During the year 2008 La Plata National University (UNLP) has stressed up in its Strategic Plan that all Intellectual Creation from professors, students and researchers must be visible and accessible from outside the scope of this college: the University has a considerable scientific and academic production, and the world might see it if it was somewhere easily available. In this direction, projects such as SeDiCI UNLP have been strongly strengthen, and new projects have been created: The Portal of Journals and The Portal of Congresses.Servicio de Difusión de la Creación Intelectual (SEDICI

De Giusti, Marisa Raquel

Villarreal, Gonzalo Luján

English

SEDICI - Repositorio de la UNLP

 
Socializing and Disseminating the Academic and Intellectual Creation: Experiences from La Plata 
National University. 
 
ENG. PROF.. DE GIUSTI MARISA RAQUEL  
Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas de la Pcia. De Buenos Aires (CICPBA)  
Proyecto de Enlace de Bibliotecas (PrEBi)- Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina 
and 
LIC. PROF. VILLARREAL, GONZALO LUJÁN 
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Técnicas y Científicas (CONICET) 
Proyecto de Enlace de Bibliotecas (PrEBi)- Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina 
 
 
Abstract. 
 
During the year 2008 La Plata National University (UNLP) has stressed up in its Strategic Plan that 
all Intellectual Creation from professors, students and researchers must be visible and accessible 
from outside the scope of this college: the University has a considerable scientific and academic 
production, and the world might see it if it was somewhere easily available. In this direction, 
projects such as SeDiCI UNLP have been strongly strengthen, and new projects have been created: 
The Portal of Journals and The Portal of Congresses. 
 
The Portal of Journals, launched in October 2008, aims to provide UNLP's groups —laboratories, 
researchers, dependences, teachers and students— that have or wish to have an on-line publication 
with a platform that facilitates the hard work that this kind of task demands; this portal is supported 
on PKP's OJS software. In the same way, the Portal of Congresses, brought out in April 2009, 
provides services for everyone in the University that needs help in the accomplishing of any kind of 
scientific-academic meeting (e.g. congresses, symposiums, workshops); OCS is the platform that is 
behind this portal. 
 
Both brand-new projects have presented many challenges, since most people in UNLP have never 
had a service as such and they need to learn a new way of carrying out theirs Journals and/or 
Conferences (including internal organization by division of roles and tasks, communication, 
revision and publication) and a new software platform as well. In order to smooth out these 
difficulties, the group in charge of the projects (PrEBi UNLP)  have put into practice many 
measures including workshops, modifications to the platform by users requests, help via email, 
scheduled meetings with people of one single journal or conference, on-line examples and a 
collaborative wiki. Besides the advantages that these portals contemplates, both projects articulate 
theirs efforts with the Diffusion Service of UNLP (SeDiCI), which boosts the dissemination of 
academic-scientific production. Along this article these measures will be explained in detail, 
together with the experiences and results obtained from each one which have enable us to identify 
best practices, detect future problems and achieve great results. 
  
 
Introduction 
 
La Plata National University (UNLP, [1]) is one of the most important universities of Argentina and 
Latin America both in number of students and in amount of academic —intellectual production as 
well. The university counts on 17 Schools with more than 90,000 students, about 10,000 employees 
(teachers and administration), 93 research centers and nearly 2,200 researchers. These numbers are 
the main reason that explain the quantity of books, journals and journal articles, theses and PhD 
theses, conferences, symposiums and meetings organized by local researchers and teachers, and 
other different sorts of productions.  
 
In year 2003, UNLP launched the Intellectual Creation Dissemination Service (SeDiCi , Servicio de 
Difusión de la Creación Intelectual)[2][3], with the purpose of providing a mean for authors of all 
these productions to publish their works and aiming to return to the society all the efforts invested 
in the public university.  
 
Since 2007, the UNLP has set up a Strategic Plan1 in which it has been remarked the importance of 
the dissemination of the academic and intellectual creation. SeDiCI project was in tune with this 
idea, but it became necessary to add new services for Organizers of Journals and Conferences that 
needed to put on-line the new contents, and for the University to track and be able to disseminate all 
these creations that escaped from SeDiCI scope. Besides all that, organizers and publishers could 
use some help in their work, meeting and sharing experiences with other organizers, having a place 
to host and publish their journals and conferences, and making organized and a bit easier the hard 
work that both journals publishing and conferences organization involve. 
 
New projects have arisen. 
 
The workaround of those issues were faced by the introduction of two new projects: The Portal of 
Journals of UNLP [4] and The Portal of Congresses of UNLP [5].  
 
The first project, launched in October 2008, is intended for groups within the University or related 
to a group of UNLP that already carry out any kind of journals (e.g. scientific, academic, discussion, 
etc) and wish to have it hosted in the official website of the university; it is also possible (and 
desirable) to upload old issues of the Journals, so all articles ever are on-line. But the purpose of 
this initiative goes further, with the idea of helping groups that wish to start a new journal and do 
not know how or where to start from. The Portal of Journals is supported by PKP's Open Journal 
Systems, sponsored by Science and Technique Secretary of UNLP, and executed by UNLP PrEBi 
team [6], which is in charge of system maintenance, users assistance, workshops for users, and so 
on. 
 
The second project has the purpose of helping groups that organize any kind of meeting with all 
tasks that this organization demands. In order to do that, the university has launched the Portal of 
Congresses, which provides both a software tool to host and manage congresses, and a team which 
helps people behind those congresses. Again, the software behind the scenes is PKP's Open 
Conference Systems, and the support group is PrEBi UNLP, with UNLP as main sponsor of the 
project. 
 
Given that the same team is the technical responsible for both projects, support activities are all 
centered in that team which means that they can take advantage of the experiences learned from one 
project and use them in the other project, and that they can combine efforts to make them profitable 
for Journals and Congresses users. In the rest of this article, we will explain what all these efforts 
                                                 
1 The first experience in this matter was in 2004, which resulted in the publication of the Management Strategic Plan 
2004-2007 where top priority projects, strategies and academic initiatives were reflected. 
are all about and remark on the advantages, possibilities, disadvantages and problems we have seen 
since the beginning of both initiatives. 
 
Argentinian translations 
 
One of the first modifications made to both systems were the Spanish translations; users 
complained that some phrases were difficult to understand, or that they had no sense in Argentinian 
Spanish, so many terms and phrases they were adapted to a more common one of users of UNLP. 
Besides, many Spanish translations in the core system and in system's plugins were missing or 
incomplete, and it was necessary to finish them. Lastly, OCS help in Spanish language did not exist 
and was written from scratch, so users can now enjoy the context help offered by the system in their 
own native language. 
 
Just few changes 
 
The first change introduced into both websites was the adoption of the UNLP styles: logos, fonts, 
colors, headers and backgrounds. Users using these OCS and OJS need to feel that they are inside a 
UNLP website, so both portals are now very similar to each other, and to the main UNLP website, 
but keeping some characteristics that make them unique. 
 
Most users of the system required the limitation words in abstracts to a predefined number. Since 
neither OCS nor OJS provides this feature, we have decided to implement it by ourselves and 
introduce it to both software tools. Given that the length of abstracts could vary from track to track 
in a conference, or from section to section in journals, our policy has been to add the new parameter 
to conference tracks and journal sections, and allow Managers to set this value in the Track/Section 
configuration page. 
 
The verification of this parameter takes place in both client side (via Javascript) and server side 
(after the form submission), which ensures the fulfillment of this requirement even if the Javascript 
engine is disabled in the browser. This feature will soon be committed to svn repositories in order to 
be considered for inclusion in OCS and OJS. 
 
Another small change implemented in OCS was the introduction of a LaTex renderer plugin. Even 
though there already existed a LaTex plugin for OJS [7] (which, by the way works perfectly), this 
plugin was not available for OCS hence we have adapted the OJS plugin to make it fit in OCS 
internal structure. This plugins has already been uploaded to PKP forums for all users that wish to 
add this feature to OCS. 
 
Workshops for users and potential users 
 
Both software tools are really complete, full of features and extremely configurable. This is very 
good once users have learned how to use all this, but new users tend to loose in the huge sea of 
options and functions available. To make the transition to these tools smoother for them, we have 
organized and given workshops specially focused on author, reviewer and director/editor scopes. 
 
In these workshops we show users (and potential users, since people assists to these workshops to 
see if the tools are good for their projects) how the process of publication is carried out in OCS and 
OJS. The idea is that users play the role of an author first, then a director or editor and finally 
reviewer, so they can experiment by themselves what every user does, how the software guides and 
helps them to complete a whole process and how publications are put on-line and seen by visitors. 
They even have an article or paper for their own, so there is no overlapping among the workshop 
participants. Since many participants of workshops like to continue playing around with everything 
they have learned, we leave on-line a testing OCS and OJS website, with a fake Congress and a 
fake Journal so they can review everything or even go on researching and learning new features not 
covered in the workshop. 
 
In our experience, users tend at first to loose a bit when they switch from one role to the other, but 
once they have understood the dynamic of the workshop they follow it with no problems and most 
times they even get on with it. 
 
Manager is a key but a bit complicated role in both OCS and OJS, therefore it is not included in 
these workshops. Nevertheless, it is mentioned many times along workshops since people need to 
understand where some features come from and who has defined them. In all workshops we also 
emphasize repeatedly that everything can be configured, so the portals can adjust to journals and 
conferences parameters, and not the other way around; this flexibility reassures participants since 
they do not have to change the way they already worked. 
 
Anyway, we are also planning workshops for these roles and just for these roles, so users can have 
the whole picture focusing on how to configure their journal or congress, add information to it, 
define processes, policies, etc. We presume that this kind of workshop will be a little harder, so we 
are collecting as much information as we can to make it the most complete possible. 
 
Using the software to learn the software 
 
With every workshop a new version of the documents used for users comes up (flowcharts, 
presentations, general documents); besides, we created some documents to help and guide users to 
configure very specific aspects such as headers, footers and style sheets. We needed to put all this 
documents available for everyone, and we wanted users to use both portals, so we decided to use 
OJS and OCS to publish documentation about OJS and OCS respectively. This way, newcomers and   
users in general can see how a document is published on-line, how visitors can read it, what 
reading-tools really are, how indexes are constructed and how different formats are displayed. Users 
have shown big interest in this, and have experimented a lot in our fake portal, so it seems that this 
was a wise move. 
 
Collaborative cooperation 
 
Most questions and doubts are common to almost all users, and the fast growth in users, journals 
and conferences have considerably increased the number of repeated questions and global doubts. 
We wanted to find a more efficient way to answer all these questions faster, and to let users share 
their experience with other users, so they can help each other and depend a bit less of the support 
team behind both portals. 
 
We needed a faster way to share information, advices, tips and solutions in general to basic and 
advanced topics, and we thought that a collaborative wiki-like site [8] was a good idea. We started 
this site in April 2009, and we are continuously writing articles and guides in which different  topics 
are explained, paying special attention to repeated enquiries made by many users.  
 
Users can also write new articles or improve existing ones, adding some information or correcting 
wrong data. Either way, any changes are reviewed by the support team, in order to ensure a 
minimum quality level in the wiki. 
 
Conclusions 
 
All measures taken for both projects are intended to people to make the most of the softwares and 
services, after having a close look to all the available possibilities of the platforms behind the 
portals. The more users take advantage of that, the more people are encouraged to take part of the 
projects.  
 
So far, many efforts have been put to help everyone and results are already showing up. The Portal 
of Journals has five journals, two of which are brand new, created by people who saw a great 
opportunity in this project. In fact, one of these journals [9] belongs to an international group with 
many Latin American Universities in it [10]. Regarding to the Portal of Congresses, there are 
already four congresses, all of them very different, and two of them having held for the first time. 
Finally, since both portals are very close to SeDiCI —the project in charge of the dissemination of 
everything produced inside UNLP and whose people are experts in on-line publication and diffusion 
area [11, 12, 13]—, the potential boost and visibility of Journals and Congresses projects have is 
really great, including the harvesting by and diffusion via OAI PMH of publications, the inclusion 
of this documents in SeDiCI repositories so they could appear in search results, and the 
dissemination in library websites via standard protocols such as Z39.50, SRU, SRW or even 
customized web-service. 
 
References 
 
[1] Universidad Nacional de La Plata http://www.unlp.edu.ar
[2] Servicio de Difusión de la Creación Intelectual http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar
[3]  De Giusti, Marisa Raquel . Villarreal, Gonzalo . Sobrado, Ariel . Lira, Ariel Jorge . Vila, María  
[4] Portal de Congresos de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata http://congresos.unlp.edu.ar  
[5] Portal de Revistas de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata http://revistas.unlp.edu.ar  
[6] Proyecto de Enlace de Bibliotecas de la UNLP http://www.prebi.unlp.edu.ar  
[7] LaTex Rendered Support for OJS http://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=3448
[8] PrEBi Wiki http://wiki.prebi.unlp.edu.ar  
[9] AUGM DOMUS. Revista electronica del Comite de Medio Ambiente.  
http://revistas.unlp.edu.ar/index.php/domus  
[10] Asociacion de Universidades Grupo Montevideo http://www.grupomontevideo.edu.uy/
Marta: Intellectual Creativity Diffusion Service at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. D-Lib 
Magazine: Vol.14. ISSN: 1082-9873. 
[11] De Giusti, Marisa Raquel; Vila, Maria Marta; Sobrado, Ariel; Villarreal, Gonzalo Lujan; Lira, 
Ariel Jorge. Interconnection And Sharing Through Webservices.Anales Chameleon Federation 
Meeting. Septiembre 2007. Bologna, Italia. 
[12] De Giusti, M.R., Marmonti E., Villarreal, G., Sobrado, A. y Vila M.M. Tecnologías para 
propagar los contenidos de una Biblioteca Digital. Experiencias desde SeDiCI.. Junio 2006. 
4º Simposium Internacional de Bibliotecas Digitales.  
[13] De Giusti, M.R., Villarreal, G. Celsius Bloodhound. International Conference on Engineering 
Education – ICEE 2007. 3-7 Septiembre 2007. Coimbra, Portugal. 
 
 
 
 


Socializing and disseminating the academic and intellectual creation: experiences from La Plata National University

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