AcademicJournal

A full-fledged academic journal platform for publishing and peer-reviewing research code. This project supports federated journal systems, allowing multiple teams to interconnect their journals via SSO and submission migration. Built with extensibility and collaboration at its core.

✨ Features

• 🔐 Secure single sign-on (SSO) federation login across journals
• 📝 Submissions with versioning, co-authors, and comment threads
• 📊 Customisable dashboard with real-time notifications and announcements
• 💬 Private multi-user discussions and stylized markdown comments
• 📦 Attach supporting documents, Jupyter notebooks, PDFs, and more
• 📤 GitHub integration for pulling submission repositories
• 🚦 Tiered role system: Users, Reviewers, Editors, and Administrators
• 🚫 Reporting and banning system for user moderation
• 🔍 Search functionality (basic title-based)
• 🔄 Submission migration between journals
• ✅ Email verification, password reset via email
• 🔐 Asymmetric encryption for sensitive requests
• 🧪 Comprehensive unit and integration tests

Note: This list is not exhaustive. The project contains numerous additional enhancements beyond the required features.

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📚 Motivation

AcademicJournal was developed to address the lack of a dedicated, sociable, and federated platform for reviewing and publishing research software. Unlike GitHub, our system adapts to academic peer-review workflows by allowing inline feedback, submission versioning, structured roles, and collaborative discussions.

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🛠️ Tech Stack

• Frontend: ReactJS
• Backend: Node.js with Express
• Database: MongoDB
• Caching: Redis
• Containerization: Podman
• Testing: Jest for unit/integration tests

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🚀 Getting Started

Requirements

• Podman (recommended container runtime)
• MongoDB
• Redis

Setup

1. Navigate to the production folder.
2. Run the provided Podman script:

       ./podman/run_production_podman.sh <port-number>

3. Access the app at http://localhost:<port-number>

The script sets up all necessary dependencies inside a Podman pod.

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🧪 Running Tests

1. Stop the container using Ctrl + C.

2. Start an interactive session:

   podman exec -it code_review bash

3. Run backend tests:

   cd backend
   npm run test_unit        # Unit tests
   npm run test_integration # Integration tests

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🧑‍⚖️ Roles & Permissions

• New users are assigned the user role by default.

• To upgrade yourself (for development):

  podman exec -it mongo_cs3099 mongosh
  use code_review
  db.users.updateOne({id: '<youruserid>'}, {$set: {role: 3}})

Roles:

• User: Can submit and discuss
• Reviewer: Can review submissions
• Editor: Can assign reviewers and publish
• Admin: Full privileges

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