Journal Software

The journal system we use has been developed especially for Musicologica Austriaca. It was customized for the particular requirements of a pioneering 21st century academic online journal on the humanities. We have taken special care to create an efficient, powerful, and easy-to-use environment for the operation and maintenance of the journal. Furthermore, we have focused on developing a technical framework that provides the best conditions for conducting scholarly discourse online.

While all core functions of the daily journal administration appear as front-end functions on the MusAu website, the powerful PHP-based SilverStripe-based back-end (CMS) is only necessary for advanced functions and configurations set by an editor. This ensures maximum efficiency of work processes and user-friendliness to authors, reviewers, and editors.

At MusAu we believe that it would not be wise to transfer the limitations of print publication to the digital world. We therefore do not want our journal to simulate sheets of paper. Rather, our aim is to make scholarly publishing more process-oriented and dynamic. What this means in particular is creating conditions for active discourse (inline comments) and a development of scholarly content (article updates).

Features

Articles:

  • All articles are available in HTML and PDF formats.
  • Articles support images, audio, video, Flash, media embedding, and downloadable supplementary material of any file format.
  • Article headers provide all necessary meta-information (upcoming).
  • OAI-PMH compatible metadata (upcoming).
  • Social media sharing.
  • Registered readers are free to post inline comments to all articles.
  • Support of different article versions and version comparison (upcoming).

For editors:

  • Use the lucid front-end editorial system for optimum efficiency and overview in the day-to-day management of the journal.
  • Keep full control over the journal and website content with the easy-to use CMS back-end.
  • Get a quick overview of all recent journal activities.
  • User management: The journal system ensures a simple and clear administration of users and groups.
  • Moderation of comments: Monitor newly posted comments prior to publication.

Are you interested in the MusAu journal system for your own journal?

All inquiries are welcome. Please write an email to the editorial team to discuss the options. We aim to spread the maintenance and further development of the journal system among several actors and are particularly happy for contributions that improve or update the journal system. This might include the following:

  • Your own suggestions.
  • Major version updates of the software.
  • New features, such as
    • implementation of multilingual content,
    • implementation of detailed statistics,
    • a newsletter and alert service module,
    • a detailed journal setup module,
    • an automatic function to select and suggest possible reviewers from the user database,
    • a module to automatically store files in an online data repository.

Credits

Idea, detail concept, and project management: Dominik Šedivý
Consulting, visual design, and technical realization: pixelpoems online architects