| As many of you know, for the past two years CA has been using Berkeley Electronic Press's Electronic Workflow System (EWS) to handle its submissions and review process. With the transition to Wiley-Blackwell as our new publisher, we had to make a decision about migrating to a new journal management system. One option was to adopt Wiley-Blackwell's in-house software system Manuscript Central, for which the journal would be assessed an annual fee. Another option was to adopt Open Journal Systems (OJS), an open-source software system used by an increasing number of open-access electronic journals. At its May 2008 meeting, the SCA Board decided that Cultural Anthropology would adopy OJS, for reasons of both section finances and support for open-source and open-access systems. (While many journals use OJS for both manuscript management and open access publishing directly to the web, Cultural Anthropology will be using it in only the former role.) With the SCA Board support, the journal field office committed resources this past summer to installing OJS on the culanth.org dedicated server, and tailoring it to our needs. Thanks to Casey O'Donnell and a small community of test users, we are now ready to make the transition. If you were a registered author or reviewer in EWS before April 2008, we are transferring your user data from EWS (courtesy of BE PRess, facilitated by Wiley-Blackwell) to the new OJS, and you will soon receive an email reminding you of your username and password. If you were not a user of the old system, or if you only registered since April of this year (when we downloaded the user data), we encourage you to register now. In either case, please visit the site soon and try it out, at http://ojs.culanth.org If you have a current submission in to CA, or are a reviewer for one, there is no need to do anything differently regarding those manuscripts; we will continue using the current EWS through December 20008, at which point all the manuscripts currently in that system should have been processed. The system should be working smoothly for both authors and reviewers, but as with any such systemic change there will no doubt be some oversights or unexpected problems. Please don't hesitate to contact us at ea@culanth.org if you encounter any difficulties, have any questions, or simply want to offer a suggestion for how the site might be improved. |
ISSN: 1548-1360