Welcome to the
Provisional JARSS Information Page

JARSS is the Journal Author and Reviewer Support System; it is a software system that supports the editorial process of a scientific journal. The system has been developed by Erik Sandewall, Björn Husberg and Daniel Bergström at Linköping University, Sweden. It was first developed for the Editorial Board Organization of the Artificial Intelligence Journal who also funded a large part of the cost for its development. Its Editors-in-Chief have used JARSS since 2003 for administrating the editorial process in their journal.

Additional users are presently on the way to begin using the system, in particular through the services that are provided by Linköping University Electronic Press when it hosts Open Access journals.

The design of JARSS differs in major ways from other editorial support systems. Let us compare it concretely with the Open Journal System (OJS) which is quite widely used. The facilities and operation of OJS was described in a recent article J. Willinsky: Open Journal Systems: An example of Open Source Software for journal management and publishing (Library Hi-Tech, Volume 23, Issue 4, p. 504-519, 2005). The most important facility that is offered by JARSS, and not by OJS, is for the management of incoming mail from authors and reviewers to the editorial office. Both OJS and JARSS provide support for sending out emails to these in the course of editorial office work, but in JARSS there is also a facility where the incoming mail is automatically collected and assigned to their respective email folders, which are typically one folder for each submission to the journal. The editor in charge is able to view the editorial database from several perspectives: seeing the entire email communication for a particular submission, or seeing the current "to do" list that helps her or him keep track of submissions where action is needed.

Furthermore, the JARSS system has a relatively advanced facility for administrating the various documents that pertain to each submission, including separate files for different aspects of the submission, separate versions of each of these, support for format conversions, and so forth. This will serve as a basis for forthcoming work towards supporting research data within the peer review process, along with the articles themselves.

Yet another facility in JARSS is the support for direct email contact between an author and a reviewer, which e.g. allows the reviewer to ask questions for clarification directly to the author. The communication between them is done through the JARSS system, so that the anonymity of the reviewer is guaranteed, but both author and reviewer participate in the communication using their ordinary email client.

In OJS, by comparison, the editor in charge will have to administrate incoming email using his ordinary email client, separate from the editorial support system. This was also how we organized our earlier system, JESS, which preceded JARSS, and it was because of the experience of using JESS that we designed JARSS in such a way that email support is an essential basic facility.

On the other hand, there are a number of facilities in OJS for which JARSS does not have any counterpart. OJS supports a broader range of activities, including the preparation of the finished article for publication and the composition of entire journal issues. We have implemented these in a separate set of software that is used for the open-source Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI), but they have not been included in JARSS.

An overview of design issues for JARSS is found in this recent memo.

A test and demo version of JARSS is publicly available at this site. Please feel free to check into this system to see how it appears for an author submitting a manuscript. If you wish to also try the "reviewer" or "administrator" parts of the system, please contact Erik Sandewall at erisa at ida dot liu dot se.