We love Pressbooks for creating books and wonder if there is any interest from the community or company to add functionality to better support creating journals or other serialized publications?
We are already using it this way to publish some journals (example), basically publishing each journal as its own book - but it would be great if there was some additional functionality or metadata that would allow us to make those a part of a series or collection.
There are a growing number of open access journals out there and it seems like this would be a great opportunity!
1 Like
hi @Christopher_Phillips supporting journal publication has not been a product priority for us to date. I agree that there are some similarities and we’re glad you’ve been able to use Pressbooks for this purpose. In terms of current metadata, we do allow you to enter a series title and # in book info, which may be helpful for serial publications, like journals:
but that’s about the extent of it. If you have specific ideas about features, functionality, or metadata that would better enable you to do what you want to do re: open journal publishing, please do share them in our ideas repo: Sign in to GitHub · GitHub. I can’t promise that we’ll prioritize them or do significant work to transform Pressbooks into software suited for publishing open journals, but if they seem like features that would be of broad general interest, I’m happy to add them to our future backlog.
Thank you so much for the quick reply @SteelWagstaff! And thank you for pointing out the Series Title and Number - I had missed that previously. I will do some more work to look into what specific features would be helpful.
I’ll share a couple of ideas here to get feedback from others before I post any specific feature requests to Github.It may be that I just need to understand what Pressbooks does with that series information or any best practices on how it might be used for journals.
Add an additional layer of series information:
Currently the meta data provides a series title and a series number. Most of our journals have 3 layers of hierarchy - Journal Title, Volume and Issue. So we could use the current metatag as:
-
Series Title: Journal Name, Series Number: Volume 1, Issue 1,
-
Series Title: Journal Name Volume 1, Series Number: Issue 1
- Put the Journal Title as the general book title and then: Series Title: Volume 1, Series Number: Issue 1
It would be great if there were three layers, if it were for journals specifically it might be:
- Journal Title
- Journal Volume
- Journal Issue
But if there are other use cases for serials, perhaps it something more like:
- Series Title
- Series Section
- Series Number
That would allow the user to specify what the section or number should be.
Ability to group and navigate within a series:
It appears that the Series Title or Series Number do not currently show up on the webbook cover page or do anything to group the books that are a part of a series together is that right?
If so - it would be great if designating a book/journal as part of a series connected it to other “books” that were also a part of that series with a series page created listing all of the books in that series. Basically creating some kind of parent/child taxonomy for the series and books within that series that would allow all issues to show on the series landing page.
Is anyone else using Pressbooks for journals? Are there any best practices that you are using to make it work for you or additional features that you would like to see?
Do you know if there is a way to change the “book” noun in “read book”? I have arts faculty who want to be able to use it as a way to showcase senior projects.
