It’s great to have Composition Forum on its own domain. That gives me latitude to do a lot more than I was able at FAU. Not long ago I added Peter Suber’s Open Access News to my feeds, and I’ve found it very useful. That led me to a useful book I’ll be writing about soon.
So far, I haven’t found a platform for CF development which looks better than Open Journal Systems. The OJS forums recently included recent discussions of two features not currently in OJS that I’d like to see: forward linking or reference tracking (the “Works Citing” which make CCC Online and the ACM Portal so useful), and automatic interoperation with directories such as CiteULike (given that OJS already does much of the heavy lifting, metadata-wise).
As I review the OJS codebase, I’m looking at several other tasks:
- getting redirects on the FAU site (given my use of includes, this should be pretty easy)
- developing a style sheet, and reviewing the issues of CF currently online to ensure compliance with it;
- working with CF editors to establish an IP policy (I’m thinking Creative Commons Attribution) then applying it to past and future issues;
- learning more about existing metadata standards; revise submissions to collect that data for future CF issues, and applying standards to the archives as well.
This of course is in preparation and connected to my larger goal: pushing journals in English studies to improve their web sites, and developing documentation, standards, examples, and scholarship to go with.