Is document revisions the right tool for this project?

[Jake Barlow]

Hi,

My name is Jake and I am a final year medical student and I am looking at setting up an open-access open-review online journal and archive (essentially a medical version of arxiv.org, if you are familiar with that). I am currently looking at the options I have available to me, and after ruling out a fair few things I have come down to either wordpress or invenio (Invenio is open-source digital library software produced by CERN for their documents, and is what arxiv is planning on moving to in the future), and wanted to know whether any of you think wordpress (and WP Document Revisions) is the best tool for what I want to do.

Functionality that I need is:

- All documents that are either published or submitted for peer review to be publicly viewable in the appropriate section

- Documents that are still in a draft stage to be only viewable/editable by the original author and other users that author nominates (i.e., other authors of the paper, so there does not have to be one corresponding author)

- Documents to have their revision history (from the peer-review stage onwards) to be publicly viewable.

- Documents that are in peer review/published to have a comments section at the bottom where other users can comment. A system of replying to comments and +1/-1 these comments.

- Each document to have a ICMJE competing interests form (a standard pdf form that authors submit declaring potential conflicts of interest) for each author viewable/accessible.

- Ability to set a large amount of meta-data for each document (standard MARC21 data, but also include MeSH (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/mbinfo.html), keywords, PMID, area of interest, etc), some by author input and some automated.

- Ability to upload other research which is in the public domain from other authors. This can be an admin task.

- Documents downloadable from the website in a pdf format

- Document archive to be searchable through meta-data, with advanced search options available

- UX needs to be sleek and simple. UI to give the option to edit their personal settings and details, comment on articles, publish articles, but otherwise minimise the potential for confusion.

- Users identifiable through title/name/qualifications. Ability for users to claim a particular qualification (e.g. an medical degree or a college fellowship), and for this claim to be able to be ratified by that organisation. Accepted, pending, and rejected claims to be visible in user comments and submissions.

- Listed authors of a paper to have the ability to endorse review and the final copies of the document (stating they have reviewed and approve the contents)

Functionality that would be ideal:

- Ability for authors to draft and edit documents on the site (it would be possible for authors to resubmit new copies each time, but this is not ideal)

- Ability for a change-list to be automatically generated on articles that have been revised, so peer reviewers can quickly see which parts of the document have been edited.

- Ability for authors to announce, either publicly or privately a trial (stating it's aims, methodology, estimated time to completion). Publicly announced trials would have their methodology open to peer review. When a trial is completed, these would be published (along with any changes that have been made to them) along with the trial.

Functionality that I'd like:

- Ability for authors to submit related documents (e.g. for a paper describing a new procedure, there could be an accompanying video demonstrating that procedure)

- Text indexing for search

- References to link to the full-text article if it is on this system, or the PubMed entry if it isn't

- Users to be able to write a short description on themselves and their particular area of interest

- Users to be able to create a reading list of papers they want to review

- Ability to see an individual users publications and comments in that persons user account

From the get-go, invenio is the better tool for the job. I have had a play with it and whilst it could definitely work, it does lack a number of key elements and I envisage a lot of difficulty trying to add these. Whilst wordpress does start further away from the end goal, Document Revisions seems to go a lot of the way and the fact that there are a lot more plugins and support available might make it the better option. Any thoughts you have would be really helpful.

Thanks,

Jake