Crossref's recommendations on journal titles

[fgnievinski]

as per pkp/pkp-lib#7569

[kaitlinnewson]

Hi @fgnievinski, can you expand on how this change relates to Google Scholar specifically?

[fgnievinski]

Sure, where it currently says:

"If an article is published in multiple languages, Google Scholar will only index the primary language."

It could be expanded to:

If an article is published in multiple languages, Google Scholar will only index the primary language. If the journal publishes articles in different primary languages, make sure the journal title remains the same across all languages, otherwise Google Scholar may misinterpret it as a different journal, leading to missed citations.

The part specific to Crossref could go into the broader section Best practices for OJS journal indexing if section Adding multilingual metadata in OJS 3.2 is not a good fit.

[kaitlinnewson]

Thanks @fgnievinski. I don't think we want to include this info as it's written in the PR since it's not within the scope of this guide, but I'll wait to hear from @AhemNason.

[kaitlinnewson]

@fgnievinski I'm going to close this PR as it's not within the scope of this guide. We have a new guide in the works called "Using PKP Software in Multiple Languages" that may be a good fit for some indexing content, so keep an eye out for that coming soon!

[fgnievinski]

thanks for the update @kaitlinnewson, I look forward to the new guide. it took us a few years to realize the standard way of publishing multilingual content in PKP/OJS results in translations totally invisible to the outside world (crossref, google, etc.). I understand PKP has code shared with other software projects whose needs to be balanced. but in terms of OJS users, my impression is the vast majority of journals would like to comply with the crossref recommended practices if that's what it takes to improve the discoverability of multilingual content.

[AhemNason]

Hey Everyone, I support Kaitlin in this shift and sorry for not taking the time to reply here sooner. I've been completely swamped. I just want to note to @fgnievinski that a really important thing to be thinking about moving forward should be making sure we push content to crossref as expected via the rest API and the crossref plugin instead of changing the way OJS records metadata to match expectations.

We work very closely with Crossref. They're sponsoring development with us, and we're in steady, close communication with their staff. It would be a mistake, I think, to assert Crossref's recommendations across all of OJS. Instead, we should really be focusing on making sure the metadata we record in the platform is being adequately shared externally. Crossref has a pretty complicated schema but it's just one place our metadata goes.

[fgnievinski]

thanks for commenting @AhemNason and for sharing information about the collaboration with crossref. I just wanted to suggest keeping the present writing of the new guide separate from any future new developments. after all, software coding and testing normally takes much more time. plus, it's already possible to fully expose multilingual content published with the existing version of OJS. the journal admin and editor just have to choose to comply with two very specific crossref recommendations: keep the journal title language-agnostic and keep articles monolingual. a guide to publishing multilingual content using OJS or a similar best-practices document would seem the perfect place to inform users about this possibility. it wouldn't impose any workflow changes to users who are not interested in crossref, it'd only offer a viable workaround for folks wondering why their translation efforts don't seem to attract more readers.

[fgnievinski]

We have a new guide in the works called "Using PKP Software in Multiple Languages" that may be a good fit for some indexing content

Hi, I just saw the new guide is out, congratulations!

Do you think the proposal might still be a good fit for the section about CrossRef?
https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/multiling-guide/en/discovery#crossref

To recap, here's the proposal:

Also consider CrossRef's recommendation about journal titles: “if your journal is in more than one language, you need to choose one version of the title as the master entry”. In other words: “you need to pick one journal title and stick with it. And, the language of the journal title does not need to match the language of the article title.” Otherwise, having a different journal title for each language may will cause an error when submitting the DOIs for registration.