New application form: tweaks, changes, feedback

[dommitchell]

Small tweaks that need to be done quickly

• [x] Remove EzID option from Question 26 and from the db. EzID is not an identifier.
• [x] Change ISSN and EISSN on the form and in the Admin system to “ISSN (print version)” and “ISSN (online version)”. Labels in the db do not need to be changed.
• [x] Question 8. Change help text to: 'The name of the platform, host or aggregator of the journal content, e.g. OJS, HighWire Press, EBSCO etc.
• [x] Question 4. Change help text to: 'Only provide the print ISSN if your journal has one, otherwise leave this field blank. Write the ISSN with the hyphen "-" e.g. 1234-4321.'
• [x] Question 5. Delete 'Please provide either a print ISSN or an online ISSN, or both. At least one identifier is needed.' Change 'Enter the EISSN with the hyphen "-" e.g. 1234-4321.' to 'Write the ISSN with the hyphen "-" e.g. 1234-4321.'
• [x] Question 4. If you leave Question 4 blank, the application auto-completes the field with 0000-0000. This should not happen.
• [x] Questions 10 and 11: change 'Contact' and 'contact' to 'Contact's' with capital C and apostrophe s
• [x] Questions 13 and 16: delete 'Include relevant currency.' from the question text and replace 'If "Yes" then add the amount (average price) with currency' with 'If 'No' proceed to question below.'
• [x] Question 19: change question text to: 'How many research and review articles did the journal publish in the last calendar year?'
• [x] Question 28: add 'If 'No' proceed to question below.'
• [x] Question 34: add 'at least 5' between 'with' and 'clearly'
• [x] Question 39: add 'If 'No' proceed to question below.'
• [x] Question 41: add a ? to the end of the sentence
• [x] Question 43: add 'If 'No' proceed to question below.'
• [x] Question 45: change 'in accordance with a CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, or CC-BY-ND license?' to 'in accordance with a CC license?'
• [x] Question 46: change question to: 'Which of the following does the content require? (Tick all that apply.)'
• [x] change it so that the Accepted email goes to the email address in Question 10, as per your comment (https://github.com/DOAJ/doaj/issues/85)
• [x] Question 32: add '(comma delimited)' after the question text.
• [x] Question 43: change question text to: 'Does the journal embed or display simple machine-readable CC licensing information in its articles?'. Change Help text URL to http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC_REL
• [x] Question 49: change 'Héloise' and 'Diadorum' to 'Héloïse' and 'Diadorim'
• [x] DOAJ Seal text: change 'the scientific quality of the papers' to 'the scholarly quality of the papers'

• [x] Question 32: disallow sentences as keywords. Some publishers have been trying to enter whole sentences in this field. @richard-jones suggested changing the delimiter to space instead of comma but we want to allow key"phrases" such as 'pediatric medicine' for example.

  NOTE: not done but only 1 publisher so far, so decided not to do anything about it just yet. See https://github.com/DOAJ/doaj/issues/132#issuecomment-46425203 .

• [x] Question 34: change help text to "The journal must have either an editor or an editorial board with at least 5 clearly identifiable members and affiliation information. We may ask for affiliation information and email addresses as part of our checks."

[emanuil-tolev]

4) Keywords also show up as subjects, e.g http://bit.ly/1df4mgN

That's a problem with the admin system :). Or rather, a stayover from the days where we didn't know the difference between subjects and keywords, so we made a special field which contains a mix of them (just to make sure we're showing all the data). We still hold them separately, I'll migrate this to the admin area feedback.

I can assure you they are saved in a specific keywords field on their own though.

[emanuil-tolev]

We should clean up the values.

What I meant by this is that DOAJ has internal consistency (most important, for the facets) but others may find the values a bit annoying to parse, as technical people seem to like cc-by, cc-nc etc (from the Creative Commons website URL-s for the respective licenses I imagine) instead of "CC by". So this is not a high priority at all.

[dommitchell]

Question 8. Change help text to: 'The name of the platform, host or aggregator of the journal content, e.g. OJS, HighWire Press, EBSCO etc.

[dommitchell]

*add new question to Application Form: "publishers should provide publication dates on their article pages"

[emanuil-tolev]

*add new question to Application Form: "publishers should provide publication dates on their article pages"

Is this more of a thing for #137? Adding a new question isn't very technically hard, but it is: a/ put it on the form UI; b/ change the data model + add to Suggestion model in the actual app + crosswalk the new value; c/ fill out whole form again on test site to test new question; d/ test what happens if a person has started out on an old version of the form but suddenly gets this (required I assume) question introduced when they submit the form (I think it will be fine, but I'm not willing to bet without testing!); e/ roll out

Also suggest change to wording to make it a question :) "Does the journal provide publication dates on each article page?" + introduce an associated example URL. Also, is my assumption that it will be a required question correct?

[richard-jones]

Yes, the addition of new content for the form needs to be pushed out to a future phase - we are now in bugfix mode only for the current application form. Propose that instead future requirements are gathered together and applied as one larger update in the next iteration of work.

On 26 March 2014 13:20, Emanuil Tolev notifications@github.com wrote:

*add new question to Application Form: "publishers should provide publication dates on their article pages"

Is this more of a thing for #137 https://github.com/DOAJ/doaj/issues/137? Adding a new question isn't very technically hard, but it is: a/ put it on the form UI; b/ change the data model + add to Suggestion model in the actual app + crosswalk the new value; c/ fill out whole form again on test site to test new question; d/ test what happens if a person has started out on an old version of the form but suddenly gets this (required I assume) question introduced when they submit the form (I think it will be fine, but I'm not willing to bet without testing!); e/ roll out

Also suggest change to wording to make it a question :) "Does the journal provide publication dates on each article page?" + introduce an associated example URL. Also, is my assumption that it will be a required question correct?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/DOAJ/doaj/issues/132#issuecomment-38681858 .

Richard Jones,

Founder, Cottage Labs t: @richard_d_jones, @cottagelabs w: http://cottagelabs.com

[dommitchell]

Sorry, added in haste to wrong issue. Added there now.

[emanuil-tolev]

All done for now. Added EzID to data cleanup issue for phase2 (need to migrate some new suggestions to the test and staging sites in order to test this properly, but shouldn't be a problem).

[emanuil-tolev]

If there really are no more immediate fast fixes needed on the application form, suggest closing this issue and adding future stuff into #137 .

[emanuil-tolev]

Not sure why I said that, you can just reopen the issue at any time... so closing for now.

[dommitchell]

Added two new tweaks to the original list.

[emanuil-tolev]

137 ?

You sure people aren't just entering 0000-0000 in Q4? I don't ever recall my own tests producing this, and I definitely left one of the ISSNs blank at least some of the time.

[emanuil-tolev]

You sure people aren't just entering 0000-0000 in Q4?

This isn't to say we couldn't add an ISSN validity check as well as a format check ("is it an ISSN" vs "does it resemble an ISSN" ... and then there's "is it a real ISSN" if you have data from issn.org ). That kind of thing can also be added to #137 if it's important.

[dommitchell]

You sure people aren't just entering 0000-0000 in Q4?

100% certain. I just tried it myself: https://doaj.org/admin/suggestion/43fe35f6817345a0a11e2e8e0b0ae028

[emanuil-tolev]

How bizarre... ok, thanks for testing it out, it takes a while to submit one of these.

[emanuil-tolev]

Is any of this relevant for phase2? Why not #137 ?

[dommitchell]

When the form went live we agreed to put textual changes into this issue and larger development issues into 137. Or do I have that wrong?

[emanuil-tolev]

Or do I have that wrong?

Sorry, no, that's correct. I misread a few of them. Looks like we'll have to fix the 0000-0000 thing anyhow - I'm already looking into it, but it's quite strange. I definitely haven't specified this as a default anywhere. Investigating, anyway.

[emanuil-tolev]

Question 45: change 'in accordance with a CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, or CC-BY-ND license?' to 'in accordance with a CC license?'

If you're going for clarifying this, I might even go for "in accordance with a Creative Commons license" since this is the first point at which the user's eyes will encounter this. On this form.

[emanuil-tolev]

Question 46: change question to: 'Which of the following does the content require? (Tick all that apply.)'

How does "Which of the following does the journal's license require?" sound? (just since we're clarifying the form, not nitpicking - I've made all the changes as you've specified them anyway)

[emanuil-tolev]

change it so that the Accepted email goes to the email address in Question 10, as per your comment (#85)

Oh yeah, this was done barely days after journal acceptance launched. I thought I'd sent an additional email about it in that thread.

[emanuil-tolev]

Question 4. If you leave Question 4 blank, the application auto-completes the field with 0000-0000. This should not happen.

I'll have to investigate this a bit more, I'd already started on it on last Monday.

Print. In Firefox, Print only prints the lefthand column (3 pages). In Chrome, all formatting is lost (6 pages). Works fine in IE (6 pages).

I assume you're using a recent version of Chrome, in which case it prints perfectly fine, just that it does it all in 1 column. So 6 pages of sequential questions. To be honest that's probably what I'd recommend for print of such a large form for human consumption, I'm surprised that it comes out as well as it does.

There's an additional problem that "hidden" questions don't come out when you try to print (all the questions where a URL field is required if "Yes" and optional if "No").

The general situation is that you can apply styles specifically to printed pages, but it can get very difficult to get it pixel-perfect the same in all browsers, or even roughly the same. It used to be like this for all web pages, not just when you were printing them, so people spent thousands of hours building frameworks to overcome this problem. But not for x-browser printing, just for getting pages to display consistently :).

I guess the important question is: Why do you want to print the form? Just asking since doing it properly would involve thinking a bit more about the use case of printing. It might well be that losing the formatting is actually better. And then there's problems like: you say Chrome loses all formatting, but it looks fine (except the missing questions) to me. I'd be inclined to think about the "why" and maybe not mark it as a tweak but open a separate issue.

[emanuil-tolev]

Everything except 0000-0000 ISSN problem and print (potential) problem has been done and rolled out live.

[dommitchell]

Agreed!

2014-04-30 17:19 GMT+02:00 Emanuil Tolev notifications@github.com:

Question 45: change 'in accordance with a CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, or CC-BY-ND license?' to 'in accordance with a CC license?'

If you're going for clarifying this, I might even go for "in accordance with a Creative Commons license" since this is the first point at which the user's eyes will encounter this. On this form.

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[dommitchell]

Agreed! Please make that change

2014-04-30 17:23 GMT+02:00 Emanuil Tolev notifications@github.com:

Question 46: change question to: 'Which of the following does the content require? (Tick all that apply.)'

How does "Which of the following does the journal's license require?" sound? (just since we're clarifying the form, not nitpicking - I've made all the changes as you've specified them anyway)

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/DOAJ/doaj/issues/132#issuecomment-41810080 .

We rely solely on donations from the community. To support our work, go to: http://doaj.org/supportDoaj

Follow us: Twitter https://twitter.com/DOAJplus Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/DirectoryofOpenAccessJournals
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Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an independent service managed by a not-for-profit company Infrastructure Services for Open Access C.I.C.http://is4oa.org/about/Company registration no. 8307499. VAT no: DK 35153470.

[dommitchell]

Everything except 0000-0000 ISSN problem and print (potential) problem has been done and rolled out live.

Have deleted the 'print problem'. Not urgent just now.

[emanuil-tolev]

0000-0000 problem done. The interface has been fixed and should not create these at any point now.

I also ran a script which updated all the records, deleting 0000-0000 where necessary - most journals and applications will have a Last Updated date of about 5th May 2014 18:18 or so.

There are 2 applications which only have an ISSN of 0000-0000 - they are old and have a rejected status, so I ignored them. Left it in though.

[emanuil-tolev]

This concludes the tweaks list (for the moment).

[dommitchell]

Added one more tweak

[emanuil-tolev]

Question 49: change 'Héloise' and 'Diadorum' to 'Héloïse' and 'Diadorim'

Sorry, due to these being unicode it took a wee bit longer to test. Basically it wasn't just changing how they appear on the form, have to change all the data retrospectively at the same time as you make the new form choices live, so wrote a script to do that. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to edit those records (or, well, the deposit policies would be a bit wrong if you did). Rolled out now.

[emanuil-tolev]

Basically it wasn't just changing how they appear on the form, have to change all the data retrospectively at the same time as you make the new form choices live, so wrote a script to do that.

.... none of which has anything to do with the data having unicode characters, doh. My point was that besides what I describe in this quote, there was some additional overhead around making sure the characters got written correctly into code, transferred and understood properly by the backend, so that it didn't munch them up into unrecognisable symbols.

[emanuil-tolev]

All the new minor text tweaks are done too, finishing this (again :)).

[dommitchell]

New tweak added at the top.

[emanuil-tolev]

Question 32: disallow sentences as keywords. Some publishers have been trying to enter whole sentences in this field. @richard-jones suggested changing the delimiter to space instead of comma but we want to allow key"phrases" such as 'pediatric medicine' for example.

Right ... but how would we disallow sentences in this case?

• Add the . as a delimiter?
• Impose a maximum length on each keyword? (But then long scientific phrases may not fit and we risk limiting "correct" usage at the expense of a few people who use it incorrectly. Still, you could say "enough" at 100-150 characters, it will filter out completely ridiculous keyword entries.)
• Perform lexical analysis and determine that something is a sentence. (This will take way too long for a feature of such relatively low importance. Text analysis can probably be employed to much greater benefit elsewhere in the DOAJ if you ever want to do it :).)

[dommitchell]

I think option 2 sounds the best. I'm going to close this for now though as it was only one publisher so far. If it rears it's ugly head again, we'll tackle it then.

[emanuil-tolev]

Question 34: change help text to "The journal must have either an editor or an editorial board with at least 5 clearly identifiable members and affiliation information. We may ask for affiliation information and email addresses as part of our checks."

rolled out