Key OJS Capabilities

Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a flexible open-source publishing system that is used by over than 9,000 journals worldwide.

Open Journals System (OJS) logo licensed from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

What functionality does OJS provide?

In its latest version (3.1), OJS offers:

User interface and reader tools

• Easily customised and fully responsive reader interface that automatically optimises display for the reader’s device
• Email notifications for readers, RSS/Atom web syndication feeds, social media sharing via AddThis or Shariff
• Support for display of feeds and other custom content blocks
• Multilingual support for the reader interface, editorial interface, and content
• Ability to display HTML references on the abstract page, and to view and save the article citation information in a range of formats

Editorial interface

• Intuitive administration dashboard with context-sensitive Help support
• Flexible editorial workflow management, from submission and peer review (single-blind, double-blind, open identity) to production and online publication

Content rendering, search and discovery

• Searching of article metadata and full-text using Boolean operators and wildcards
• Support for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Google Scholar indexing
• Ability to capture ORCID identifiers and funding data, and to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and Creative Commons licences automatically on publication
• Support for full-text HTML and supplementary material
• Rendering of full-text JATS XML as HTML
• Support for a range of metadata formats, including Dublin Core, JATS XML and MARC21, and ability to submit article metadata to Crossref, DOAJ and PubMed
• Browsing articles by author and section, article recommendations on abstract page, commenting and annotating functionality via Disqus and Hypothes.is

Reporting and analytics

• Article usage statistics and COUNTER-style journal reporting
• Publishing and user administration reports, e.g. ability to export registered users, articles under peer review, published articles
• Support for Google Analytics and Piwik web analytics

Range of Formats

• You can publish your articles via PDF, HTML, and XML. You can also include supplementary materials, such as links to videos and podcasts.

Citation Downloads

• You can choose to download citations in ten different referencing styles, in the BibTeX or Endnote/Zotero/Mendeley (RIS) format.

Customisable DOI Patterns

• Choose what format you’d like your DOI to be presented in.

Rolling Publications

• OJS is perfect for rolling publications. You can set a new issue up, and allocate articles to it as and when they are ready. This means editorial work is spread out through the year.

User Account and Access Controls

• You can choose whether to allow users to register to the site or create register accounts yourself.

Announcements

• You can post calls for papers, journal news, notifications of new editorial board members, and any other news you want through the announcements section.

New Issue Notifications

• You have the option to alert all notification subscribers to new issues, which can help drive usage.

Fully Accessible

• As OJS is an open-source platform developed for open access publications, it is easily mined by abstracting and indexing databases to ensure that article metadata is as discoverable as possible.

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