WordPress as Academic Journal : Needed Plugins

Not Annotum, with your favorite WordPress Theme or Theme Framework, you can setup WordPress as Academic Journal. Here are the details. Much criticized part of Academic Journal in Post Colonial, Open Market is the brutal and costly setup and impractical neutral Peer to Peer review in any Academic Journal. The process to ISSN is free, but maintaining a Journal website is quite difficult. Among us, who are blogging since past 5-6 years, management part is easy because we know various things which an ordinary person will not know.

Open Journal System can be free but it is like using WordPress version 2.0, may be worser. In 2014 such kind of outdated Open Journal System with very less user base, hefty charges for modification make Open Journal System out of the competitive game in Search Engine result. Definitely, one should target to rank in Search Engine as well – to keep the membership either to free or to very less, alternate method of revenue earning should be made, else the situation will become like Journal of Indian Medical Association – you can check, at the time of publishing this article; jima.in domain is on sell by Sedo! The price tag is 7500 Euro. Obviously, there are lot of back links, Wikipedia page which makes the domain as good candidate for Sedo. It is quite obvious, to us buying such domain has very less return of investment. I have doubt, whether it will sell at even 100 Euro. It is not a top level domain. What I wanted to emphasize, opening a Journal Website by following our described method, but mind mapping must be done how to run it. So, what advantages we are gaining :

1. WordPress has huge user base, from very basic service provider to developers from WordPress core is available
2. All of us, who earns from Blogs, ourselves has some WordPress Plugins – we have enough knowledge about WordPress
3. Open Journal System is worser than a PHP SQL script from Hotscript like sites. Their approach is appreciable but wrong. They deliberately avoided using any standard PHP MySQL software as skeleton.
4. Open Journal System is risky from security point of view. There is no practical data available but keeping the main config file in the way is only found in the cloned scripts.
5. Open Journal System is neither SEO friendly nor offers great Pretty Permalinks unlike WordPress
6. In mid 2014, there are lot of WordPress Plugins, in combination can offer more features somewhat like a CRM, which fully makes WordPress King in the field.
7. All Cache, CDN plugins, HTML5, schema.org markups are available
8. We can easily tweak existing Plugins to get Academic Journal specific per post XML and/or Dublin Core meta data.

WordPress as Academic Journal : Initial Steps

Obviously to run WordPress, for the needed setup, you will possibly select Rackspace Cloud without the managed layer and follow our basic guide to install WordPress. You will need some identity management system of your own, although not mandatory, you can read our guide to install LDAP Server on Ubuntu on Rackspace Cloud Server. Using a SSL certificate, we think is mandatory today. You can search our website for SSL related tutorials.

It is not mandatory to use Annotum theme, you can use the best theme you know with a light child theme. Light because there will be lot of Javascripts. You can expect glitches to combine them in W3C. You can apply for ISSN later. It is free, time taking and unfortunately I at least have not found any $1 – $5 dollar gig. The whole Academic system is closed source, how you can expect a fast work?

WordPress as Academic Journal : Needed Plugins

So, after installing WordPress and installing a proper theme, we suggest to use these Plugins to use WordPress as Academic Journal. Do not use these Plugins for normal blogs with the hope of better SEO. Google probably uses different set of logics to rank Journal sites. Obviously we will target for the best on page SEO like for normal blogs but we are using WordPress as Academic Journal, after installing WordPress, the WordPress Admin might appear like a cockpit to you. Funny thing is that, a Journal article was published only on ‘researching’ whether WordPress can be used as Journal software. But the most useful article we found was :

Sanjay wrote in 6th December, 2009 – 5 years past since then. How much he is great, that article is an example. However, we found more better alternative plugins as much time has been past. We are using StudioPress Genesis and a Free HTML5 child theme. We expect, Woo Themes, Thesis, WordPress Default Theme will behave in the same way like Genesis. Do not use other complicated theme to avoid hundreds of problems and conflicts. Here is the list :

1. Co-Authors Plus : Blog is written by one person, multiple authors can be assigned for Scholarly article
2. Crayon Syntax Highlighter : Need for our Journal for Syntax Highlighting
3. DOAJ Export : Well, take this as your XML Sitemap Plugin to generate DOAJ Article XML Schema. Do not redirect feed, do not use Feed Burner.
4. Document Repository : Helps to convert WordPress into a revisioned document repository. You will get three extra plugins with it – Repository Custom Roles, Document Repository Network Extras and Document Repository Custom Taxonomies. Later two are buggy. They will ask you to update and get deactivated.
5. Edit Flow : For the sake of better editorial workflow options.
6. Email Post Changes : Automated Emails to the Authors for changes.
7. Genesis Co-Authors Plus : Genesis specific top up for Co-Authors Plus Plugin.
8. Select Genesis Staff Bio Grid : A nice plugin to add grid of staff member profiles with popup lightboxes.
9. GoogleOAuth : Allows autologin against Google Apps OAuth service
10. Kblog Include : Important.
11. Kblog Metadata : Opens the bibliographic metadata of academic posts to manipulate.
12. Kcite : Add bibliography with shortcode.
13. Mathjax Latex : Transform latex equations in javascript
14. Mendeley-profile : Optional. Displays the profile information, publications and curriculum vitae from Mendeley.
15. Mendeley Plugin : Offers the possibility to load lists of document references from Mendeley (shared) collections.
16. Post Forking : Adds git like Forking to create an alternate version of content.
17. Post Revision Display : Show list of post-publication revisions like diff
18. WP OAuth2 Complete Provider : Use OAuth2 structure and become a provider
19. YAFootnotes Plugin : To add foot notes.
20. Table of Contents Plus : Add nice TOC.
21. Plugin for PDF output : There are many, use what you want.
22. Owark : You will find it here :

Some Plugins might need to be tweaked. Total cost of setup is near zero. There is a Plugin for adding Dublin core metadata. You need to tweak it a bit to add Journal Article specific Dublin core metadata.