Using OJS: Preparing your Manuscript

Hello, and welcome to the first of several online video tutorials for how to use Cultural Anthropology's Open Journal System or OJS.

OJS is an open source project aimed at providing manuscript tracking and management tools to a wide variety of users. We use it because it allows us to maintain, store, track, and archive the submissions to the journal.

This first video is actually a precursor to using OJS. It is aimed to teach you about how to properly prepare your manuscript for submission to OJS.

You'll see here that I've placed a folder on my desktop containing the files associated with my CA submission. In this folder you can see that I have a Microsoft Word Document or "DOC" file and two JPEG image files. Typically many authors will embed image files into their document, which works, but actually creates more difficulty later in the publishing process.

I'll be demonstrating with Microsoft Word, in part because so many authors use it. However, nearly every word processing program offers the ability to export a document to RTF or "Rich Text Format."

Now, you might be wondering why we don't just use DOC files for our submissions or whatever program an author likes. Primarily it is an issue with the review process. Not every reviewer has the same programs an author has. It is also possible that an author is using one version of a program and a reviewer has another. It is also problematic for archival reasons. RTF is an open document standard. Support for it can be continued in the future. DOCs or DOCX files that the newest version of MS Word creates change and are not necessarily interroptible. For this reason we ask that authors submit an RTF.

Now to explain how to anonymize your RTF for submission. I'm going to open my document, and you can see if I go to the File menu, and to properties, that my name and company are listed within this document. If I were to remove it right now, and then save my document as an RTF, the newly created RTF would actually contain my name and company automatically, a feature of Microsoft Word.

Special Note for End Note Users: You may want to "remove field codes" from your document prior to saving it as an RTF. This is because of the additional data inserted by EndNote. This article may be of use to EndNote users.

So, I'm going to export my document as an RTF. If I go to the File menu, and to Save As, I can change my document format to RTF. It is possible that Word will warn you that certain formatting will be lost. That's alright, because journals don't really use your formatting anyway, that happens at the layout stage. As long as the words and material are in there, you're good to go. If you absolutely cannot live without your special formatting, you may want to create a PDF of your document and upload that, again ensuring that the PDF does not contain any author identifying information. This is a longer process that we wont address here.

Now you can see that if I open the newly created RTF file, and I go to File and Properties, my name and company are still filled in. If I delete the information from these two fields and save the document, they are removed. You can also see that a simple program like Text Edit is now capable of opening my document. Again, with the author information removed.

If you're a savvy viewer, you'll notice that I likely have other author identifying information in the document. I'm going to actually leave that material in here, so that I can demonstrate how to upload a revision of your document to the OJS. But that, is another video.

The next video will demonstrate how to create an account on OJS and how to upload your first submission.