Journal of Enterprise Architecture on Annotum

I am proud to be Chief Editor of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, a peer-reviewed international quarterly publication for the enterprise architecture community, which:

supports global academic and practitioner communities of interest through the publication of articles that promote the profession of enterprise architecture, and deals with issues regarding practices and methods, case studies, and standards at the national and international levels.

In the recent (November 2011) number, I announced a new initiative:

JEA is now mature enough as a publication for it to start making sense, becoming indexed and ranked as a journal in systems like Scopus. Together with our new editorial board member, James Lapalme from Montreal, and the rest of the editorial board, I will work on getting JEA registered, indexed, and ranked.
While this should make JEA more attractive for academics to publish in, JEA will continue to target itself as a journal of, by, and for the enterprise architect community.

I have looked into this some more now, and the first challenge is a more or less technical one, in that the journal currently lacks some essential metadata. Today, it doesn’t even have an ISSN number, nor any DOI data. And the journal itself is not indexed anywhere, and only available for download as PDF for members, with no publicly available metadata.

Until we get these things in order of kinds, Scopus doesn’t want to talk to us. I have requested that our publisher gets an ISSN and a DOI/Crossref registration.

With this metadata in hand, the next challenge will be how we get that data  to relevant sources, and this means we need a ‘metadatasystem’ of kinds.

JEAs requirements:

• Table of Contents for each issue (editor’s order)
• URI for every article, containing metadata including abstract.
• DOI-info for each article, issue, and volume.
• Citation info in APA.
• …

The journal’s current website runs on Drupal. I haven’t found any Drupal modules that makes it a journal/metadata-in-a-box. Any Drupal experts out there who know better?

Annotum

Then I found Annotum. That’s for WordPress, which I know better than Drupal. Annotum is a:

fantastic new tool to author and publish beautiful, peer-reviewed scholarly articles and journals.

I of course had to take a look at it, and must say it has some nice features. All the workflow features look interesting, and in due time, something we need to try out with JEA. Annotum however also soon offers auto-generation and registration of CrossRef DOIs, which on its own makes Annotum very relevant to investigate.

Annotum also has some challenges for my purpose, so I posted a comment on the demo site. In my case, and I don’t think it is particularly special, every new number/issue of a journal is part of a volume (e.g., Volume 6 Issue 3). JATS says:

<volume>6</volume> <issue>3</issue> 

Annotum only works with one category for one article, so you have to make each article category unique, i.e. “Volume X Issue Y” or whatever. That makes it difficult to create structured data.

Annotum has removed, for some reason, the normal possibility WordPress offers of creating custom fields. This makes it double-difficult to create structured data / metadata.

Instead, Annotum has introduced some fixed fields, Abstract, Funding Statements, and Acknowledgements. Unfortunately, those fields are not searchable in the curent release.

Quirks aside, I am generally very impressed with Annotum and how it uses, and expands, WordPress.

The result so far? JEAs metadatasystem: http://aeajournal.info.

Comments are appreciated.