I’ve done some interesting things with CF, I think, and I’m proud of the journal’s high accessibility and quality of markup. Yeah, there are some irregularities, if you compare the first and last issues I created, but things are very stable overall, and articles load fast and print well.

Here’s a list of the things I did in my seven years with the journal:

• Moved the journal from servers at a university to its own domain, publishing redirects for existing articles and building a lightweight content management system for delivering content
• Built an index in Delicious, providing an easy way to move between subject areas or to see all of a particular type of article in the journal
• Established standards for metadata, ensuring that articles and profiles have abstracts and keywords
• Installed OJS and helped Michelle Ballif learn to use it to smooth editorial workflow for articles

What would I like to see incoming editor(s) do?

• Keep my commitment to high-quality, lightweight, accessible markup.
• Finish the conversion to OJS, importing existing issues into that system.
• Add online issues not in our Delicious index (and consider moving away from Delicious to a different platform for indexing).
• Tackle some of the big projects I started but did not finish—establishing a way to forward link citations between Composition Forum and other journals.

At CCCC this past week, I met with the CF editorial staff and made plans for transition. Just a matter of finding a replacement, getting them started, and handing over the keys.

wget http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/download/patch/ojs-2.3.3-3_to_2.3.4.patch.gz
gunzip ojs-2.3.3-3_to_2.3.4.patch.gz
patch -p1 < ojs-2.3.3-3_to_2.3.4.patch
php tools/upgrade.php upgrade
php tools/upgrade.php check

which I did recently.  The coders working on the project are attentive to problems, regularly answering questions in support forums, even those which amount to, “I can’t get OJS to work on Red Hat 7, please help!” (Like any open source project, OJS attracts its share of users with minimal budgets and thus minimal access to up-to-date servers.) Right now, I’m not worried about the way it looks–a common and well-justified complaint–I can tweak that later with some CSS hacking, and perhaps return something to the project with interface design improvements.

Not long ago I went to Illinois Wesleyan to hear a talk by OJS project lead John Willinsky. He focused more on open access than OJS, mentioning the software only a few times. Willinsky spent a lot of time discussing the practical side of open access, which I appreciated. This was, in large part, response to a question raised during the introductions. One of the officers of the Midwest Sociological Society attended, asking (I’m paraphrasing): “Is open access going to erase the $270,000 we get from journal subscriptions?” A good question. After the talk, I looked, and discovered MSS provides a $10K stipend and $2,500 travel budget to the editor of its journal The Sociological Quarterly. That’s peanuts compared to the budgets of medical journals, but for a small outfit like Composition Forum . . . we could do a lot with that money. So while, like Willinsky, I’m completely committed to open access from an ethical perspective, I’m eager to find ways to adopt OA models while preserving revenue streams–and without going toward the author fee model. Particularly for the humanities, that’s not a sustainable way forward. Willinsky spent the most time describing a model where libraries would work directly with scholarly societies to form cooperatives which perform the same tasks currently performed by commercial publishers and database middlemen. Money which now goes to profits and data munging would be replaced by direct access to data and smarter reuse of existing library labor and infrastructure. Willinsky sketched this possibility out very quickly. In retrospect, I wish he’d spent more time on it.

I found out about Willinsky’s talk from Cheryl Ball, who is doing some OJS-related work of her own. Cheryl and the rest of the Kairos team recived an NEH grant to write plugins and modifications to the OJS codebase so it can handle Kairos-style webtexts. We had ulunch after the talk, and discussed that project and other stuff. I agree that sort of work is the way forward, and a large part of the reason I’m working with OJS: even though it may be overkill for a small journal like Composition Forum, my current approach to making the journal–wrangling HTML from Word files via custom scripts, followed by more custom scripts to deliver it–isn’t any better. Especially where metadata is concerned. Hopefully, as we use OJS, we can realize a more generalizeable solution.

For the record, I don’t think I forgot my password; I think it was zorched by the database issues.

I hope this gets fixed soon; I have a new issue of Composition Forum to index…

Two “lasts” with this issue as well. Derek Owens is stepping down as review editor, with Jeanne Rose and Lori Salem taking his post. And this will be the last issue of CF published by hand. I’ve installed Open Journal Systems, and while I have some configuration work to do, I’m already looking forward to using it and becoming more involved in the PKP community.

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.

Here’s the code I use show the last three feed items, nicely formatted. (Link because some of the lines are really long.)

• spent a lot of time reading journals on their list of journals? I see First Monday, but they just converted to OJS.
• submitted an article to a journal using OJS?
• seen an installation which doesn’t use frames on articles?
• used another software package which provides similar functionality?

I’m also thinking about hacking on WordPress to make it do what I want (like as the CCCOA crew has done with Movable Type). I’ve written about what we think online journals should do; to be specific, here’s what I hope for:

• all the features of CCCOA–integration with del.icio.us, strong metadata handling, works cited & citing with links when available
• good ole standards-compliant XHTML and CSS
• front page which includes a weblog and/or rips the RSS feed of a weblog
• robust searching
• smart handling of multiple formats
• export to and interoperation with existing metadata systems

OJS does a lot of that, to be sure, and it has a plugin architecture, which appeals to me. And they’re even moving forward on single-sourcing from word processors via XML. Pretty interesting…

The journal I work with, Composition Forum, is gearing up for some major changes, and we’re gonna need some way to manage our do lists. Basecamp is a strong candidate, of course.

• Our panel about journals was well-received. Derek’s talk, “How Archives Learn,” applied Steward Brand’s book How Buildings Learn to archives, especially the CCC Online Archive. Doug Eyman and Colleen Reilly presented “Research and Citation Practices for New Media Scholarship,” taking on specific questions about metadata standards and expectations for citation. I distributed my draft standard for the web presences of journals, and explained why I think we should adopt a WaSPy standards framework for bringing journals up to speed. Collin was unable to attend, but sent along a screencast of his talk, “Visualizing the Invisible Collage of Research.” We had about 40 attendees and good conversation afterward. This good work will continue.
• Many creatures of the sea met their demise for my benefit. Two highlights: first, Sid Dobrin and company hosted a fish fry, sharing redfish which had been swimming earlier that day. I ate about three pounds and piled on the grits too. My contribution: a bottle of Templeton Rye. Yum, yum, yum. Second, crawfish etouffee and jambalaya at the Acme Oyster House. The former was driven by a simply perfect roux; the latter by smoked fish and chicken.
• I participated in the CCCC-IP caucus meeting. Last year’s sense of the house motion for the consideration of open source is moving toward a full resolution; I hear it passed this morning. It will be interesting to hear what’s next.
• Very good conversations with the Composition Forum crew. We have an excellent plan to kick-start the journal; we’re going to take advantage of our online format to publish more things, more often. I’ll write about that soon.
• I shared a room with Derek, which provided a lot of time to talk about our panel topic and related geek stuff.
• Two friends picked up book awards: Thomas Rickert for Acts of Enjoyment, and Byron Hawk for A Counter History of Composition. Congratulations to both.
• I ran! Just 30 minutes on the treadmill, very slow, with some stretch breaks. But any run is better than no run. Swimming today; perhaps I’ll join the Road Runners Sunday….
• No travel hassles, though it rained like hell during both of my trips to and from the airport.

I love the food in New Orleans, and I’m happy to provide much-needed business to the area (to the extent that NCTE renting a convention center from a multinational corporation does that). But New Orleans doesn’t have much else for me. Lite beer, fruity drinks, and the Bourbon Street scene just don’t appeal.

Now, to the writing and grading I didn’t get done in the Big Easy. Oh, and thinking about next year’s conference….