Introduction

With the time resources available I am afraid this documentation will be little bit difficult to digest, my english is messy but it can be worse if I don`t have time to read it afterwards. You were warned :)

The purpose of this module

This module has been developed for the real e-journal, based on the model of OJS and my invention. It organize nodes into a (non)periodical publication - we talk here about journals, periodicals etc. but you can insert whatever you want (the ejournal module does not want you to publish periodically, it simply organizes the content around the concept of issues.)

Who is this module for

For administrators - it gives them a publishing system. For publishers - it gives them a publishing platform (well, to be clearer - Drupal is the publishing platform, ejournal simply provides certain way how to use this platform).

Future of this module

Uncertain ;-) As everything. This module can work quite well for magazines and journals, many of which you can see around on the internet. It has been in production use for one year or so, experienced 2 upgrades of Drupal (and its developer survived them). As it is related to my current job, I am developing this module as a proof of a concept - I want to prove that it is possible to build a professional publishing system on the Drupal platform (including these strange things as peer-review workflow, manuscript tracking, reports etc.) In my job, I am concerned with the online submission and manuscript tracking systems (besides other things) and I would like to understand and choose the best, therefore I am trying to build a new one (just for fun ;-).

Secondly: from what I understand, OJS is the only widely accepted free JMS in academia (really, the only one that survived and has a good user base) but many scholarly publishers or societies may still judge it as inferior compared to the professional systems. I don`t know (yet) these professional systems, but from what I know about the OJS, I think that Drupal can do the same thing and even more. There are differences about the architecture and development of these two, in my personal view, Drupal is more flexible, but for the time being, if you need peer reviewed journal tracking system, go for OJS (or help me developing ;-)

Installation

So you downloaded the module from here (http://drupal.org/project/ejournal)

1. Extract the contents into your drupal/modules directory
2. Enable the module in the administration section as usual
   1. As you will see, the ejournal has several modules, I will describe some of them
      1. ejournal-core: provides the basic functionality, organizes the published nodes around issues
      2. ejournal-authors: gives you ability to build links between your taxonomy terms and your users (i.e. your real author or reviewer "John McCormack" can be found when clicking of the taxonomy term "John McCormack")
      3. ejournal-shortly: the module, that gives you ability to display short messages around your published issues (think of it as an additional info, advertisements or special content displayed around the standard content)
3. After you enabled the module(s), you need to create your journals (only "ejournal administrator" can create/edit/delete journals)
   1. Go to the admin/settings/ejournal
   2. Click on the Add tab and fill in the necessary fields

- Only a few fields are required, it is not necessary to use ISSN, publisher name, or references

- You should understand the links between ejournal and taxonomy, usually, every journal is divided into some sections (such as Editorial, Reviews, Original papers - or Apple recipes, Peaches, Banana puddings, Orange drinks...). Ejournal gives you option to use taxonomies to organize your journal, first create some vocabulary and assign this vocabulary as a "section vocabulary" for the new journal you want to create

- Similar concept applies for Authors (if you have ejournal-authors module installed). You need to create a vocabulary that will serve the purpose of identifying authors, create a vocabulary of authors and later on the ejournal will give you a chance to join the terms with the profiles (of the users)

- Content types: ejournal does not dictate the type of the documents, the structure of your articles - simply create the types that best fits you and your readers. After you created the document type, you need to tell ejournal which document types it should use (e.g. you created a new document type "article-review", you assigned this type to a new journal "Books review" - whenever some of your users creates a new node of the "article-review", this node will be controlled by the ejournal module, with all the security and configuration options - see later) - bear in mind that ejournal core takes care of the issues and basic article workflow, it can be enhanced by other plugins/volumes so this is just a base

1. So you created a new journal (you can create as many journals as you want)
2. Now go to the admin/ejournal
   1. Your ejournal is living, but now you must create the issues (if you know OJS, than you will be familiar with this concept)
      1. On the listing, next to your journal name, you will find link "add issue"
      2. Click on it and create your issue, it is important to understand the type of it:
         1. Future issue: administrators and authors can work with it, but readers can`t see it (it will be disclosed in the future)
         2. Current issue: can be only one
         3. Published issue: if you edited your future issue and changed its status from future to "current" than the actual "current" issue becomes "published" (i.e. visible, but not the current)
         4. Not published: think of it as a kind of a storage place, your users will not see it, it will not be offered when new articles is created but you can place your articles into in and when you decide to publish them, you just move them from "Not published" to "future" or whatever
         5. Working: This is a special type, not available here (but let me describe it) - if author submits a paper, it goes automatically to the "working issue", the article is hanging in the air (think of it as a queue) - submissions are gathering in this stack and from this stack you can move them wherever you decide to do so. But it is a working area and that is why it is called "working"
   2. When you click on submit, your issue will be created
   3. You can create as many issues as needed
3. That's it, now you have the factory, just find the workers to fill it with life