Open source infrastructure for the new publishing platform

After we introduced the strategic and conceptual orientation of our new open-access publishing platform, we now would like to introduce its technical aspects.

Our technical services encompass the hosting of journals and conference publications and the distribution of metadata and content to indexing, archiving, and registration systems. We also develop OJS plugins for community use. We offer a continuously enhanced XML-based publication workflow for journals and engage with the OJS developer community in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland).

Open Journal Systems

We use Open Journal Systems (OJS), the world’s most widely used journal management software from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). We constantly keep OJS and the underlying software infrastructure up to date to provide a modern hosting experience. For journals, the software is ready to use. For the conference publications, we are developing necessary functional extensions for OJS in coordination with PKP.

Hosting and Standards

To ensure not only free access to the published content, but also to guarantee easy reuse, all articles and conference contributions are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) and the authors retain copyright. The license information is included in all article formats (PDF, XML, HTML) and in the metadata. All content is professionally archived on a long-term archiving platform by the TIB. Furthermore, persistent identifiers (ORCID IDs, Crossref DOIs, and in the future, RORs) are used.

Plugin Development

OJS supports the extension of functionalities through a plugin architecture. We are currently developing three OJS plugins.

• The first plugin we developed is the Rosetta plugin for archiving publications in the TIB long-term archiving infrastructure (based on Ex Libris Rosetta)
• We are developing a plugin to support the Research Organization Identifier (ROR) under Participation of the wider community and with the support of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). We plan to maintain the ROR plugin in the long term and to gradually address community requests. The first iteration of development is already in the final stages.
• The third plugin currently in the planning stage of development is the support of conference metadata in OJS in intensive cooperation with the ConfIDent project. The support of conference publications with OJS is one of the main priorities of the TIB-OJS infrastructure.

Additionally, we integrated the Open-Impact-Vizualizer-Plugin of the ROSI project into our plugin portfolio.

XML Workflow

We support a template-based basic XML workflow for the production of articles and conference publications. Authors usually submit their articles as Word documents, and then OJS plugins enable conversion, editing and distribution of the publications. We support JATS as XML standard. The processing of XML-based articles is a complex and dynamic process, and we continuously refine the XML workflow components.

Developers network

We collaborate with the German-speaking and international OJS developers community to improve the quality of the software and take a leading role in the German and international OJS developer community. In addition to that, we regularly offer presentations at conferences and workshops and advise the community in XML publishing workflows and actively support the Identifier Plugins.

Our software is provided under free licenses and can be reused and further processed by the community.

Interested?

If you are interested in hosting jounrals and conference publications on our platform, please feel free to contact us:

Dr. Xenia van Edig (editorial contact): xenia.van.edig@tib.eu
Dulip Withanage (technical contact): dulip.withanage@tib.eu

Dulip Withanage

arbeitet im Bereich der Publikationsdienste und betreut die Open-Access-Platform TIB-Open-Publishing