10.6092/issn.1973-9494/7956
AlmaDL Journals is an Open Access publishing service of the University of Bologna, Italy. After 5 years from the publication of the first paper in Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage about the service, we review the transformations and the growth it has experienced during this time span, with a look at the changes that have occurred in Open Access publishing that have driven and inspired the modifications adopted by AlmaDL Journals.
application/pdf
1973-9494
7956
en
Piero Grandesso
Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage
web design
The Academic Publication Service <em>AlmaDL Journals</em> and the New Challenges of Open Access
Text.Serial.Journal
https://conservation-science.unibo.it/
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Articles
2018-03-28
2018-03-27
2018-03-28
2019-09-06
193-202
CSCH
Piero Grandesso
2017
10.6092/issn.1973-9494/7956
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Area Biblioteche e Servizi allo Studio – AlmaDL, University of Bologna
1973-9494
web design
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Kaptan, K. (2017) ‘RETRACTION: Heritage Management Of Temple Tanks In An Urban Scenario: A Case Study Of Thirupporur, a Traditional Town In the State of Tamilnadu, India, by Kubilay Kaptan’, <em>Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage</em>, 16(1), pp. 365–367. <a href="https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1973-9494/7176" class="uri">https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1973-9494/7176</a>.
The Academic Publication Service <em>AlmaDL Journals</em> and the New Challenges of Open Access
https://conservation-science.unibo.it/article/download/7956/7676
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    At the time the Journal “Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage” was founded in
2001 (when it was called “Quaderni di Scienza della Conservazione”), the University of
Bologna’s Digital Library, AlmaDL, had already been carrying out its constructive activ-
ity of preserving and making its digital collections available online to support teaching
and research.
    In particular, OJS constituted the open source platform for the management and
publication of digital scientiic journals. It was among these journals that “Conserva-
tion Science in Cultural Heritage” started its life and subsequently continued its annual
publication to become in 2007, an international bilingual Journal in both print and elec-
tronic versions, in English and Italian.
    Perseverance, the conquest of spaces and the consequent evaluations (made
by the most varied, national and international scientiic Institutions), the Journal has
achieved over the years as regards the scientiic quality of the contents of the publica-
tions, are all based on interdisciplinarity and internationalization.
    The technical-historical Journal has also been able to rely on the sound organiza-
tion and acknowledged expertise of the staff that constitutes Alma DL. And, in refer-
ence to this competence and to several problematic moments related to the 17-year
history of the Journal, I would particularly like to express my profound gratitude to
Maria Laura Vignocchi, Publishing manager and head of the Digital Library of Bologna
University, who has accompanied me along the way with her advice, suggestions, but
also with her constructive improvements in the appearance and content of the works
published and disseminated by AlmaDL within the OJS platform.
    Accompanied by her collaborators, at irst Andrea Zanni and then Piero Grandesso,
who is the author of the present work, the synergy of the advantageous partnership
has enabled the Journal to achieve the current results, as testiied by the statistical
data provided by AlmaDL, as well as by EBSCO (Elton Bryson Stephens Company)
and Facebook.
    It is therefore only right for me to include this foreword to Piero Grandesso’s paper,
in which he states, clearly and effectively, how AlmaDL has incremented and changed
its structure compared to the situation presented ive years ago in a previous paper by
Maria Laura Vignocchi, published in the Journal. This is the result of the hard, but com-
mendable and highly positive work carried out by the Publishing Service of the AlmaDL
at the University of Bologna on the international scene.
                                                                            Editor-in-Chief
T    HE ACADEMIC PUBLICATION SERVICE ALMADL
     JOURNALS AND THE NEW CHALLENGES OF OPEN
     ACCESS

   Piero Grandesso*14
   Area Biblioteche e Servizi allo Studio – AlmaDL
   University of Bologna, Italy


   Keywordsμ scientiic journals, Open Access, DOAJ, plagiarism, web design



   1. Introduction

    Five years have passed since the publication of a paper, in this very same Jour-
nal, about AlmaDL Journals publishing service [1]. AlmaDL Journals1 is an academic
service managed by the University of Bologna Digital Library and is based on the
renowned open source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS)2. It provides
both the publishing platform and the technical support to Editorial Teams of the Univer-
sity that want to publish in Open Access.
    Since 2012 both the service and the scholarly Open Access publishing ecosystem,
have seen a steady growth [2], marked by deep transformations and new challenges.
With this brief paper we would like to review the service transformations along with
the evolution of the surrounding ield, taking this as a rare opportunity for self-analysis
and as a base for future planning. Experience matured so far has taught us that only




                                                                                                   CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
investments in quality help new editorial initiatives to overcome the risk of irrelevance
and failure.


   2. Evolutions in Open Access Publishing

    In the last ive years several evolutions have impacted not only the ield of Open
Access publishing, but the whole sphere of scientiic publishing. A signiicant step
towards the afirmation of Open Access publishing models (in particular the model
known as the “Gold Road” to Open Access) was represented by fundamental changes
in the legal frame made by the European Union.
    Starting from the EU Research Framewok Programmes, FP7 and Horizon 2020,
and the EU recommendation on access and preservation of scientiic information [3],
the European Union has played a great role in the surge of Open Access publications
and several countries have promoted speciic national policies to foster Open Access.
In Italy a signiicant step toward Open Access was gained in 2013 after a previous
decree (91/2013) was converted and approved as Law 112/2013. This introduced into
Italy the principle of mandatory Open Access publication for publicly funded research.


* Corresponding Author: piero.grandesso2@unibo.it

                                                                                             193
                                                                            The increased need for Open Access journals eventually gained the interest of vari-
                                                                        ous publishers who started their own Gold Open Access journals, predominantly ind-
                                                                        ing the application of Author Processing Charges (APC) as the business model to
                                                                        cover publishing costs and provide a margin of proit. Bibliometry and journal reputa-
                                                                        tion play a leading role in driving preferences for researchers wishing to publish, a fact
                                                                        that leads to some major problems regarding Gold Open Access. Among them is the
                                                                        increase in APCs, that not uncommonly have reached igures of several thousands of
                                                                        euros, and the advent of hybrid Open Access. The latter simply refers to the option to
                                                                        publish a single Open Access article in a subscription based journal — provided the
                                                                        payment of a mostly higher than average APC is made — resulting in so called «dou-
                                                                        ble dipping», since research institutions will have to pay both for publishing and for the
                                                                        journal subscription [4].
                                                                            The role of big publishers in Open Access is testimony to the increased require-
                                                                        ments of quality, requested by researchers, within Open Access publishing and the
                                                                        need to cope with higher professional standards promoted by leading publishers.
                                                                            On the other hand, the level of maturation achieved in the Open Access publish-
                                                                        ing panorama implies an ever-growing variety of publications with huge differences in
                                                                        quality and robustness, including a number of predatory initiatives. The widespread
                                                                        phenomenon of online scientiic predatory initiatives is at the basis of the increasing
                                                                        demand for better quality assessment of journals. The wide range of malpractices is
                                                                        not, however, limited to so called «predatory publishing» but expands to include the
                                                                        hijacking of journals and websites, misleading metrics that mostly provide fake Impact
P. Grandesso - The academic publication service AlmaDL Journals




                                                                        Factor, bogus conferences and a number of general issues regarding misconduct that
                                                                        affect the peer review process [5].
                                                                            Thus, there is an urgent need for tools to improve the retrieval and iltering of qual-
                                                                        ity scientiic content, plus the need for more advanced instruments to discriminate
                                                                        and contrast malpractices and to enhance publication trustworthiness. It is also from
                                                                        these needs that several services were launched and have subsequently inluenced
                                                                        the scientiic publishing panorama. They includeμ ORCID, the permanent identiier for
                                                                        researchers3; Publons and Reviewer Credits, platforms that keep track of the peer re-
                                                                        view process and give reviewers due credit4; Emerging Sources Citation Index, a new
                                                                        product by Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, that acts as an intermediary step for
                                                                        new sources to be included in the main products of the Core Collection5.

                                                                           2.1 New criteria for evaluating quality

                                                                           One of the main projects that underwent complete refurbishing and is now amongst
                                                                        the main landmarks for Gold Open Access publishing is the Directory of Open Access
                                                                        Journals6. In 2012 DOAJ started a long process of metadata enrichment and revision
                                                                        of the inclusion criteria which culminated in a highly anticipated reapplication process
                                                                        to all the journals indexed in its database in January 2015. The reapplication process
                                                                        took more than one year and implied the exclusion of almost 3300 indexed journals
                                                                        that failed to provide the newly required data: since March 2014 a newly introduced
                                                                        application form requires extensive information regarding journal policies, copyright
                                                                        and publication charges7, effectively pushing indexed journals toward better quality
                                                                        and transparency in their organization and management [6].
                                                                           Another factor that impacted greatly on the work of AlmaDL Journals was the ap-
                                                                        proval of new rules promoted by ANVUR8, the Italian agency for scientiic evaluation,


                                                                  194
regarding journals. In recent years, the rules have been amended a number of times9,
requiring some work to cope with the new requirements. The newer version of the
rules for journal classiication also imposed tighter requirements in tracking the differ-
ent stages in the peer review process and in transparency, in general. In addition, the
evaluation of a journal’s inclusion in the bibliographic databases, Web of Science and
Scopus, gained more relevance.
   It is in light of these new recommendations and requirements and based on the ex-
perience of some submissions to Scopus - which were not always successful, that we
decided to aim at enhancing the overall editorial and publishing quality of our journals.

   2.2 Ever-evolving web technologies

     The web is the natural environment for Open Access publishing and a publishing
initiative cannot ignore its rules. The technological development of the web is con-
tinuous and advances in web design and web communication are becoming increas-
ingly important in readers’ engagement and retention. Although scholarly readership
is somehow less exposed to typical phenomenon inluencing generic Internet users
such as the transition to mobile devices, the evolution of the web means continuously
improving and upgrading publishing solutions.
     The attention to best practices regarding user experience (UX) is affecting scholarly
publishing with a certain delay - particularly Open Access initiatives - and should be
taken into account due to their consequences on readership retention.
     One of the advances we can underline is “responsive design” as a solution to the
mass transition of Internet users from personal computers to mobile devices. Although
responsive design is not a new concept - it was already well known in 2012, as was
the shift towards mobile devices - it did not penetrate scholarly communication until
very recently. If the number of users accessing Internet from mobile devices has ex-
ceeded access from desktop devices since 201410, Open Access publishing appears




                                                                                                   CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
not to have acknowledged this shift, with a wide number of publishing services still not
providing a suitable user experience to non-desktop users.
     From the analysis of trafic data through the AlmaDL Journals collection, we still see
the predominance of desktop users in 2017, but the number of users accessing via
mobile devices and tablet is steadily increasing and is currently between 15% to 30%,
depending on the speciic journal. These percentages cannot be ignored. A journal’s
website needs to provide an adequate experience for this readership.
     Since 2015 Google has been considering user experience from mobile devices as
a ranking factor in searches11, giving a more direct and urgent impact to the general
unpreparedness of Open Access publishing in this regard. A big step towards a mod-
ern approach to web design has been achieved by several platforms after the release
of the new version of Open Journal Systems 3.0, at the end of August 2016, although
it is unlikely that the new version will be adopted promptly among the numerous OJS-
based services. The new release takes into account the responsive design approach,
reaching by default good usability even on small devices, and presents a number of
optimizations in accessibility and readability of content, search forms, submission pro-
cesses and so on.




                                                                                             195
                                                                           3. Evolution of AlmaDL Journals

                                                                           Since 2012 AlmaDL Journals has undergone a number of signiicant changes. The
                                                                        irst relates to the turnover within the staff and the shift from IT experts internal to our
                                                                        staff, to the external support of the Web Technologies sector of the IT Center of the
                                                                        University of Bologna. The core of the staff dedicated to the service has remained a
                                                                        single full-time person, while the service has grown both in numbers and in areas of
                                                                        interest, thus requiring the deinition of priorities for the various desiderata.

                                                                        Table 1. Number of journals in AlmaDL Journals platform with increment relative to 2012. Journals
                                                                        are counted only if they have published issues. Data for 2017 and 2018 is estimated.

                                                                         Year                            Journals                        Increment since 2012
                                                                         2012                            17                              N/A
                                                                         2013                            19                              11,76%
                                                                         2014                            20                              17,65%
                                                                         2015                            27                              58,82%
                                                                         2016                            30                              76,47%
                                                                         2017 (est.)                     35                              105,88%
                                                                         2018 (est.)                     37+                             117,65%
P. Grandesso - The academic publication service AlmaDL Journals




                                                                           Between 2012 and 2017 the number of journals participating in the service in-
                                                                        creased from 17 to 33, with 6 additional journals that will soon start to publish on our
                                                                        platform. Of the current journals that appear, one has yet to release its irst issue, ex-
                                                                        pected by the end of this year; a small number of journals have suspended publication;
                                                                        this means we are just preserving their past issues. Considering these igures, we can
                                                                        afirm that by the end of 2017 the number of journals will have increased by more than
                                                                        100% since 2012.
                                                                           Of the last 16 new acquisitions, nine represent new projects that have published
                                                                        their irst issue within AlmaDL Journals, while others come from a variety of previous
                                                                        publishing experiencesμ traditional print publishers, scientiic online publishers, and
                                                                        online self-publishing. For a number of the newly acquired preexisting journals, the
                                                                        service also covers past issue recovery and preservation.

                                                                           3.1 OJS submission tracking

                                                                            Following the new requirements from ANVUR and aiming at an overall improvement
                                                                        in publication quality, AlmaDL Journals is actively fostering the adoption of the OJS
                                                                        online submission process as a replacement for the more common submission via
                                                                        email. The adoption of a proper tracking system for submission processing - preferably
                                                                        not limited to peer review - is becoming urgent with the growth of several journals and
                                                                        after speciic examples of the low reliability of manual tracking via email. The possibility
                                                                        of tracking the whole process, from peer review to the editing of an article, is essential
                                                                        in the case of legal complaints and to dramatically reduce the risk of mistakes and
                                                                        malpractice.
                                                                            Poor user experience, the complexity of the whole process and a common lack
                                                                        of conidence with the web by some parts of the scholarly community are among the


                                                                  196
reasons for the slow adoption of submission tracking. Adoption of the OJS submission
tracking has been very slow - up until a few years ago only 4 journals in the collection
were using it. However, after its implementation, in one case the positive outcome of
a highly internationalized journal12 has led to a new initiative to promote the system
within other journals. The submission tracking process of the AlmaDL Journals plat-
form has been recently revised with a complete upgrade of the prepared emails and
a better layout for the back-end - at least for some journals that have adopted a new
standard graphic design. New training programs for editorial teams, complete with
peer review simulations run in a test instance of the platform, should hopefully extend
its adoption to almost 20 journals.

   3.2 Policies and Plagiarism prevention

   In order to comply with the new requirements in terms of completeness and clarity
of journals’ policies, AlmaDL Journals engaged each editorial team in a process that
strongly improved most of the journal policies adopted, in particular the Open Access
Policy and the Peer Review Process description, along with a better understanding in
adopting an Ethical Code of Conduct. As regards Open Access policy, an effort was
made to improve understanding of copyright choices and limitations, and all the jour-
nals adopted a self-archiving policy that was submitted to SHERPA/RoMEO13. On the
occasion of preparing for reapplication to DOAJ, AlmaDL Journals also took the initia-
tive to upload a cleaner version of article metadata for each journal.
   Plagiarism detection and management have long been an issue under considera-
tion and was inally offset after a couple of critical eventsμ the irst was a public claim
of plagiarism, an accusation that revealed itself to be groundless. Due to the online
submission tracking and the adoption by the journal of a Code of Conduct, the editorial
team was able to properly address the accusations and give transparent feedback on
the matter. A second case of suspect plagiarism was raised in the irst half of 2017 in




                                                                                                   CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
this journal and ended with a retraction [7].
   Driven by these experiences, AlmaDL Journals decided to start an experimental
adoption of a service for plagiarism detection, and to make it available to each editorial
team. A proper plagiarism detection service can serve not only to minimize the risk of
plagiarism, but also as a powerful tool to improve the quality of citations within each
paper. The adopted service is currently iThenticate14 and its effectiveness will be evalu-
ated annually based also on budget constraints and its effective adoption by editorial
teams.

   3.3 Web Design, responsiveness and SEO

    In order to encourage readership and provide better user experience, AlmaDL Jour-
nals introduced a series of optimizations and a new layout. Although the platform, OJS
in the version 2.4, is not optimized for small resolutions, responsiveness was achieved
by customizing the platform code, and preparing a properly crafted stylesheet. The
increasing need for a modern and responsive layout prompted the realization of a
sustainable and serial solution to prepare a customized and responsive layout for each
journal.




                                                                                             197
P. Grandesso - The academic publication service AlmaDL Journals




                                                                        Figure 1. The new graphics of the AlmaDL Journals index.

                                                                           The result is AlmaDL Journals Layout15, a solution for generating Cascading
                                                                        Stylesheets used to set up the graphic appearance of a website. The stylesheets are
                                                                        meant to make OJS 2.4 responsive - although with a few minor compromises - so that
                                                                        a journal can be comfortably accessed regardless of the screen size of the device. The
                                                                        major need for sustainability was accomplished by converting each possible customi-
                                                                        zation into parameters and options that could be enabled or set via simple changes,
                                                                        while maintaining a general standard structure. This allowed for the progressive ex-
                                                                        tension and optimization of the graphic solution, while it was progressively proposed
                                                                        and applied to several journals, with relatively small effort in generating each speciic
                                                                        layout.
                                                                           In only a couple of years this effort has resulted in a new layout for the AlmaDL
                                                                        Journals index and for nine preexisting journals. The new layout has also been applied
                                                                        to another six new journals and in the coming months the layout will be provided for a
                                                                        further 4 applying journals. In the long term the goal is to apply the responsive layout
                                                                        to nine other journals that have no custom layout and that until now have had to rely
                                                                        only on the default and unresponsive OJS 2.4 layout. This was meant to achieve not
                                                                        only responsiveness - thus avoiding the penalty in generalist search engines for non-
                                                                        responsive websites, it was also meant to improve general readability of the journals,
                                                                        clearer navigation and interaction within the platform and to make the back-end used
                                                                        for submission, peer review and editing, less confusing.
                                                                           The future transition to the newer OJS version 3.0 should allow for a better service,
                                                                        which will be more compliant with current web standards and best practices16. The
                                                                        transition is not currently scheduled, due to limitations in workforce activities and the


                                                                  198
need for time to allow a proper, deep analysis of the changes in the editorial worklow
and other signiicant areas.




Figure 2. Demo of the responsive layout.

   Other improvements to the currently installed OJS 2.4 platform were only tested in
an experimental form and have not yet been deployed, also due to the above-men-
tioned turnover of the IT staff. They included the adoption of new formats for metadata
exposure - Schema.org17 being the irst in consideration - and the visualization of more
information at article level - such as the section with peer review status and download
numbers for each article.




                                                                                                 CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
   Further improvements were made based on Search Engine Optimization best prac-
tices and much more could be achieved. The idea behind this kind of intervention, such
as the setup of a proper meta description in the HTML header, providing a Favorites
Icon, setting a custom Robots.txt to avoid double indexing for web spiders, is that dis-
coverability, readability and accessibility of Open Access Scientiic publications should
always be a top priority.

   3.4 Publication formats and better worklows

    Better quality, improved dissemination and readability are the main reasons for the
latest project that AlmaDL Journals has been experimenting in the inal months of
2017μ a new worklow for full-text publication formats. Due to the lack of dedicated
expertise and staff, the service has never really addressed the matter of publication
formats as an option and Open Journal Systems has never provided any tool for the
preparation of galley iles.
    This lack of assistance has left Editorial Teams alone in preparing their own publi-
cation formats, which has meant being limited to using, with only one exception, PDF
iles. The same generation of PDF galley format for full-text articles has been managed
differently by Editorial Teams depending on the availability of expertise, dedicated
funds and on the eventual familiarity with the document preparation and typesetting
system, LaTeX18. If journals of statistics, information science and mathematics have no

                                                                                           199
                                                                        problems in PDF preparation, the production of full-text publication formats constitutes
                                                                        a huge problem for most journals in the ield of humanities and social sciences.
                                                                            This situation has led to an increasing number of dificulties in layout preparation
                                                                        and an overall poor quality in the generated PDFs, with problems such as inactive
                                                                        links, fonts that are not embedded and common dificulties in illing the PDF with use-
                                                                        ful information such as the article’s DOI. There was, moreover, the consideration that
                                                                        publishing only in PDF format was not the best solution when considering accessibil-
                                                                        ity, readability and web archiving; several experiments in HTML galley publishing also
                                                                        revealed that - from the reader perspective - the HTML format was by far the preferred
                                                                        choice, aside from being a speciic web-irst format.
                                                                            During submission processing optimization, AlmaDL Journals started to explore a
                                                                        few solutions for a worklow that also included full-text editing and layout, in order
                                                                        to obtain a better-quality PDF and an HTεδ ile format, that would possibly enable
                                                                        future conversion into other formats, in particular JATS XML and TEI XML. This has
                                                                        resulted in an experimental worklow based on an open source text conversion tool,
                                                                        pandoc19, and the conversion of articles into plain text iles, formatted in εarkdown, a
                                                                        simple syntax for written text, and with articles’ metadata in YAML, a simple format for
                                                                        structured data. Employing proper templates and adequately trained editorial teams,
                                                                        we aim to use this worklow to produce PDF, HTεδ and potentially other formats, for
                                                                        each article, with overall improved quality and a reduced risk of editorial mistakes.
                                                                        The irst issues based on this worklow should be published by the end of 2017, with
                                                                        the prospective of extending the solution to other journals during 2018. This may be
P. Grandesso - The academic publication service AlmaDL Journals




                                                                        accomplished provided that adequate solutions are adopted to make it sustainable
                                                                        for AlmaDL Journals, considering that at the moment conversion of each article using
                                                                        the new worklow requires major intervention by our service. In a couple of years, or
                                                                        at least before migrating to the newer version of OJS, it will be appropriate to analyze
                                                                        web trafic data to evaluate the effectiveness of these changes.
                                                                            Given the actual Open Access publishing ecosystem, AlmaDL Journals’ aim is to
                                                                        ind the right compromise between quality improvement and service sustainability.


                                                                            Acknowledgements

                                                                           I would like to thank Marialaura Vignocchi, head of AlmaDL services, for her role as
                                                                        a mentor in my work, for her suggestions and for proofreading the manuscript.


                                                                            Notes
                                                                        1
                                                                          https://journals.unibo.it/
                                                                        2
                                                                          https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/
                                                                        3
                                                                          https://orcid.org/
                                                                        4
                                                                          https://publons.com/ and https://reviewercredits.com/
                                                                        5
                                                                          http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/multidisciplinary/esci/
                                                                        6
                                                                          https://doaj.org/
                                                                        7
                                                                           a version of the old form is available in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/
                                                                        web/20131223055145/http://www.doaj.org:80/suggest
                                                                        8
                                                                          Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del Sistema Universitario e della Ricerca, http://www.anvur.
                                                                        org/ is the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation Universities and Research Institutes in Italy
                                                                        9
                                                                          a short report on several poorly documented changes in the rules are available at author’s


                                                                  200
personal website (in Italian), Quali differenze tra i regolamenti ANVUR?: http://pierog.it/2017/06/
quali-differenze-tra-i-regolamenti-anvur/, along with the latest comparable versions of the rules:
https://gist.github.com/piero-g/aba4845e2c3a17e887eab7c8a7dda5ec [Both accessed: 10 Octo-
ber 2017].
10
   for an insight of mobile access see Mobile Marketing Statistics compilation, from Smart Insights.
Available at: http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-
marketing-statistics/ [Accessed: 10 October 2017].
11
   https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6196932?hl=en [Accessed: 10 October 2017].
12
   we are referring to Almatourism https://almatourism.unibo.it, the journal can now rely exclusi-
vely on online proposal
13
   http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php
14
   http://www.ithenticate.com/
15
   https://github.com/piero-g/almadl-journals-layout
16
    OJS 3: New Features Overview, in Public Knowledge Project. Available at: https://pkp.sfu.
ca/2016/09/01/ojs-3-new-features-overview/ [Accessed: 10 October 2017].
17
   http://schema.org/
18
   https://www.latex-project.org/
19
   http://pandoc.org



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        Urban Scenario: A Case Study Of Thirupporur, a Traditional Town In the State of
        Tamilnadu, India, by Kubilay Kaptan’, Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage,
        16(1), pp. 365–367. doi: 10.6092/issn.1973-9494/7176.


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                                                                          Biographical notes

                                                                           Piero Grandesso works on scholarly Open Access publishing and is in charge of
                                                                        the journal publishing service of the University of Bologna: AlmaDL Journals, where
                                                                        he has prepared the layout for OJS 2 journals and the worklow for multiple publication
                                                                        formats. Open Access passionate and former wikipedian, he has a Master’s Degree
                                                                        in history.



                                                                            Summary
                                                                            AlmaDL Journals is an Open Access publishing service of the University of Bologna,
                                                                        Italy. After 5 years from the publication of the irst paper in Conservation Science in
                                                                        Cultural Heritage about the service, we review the transformations and the growth it
                                                                        has experienced during this time span, with a look at the changes that have occurred
                                                                        in Open Access publishing that have driven and inspired the modiications adopted by
                                                                        AlmaDL Journals.

                                                                           Riassunto
                                                                           AlmaDL Journals è un servizio di pubblicazione Open Access dell’Università di Bo-
                                                                        logna, Italia. A cinque anni dalla pubblicazione del primo articolo sul servizio in Con-
                                                                        servation Science in Cultural Heritage, esaminiamo le trasformazioni e la crescita che
P. Grandesso - The academic publication service AlmaDL Journals




                                                                        AlmaDL Journals ha sperimentato in questo intervallo di tempo, con uno sguardo ai
                                                                        cambiamenti che si sono veriicati nel settore delle pubblicazioni Open Access che
                                                                        hanno guidato e ispirato le modiiche adottate da AlmaDδ Journals.




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