WordPress as a tool for the publication of scientific journals

Creator: Nate Steiner, picture available under CC0-Licence V 1.0 from https://www.flickr.com/photos/nate/284184160/

nnYesterday, Piotr Otręba asked on the Radical Open Access mailing list for themes and plugins to use WordPress as an Open Access Repository. I also spent some time on this question and answered with this message: „I used annotum in the past to run journals as a test, but it is outdated, http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2011/06/30/annotum-publishing-with-wordpress-soon-coming-to-a-journal-near-you/. As far as I see, there are unfortunately only several plugins that simulate some repository functions in parts, e.g. ScholarPress Coins, Enhanced Publication, OAI-ORE Resource Map. However, these have very few users, so it is difficult to say how reliable and sustainable they are. Perhaps a crowd funding campaign for a wordpress-repository theme/plugin might be an option …“nnThis morning I read another answer (from Mathew Arthur, Co-Editor in chief and WordPress-publisher of the Open Access journal Capacious) which is a kind of late Christmas gift. Mathew describes in detail (and by using many screen shots) the necessary adaptations to run a scientific journal using WordPress, which fulfills expectations technically as well as organizationally (peer review) and is at the same time much more flexible than OJS. Here is a quote from Mathew’s message: „Using WordPress with only a few plugins (…) and filters in the theme functions.php file, the Capacious platform includes a robust online article submission, revision, and online publishing architecture. Each submission entity is tracked throughout review, editorial, and typesetting processes all the way through to publication and each article and all its associated blind review comments, edits, and assets are accessible from an intuitive administrative dashboard. Article pdfs are generated dynamically from the same submission entity and assigned a digital object identifier (DOI).“ The Google Scholar indexing also seems to run smoothly.nnThere is almost always something to improve and maybe this also applies to these WordPress adaptations, but there may be interest in working together to address any improvements. In consideration of the frequent questions to me about using WordPress as a journal platform, I would be pleased.nn