Open Journal Systems Help

Journal Sections

The Journal Manager is able to create different sections within the journal in Journal Sections, under Journal Management. A journal might typically include such sections as Articles, Book Reviews, Research Notes, Clinical Applications, Commentary, Editorial, etc.

If Section Editors are to be used, the Journal Manager is able to specify Section Editors who may be assigned to see through the editorial process those submissions that have been submitted to the Section. (The Editor assigns submissions in the Unassigned submissions queue to one of the designated Section Editors as part of the Editorial Process).

Sections may be presented in different formats or layout design within the journal. The Table of Contents, which the Editor arranges for each issue, will be divided into the Sections that have been created, although if there is no content for a particular Section in a given issue, the Section will not appear in the Table of Contents.

Creating a Section policy. In setting up a Section, the Journal Manager should enter a brief Policy Statement for the Section, which will be made available to authors and readers in About the Journal under Section Policies. The statement should describe the scope of the Section and type of submissions sought. It should include information on whether submissions to the section are peer reviewed and indexed, whether the Section is open or restricted to invited work (or to Editors), the desired length for the articles, etc.

Specifying a Review Form. The Journal Manager can specify a custom review form to be used in place of the default free-form set of text boxes. The form chosen here will be the new default, but Editors will be able to override this default when choosing a reviewer, if need be.

Indexing the contents of a Section. Items in a section should be indexed if they contribute to the literature (which is not the case, for example, with a section devoted to conference announcements or job notices). The indexing option will enable authors to enter the relevant metadata for indexing the items which they submit. The metadata will be made available to research search engines that adhere to the Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol and to other indexing services once the item has been published. Items in Sections that are indexed will also have their authors added to the Author List on the Search page and will be accompanied by the Reading Tools selected by the Journal Manager for this journal.

Enabling or disabling abstracts. Some sections, such as Book Reviews, will not require abstracts; this option allows the Journal Manager to disable abstracts for the section. When abstracts are disabled, they will not be requested in the article submission process, or displayed in the Table of Contents.

Configuring item identification. When presenting metadata to viewers or to external systems (e.g. via OAI harvesting), the item's type must be identified. For example, an item could be a peer-reviewed article, non-refereed article, invited article, etc.

Restricting the contents of a Section. The Restrictions box should be checked for Sections of the journal (such as Editorials or Interviews) that are not open to author submissions in an unrestricted way. Restricted submissions must come from the editors or are invited. Such a section can only be submitted to by authors who are also registered as Editors or Section Editors.

Hiding the section title in the Table of Contents. It may be desirable to solicit submissions for a section and/or organize published articles into a section but hide the name of the section when presenting it to readers.

About. You may wish to remove information about this section from appearing in About the Journal. This is useful if, for instance, you have a Journal Section that only updates very occasionally, or an errata section.