem that the editor likes TeX. He/she should be glad I'm willing to invest the time to (freely) provide content.

As for the functionality, there are two aspects: handling the subscriptions and handling the review process. Good solutions for both aspects exist. There's basically no need to reinvent the wheel.

DSpace

[kinema]

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."

These people can do this for you:

[henben]

http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/startajo urnal [biomedcentral.com]

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 [openacs.org]) 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 [attbi.com] 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 [weblogs.com] if you want to get in touch.

John

xaraya

[an_mo]

Check out Xaraya [xaraya.com], a promising Nuke clone. It's still in development phase but you should be able to take the codebase and extend from there your modules. There are several others nuke cms (phpnuke, postnuke, envolution...). The open source cms development is still in an evolving phase due to repeated forks.

Try using Bricolage

[Maple Syrup]

You might try using Bricolage [bricolage.cc]. It's open source, based on mod_perl and Mason [masonbook.com], and it seems like it would do most of what you're looking for.

EDAS

[csp]

A lot of conferences use the EDAS system [edas.info] for handling the peer review process. I've not been an admin, but it has worked well as a reviewer for conferences like IEEE Infocom, Globecom, etc.

How about a Wiki?

[Demosthenex]

I'd think Twiki with a custom skin and several webs would do what you want.

Twiki has some features that aren't in the traditional Wiki like access and revision control.

Check it out at http://www.twiki.org/

Demo