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Potential projects: #2 Integrating ICE with the Open Journal Systems

2009-01-06

Back in December I was at the Open Access Publishing meeting in Sydney, where I got to meet MJ Suhonos and John Willinsky from PKP. I talked about how ICE complemented software from PKP.

Coincidentally, while I was writing up what I said at the meeting I got an email from Chris Rusbridge wondering about whether ICE could help with a conference/journal workflow. Papers from the International Digital Curation Conference (like ours) flow through to the International Journal of Digital Curation (IJDC). The IJDC people are apparently thinking about trying to make the journal available in (X)HTML as well as PDF and to accept a broader range of submissions than just Microsoft Word documents.

I think, but don't actually know that ICE technologies could help with this.

So here's a second idea for a small project, adding ICE support to the OJS journal system to see if providing templates-with-toolbars can work for real live conferences and/or journals. Will authors use the template? How well? Even if they only use it a little bit would it be worthwhile? Do we need a system like PKP's Lemon8-XML to add structure where authors don't? (I think we do, but I don't yet know what it will look like.)

Here are some technical things we'd need to do to support a pilot/trial (assuming we tackled the IJDC)s:

  • Adapt the APA template that they use for the journal so that it looks how the Journal editors want it to look, and document the process. (I did a proof of concept on this for our submission to the conference so I know it works).

  • Make a Zotero/CSL citation style for the journal. (I made a start but it needs to be done properly) Should we bother with EndNote or is making an EndNote style too much of a legal risk these days?

  • Refine the work that Linda Octalina has been doing on getting ICE services embedded into OJS which will involve some conversations with the PKP team about the best integration points with their software.

  • Build on thework that APSR did on OJS to repository deposit to add content to an appropriate repository.