Open Journal Systems
The Evangelists of Empire online journal, part of the History Conference and Seminar series from the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne (deep breath, still with me?) was launched today. I worked on it with my colleagues at the eScholarship Research Centre, James Williams and Eve Young, and the lovely editors from History, Amanda Barry and Joanna Cruickshank.
All that wonderful research, freely available to the public and much more easily accessible (through Google) than it would have been pre-Web. Not to mention a print version of the entire journal finished and available at the same time.
We used Open Journal Systems for the content management system, and are pretty pleased with the results - although I tore my hair out at times working with it (and I really did tear my hair out - a bad habit developed since having a baby). Deferring to the blurb, “Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.”
Making the journal look different to so many of the other journals using OJS involved much tinkering with the css and the templates (and unfortunately having to resort to hard coding content into the about template :( - ah well) - that’s the good thing about open source. But I really should give some feed back to the developers about what improvements would have made my life easier - that’s the other thing about open source - finding the time to contribute when the next project beckons…