Past Issues

Studies in Informatics and Control
Vol. 28, No. 1, 2019

An affordable Web-based Grant Management Software Designed to Support Romanian Scholarly Publications

Ionuţ-Eugen SANDU, Dragoș-Marian SMADA, Mihail DUMITRACHE
Abstract

The rise of Web-based publishing and the increase of electronic usage has triggered profound changes in academic publishing and has determined national governments to take some forms of action designed to actively promote and support the publication of high-quality scientific literature produced in their own country. Considering the spread of ICT technologies nowadays, an online platform was developed in order to encourage participation in the grant competition for Romanian scholarly publications and establish a digital connection between the main actors involved in the process. In this context, the article presents the system architecture, development and outcomes. Building such a platform has required gathering and studying accurate information for data aggregation and user experience, having in mind a scalable design for requirements update or further developments. The system revolves around digitally connecting three major actors – publisher, evaluator, competition organizer. For ensuring the platform’s reliability and preventing failures, user-centric tests were developed and set to run automatically at specific triggers, such as code submission. The platform contributes to the transparency of the entire grant management process, substantial reduction of the time for submission, and streamlining of the evaluation procedures. The web platform has been effectively developed, implemented and regularly used by both publishers and reviewers in the latest Romanian grant competitions.

Keywords

Software development, On-line evaluation, Scientific publications, User-centric tests.

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