Journal Tracker

What is JoTrax?

This software is based on the free version of the START conference manager. Rich wrote Thu, 2001-12-06:

The bottom line is this: I no longer support START V1. If you want to take it for free, be my guest.

At that time there was a commercial version of START V2 and also a START V2 online service for conference management.

I customised START V1 so I could use it for Journal Tracking from submission through editorial board decision process. This required the customisation of most templates, revising several of the perl scripts and adding some new scripts. The allocation of reviews and the overall workflow of journal reviews and decision processes is different from conferences. For regular issues submissions trickle in continually and necessitate incremental review assignment. Special issues have deadlines although on a less tight timeline and more flexible than conferences. Different roles need to be supported: chief editor, handling editor, guest editor, secondary reviewer, etc. Fortunately, while the overall organisation and workflow differs, the core functions of paper and review submission and recording are similar to those in conferences.

Is JoTraX available?

JoTrax is currently not available. The current version of JoTrax is still quick and dirty and I do plan to rewrite this and make it available.

JoTrax Setup

The following documentation is for internal use..

File System

The following file structure is recommended where JN is the Journal name.

                 http://host/~user/cgi-bin/JN (public)
                                  |
      .-------------.-------------.-------------.-------------. 
      |             |             |             |             |
  index.html     images         Review        Editor       JoTrax (secret)
  track.html        ^         (restricted) (restricted)       ^
 submit.html       / \             ^            ^            / \
                                  / \          / \

If you are the editor of several journals you want several copies of this structure JN1, JN2, ... to keep the data bases separate.

Basic Configuration

To set this up for a new journal follow these simple steps - assuming that your systems runs an Apache server and suEXEC to your ~user/cgi-bin directory

create .../cgi-bin/JN referred to subsequently as $JN
copy JoTrax to $JN/JoTrax and set permissions to user only
place the CFP in $JN/index.html expecting submit.html for world readable submission
copy JoTrax/images/* to $JN/images/ (world readable)
configure JoTrax (see $JN/JoTrax/README)
copy cgi scripts from $JN/JoTrax/www/cgi-bin to $JN (permissions user only)
copy cgi scripts from $JN/JoTrax/www/Review to $JN/Review (permissions user only)
copy cgi scripts from $JN/JoTrax/www/Editors to $JN/Editors (permissions user only)
Web-browse pages, edit templates and go to 5 or leave as is

Editorial Board / Reviewer Access

Edit the file $JN/Review/.htaccess and $JN/Editor/.htaccess to use a password file and a group file of your making. These must be readable to Apache. Add or delete reviewers to/from the password file by

   htpasswd -b journalpasswd reviewer@univ.edu pw232wp

Edit a group file distinguishing reviewers and editors.

Heinz Schmidt, Dec 2001 JoTrax - hws@monash.edu.au