The project Modern Publishing – part of the Hamburg Open Science (HOS) program – combines the many years of experience of the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) and the Hamburg State and University Library (SUB). Both institutions started their collaboration in 2019 to develop a process chain for Single-Source-Publishing based on open source solutions such as GitLab and Open Journal Systems. In addition to aspects of collaboration and participation, the focus is also on automatisms for generating different formats of a publication.
First architectural design (2019)
At the Open Access Days 2019 (OA Days), the first draft of the sociotechnical system and its components of the tool chain – Markdown, pandoc-scholar, GitLab, Docker, Hypothes.is and OJS – were presented during the poster session::
The writing and publishing process is divided into three phases: the writing, the pre-submission and the submission stage (see Dürkop / Hagen 2019). The writing stage includes the writing process of one or more authors, which leads to a first draft of the text. The pre-submission stage is the phase before the submission, in which different tools are used to generate different formats. Collaborative feedback processes allow a quality control of the contribution before it is transferred to the target system in the desired or required formats as part of the submission stage – in case of our project OJS.
As part of the tool marketplace at the OA Days 2019, interested parties were able to gain further insights. For the project team, the direct exchange with professional colleagues was particularly valuable. This way the process chain and its flexibility could be developed further with different perspectives in mind.
Architectural draft (2020)
The result of the continuing work is Single-Source-Publishing with Swapfire and OJS, which will also be presented as part of our Open-Access-Week workshop (workshop registration) by Tim Boxhammer (SUB HH), Axel Dürkop (tub.), Florian Hagen (tub.), Albert Krewinkel ( tub.) and Isabella Meinecke (SUB HH) today from 2:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.:
The representation – in the form of a vortex or a kind of snail – shows a workflow of the project for Single-Source-Publishing of a journal publication. Markdown texts are converted into PDF and HTML files with the help of static site generators and converters – depending on which target formats (e.g. journal articles, but also teaching-learning scripts or websites) are needed.
The process chain is divided into seven steps:
- 1. Authors submit article texts, metadata and references in OJS.
- 2. Following an assessment, the submitted document – if it is available as a DOCX file, for example – is converted into a Markdown file with Pandoc.
- 3. After the conversion process has been completed, the text corpus must be checked and edited manually.
- 4. As part of step 4, the references are prepared for the use of the submitted BibLaTeX file.
- 5. With the help of Netlify CMS the metadata is recorded.
- 6. Formats such as HTML or PDF are continuously produced with GitLab (universal content management system), Docker (container virtualization) and pandoc-scholar (format conversion).
- 7. The final files are finally uploaded to OJS and published.
Practical application and workshop
In practice, the different possibilities of the process chain were tested with specialist colleagues inside at the TUHH and beyond. Most recently, the freely available and peer-reviewed scientific journal kommunikation@gesellschaft – which has carried out research regarding information and communication technologies for 20 years – was relaunched according to Open Access and Open Science standards using the method shown above.
The project team is looking forward to the workshop and is always open to questions and suggestions.
Further information on the Modern Publishing project:
https://oa-pub.hos.tuhh.de/en/
More about the Open Access Week 2020:
