openproceedings

Github/FigShare based OpenScience publishing platform for conference proceedings

Github provides an ideal platform for:

• collecting proceedings submissions as Github pull requests
• peer reviewing (typically open, optionally with anonimized accounts) as inline comments
• accept submissions my merging the pull request

See an example from the 2013 Scipy Proceedings.

On top of this openproceedings provides:

• continous publication of HTML and PDF versions of proceedings on a website (provided by Pelican + Travis-ci)
• automatic submission of PDF version to FigShare via API
• FigShare DOI added to the website as link and in downloadable BibTeX file
• any subsequent modification to any submission immediately updates the website, and optionally triggers an update to FigShare

The workflow is strongly based on the publisher scripts of Scipy proceedings.

See for example a couple of papers from Scipy 2013 built with openproceedings, also published on FigShare:

http://openproceedings.github.io/2013/

Components

• Pelican does all the hard work of converting RST or MarkDown to HTML and PDF: https://github.com/openproceedings/openproceedings-buildbot
• few bash scripts (prepare.sh, build.sh, deploy.sh) and _travis.yml take care of configuring setup Travis-ci, build HTMLs and PDFs (including pushing to FigShare) and deploying to the website.
• figshare_pdf is the plugin that implements the interface to FigShare: https://github.com/openproceedings/pelican_figshare_pdf
• a separate repository just for the papers: https://github.com/openproceedings/openproceedings-papers-2013

How to set it up

• create a new Github organization
• create a new repository under the organization for Github Pages (i.e. needs to be named as yourorganization.github.io)
• create a fork of openproceedings-buildbot and openproceedings-papers-2013 under the organization
• using travis encrypt set the variables GH_TOKEN_CONTENT and GH_TOKEN respectively to the Github authorization token for the papers and the Github Pages repositories to allow Travis to push to those.
• open a dedicated account on FigShare, create an Application, authorized it and use travis encrypt to set the environmental variable needed by pelicanconf.py
• check all the .sh scripts in the root of openproceedings-buildbot and update all the urls to point to your repositories instead of openproceedings
• get in touch with me if you need help!