PubLink: A Toolset for Enriching Scholarly Digital Publications

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tristan Weddigen
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 501142032

PubLink, funded by the "Infrastructures for Scholarly Publishing" DFG Program, is a comprehensive toolset that integrates existing scripts with new software and methods to meet the demands of the editorial workflow. Aimed at journal editors and authors, PubLink fills some gaps in the digital publishing workflow. It is designed to speed up and enhance the online publishing experience and is currently being used in a live publishing environment (BHMPI). PubLink specifically targets the online publication of JATS XML articles which may be obtained from various proprietary sources on OJS platforms. The project's primary objective was to develop a workbench containing various tasks and transformations accessible to researchers and institutions for seamless installation on their servers. In particular, one of the applications facilitates the processing of JATS files, merging them into a Native XML format. Documents in this format can then be imported into OJS using the official importer, thus ensuring that all metadata is extracted and associated files are compiled efficiently. In addition to command-line tools, we have developed a web interface to simplify file processing for editorial teams with varying technical skills, initially for the use of the Digital Publications team at BHMPI. The web interface provides a user-friendly GUI enabling users to engage with the implemented tools. The web interface and underlying toolset will be made available as a downloadable docker system that can be installed in an institution or on a researcher's desktop. This follow-up to PubLink will focus on making the platform into an online public service that can be used directly by scholars and institutions that don’t have the infrastructure or the expertise to run the system on their own premises. A demo version of this platform showcasing the tasks that have been developed so far is available at https://cont.humanitiesconnect.online/ and includes services such as the JATS to OJS conversion (this tool is also available in GitHub as a standalone at https://github.com/biblhertz/jats_to_ojs). The online platform is integrated with the ORCID login system, meaning that anyone with an ORCID account can use the tools.

• DFG Programme: Science Communication, Research Data, eResearch (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Elisa Bastianello, Ph.D.