Open Journal Systems

Design

Open Journal Systems (OJS) was designed to facilitate the development of open access, peer-reviewed publishing, providing the technical infrastructure not only for the online presentation of journal articles, but also an entire editorial management workflow, including: article submission, multiple rounds of peer-review, and indexing. OJS relies upon individuals fulfilling different roles, such as the Journal manager, editor, reviewer, author, reader, etc. It has a module that supports subscription journals.

The software has a 'plugin' architecture, similar to other community-based projects such as WordPress, allowing new features to be easily integrated without the need to change the entire core code base. Some of the plugins contributed to OJS include tools to facilitate indexing in Google Scholar and PubMed Central, a feed plugin providing RSS/Atom web syndication feeds, a COUNTER plugin, allowing COUNTER statistics and reporting, and more. OJS is also LOCKSS-compliant, helping to ensure permanent archiving for ongoing access to the content of the journal.

To improve reader's engagement, PKP has developed a series of Reading Tools, which provide access to related studies, media stories, government policies, etc. in open access databases.

Versions

Originally released in 2001, OJS is currently in version 3.0.0, though this version does not include all the features of version 2.4.8. OJS is written in PHP, uses either a MariaDB (née MySQL) or PostgreSQL database, and can be hosted on a Unix-like or Windows web server.

OJS has been translated into many languages. As of Version 2.3, there are 17 languages with complete translations (Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian, Arabic), with many additional languages (including Chinese, Hindi and Vietnamese) in development. All translations are created and maintained by the user community.

Use

A user community has developed around the software, with active participants, and enhancements being contributed to the project from the Brazilian Institute for Information in Science and Technology (IBICT), the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and others. A growing body of publications and documentation is available on the project web site.

As of mid-2015, OJS was being used by at least 8,000 journals worldwide. A map showing the location of these journals is also available on PKP's website. A survey in 2010 found that about half were in the developing world.

OJS hosting service is offered for a fee by PKP|PS (PKP-operated Publishing Services), as well as a variety of third-party commercial and non-commercial service providers not affiliated with PKP.

The Public Knowledge Project is also collaborating with the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to develop scholarly research portals in Africa, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Vietnam. In Venezuela, at least 30 independent organizations, public and private universities publish more than 200 journals using this platform.

OJS, as well as the Érudit publishing system, is being used in the Synergies project, creating a scholarly portal for Canadian social sciences and humanities research. OJS is also being used for research portals in Brazil, Spain, Italy and Greece.