I am finally allowed to disclose a project in which José Luis Canet and I have been working since the beginning of 2021: Celestinesca‘s new website!
With the purpose of making reading, finding and quoting articles easier, and centralising the submission and peer-review processes, Celestinesca has moved to Open Journal Systemss (OJS). OJS is the most widely used journal publishing platform and it allows readers, authors, reviewers and editors to keep track of everything that is going on in the journal, from new issues to the status of a submission or the changes made to an article.
Celestinesca‘s new website has been designed with accessibility and ease of use in mind (at least as much as the template has to offer). Its inteface is simple and intuitive, and can be viewed in monitors, tablets and mobile phones. We have chosen a clean layout and a regular-sized, sans-serif typeface that can be read comfortably in both, big and small screens.
Despite important, aesthetics were not the central reason for this refurbishment. Our main purpose was to adapt Celestinesca to the indexing requirements of platforms such as Latindex or Web of Science or Scopus, without which it is impossible nowadays to measure the actual impact of any journal. With these changes, we hope to improve the metrics of the articles published in Celestinesca, which –in my opinion– are unjustly low. Celestinesca being an essential journal –actually, THE essential journal– for celestinesque scholarship and well-cited, it is not fair for authors that its metrics do not reflect this importance just because a few metadata are missing.
With this purpose, Celestinesca‘s articles from 2003 onwards do now have a DOI, so that they are easier for robots such as those scanning the internet for Google Scholar to identify as scholarly articles and to trace brack where they have been cited (NOTE: for this to be really effective, we need to start adding the DOI to the bibliographic reference every time we cite Celestinesca). Articles include comprehensive metadata as well, which are central for being indexed in the above mentioned platforms and, what is much more important from the point of view of the researcher, can be interpreted by bibliographic software such as, for example, Zotero, so that you never have to enter the bibliographic information by hand again. AND there is a search function that makes finding articles much easier.
In addition, we have worked hard to put all the relevant information about the journal together. The section “Acerca de la revista” gives a comprehensive overview on the journal’s members, its editorial policies, the submission and the peer-review processes, the copyright of the articles and the history of Celestinesca. There is even a renewed editorial team, with new and old faces.
To round things up, we have added two direct links to Celestinesca related sites: Anejos de la revista Celestinesca and the bibliographic database Bibliografía celestinesca. And a news section, but it is a little bit empty now.
With regard to the new submission and peer-review processes, everything will be made through OJS. No panic! There is a step-by-step guide for authors and a step-by-step guide for reviewers. And, if you still have problems, you can always contact us at the brand new e-mail address celestinesca@uv.es.
Due to my personal implication in the project, I might not be the best person to say this, but the new website of Celestinesca is much better than the old one. I hope you like it as much as I do and, above all, I hope that the aim of making metrics reflect the real relevance of Celestinesca for celestinesque scholarhip is met.
