Fidus Writer 3.2 release with plugins

It has been half a year, and here we are with yet another release! As always, there are tons of fixes all over the place.
You can try it out on our server at https://app.fiduswriter.org. Also, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany has set up a Fidus Writer instance for production use for social scientists and others. You can find GESIS’s Fidus Writer instance at https://fiduswriter.gesis.org .

Fidus Writer 3.2 — news and highlights

The main new thing this time are plugins. The interest in Fidus Writer has grown a lot over the past five years and we have heard of people with many different ideas about what they would like to do with Fidus Writer and what improvements it needs. Until now we always had to filter, make decisions about whether workflow one or workflow two was more important. All the while, we were scared that Fidus Writer may get too complex and have too many features that most users would find useless.

No more! With the plugin system we have added, a lot of non-core features can be added without having to consider how popular just that feature will be. The plugins have of course full access to all parts of Fidus Writer — both on the frontend and the backend.

Simultaneously with Fidus Writer 3.2, these three plugins are shipping:

Citation search: Fidus Writer’s citation management system is top-notch, but getting citation items into the system can be cumbersome. With this plugin the user can search databases such as Datacite, Crossref or Sowiport and directly import the sources into a paper. This plugin was created as part of the Open Scholarly Communication in the Social Sciences (OSCOSS) project of the GESIS institute and University of Bonn.

Open Journal Systems: Allows users to integrate Fidus Writer with the popular open source peer-review management system “Open Journal Systems” (OJS) from the Public Knowledge Project. Users registered with Fidus Writer can submit their articles directly to journals hosted with a connected OJS instance. The peer-reviewing back-and-forth—including commenting, modifying the initial submission text, etc.—can then be done entirely with Fidus Writer, without the need for down- and uploading documents. This plugin took about a year to write and is also developed by the OSCOSS project.

Books: This is a plugin to allow for the creation of books and article collections, joining several documents together. Up until version 3.1, this was a part of the main Fidus Writer application, but we discovered that many users don’t really care about books and just want to edit individual articles. So now it is optional.

There are also a number of other improvements in version 3.2.0. For example:

Internal headline links: It allows users to easily link to headlines contained in the same document (another distribution by OSCOSS).

Export styles that resemble Springer and ACM document styles — two of the most used journal styles in computer sciences (still somewhat basic).

The OSCOSS also been publishing a number of papers relating to the developments around Fidus Writer (written using Fidus Writer, of course):

On the OJS-Fidus Writer Integration: Sadeghi, A., Wilm, J., Mayr, P., & Lange, C. (2017). Opening Scholarly Communication in Social Sciences by Connecting Collaborative Authoring to Peer Review. Information – Wissenschaft & Praxis, 68(2–3), 163–170. http://doi.org/10.1515/iwp-2017-0030 https://goo.gl/fKNkQN (preprint openly available version at arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04428 )

On running Fidus Writer on a Network Accessible Storage (NAS) server: Wilm, J., Sadeghi, A., Lange, C., & Mayr, P. (2017). Decentralized creation of academic documents using a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server. In Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication co-located with the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2017). Portorož, Slovenia. https://www.fiduswriter.org/2017/05/24/decentralized-creation-of-academic-documents-using-a-network-attached-storage-nas-server/ (preprint openly available version at arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04185 )

One thought on “Fidus Writer 3.2 release with plugins

  1. Great plataform, great improvements. Some medical researchers are using the platform in valparaiso, chile

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