The main aim of the HOAP project is to use Eprints software to develop a low cost platform for our University journals. In our original project plan we scheduled this for completion by the end of month 4 of the project (August). However, we underestimated the complexity of this and also the fact that August is not the best time to meet!
The delay has also worked in our advantage as the University is currently rebranding its web presence and the HOAP pages will now reflect this. In addition, research at the University is now to be defined into the six themes below. The delay in getting the Eprints pages launched will now allow us to brand each journal we launch under one of the themes.
We have some very rough mock-ups of what the Teaching in Lifelong Learning journal may look like below. Basically we intend to have a landing page in the Repository and then a contents page for each issue which will link directly to the abstract/references and the full text in PDF.
After discussions with Eprints we have decided to create a ‘new’ Repository, which will sit alongside the existing Repository. This involves a little extra work at the planning stage; hence the delay, but the benefits far outweigh this. The main reasons for doing this are to be able to maintain navigation throughout – if we didn’t do this readers may not be able to get back to the journal front page from the abstract and PDF. In addition, we want to keep the browse list of journal article authors separate from Repository authors.
We are also working on a revised Eprints article workflow in order to streamline the workflow as much as we can. We hope to include an improved references display that will allow users to see all references, including DOI links, in the abstract view.
As CrossRef publishers we are committed to add DOIs to all article references (about 400 in total). We estimate that this will take us well beyond the end of the HOAP project, however, as part of the sustainability planning we have committed to do this. We will then build this into the workflow for issue publication and costs, which we will blog about in the coming weeks.