Open Journal Systems, also known as OJS, is a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

for the management of

peer-review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...

academic journals An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and ...

, created by the Public Knowledge Project, and released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

History

Open Journal Systems (OJS) was conceived to facilitate the development of open access, peer-reviewed publishing, providing the technical infrastructure for the presentation of journal articles along with an editorial-management workflow, including article submission, peer-review, and indexing. OJS relies upon individuals fulfilling different roles, such as journal manager, editor, reviewer, author, and reader. It has a module that supports subscription journals. Like other community-based projects such as

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

, the software has a plugin architecture, which allows new features to be integrated without changing its core

codebase In software development, a codebase (or code base) is a collection of source code used to build a particular software system, application, or software component. Typically, a codebase includes only human-written source code files; thus, a codeb ...

. Available plugins facilitate indexing in

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...

and

PubMed Central PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center fo ...

, publishing RSS/

Atom Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons. Every solid, liquid, gas, ...

web syndication feeds, and providing COUNTER statistics about online usage, several plugins are curated and directly available for download through its plugin gallery interface. OJS is also

LOCKSS The LOCKSS ("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") project, under the auspices of Stanford University, is a peer-to-peer network that develops and supports an open source system allowing libraries to collect, preserve and provide their readers with acc ...

-compliant, which helps ensure ongoing access to journal contents. Third-party plugins include Reading Tools, which point readers to related studies, media stories, and policy documents in open access databases, th
Better Password plugin
which forces the users to use strong passwords, and many others freely available in GitHub. OJS also provide
custom themes
which might be added to the installation through its plugin gallery and
demo installation
to experiment its features.

Versions

OJS is currently in its 3.3.0-11 version, released in June 2022, and its first version was originally released in 2001. The software possesses an open well define
development roadmap
and a set o
milestones
The software is written in

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

, currently supports two databases,

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ori ...

and PostgreSQL, and can be hosted on a

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

web server. Note: OJS 2 has reached its end of life in 2021, its latest release was the version 2.4.8-5, released in May 2019. When upgrading from the version 2.x to 3.x, some care must be taken given that several features have been added and removed, especially if the installation has hand-made customizations.

Translations

As of version 3.3.0, the software has been translated int
50 languages
Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Gaelic, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Kurdish, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese, with many additional languages (including Uzbek, Urdu, Sinhala, Lithuanian, Korean, and Mongolian) in development. Translations are created and maintained by the user community.

Documentation

PKP keeps an extensiv
documentation hub
where users can find documentation about all of its systems. The documentation covers basic software usage, migration instructions, development practices, accessibility, video tutorials and the content has been translated partially into other languages.

Usage

A user community has developed around the software, with active participants, and enhancements being contributed to the project from the (IBICT), the ''

Journal of Medical Internet Research The ''Journal of Medical Internet Research'' is a peer-reviewed open-access medical journal established in 1999 covering eHealth and "healthcare in the Internet age". The editors-in-chief are Gunther Eysenbach and Rita Kukafka. The publisher is JM ...

'', and others. A growing body of publications and documentation is available on the project's website. As of mid-2021, OJS was being used by at least 25,000 journals worldwide. A daily updated 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. The Public Knowledge Project is also collaborating with the

International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications INASP (International Network for Advancing Science and Policy) is an international development charity working with a global network of partners to improve access, production and use of research information and knowledge, so that countries are equ ...

(INASP) to develop scholarly research portals in Africa, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Vietnam. In

Venezuela Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ( es, link=no, República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many islands and islets in th ...

, at least 32 independent organizations, public and private universities publish 230 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.

Hosting

OJS hosting service is offered for a fee by th
PKP, Publishing Services
(PKP-operated Publishing Services), as well as a variety of third-party commercial and non-commercial service providers not affiliated with PKP.Open Access Directory (OAD): OA journal launch services
/ref> PKP has also released
Docker container
in

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

, which may be helpful to spin-up an OJS instance without having to deal with the web server, database and PHP installation. The container is still in beta, so it should be used only for testing purposes.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Open Journal Systems Free software programmed in PHP 2001 software Publication management software Open access (publishing)