Open Journal Systems

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Open Journal Systems (OJS) is software for the management of peer-review journals, created by the Public Knowledge Project. It is open source, released under the GNU General Public License.

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 submissions, multiple rounds of peer-review, and indexing. OJS relies upon individuals fulfilling different roles, such as the Journal Manager, Editor, Reviewer, Author, Reader, etc.

A growing body of publications and documentation is available on the project web site, including OJS in an Hour, the OJS Technical Reference, Customizing OJS, Getting Found, Staying Found, and more.

As of November 2006, OJS was being used by at least 875 journals in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. A selected list of OJS journals is available on the PKP web site.

Originally released in 2001, OJS is curently in version 2.1.1 with version 2.2 expected in early 2007. OJS is written in PHP and uses either a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. It can be hosted on a UNIX-like or Windows web server.

OJS has developed a strong user community, with many active participants, and significant enhancements being contributed to the project from the Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (IBICT), the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and others.

OJS has a 'plugin' architecture, similar to other community-based projects such as WordPress, allowing new features to be easily integrated into the system 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-compliant statistics and reporting, and more.

OJS is also LOCKSS-compliant, helping to ensure ongoing access to the content of the journal.

To improve reader's engagement with the work published in journals using OJS (as well as with conference papers in OCS), PKP has developed a series of Reading Tools (see right column in linked example), which provide access to related studies, media stories, government policies, etc. in open access databases.

OJS has been translated into eight languages (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish), with an additional nine languages (Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Farsi, Hindi, Norwegian, Thai, Vietnamese) in development. All translations are created and maintained by the OJS user community.

The Public Knowledge Project is also collaborating closely with the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to develop scholarly research portals in Africa, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Vietnam.

Alongside the Erudit publishing system, OJS 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 and Catalonia, Spain.

Other open source journal management systems include: DPubS, GAPworks, Hyperjournal, ePublishing Toolkit, OpenACS, SOPS, and TOPAZ.