Annotum is now available. First mooted in March 2011, it’s now a new WordPress theme that aims to deliver a….
* simple, robust, easy-to-use authoring system to create and edit scholarly articles
* an editorial review and publishing system that can be used to submit, review, and publish scholarly articles
An open-source, open-process, open-access scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress, built on the Carringon Theme framework. Annotum provides a complete, open-access scholarly journal production system including peer-review, workflow, and advanced editing and formatting features such as structured figures, equations, PubMed and CrossRef reference import, and structured XML input and output compatible with the National Library of Medicine’s Journal Article DTD.
Could be especially useful for university librarians who have journal management foisted on them?
Looks like it has potential, perhaps in providing a more usable alternative to the Open Publishing System.
This brings up an interesting point: if you were, say, a university that wanted to publish a new online journal, or the proceedings of a single conference, what would you do? It seems that the current practice in both cases is to put up a batch of PDFs and hope someone finds it: do you know of any software that provides a better option?
The publishing of a new online journal is perhaps rather different to the publishing of a set of conference proceedings.
I agree that proceedings often appear to be very shabbily and awkwardly presented online, at least in the arts and humanities. It’s something that reflects badly on the humanities – outsiders might assume we simply don’t have much pride or confidence in our discipline. But Omeka [ http://omeka.org/ ] might have a role to play in making such a collection of papers / posters / audio-recordings / notes / conference handbook / wiki etc all available online in a nice graphical theme – with built in discoverability and search-engine friendliness. Ideally that might be used from the start, rather than be retro-fitted to the conference materials afterwards.
Any system you chose for establishing a new open access ejournal would need to have a streamlined system by which one could ensure…
* an easy and transparent flow in the peer review process, perhaps including open public annotation at various stages of publication.
* easy embedding and enforcement-detection (watermarking, perhaps) of open access licences.
* ability to expand in the future to encompass rich-media and things like HTML5 animated interactive timelines and other graphical flabberghasters.
* storage and presentation of datasets.
* embedding of metadata, including embedding of the journal title and home URL in each individual PDF or HTML article page (so they can be easily tracked back, after they get casually downloaded to a student’s hard-drive).
* search-engine friendliness (i.e.: make sure the article title shows up as the clickable link in search results, not something like “43w94.taryyt.indd”).
* discoverability – RSS feeds for linked tables-of-contents, and make the domain name human-readable (e.g: http://www.fabric-artists.org rather than using initials or shortened forms such as http://www.f-art.com) which Google also seems to like. Consider having the URL structure be human-readable – for example…
http://www.technology-history.org/journal-issue-004/free-full-text/2009_adams_preindustrial_water_mills.html
Once it’s set, never ever break the URL structure by juggling server directories.
* have a good journal search engine for users, via a Google CSE or similar.
* make contacts with your marketing degree course lecturers, and ask them to set a “live” student project of promoting the journal for a month, after (not before) the journal has published its first issue. Alternatively, just pay a freelancer $300 or so to do that for a week.