Journal-wide UI for tracking deposits and distribution

[NateWr]

Describe the problem you would like to solve
Journals deposit and distribute published material to many different third-party vendors, such as Crossref, DataCite, DOAJ and ORCID. In addition, journals provide data about their publications through an OAI endpoint and may in the future need to publish cross-journal metadata such as licensing details.

Where OJS supports automated deposits, it does so on an ad-hoc basis. This is usually managed through the Tools > Import/Export interface. There is no single point where a journal manager can get an overview of their distribution tools, identify outstanding distribution tasks, and rectify problems with distributed data.

Describe the solution you'd like
A single page where different tools and services could load a dashboard panel, provide information about outstanding tasks, and link the user on to settings and tools that may be needed.

Deposit and distribution tools and services that might be added to this page include:

• Crossref
• DataCite
• Pubmed
• DOAJ
• ORCID
• Preservation Network (PN)
• CLOCKSS / LOCKSS
• Institutional Repositories
• OAI
• PKP's Beacon
• Google Scholar
• OJS Sitemap
• Google Webmaster Tools

Plugins could add their own dashboard panel when active and the page could provide guidance to journal managers on what services may be appropriate for their needs.

Who is asking for this feature?
We get persistent requests for improving the Crossref deposit management, but these same issues arise for other services. In addition, giving these services greater visibility within the application may help communicate the value of using OJS as a publishing tool.

Additional information
This is a preliminary mockup demonstrating how tools and services could be added and could provide their own status information, quick access to frequent tasks, etc.

[jmacgreg]

This concept looks great to me! I would also include Google Scholar in there, even though there isn't much if anything to be done in terms of settings. But some confirmatory language that the plugin is running would be great, and possibly also a link to the site's Site Map and a suggestion to register with Google's Webmaster Tools (or whatever they are calling it now) would be helpful.

[NateWr]

Good thinking! I've added those to the list above.

[AhemNason]

I'm going to spend more time looking this over and provide better feedback but this mock-up filled me with a sort of excitement that I am, frankly, embarrassed about.

[AhemNason]

Just echoing James feedback here again. I think this is great. And I think "distribution" is definitely a better way to think about these things than import/export.

[willinsky]

I agree with James and Mike on this being such a great addition for managing journals. I'd also like to consider whether it could be a part of our "journal integrity" initiative, which is intended to help journals do more to establish for authors, researcher-readers, and the public the steps they've taken to publish to the highest academic standards in preserving the journal's integrity as a source of knowledge.

In the case of this new Distribution feature, for each service and tool that a journal was operating (if not always complete), OJS could provide a tastefully designed "Journal Services" box on the journal's homepage (perhaps as an option for each service or as a whole), which would include a list with a text along these lines, "[title of journal] distributes article and journal data to the following scholarly publishing services: DOAJ, CrossRef, ORCID, PKP Preservation Network, PKP Beacon, Google Scholar..." (with hyperlinks to each).

Now I realize that there is not going to ever be a fool-proof integrity indicator. Yet part of this effort is for us to take more of a lead with OJS in demonstrating to the public what journals do in their efforts to maintain high academic standards. A big step in that direction might be achieved, I want to believe, by three steps: Displaying these services on the journal's homepage, in addition to providing on article landing pages the peer-review dates and reviewer numbers (with content optionally dependent on authors and reviewers), as well as displaying ORCIDs for all editors and editorial board members (by having an optional "board" generator to which journal managers can add users with ORICIDs for display under About).

[NateWr]

I think that's a good idea @willinsky, and deserves some wider consideration than this issue. I've copied your comments over to a new issue and dropped in some ideas: #6042

[NateWr]

A more detailed use-case from @davidjb for an ORCID management UI in this comment:

In my situation, I've currently got a multi-journal installation where some journals are looking at official ORCID integration and others aren't. Because the OJS install uses federated single-sign on (Shibboleth), this means that one journal someone contributes to may authorise ORCID iDs and another may allow manual entry (e.g. have the ability to edit their ORCID iD in a text box at the site-level or on a different journal) -- having this all be consistent (e.g. what's described above) would solve this issue.

The ability to manage and see authorised/unauthorised ORCID iDs (like what @NateWr, @withanage and #5980 describe) would be fantastic and a huge win for journal managers. At present, the visibility isn't there (beyond looking at published articles) and trying to retrospectively link ORCID iDs means an un-publish/edit contributor/re-publish cycle for all articles and all contributors on each article -- a long and complicated process.