The PoPuPS project philosophy

One of ULiège Library's missions is to develop and provide the scientific community with efficient, user-friendly tools for disseminating and exploiting knowledge. Firmly committed to the Open Access movement, ULiège Library believes that access to knowledge should be free and open to all, with no financial constraints.
 
ULiège Library therefore offers a modern platform for the public publication of scientific journals in Open Access, with functionalities that keep pace with technological developments, particularly in terms of referencing and citations.
 
The main ambition is to provide journal editors with a simple, cost-effective solution for publishing and distributing their journal(s) or conference(s) on the Internet, while retaining their full editorial autonomy and independence, and with maximum visibility. With nearly 8,000 articles already online, PoPuPS also aims to offer readers, researchers and citizens alike, free and immediate access to the results of research published on the platform.
 
PoPuPS, as a journal incubator, enables existing journals to switch easily to open electronic distribution, or to free themselves from commercial publishers whose interests do not coincide with those of the scientific community. PoPuPS also enables the emergence of new, natively digital journals.
 
Since 2018, PoPuPS has been one of the founding members of the REPÈRES network (REseau de PEpinières de REvues Scientifiques). The network currently comprises seven universities, five Maisons des Sciences de l'Homme (MSH) and a total of almost 100 journals.
 
Journal editors who decide to publish on PoPuPS undertake to :
  • rigorously respect the major principles of scientific quality (described below);
  • publish content at least once a year;
  • offer their services free of charge to authors (no APC, Author Processing Charge).
In keeping with the project's underlying philosophy, PoPuPS is not designed to make a profit. It is intended as a service for the scientific community and the general public.

Technically

PoPuPS is based on the Lodel software created by Cleo and maintained by OpenEdition.
 
The tool provides journal editors with simple management of the formatting and publication of structured and complex academic texts. It automatically transforms tagged text files (.doc or .odt) into XML-TEI files, and translates them into xhtml for online publishing. Each article published on PoPuPS contains descriptive data (metadata) and can be supplemented by appendices in various formats. Author and keyword indexes are automatically generated. These are supplemented by an internal search engine.
 
For journal editors, the use of PoPuPS follows the entire editorial process, from manuscript submission to text editing, including spelling and typographical corrections, and the various stages of validation and peer review. These stages are entirely the responsibility of the journal editors. At the request of several of them, however, a technical support service for editing work has been developed and is available as an option (see below).
 
PoPuPS does not currently perform content enrichment. The keywords and keywords indexed in the articles are those chosen by the journal's editors, and often proposed by the authors themselves.

Aiming for quality

For a number of years now, PoPuPS has been committed to enhancing the quality of the scientific journals it publishes. This involves improving the transparency of editorial processes (including peer review), the quality of information provided to readers and authors, and the visibility and referencing of journals and the articles they publish.
 
The main aim of this demanding positioning is of course to enhance the support and interest of authors and readers, while increasing the international recognition of all published titles.
 
The efforts made by publishers in this area must not only be supported and reinforced, but also translated into a global quality approach, both for the journal itself and for its distribution.
 
This approach takes the form of advice and support for journal editors, as well as specific developments. It is facilitated by our participation in the REPERES network and the integration of QUÉRO criteria into our quality approach.
 
The main points of attention concern :
  • complete description and presentation of reviews ;
  • description of the manuscript validation process (reading committee, editorial board, publisher, peer review, etc.);
  • an exhaustive list of people involved in the editorial process, with their affiliations and qualifications;
  • authors' guide;
  • authors' rights and distribution licenses (Creative Commons);
  • respect for ethical aspects (both for upstream research and for publication);
  • indexing and visibility.
This objective also enables us to differentiate ourselves very clearly from the too numerous and flourishing pseudo-journals and predatory publishers.

Basic services

Support and training

Once a journal or conference has been accepted for inclusion on the portal on the basis of criteria of scientific quality and editorial rigor, and after signing an agreement between the publisher and ULiège Library, those responsible for the journal or conference are taken care of creating their publication space (each journal or conference has its own site) and training the people responsible for formatting the articles.
 
In addition, various support documents are made available in the "publishers' area". A permanent help desk completes these front-line aids.

Visibility

All new articles are assigned a Crossref DOI (Digital Object Identifier). This permanent international identification increases the visibility of articles and facilitates their citability.
 
In terms of visibility and distribution, all articles published on PoPuPS are referenced in Google Scholar, search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, the Central Discovery Index (CDI) used with Primo and Summon discovery solutions (Ex Libris ProQuest) and in Isidore (for titles in the humanities and social sciences).
 
In addition, all journals are referenced in the knowledge bases of EBSCO (A-to-Z) and Ex Libris ProQuest (SFX KB, Alma Community Zone and 360Link) and in Mir@bel, of which ULiège Library is a member.
 
PoPuPS managers are continuing their efforts to integrate content published on PoPuPS into other international bibliographic tools.

Statistics

ULiège Library has developed a statistics tool for PoPuPS. It provides viewing and downloading statistics for all articles.
 
In addition to displaying statistics, article by article, the PoPuPS platform shows a ranking by source of the number of views or downloads (by country) and by article (top 30 most viewed/downloaded articles).

Additional services

ULiège Library offers a number of additional services. If a publisher is interested in one of these services, please contact the PoPuPS team.

Automation of the editorial process

A new service for electronic submission of articles and automation and monitoring of the validation (reviewing) process has been developed with PKP's OJS (Open Journal System) software.
 
This system runs on an independent server, but is linked to the PoPuPS distribution platform. It automates part of the upstream editorial chain.

Automatic production of PDF files

The ULiège Library team has developed a process for automatically creating (printable) pdf files from the document displayed in Web format (XHTML). This service eases the workload of editors by automating this sometimes time-consuming stage, while ensuring quality output.
 
The quality of the pdf produced obviously depends on the quality of the files uploaded to the platform and the quality of the metadata associated with the articles.

Additional referencing assistance

To improve their visibility, it is important for journals to be present in as many bibliographic databases as possible.
 
For ULiège Library, presence in the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) is essential. It ensures automatic presence in a large number of other documentary resources, and offers a label of credibility to the journals accepted there. Indexing in other bibliographic tools, such as Scopus, can also increase visibility.
 
The PoPuPS team can help journal editors apply for indexing in these databases, as well as other more specific bibliographic databases (depending on the field) deemed useful by journal editors.

Help with feeding the site

Currently, PoPuPS is populated by importing articles in Open Document (LibreOffice) or Word format, formatted and tagged in Lodel style. This process is carried out by the publishers.
 
At their request, formatting and feeding can be handled by the ULiège Library team. However, this service only concerns the technical aspects (no proofreading) and is invoiced separately.
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