URAN Publishing Service
Project “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine”
1. Summary
The “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” project (http://journals.uran.ua) is a national technology platform based on the Open Journal Systems (OJS) which provides the following processes for Ukrainian scientific periodicals:
- editorial processing,
- publication,
- post publication support.
The resource is being developed on the basis of voluntary mutually beneficial partnership of publishers, research libraries and information centers of Ukraine who wish, are able and willing to work in a high-tech web-based environment.
The project involves three aspects of publisher’s integration:
- cooperation in the implementation of OJS,
- the use of a single national register of subjects and objects of the publishing process,
- compliance to common principles of publishing and editorial policy.
Cooperation of the “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” project with leading international scientific and information resources aggregators, national and world academic libraries facilitates access for materials of involved publishers to prestigious reference databases, directories and search engines. Via the software gateways of the platform the publications of the “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” project are fully represented in the federated global catalog WorldCat, academic libraries, directories of such search platforms as Google Scholar, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, OpenAIRE and others.
“URAN Publishing Service” enterprise holds the license of an authorized provider to the international registry ORCID, allowing interested participants to quickly update their authors profiles with new publications data.
To every publisher of the “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” is assigned a professional consultant well familiar with the world market of scientific communications. Due to this, the number of participating journals is constantly increasing, as well as the "visibility" of these journals to scientists around the world.
The “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” platform offers a complete set of services to the authors of participating journals. These services include the "single window" for article submission, tracking the current stage of the editorial processing, readability and citation indices of all articles published by the “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine”. In this way, publishers are able to provide the best and the most profitable conditions for publication for scientists (prestige, processing time, cost, convenience, additional benefits), expanding the geography of the authors, attracting the attention of scientists who are currently publishing in other Ukrainian journals.
2. The Technology Platform
The Project is based on the software package “Open Journal Systems”, adapted to the needs of local publishers. Although its distribution is free and publishers are free to install it on their local servers in order to administer their own publications, from a technological point of view it is more advisable to join the “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” Projects and use the jointly adapted and localized implementation of the system.
The “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” server has many components which are absent in the original OJS package. These are the components are needed only to Ukrainian publishers and are not used in other countries. Developed at the request of individual journals participating in project, these new additional functional modules of the system are available to all publishers. For example, the server “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” supports quotation markup according to the DSTU-GOST 7.1-2006 standard, it fixes some bugs of Cyrillic syntactic analysis, has enhanced support for multilingual metadata as well as of ORCID technology, implements software gateways to communicate with other scientific information projects in the region.
The “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” server always implements the latest versions of Ukrainian and Russian localization which are updated daily and immediately become available to publishers. Any system bugs found by Ukrainian users are promptly corrected. The basic OJS package distribution is updated with a significant delay regarding such local issues.
3. Participation in the Project
The basic technical and advisory support of sites on the “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” platform for journals with open access is free.
In case a publisher decides on the introduction of e-subscription to his journal articles, he should enter into an additional agreement with “URAN Publishing Service” for the service of commercial web-content. The agreement defines a fee as a percentage of the publisher’s profit from subscriptions to electronic content. Terms of the agreement are not the same for all editions. Upon request of the publisher the “URAN Publishing Service” analyzes the current market niche of scientific journal and the prospects for its commercialization. Based on such analysis, the Publisher receives a personal business offer.
In case a Publisher provides free access to the electronic version of a publication, but the printed version is distributed by subscription, no additional agreements with “URAN Publishing Service" are necessary.
Extended membership of an institution in the “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” Project provides for the maximal effectiveness of publication preparation and distribution of periodicals, based on prestigious science and information standards. Extended membership is available under the annual contract for services with “URAN Publishing Service” with a monthly fee, the amount of which depends on the volume of publications.
More information about the services provided in the framework of basic and extended memberships and the financial conditions for participation in the Project are presented in Services to Publishers section.
4. Joining the “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” Project
1) The authorized representative of the scientific journal must be registered on the website of the project “Scientific periodicals of Ukraine” as a reader, author, reviewer or editorial staff member of any of the journals that are already participating in the project. If he/she is not registered, it must be registered (select any edition of the ones offered) at http://journals.uran.ua/user/register.
2) The editors of the publication (or other authorized representative) must send request e-mail to
E-mail should indicate:
- title of the journal;
- journal ISSN;
- areas of science in which the journal is included in the lists of the Higher Attestation Commission of Ukraine;
- the name of the user registered on the site http://journals.uran.ua/ who will act as the journal manager.
No official letters certified with signatures and seals are necessary at this stage, since the site of the new publication in the "Scientific periodicals of Ukraine" for the initial testing period is created as non-public. During the editorial testing of the system, access to the journal’s website is restricted to authorized representatives of the editorial office and the administration of the "Scientific periodicals of Ukraine" project.
5. Platform testing by the Publisher
After receiving a positive response from the project administration, the plenipotentiary representative of the editorial office can enter the website of "Scientific periodicals of Ukraine" with his/her registration data and gain access to the site of his/her journal again.
In the process of testing the platform, authorized representatives of the editors (libraries) set up and fill out the site of their journal, experiment with various options, study and learn the logic of the system.
The publication has different dynamics in the development of a new publishing platform. On average, this process continues in the editorial office from 6 months to 1 year. In the process of getting acquainted with the functionality of the editorial system, it is recommended to issue at least one issue of the journal in OJS. To do this, the editors create users for their authors in the system and submit manuscripts to the journal on their behalf. Manuscripts presented in this way are carried out by the editors throughout the editorial cycle (peer review, literary editing, layout, proofreading, formation of the issue, publication).
The system offers the possibility of importing and posting on the site a journal of archived issues that were published before the start of the OJS application by the editors. The formation of the electronic archive of the journal is also recommended to begin at the stage of testing the system. Most often, this problem is solved by the library of scientific institutions. Editorial offices are working on current issues, while libraries are simultaneously digitizing and describing old issues, each year deepening the electronic archive of the journal.
If the publisher is interested, URAN Publishing Service LLC on a commercial basis carries out a range of activities to create a digital archive of the journal. The terms and cost of these works are determined individually for each journal..
6. Web-site creation on the platform of the “Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine”
The editors of the project’s journal can determine the time it takes to complete acquaintance with the system. If the publication’s website on the platform Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine” is the type that suits the editors/editorial board of the publication and the editors are confident that they can work in the system with real authors, it informs the assigned consultant from URAN Publishing Service LLC. After that, the journal opens publicly to the new website of the journal, it begins to be indexed by search engines, the metadata of published articles is exported to the databases and systems with which the "Scientific periodicals of Ukraine" are installed, the site is registered in the corresponding e-journals catalogs and becomes available to all Internet users.
Requests for inclusion of the journal in the basic list of catalogs and scientific information retrieval systems are submitted by the administration of the "Scientific periodicals of Ukraine" project. The publisher can submit requests for indexing the contents of the journal in prestigious databases of aggregators of scientific and information resources, either independently or through the administration of the project. These issues are agreed upon at the stage of opening public access to the journal website.
7. Staff allocation for Project participation recommendations
At the stages of initial acquaintance with the OJS system, editorial offices are encouraged to identify individual employees who will be responsible for the implementation of the new technology platform. If this approach is not possible, the system testing process may be delayed. The person responsible for implementing OJS in the editorial office must be sure of the PC user. It is recommended that he/she has experience (as an author or, ideally, as a reviewer/editor) with the editorial platforms of the world's leading publishers of scientific periodicals (Elsevier Editorial System (EES), Springer Editorial Manager, Wiley-Blackwell Author Services, etc.) The OJS system is an analogue of these systems in terms of functionality and basic architecture. In addition, editorial offices are encouraged to attract the potential for collaboration with the libraries of their institutions and work together on the sites of their journals. The existing experience of the participants of the "Scientific periodicals of Ukraine" project proves the high efficiency of cooperation between libraries and editorial offices in the process of creating electronic archives of scientific journals.
8. Selection of the domain name for the site of the journal
The "Scientific periodicals of Ukraine" project operates in the base domain space journals.uran.ua. New scientific journal sites automatically receive an address in this domain space. However, at the request of an authorized representative of the journal, the site can be configured to support a different domain address. The journal website can have an address in the publisher’s domain space (for example, stp.diit.edu.ua) or an address acquired at the expense of the publisher (www.radioelektronika.org, otp-journal.com.ua etc.). Setting up domain addresses for participating journal sites is free.