OJS
OJS (Open Journal System) is an open source platform primarily intended to allow the digital publication of academic journals. Swansea’s Digital Humanities team supports the use of OJS, in partnership with the Library Research Support team.
Unlike many publishing platforms, OJS can be used for every stage of the journal process: articles can be submitted, received, peer-reviewed, approved and published all in the same system. The journal owner can control the permissions afforded to their editorial team, assigning papers to review and other tasks to be completed whilst retaining ultimate editorial and administrative control of their journal. The Public Knowledge Project (OJS’ developers) describe the platform thus:
“OJS assists with every stage of the refereed publishing process, from submissions through to online publication and indexing. Through its management systems, its finely grained indexing of research, and the context it provides for research, OJS seeks to improve both the scholarly and public quality of refereed research.
OJS is open source software made freely available to journals worldwide for the purpose of making open access publishing a viable option for more journals, as open access can increase a journal’s readership as well as its contribution to the public good on a global scale”
In addition to the platform’s technical features, academics who wish to publish through Swansea’s Digital Humanities team have access to a small team of knowledgeable staff. The Digital Humanities team is on hand to support you in setting up and maintaining a journal using OJS, as well as in migrating existing journals from other OJS instances or platforms. This service comes at no financial cost as part of our commitment to becoming a trusted technical partner to organisations and individuals both from the University and the wider community. It is, however, important to consider other expenditure, such as staff resource and time, when deciding to set up an academic journal.
Aside from the practical technical support in setting up a journal, our colleagues in the Research Support team are available to advise. They are experts in best practice in open/scholarly journal publishing, and can help with things such as ISSN, DOIs and licensing.
The team are currently migrating the established journal NeoVictorian Studies to OJS from a bespoke website that no longer meets the publication’s needs; its editor, Mel Kohlke, has kindly shared her wealth of experience of running a scholarly journal at previous Open Publishing events run by the team, and we hope to repeat this in future. In addition to NVS, the Swansea team are currently working on a new journal for the Egypt Centre and aiding the transition of another established journal, IJPDS, to our instance of OJS.
Staff who are interested in starting or migrating a journal with the help of the Digital Humanities and Research Support teams should contact digitalhumanities@swansea.ac.uk, or fill out this form, which will help us to contextualise your publishing plans.
We hold informal, drop-in Open Publishing coffee mornings regular – these are great opportunities to connect with the teams and see demonstrations of exactly what we, and OJS, can do for you.
Some examples of journals already using OJS to great effect are viewable here.