Volunteering with BCRA (Software Projects)

This page contains further information on software projects, which are mentioned briefly on our volunteer page.

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Summary

At the moment, we are not specifically asking for someone to write and maintain web pages but there are several other areas where we would like assistance.

• Advising on upgrading our systems
• A "Submission Management" package for Cave & Karst Science
• A "Copyright Agreement Registration" package for all of our publications
• Registering our internal DOIs with the official DOI body

Upgrades

Some of our systems are old and clunky. If there are more modern, more easily maintainable solutions, should we be adopting them? For example, are Mailman lists the best way to run bulk emails? How can we use Google docs (or similar) to manage field meetings?

We think (but will accept advice) that it would be better to use existing packages than to create our own bespoke solutions for these systems.

Submission Management

See Wikipedia's description of Submission Management software. Primarily for Cave & Karst Science we would like a system that allows contributors to upload their papers, confirm our copyright terms, and allow our editors to track progress. Existing systems exist, and we are willing to pay a licence fee to use an existing product. You will need to talk to the editors of C&KS and to assess the existing academic systems to which the editors will refer you.

Copyright Agreement Registration

This is a subset of the above Submission Management system, which would be used across all our publications (C&KS, CREGJ, Cave Studies, Review) and is a method of recording that authors have seen and agreed to our copyright terms. Practical experience has shown that it is difficult to get our editors to do these checks in a methodical manner, and this could cause problems for us in the future.

The current method of recording copyright agreement requires an editor to draw to the contributor's attention our Information for Writers and Contributors page and, in particular, the section How to convey your agreement to us. The problem is that this task gets overlooked. It is generally agreed that any task that requires an editor to do anything 'manually' (like email a contributor and send a 'standard text') is not going to work. We therefore need a web form that

• Allows an editor to simply enter a contributor's name and email address, and does all the rest automatically
• Allows a contributor to complete a web form to show his agreement to our terms
• Provides a progress suummary for editors

An initial crude demonstration is at bcra.org.uk/copyright/licence_agreement.html

Digital Object Identifiers

BCRA has a scheme for digital object identifiers. A rough demo was written in 2015, but it no longer fully works because of changes to other parts of our web site. The entire code needs re-writing, and this task will be undertaken by David Gibson at some point. However, having created our draft DOIs we now need to register them with the official DOI body. As there are some 1500 of these identifiers, we need someone to manage this aspect of the project - e.g. find out how to do it, what fees to pay and whether there is an automated process for registering 1500 identifiers. Our list of identifiers is at https://doi.bcra.org.uk/listing_development.html.

Our DOI scheme means that to access a particular "asset" it is quoted as, for example, doi.bcra.org.uk/j115i. There are some problems though...

• The DOI in that example refers to a page that is not publicly viewable, so it has to go to a login page. The login page is very out-of-date and needs presenting in a more user-friendly manner.
• DOIs for a "free" web page currently do not work - there is a bug somewhere
• The main problem is that a DOI like doi.bcra.org.uk/j115i is not recognised by many academic databases, so we need to purchase DOIs from http://doi.org and to map our references (as in the list at listing_development.html) to the doi.org domain.