Date: July 10, 2009

Presenters: Gonzalo Villarreal, Marisa Raquel De Giusti

s13610, “Feet” January 27, 2009 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution. La Plata has a sandbox for OJS and OCS users to get a "feel" with templates!

Session Overview

Abstract

This presentation was delivered by Gonzalo in real time through Skype.

Background on La Plata National University (UNLP)

He described UNLP as a major university in Argentina and Latin America. It has more then 90 000 students and 10 000 employees, including staff and administration.

About UNLP:

They produce journal articles, degree essays and theses, multimedia production, books and e-books and other products.

History of Development

In 2003, UNLP launched the Intellectual Creation Dissemination Service, SeDiCi, for 2 purposes:
– to provide authors a means to publish
– to benefit society for all it has invested in the university

The original plan of the university was to receive, digitize, catalog and upload documents to the SeDiCi website, but software was needed. After an extensive worldwide search, the team felt they had to design their own software. Celsius-DL was the answer to complete the service to scholars. It has since been recognized as the OEA’s award in 2005 as the best Digital Library in America.

Celsius-DL supports a free scheme and is used to configure a wide range of  materials. It exports to Dublin-Core or Marc21, is a data and service provider and it is built on open source technologies.

Since 2007, UNLP has recognized the importance of disseminating academic and intellectual creations. Journals also were seen as crucial to disseminate, so SeDiCi was expanded to include them. In October, 2008, UNLP launched the Journals Portal. Pre-existing and new publications are both accepted. Authors publish through a review process, easily communicating with other authors, reviewers and editors. OJS was chosen as the platform for them to use.

They then decided to create the Congresses Portal. This helps groups and others organize meetings. PKP’s OCS was selected to supply the service. SeDiCi’s team offers user, systems and technical support to users, but they had to overcome some obstacles and learn how to use it.

Obstacles and Solutions

1. Obstacles included many words or phrases in Argentina that were different from Spain. Corrected translations are now complete. In service to others, they are also available on PKP’s website for download.
2. In addition, some OCS users needed to use some LaTex in their abstracts. None were available, but they are now available as a plugin.
3. Next, the UNLP main website was comfortable for users, so the Journals and Congresses websites have been adjusted to look similarly. A comparison may be seen on-screen to show the similarities.
4. Further, templates are available for users uncomfortable with changing them, but wanting to meet their own needs. OCS and OJS is fully customizable by editing a CSS file. Many CSS styles were made for publishers to choose from because not all had web designers to make changes.
5. Finally, workshops online have been offered. Users can see an overview to see what the software is capable of and what it won’t do. There are workshops for users and workshops for managers. They have a “sandbox” area where users can try things without affecting the real system.

Note: the voice link with Gonzalo was lost in the last 2 minutes of his presentation. We hope all essential concepts were conveyed.

Blogger’s Thoughts:

The workshops sound tremendously helpful for users and managers. The sandbox feature is very practical and should be of interest to many. A great deal of work has been done to provide leadership in Argentina and its metron of influence. While the audio feed accomplished the task, it would have been good to see them in person to be able to ask questions and benefit from their experience. I was particularly interested in how their design of Celsius-DL provided benefits not found in software as a result of their worldwide search.

In light of the work so many other libraries and institutions are doing to promote the dissemination of scholarly knowledge and research, through either the use of OJS and OCS, one thought seems to echo through the workshops. It is a “cry” for collaboration and communication. From sharing experiences and collaborative problem-solvingj, to establishing some form of index standard are common issues shared by Mexico, the U.K., Canada and others. I hope a leader emerges and this is actualized.

While this is recognized as a technically-themed presentation, I wondered how much use of open journals resulted from their work. While I couldn’t access this information, I was able to view a page on their website that revealed how many “hits” they’ve had at SeDiCi and how many registered users they have. I was surprised that the vast majority originated in the United States! Journal numbers, particularly open journal numbers would be of interest to many at the next conference.

Presentation Link to be provided by conference organizers.

Presenter Links:

Gonzalo Villarreal [The blogger lacked the language to translate, but has listed some found on the SeDiCi repository!]

A Linux publication

Co-authored, in Portugese:  Manuscript Character Recognition Overview of features for the Feature Vector

Marisa Raquel De Giusti

Simulation framework for teaching in modeling and simulation areas

Storage of Simulation and Entities History in discrete models

Article by both outlines the history of their work at La Plata in more detail.

Related Links

PrEBi at La Plata National University