Make changes to your existing publications

Octopus is designed to allow researchers to publish early, and get open, constructive, quality-focused feedback from the community. Our reversioning feature allows authors to make use of that feedback by publishing new versions of their work. 

We've worked to make sure the process for publishing a new version is as simple as possible. First, find the live publication you'd like to reversion either via the publication's page itself, or on the author page, and click the "Create new version" button. 

After using this option, the normal draft editing screen will open, allowing changes or modifications to be made to the publication as required. The only difference between creating a new version and a brand new publication is that any existing links that were already present on the previous version cannot be deleted. Once the required changes have been made, the new version can be published or sent for co-author approval as normal. 

After publishing a new version 

Upon publication, the new version will become the default version that is displayed on the site. Readers are able to switch between viewing the latest version and older versions by using the dropdown to the top-right of the page. 

With the release of this feature, each publication on Octopus has been updated to have two DOIs. The existing DOI is the "canonical" one. This DOI will always point to the latest version of the publication, allowing the latest content to be cited regardless of how many updates occur. The second DOI is version-specific, and can be used to point to a specific version without needing to worry about any future changes that may occur. 

DataCite's entry for the publications DOIs are also updated to refer to each other, so the relationship between different versions of the publication can be programmatically determined. 

A new look for the account page 

To make it easier to work out what is going on with different versions of a publication, we've reworked way the account page is organised. Previously, draft and live publications were displayed in separate lists. As a publication can now have both a draft and a live version, this page has now been updated to display each publication with information about what is happening to the draft (if it exists) and to the latest live version. To help track down specific publications, this page can now be sorted to only display publications that have a live version, a draft version, or both.